revere | February 23, 2008Indonesia is providing bird flu specimens to WHO again. And Indonesian Health Minister Dr Siti Fadilah Supari has just published a book declaring the 50 year plus history of global influenza surveillance is part of a conspiracy by the developed world to control the rest of the world:
"Developed countries become richer because they have the capability to develop the vaccine and control the world," she writes.
Dr Supari also expresses alarm at WHO laboratories sharing bird flu virus data with the United States National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where nuclear weapons are developed.
"…
revere | February 22, 2008Recently we posted on the insanity of requiring informed consent for posting a hygiene checklist in the ICU. This week the New England Journal of Medicine weighed in.
Here's some background from the NEJM Commentary:
About 80,000 catheter-related bloodstream infections occur in U.S. intensive care units (ICUs) each year, causing as many as 28,000 deaths and costing the health care system as much as $2.3 billion. If there were procedures that could prevent these infections, wouldn't we encourage hospitals to introduce them? And wouldn't we encourage the development, testing, and dissemination…
revere | February 22, 2008CDC has just issued a report on the state of US readiness for a health crisis. Its assessment is upbeat:
In the first report of its kind, US health officials said the nation's cities and states made a strong effort to prepare for a flu pandemic, bioterrorism, or other emergency health crises, but big challenges remain.
"I think in terms of effort and progress, an 'A,' " Dr. Richard Besser of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said when asked to assign a letter grade. "In terms of amount of work to be done, I would say that's absolutely enormous." (AP)
Let's see if we can interpret…
revere | February 21, 2008A notice from ProMed yesterday alerted many of us to a new published report [subscription firewall] about H5N1 influenza detection in an arthropod species in the vicinity of an infected poultry farm. The arthropods were mosquitoes (Culex tritaeniorhynchus) in Thailand. Two years ago a similar report implicated blowflies (Calliphora nigribarbis and Aldrichina grahami) near some infected farms in Kyoto, Japan. Both papers suggested using arthropods near infected farms as surveillance tools. But both, especially the Japanese paper, raised the open question whether arthropods might play a part in…
revere | February 20, 2008The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn't want Americans to buy legal pharmaceutical products from Canada where the identical drug is considerably cheaper because the imported drug might not be safe. Those unreliable Canadians. Better to pay top dollar for heparin from the American subsidiary of a Big Pharma multinational, Baxter Healthcare. Except that the active ingredient in Baxter's intravenous heparin came from China. From an uninspected plant. And there was indeed a safety problem:
More than 350 adverse reactions to the drug have been reported to the FDA since the end of 2007,…
revere | February 20, 2008A paper published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) extends the work of a group of glycobiologists at MIT on unravelling why some flu virus likes bird cells and others like human cells. Glycobiology is the science that investigates the sugar studded proteins on the outside of cells. Like a suit of clothes, a cell's glycoprotein cover plays important functions in protecting the cell, identifying it and as a signal to interact with things outside of itself, such as hormones or immune cells. But other organisms have learned to use the same signals and can…
revere | February 19, 2008Even in the world of giant beef recalls in the US this one stands out: 143 million pounds. This dwarfs (by a factor of four) the previous recall record of 35 million pounds, and as the AP report observes, amounts to two hamburgers for every man, woman and child in the United States. This one has an added twist: not just safety but animal cruelty:
The federal agency said the recall will affect beef products dating to February 1, 2006, that came from Chino [California]-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., which supplies meat to the federal school lunch program and to some major fast-food chains.…
revere | February 19, 2008There's bird flu in poultry all over Bangladesh and new human cases reported in China, Vietnam and Indonesia. Is this the sound of the other shoe dropping? Or is it just this:
This barchart is from February 5 so it doesn't include all the new cases. But it clearly shows that when we get to flu season we also get to bird flu season. How will we know if something different is happening? It's a good question and I don't have an easy answer. Here are four signals and what I would make of them.
Sudden increase in number of cases that are not connected or are connected by a common source (as…
revere | February 18, 2008I hardly know what to make of a story about market research on the top ten flavors predicted for 2008. For one thing, I have no idea what some of these flavors are. I had to Google several. But what do I know?
The top sweet flavor, according to Bell Flavors and Fragrances, isn't that exotic: mango. But here's the rest of the "sweet" list: acai, lychee, pomegranate, mint, blueberry, verbena, goji [aka wolfberry], noni and guarana. I linked to a couple Wikipedia descriptions. Particularly intriguing is noni, "Morinda citrifolia, commonly known as Great morinda, Indian mulberry, Beach mulberry,…
revere | February 18, 2008Accidents in swimming pools can be serious or fatal (drowning, broken necks) but fortunately they are rare. For pool operators one of the more likely nightmares of daily operation is when someone has "a fecal accident." In other words, someone craps in the swimming pool. CDC has guidelines for chlorinated pools (which covers most public pools; they are guidelines because regulations are on the state, not federal, level). And they just revised them. It makes interesting reading, although I suppose this is an acquired taste. Here are the details, followed by a classic dramatic re-enactment on…
revere | February 17, 2008When my colleagues announced early afternoon on Friday he was headed home because he was sick, I knew the flu had finally arrived on my doorstep. It was already here, of course. The emergency rooms are jammed, clinics have long waits and hospital admissions for flu are up -- way up. The flu situation was the page one column eight story in Saturday's Boston Globe:
The flu virus is rampaging across New England, spawning waves of coughs and fevers, causing patients to flood doctors' offices, and raising questions about the effectiveness of flu shots given to tens of millions of Americans.
During…
revere | February 17, 2008August, 1969. I was a young doctor and in those days it was common to lend a hand at mass demonstrations, sit-ins, "sanctuaries", free clinics. Some of it was scary as hell (the Chicago convention) but a lot of it was boring. Some of it had low priority, especially when it wasn't political and there was always more to do than time or energy to do it. So when I got a phone call from a friend asking if I would staff a clinic at a rock concert I told her, "Hell, no. It's going to rain like stink. Do you think I'm fucking crazy?" It did rain at Woodstock that weekend. And I stayed home in a nice…
revere | February 16, 2008It's official. Living in one of the 120,000 trailers FEMA supplied after Hurrican Katrina is bad for you:
Federal health officials on Thursday urged hurricane victims to move out of trailers supplied by FEMA after tests showed dangerous levels of formaldehyde fumes.
Tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on more than 500 trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi showed formaldehyde levels that were five times higher than levels in a normal house. The levels in some trailers were nearly 40 times what is normal.
The CDC said people should move out quickly -- especially children,…
revere | February 16, 2008A lot of things that seem on first glance to be "news" are really just reprints or slight edits of press releases written to tout a commercial product. This is also true of "Newsletters" that charge money for inside news.
Datamonitor is a company that claims to be "the world's leading provider of online data, analytic and forecasting platforms for key vertical sectors. We help 5,000 of the world's largest companies profit from better, more timely decisions" (Datamonitor website). Some of the stuff they give away, since I see it and I don't subscribe to anything they sell. But based on its…
revere | February 15, 2008"Open Access" is apparently an Idea whose Time has Come:
All papers by Harvard scholars accepted for publication as of today will be freely available to the public. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously passed a motion last night (February 12) that requires all arts and sciences faculty articles to be made publicly available.
Harvard is the first US university to mandate open access to its faculty publications, Peter Suber, open access advocate, wrote on his blog yesterday. The mandate "should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have…
revere | February 15, 2008We've posted a bit (here and here) on this year's flu vaccine and some mismatches. Because of the time it takes to ramp up production the flu vaccines for the following season are made in the early spring of the year before, often, as now at the peak of the ongoing flu season. Yesterday WHO announced that they were changing all three of the strains in next year's vaccine, something that is unusual but not unprecedented.
This is all reported by the best of the best flu reporters, Canadian Press's Helen Branswell. I could do some pull quotes and summarize what she wrote, but instead I'll just…
revere | February 14, 2008Via one of my favorite blogs, Brain Police, this primer on US - Iranian relations:
So in 1953 we screwed the Iranian people out of a democracy so a British company could keep stealing their oil. Now it's bad for us and really bad for the Iranians. Especially Iranian workers:
As you probably know, the Iranian government has been arresting workers who have stood up and tried to organize unions -- including Mansour Osanloo and Mahmoud Salehi, who both languish in jails despite continuing health problems.
This repression is in violation of International Labour Organization core conventions and…
revere | February 14, 2008If you've ever boned a chicken (and who hasn't, right?) you know it isn't easy. It's hard on the hands and dangerous if you are doing it fast, with sharp knives. How fast? Say, a few thousand chicken breasts a day? Every day. Day after day. And doing it for chicken feed (metaphorically speaking), so you can't afford health insurance. But at least you get some medical care if you're hurt at work. From the company:
Mike Flowers is a powerful gatekeeper. He often decides whether to send poultry workers to a doctor when they get hurt on the job or complain of chronic pain.
"I think we do a pretty…
revere | February 13, 2008If I commit a crime against and possibly damage who knows how many American citizens I sure hope Congress comes to my rescue and gives me retroactive immunity:
The Senate voted Tuesday to shield from lawsuits telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without court permission after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
After nearly two months of stops and starts, the Senate rejected by a vote of 31 to 67 a move to strip away a grant of retroactive legal immunity for the companies.
President Bush has promised to veto any new surveillance bill that does not…