revere | December 23, 2007PZ and Greg Laden have 'fessed up and long time readers know I write the same thing on my Sermonette each Christmas: I am a big fan of Christmas, godless bastard that I am. It is my favorite secular holiday and there is hardly anything about it I don't like. Well, there are a few things: like the whining about how commercial it has become and how its "true meaning" has gotten lost. Why do I like Christmas so much?
I want to preface this by saying there are valid reasons some people hate Christmas. It's a dark and gloomy time of year in the northern hemisphere and some people react badly.…
revere | December 22, 2007WHO [World Health Organization] is now saying that human to human (H2H) transmission has not been ruled out in China or Pakistan:
China:
The World Health Organization said Friday it was impossible to say whether a case of bird flu in China involving a 52- year-old man was due to human-to-human transmission - but, even if it was, it was down to very close contact between the victims.
The Assistant Director-General for Health Security at WHO, Dr David Heymann, said the only proven transmission of this nature so far, in Indonesia and Thailand, had been as a result of very 'close contact' in a '…
revere | December 21, 2007Being a poultry worker, in any country is not wonderful. There's the risk of bird flu, of course. And lots of opportunity to be seriously injured. And its strenuous, difficult, low paying and dirty work, which is why it employs so many undocumented workers.
It also turns out it is a great way to pick up drug resistant E. coli:
Poultry workers in the United States are 32 times more likely to carry E. coli bacteria resistant to the commonly used antibiotic, gentamicin, than others outside the poultry industry, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg…
revere | December 21, 2007It's been less than a week since the first reports out of Pakistan that cases of bird flu were appearing there. At the time we warned that the coming of flu season meant these kinds of reports were to be expected, but by the weekend concern increased as a family cluster appeared. As common in the early days of an outbreak news reports were contradictory and confusing. We elected to wait. By Sunday, some excellent reporting by Helen Branswell and diligent combing of the news by flusites allowed us to make a preliminary summary. We fully expected more surprises.
The biggest surprise so far is…
revere | December 20, 2007One of the enduring mysteries is what causes traffic jams. Sometimes it's obvious -- sort of. I remember having to make a daily trip from New York to Bellevue Hospitals in New York down FDR Drive. At one spot the three southbound lanes suddenly widened into five lanes because of some construction and then, after about 100 yards, narrowed again to three lanes. If you didn't know better you'd think the extra capacity of the roadway wouldn't be a problem but in your mind's eye you can see exactly what happened. All those cars that filled up the extra space had to reconverge to three lanes. The…
revere | December 20, 2007Nature's senior correspondent, Declan Butler, was one of the first to raise the profile of a pandemic threat in the scientific community and has had done some superb reporting since, including several stories on sharing gene sequences. The problematic actors in his earlier stories were respected scientists and the business-as-usual way they were approaching release of genetic sequences even as the world worried that the virus they were studying, influenza A, was inexorably searching for the right recipe to enhance its own raison d'etre, to make still more copies of itself, potentially with…
revere | December 19, 2007Bush and the Democratic Congress are still battling over the budget, although it is said they are getting closer. Getting closer to Bush unfortunately means giving him all the bombs and bullets he wants but not much else. A case in point is the latest proposal for the NIH and CDC budgets:
Over the weekend, Congress prepared a new version of appropriations following President George Bush's veto of previous bill in November. This new bill includes $760 million less for NIH and $240 million less for CDC than the vetoed bill, according to news reports today.
The result is an increase of less…
revere | December 19, 2007We have occasion to comment often here about how the same bird flu story is spun different ways. A case in point is reporting on statements made by the head of Indonesia's National Avian Influenza Committee, Bayu Krisnamurthi and the two different directions Agence France Presse and Reuters took the story.
Here's AFP:
Indonesian bird flu officials said Tuesday they were investigating several recent avian influenza deaths where the victims were believed to have not come into contact with infected poultry.
"In the last three to four months, we have had four cases where the poultry in the…
revere | December 18, 2007It is taking the Occupational Safety and Health Administratiohn (OSHA) a long time to write rules to protect flavoring workers from a serious lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans, linked to artificial butter flavor used in microwave popcorn. According to the public health blog, The Pump Handle (which has been instrumental in keeping the diacetyl story alive), OSHA has initiated a rulemaking. But meanwhile another factor is pre-empting OSHA's tardy start. The market:
ConAgra has removed a controversial chemical from its microwave popcorn that gives the snack a buttery, creamy taste,…
revere | December 18, 2007I don't know much about the West African state of Benin, but the newswires have made sure to alert me to the fact it is the home of ritual Voodoo sacrifice. Which, it turns out, is relevant to bird flu because Benin is having a poultry outbreak with H5N1. This is not much of a surprise, as it is surrounded by neighbors that already have reported infected poultry: Nigeria, Togo, Niger and Burkina Faso. A bit farther afield but still in the region are Ghana, Ivory Coast and Cameroon, all with reported poultry outbreaks. Nigeria has also had a human fatality.
But back to Voodoo. In the US we…
revere | December 17, 2007The title of the Nature paper is "Fetal load and the evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins" (Nature 450, 1075-1078 (13 December 2007) | doi:10.1038/nature06342) and the Editor's comment is given the slightly snappier title, "The mother load." (Nature (DOI:10.1038/nature06342). But I like the New Scientist version best: "Why pregnant women don't fall over."
Here's the issue. Animals that walk upright on two legs (bipedalism) have their center of mass (COM) over their hips. This means that when walking the muscles spanning the hip from trunk to leg have to contract on the weight…
revere | December 17, 2007With everyone on tenterhooks over the confusing outbreak of human bird flu cases in Pakistan and the first reported case in Burma (aka Myanmar), WHO is taking the opportunity to give its member nations a pep talk about swift reporting. Since there is evidence the reporting might not have been so terribly swift in that case, one must assume they consider this a "teachable moment" rather than an exemplar:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Sunday praised Asian countries for swiftly reporting the latest bird flu cases after Pakistan and Myanmar were hit by a resurgence of the disease.
Asia-…
revere | December 16, 2007If I knew for sure what was going on with the reported human bird flu outbreak in Pakistan's northwest border region I'd tell you. At this point it appears no one knows for sure -- not WHO, not CDC, not even the Pakistani authorities. The region where the cases are reported is near the Afghan border and is not under firm government control. The unsettled political situation merely adds to the usual confusion inevitable in the early days of any outbreak. We are all looking for a pandemic signal embedded in a lot of noise, difficult enough, but we don't even know what the signal sounds or looks…
revere | December 16, 2007I'll give the clergy one thing: sermonizing can be hard work. Not always, of course. Some politicians and religious figures do it effortlessly, without thought, so to speak. Maybe I should leave off "so to speak." Without thought. Sometimes, though, it's hard to think of what to say on Sunday. But today isn't one of them. There was so much good material over the last week, choosing was difficult. Would it be the vacationers in Australia who got drunk together and started to argue evolution versus creationism? The English creationist wound up killing the Scottish biomedical scientist with a…
revere | December 15, 2007Since this is not a breaking news site, I am waiting to see what is going on in Pakistan. I'll likely sum up tomorrow afternoon what I find by then (I hope with some value added). Here are some places you can keep checking for breaking news. They are the usual suspects:
Helen Branswell's reports (natch). Latest here.
Flu Wiki Forum
Crof's Blog
Avian Flu Diary
Scott McPherson
Sophia Zoe
Flu Trackers
CurEvents
Recombinomics
There are plenty of others, most accessible from one of the above sites. I'll be checking along with you.
revere | December 15, 2007As noted yesterday, it's flu season. That includes bird flu. So we are seeing cases pop up. Yet another in Indonesia and the father-son cases in China. Then reports out of Pakistan of the first human cases on the Indian sub-continent. Those case are as yet unconfirmed. Now WHO is confirming cases in Burma (aka Myanmar), the first in that military dictatorship not known for being open about what goes on there:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) announced Myanmar's first human case of bird flu, the victim a seven-year-old girl who survived the disease.
The girl, from the northeastern Shan…
revere | December 14, 2007This Reveres lives in a major northeastern city. That's not a secret. The northeast gets snowstorms. Not a secret. Living in a major northeastern city when it has a snowstorm is an experience, and not a good one. No secret. I'm not telling you anything new. So it's no big surprise that I left the medical center at 1:45 pm yesterday, just as it was starting to snow, and didn't arrive home until 6:05 pm.
I feel compelled to do the numbers. How long is my usual commute ? 15 minutes. How many times did my 95 Volvo get stuck? Six. Each time it had to be pushed by kind strangers or my daughter (or…
revere | December 14, 2007China tries to close the door on a possible H2H while Pakistan opens the door to human bird flu cases on the Indian sub-continent. First China. Two recent cases, a fatal case of a 24 year old male followed after a period of some days by the infection of his father raised the issue whether the son passed the H5N1 infection to the father. No one wants this to be the case and the Chinese, who are hosting the summer Olympics in Beijing have a lot at stake. The spin on this, though, is incomprehensible:
China's health authorities said here on Monday that no human-to-human transmission had been…
revere | December 13, 2007I'm not one of those people that thinks bloggers are all powerful but I know that blogs are often an effective way to expose bad behavior by some corporations. If I know this, you'd think everyone in the corporations would know it, too. I guess the word didn't get out to Best Buy:
Best Buy sent a cease and desist letter to blogger Scott Beale (Laughing Squid) for having had the audacity to blog news that prankster/comedy troupe Improv Everywhere selling t-shirts that were a parody of the Best Buy brand. Whether or not the parody is legally in the clear is one matter, but Best Buy…
revere | December 13, 2007The medical site WebScape has a service that caters to physicians called MedPulse. In about 20 specialty areas it surveys a dozen or two scientific journal and alerts subscribers to interesting or pertinent papers. I subscribe to the Public Health and Prevention topic and the other day got the list of the "most read" articles by subscribers in the last year. There is always something curiously fascinating about "top ten" lists and this was no exception. So what do you think preventive medicine types were reading on MedPulse newsletters the last year?
At the top of the list was a paper from…