revere | February 5, 2010We still don't know if we are experiencing a lull in flu or the virus has burned itself out for the season, but it's as good a time as any to reflect a bit on where we've been and where we still need to go. Being otherwise occupied (I'm sure you are sick of hearing about my grant writing obsession but not half as sick as I am about having it!), I'll start with something relatively straightforward: how CDC did on the epidemiology and surveillance front. Historically this is the agency's strong suit and so it is expected they would have acquitted themselves well. And pretty much, they did. A…
revere | February 4, 2010Writing a big grant proposal can be an all consuming affair. At least it's consuming all of me. And it's not because it's my first time. I wish. In fact it's the fourth time I'm doing this particular competitive renewal for a mega research program I've managed to keep continuously funded for 16 years. But each 5 year cycle it gets tougher, not easier and I wind up thinking about it all the time. The whole experience is reminiscent of the story of the World War I doctor given the task of selecting one of three volunteers for a dangerous and urgent mission. There was only time to ask each…
revere | February 3, 2010The Nature blog, The Great Beyond, has an interesting although not surprising report of accusations on BBC that a cabal of researchers has been impeding publication of important stem cell research to help themselves or help their friends:
Truly innovative stem cell research is being suppressed by a clique of peer reviewers for high profile journals, several researchers claimed today.
They told the BBC that the problem lies with those responsible for producing the reviews of research that journals such as Nature use to decide whether to publish the work.
Two scientists told the BBC they…
revere | February 2, 2010Grant writing makes you crazy and also forces bloggers to stoop to ever lower levels. Hence this from the Discover Magazine blog via Boingboing.
While trawling for gold in the medical case literature they struck it rich with the story of the 15 year old girl with no vagina who got pregnant by giving her boyfriend a blow job (British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology: 1988 Sep;95(9):933-4). Not possible? You be the judge:
Case report:
The patient was a 15-year-old girl employed in a local bar. She was admitted to hospital after a knife fight involving her, a former lover and a new…
revere | February 1, 2010If you want to know why I despise every Republican Senator and Democratic Senators Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, Max Baucus, "Independent (of morals)" Joe Lieberman and probably a bunch more whose names I am repressing, it's because they enable and support and help entrench as the bedrock of our health care system, insurance companies. Here's what these companies are like:
A Boulder County jury has ruled that a health insurance company must pay $37 million to a Lafayette woman whose health insurance policy was canceled after she was seriously injured in a car accident.
The insurance…
revere | January 31, 2010I'm coming up for air during my grant writing (so far this weekend I've spent in excess of ten hours yesterday and today just writing; all the rest of the time I spent obsessing about what I wrote and what I still needed to write), but you know I'm desperate when I start posting stuff like this:
UF [University of Florida] researchers reviewed 96 cases that had complete medical records from more than 4,000 entries in the International Shark Attack File, a record maintained by UF's Florida Museum of Natural History. Assigning scores to clinical findings such as blood pressure, location and…
revere | January 31, 2010Pat Robertson said something impolitic about Haiti (like the earthquake was because they made a pact with the devil) and as result he gets a lot of hate mail. I wouldn't ordinarily reprint any of it, but it seems like the devil (aka Satan) was pretty pissed and sent him a letter (hat tip readers J and K C). So we decided to give the Devil his Due:
Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made…
revere | January 30, 2010Howard Zinn is gone, now, but he left us plenty. Here is a short piece he wrote a little over ten years ago in Z Magazine (hat tip, SR). It's typical of his style: inspiring, humble, practical, especially in these times:
On Getting Along
Howard Zinn, March, 07 1999
You ask how I manage to stay involved and remain seemingly happy and adjusted to this awful world where the efforts of caring people pale in comparison to those who have power?
It's easy. First, don't let "those who have power" intimidate you. No matter how much power they have they cannot prevent you from living your life,…
revere | January 29, 2010Howard Zinn died on Wednesday. He was a colleague and more than an acquaintance but a friend, although not a close friend. I knew him for 40 years, although hadn't seen him recently, the last time was a few years ago when we shared a platform together. The auditorium was packed, not to see me but to see him and he was his usual feisty self. But it was a feistiness that was full of kindness and compassion. Just to be in his presence conveyed a strange kind of empowerment. He made you believe you could make a difference, even when it was crystal clear the one who was really making a difference…
revere | January 28, 2010The Reveres have written many posts about the World Health Organization in five years. Some just reported on their activities, others, as seemed appropriate, were critical or praised them. WHO operates in a difficult landscape under rules of engagement not well suited to fighting an enemy that recognizes neither national borders nor national sovereignties and one might question this intergovernmental agency's relevance given those constraints. But we have always bridled at accusations WHO acted unethically or incompetently, neither of which is true. WHO does a difficult job with just a…
revere | January 27, 2010Carl "Dan" Fish worked at Dupont's Belle plant for 32 years until last Saturday. That's the day he was sprayed in the face by phosgene gas. Sunday he was dead:
On Saturday, Fish was hit with a small cloud of phosgene that leaked from a line used to transfer phosgene from storage cylinders to a crop protection chemical production unit, plant officials said.
The fatal accident was the third in a series of four incidents at the Belle plant in just two days, including Friday's discovery of a 1,900-pound leak of toxic and flammable methyl chloride that went undetected for nearly a week. (Ken Ward…
revere | January 26, 2010[Previous installments: here, here, here, here, here, here]
Last installment was the first examination of what "randomized" means in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). We finish up here by calling attention to what randomization does and doesn't do and under what circumstances. The notion of probability here is the conventional frequentist one, since that's how most RCTs are interpreted by users. Before we launch into the details, let's stop for a minute to see where we've been and why.
We began with a challenge to you, our readers. In the first post of this series we described an…
revere | January 25, 2010While I work on my monster grant proposal -- I and my colleagues have been working on it for 9 months, but with the deadline only 3 months away it is time to turn the volume up to 11 -- blogging may be light or brief. But posting something is an excuse to take a break and surf the web a bit, so that's what you'll be getting for the next 3 months. After that I'll probably check into an institution with no internet access to be sedated.
Yesterday I read on Medgadget that AccuWeather is selling an iPhone app to alert users of weather-associated health events in 16 locations:
Do you suffer from…
revere | January 24, 2010It used to be my job to teach the environmental health survey course for public health students and air pollution was a topic I spent a lot of time on because it interested me and intersected some of my research work. One of the things I taught my students was that some air pollutants were very local -- carbon monoxide (CO) being a good example; levels of CO on one side of the street could vary significantly from those on the other side by virtue of traffic patterns or street canyon effects -- while others were considered regional pollutants. Ozone (O3) was my example of choice. It isn't…
revere | January 24, 2010Some readers seem to think I should be commenting on the election of Scott Brown to the US Senate in Massachusetts. I don't have much to say. Senate Democrats brought it on themselves, although it's too bad they also brought it on the rest of us, but that's the way the system works. So Welcome to the Senate Mr. Brown. I'm sure The Family will be glad to have you over for dinner:
revere | January 23, 2010I'm fully immersed in writing a big grant proposal so I have even less time for blogging and reading blogs than usual, but that doesn't mean I have no time. Along with my colleagues I've been working on this beast for 9 months, but now with only 3 months to go before the deadline it's crunch time (the last time we did a competitive renewal of this thing the application was over 900 pages long and this one will be close to that). So time is a precious commodity.
It is also a fascinating biological variable and scienceblogs is blessed with several experts on the subject, notably Coturnix at…
revere | January 22, 2010It was some time after the pandemics of 1957 and 1968 that we were able to judge their severity and it will likely be some time after this one has finally burned itself out, most likely to become "just another" seasonal flu, that we will be able to gauge the 2009 swine flu pandemic. A lot of data is being generated but it will take time to harvest it and send it to the scientific market for consumption. A report in today's Lancet reminds us that we aren't seeing all there is to see, even with unprecedentedly rapid means of communication and better surveillance than ever in the history of our…
revere | January 21, 2010In my regular science trawling I noticed a fascinating paper in Nature (epub ahead of print) that I haven't seen anything about in the news. It seems to me it's worth a discussion, if for no other reason than it uses a relatively new approach, small interfering RNA (siRNA), to dissect the functions in the host cell the virus needs for the only thing it wants to do, make a copy of itself. It also lets me try out on you a new analogy I cooked up for a short talk on flu for high school students and their parents and teachers. It turns out that parts of it will be useful to explain the new siRNA…
revere | January 20, 2010Every two years the US National Science Board does an analysis of how the country is doing on research and development (R&D). While an important measure of the ability to innovate and compete in a highly competitive and globalized world, I have a hard time getting excited about how this is being portrayed as a horse race, who is ahead, who is coming on strong, who is slipping behind. I'm a scientist and I don't think of this as a national competition. I understand how the President's science advisors might, since they are interested in science as a handmaiden to the economy. But if…
revere | January 19, 2010An interesting sounding paper just appeared in the December 2009 issue of the journal American Sociological Review but we don't have time to read it. So I'll just tell you what the press release says:
As many as 50 per cent of people bring their work home with them regularly, according to new research out of the University of Toronto that describes the stress associated with work-life balance and the factors that predict it.
Researchers measured the extent to which work was interfering with personal time using data from a national survey of 1,800 American workers. Sociology professor Scott…