revere | September 30, 2007Bioterrorism defense dollars seem to be devoted mainly to procurement. This follows President Bush's prescription for how all Americans could defeat the terrorists after September 11: go shopping. Practicing what they preach, the federal government has gone on another buying spree for something we don't need: anthrax vaccine:
The federal government has awarded a $400 million contract to Emergent BioSolutions for another 18.75 million doses of anthrax vaccine, with a bonus to be paid if the company wins approval for extending the vaccine's shelf life.
The 3-year contract for BioThrax vaccine,…
revere | September 30, 2007Last week about 50 Boulder High School students walked out of class rather than recite the Pledge of Allegiance with the words "one nation, under God" in it. They wanted to recite their own version, cleansed of the offending phrase. I have a better idea, but first here's what happened in Boulder:
About 50 Boulder High School students walked out of class Thursday to protest the daily reading of the Pledge of Allegiance and recited their own version, omitting "one nation, under God."
The students say the phrase violates the constitutional separation of church and state.
They also say the daily…
revere | September 29, 2007There's a polio problem in Nigeria. You may have heard that. Unfortunately what you haven't heard -- and what one could even characterize as a cover-up -- is that among the many cases of polio in northern Nigeria and surrounds, there are also 69 cases of paralytic polio in children from the type 2 vaccine strain:
Nigeria has found 69 cases of children paralyzed by polio not caused by wild polio viruses, but rather weakened viruses from polio vaccine that have circulated and regained their power to cause disease, a team of international scientists reported Thursday.
The ongoing outbreak in…
revere | September 28, 2007General Petraeus, speaking for President Bush, has told us things are going well in Iraq. He backed it up with charts, numbers and "twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence." (YouTube version here). One of the charts he didn't show, however, was this chart (via atrios) from the Department of Defense. I wonder why:
revere | September 28, 2007If regulators in the state of California, a slate of scientists and doctors including 6 nobel laureates in chemistry and environmental and farmworker groups were all against registering a new toxic fumigant for fruits and vegetables, who would you expect to be in favor of it? If you guessed the Bush administration lap dog agency, the US Environmental Protection Agency, you'd be right. But it wasn't that hard a question.
The fumigant in question is methyl iodide, marketed by Tokyo-based Arysta LifeScience Corp to take the place of methyl bromide, being phased out as a greenhouse gas under the…
revere | September 27, 2007So the Harvard Coop fiasco goes into yet another day with lawyers at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society giving the book sellers (part of the Barnes and Noble College Division) a much needed lesson in copyright law. To recap (see also here and here), Harvard undergraduates running a comparison-shopping textbook service online were copying down course book ISBN numbers in the Harvard bookstore and were told to leave. On a second occasion The Coop (the name of the bookstore) called the cops, who, however, refused to intervene. The Coop's reasons were that the ISBN…
revere | September 27, 2007It's not nice to get mumps. Mumps is caused by a paramyxovirus. Since the introduction of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine most people have been spared the unpleasantness of the swollen, inflamed an painful salivary glands, or in older individuals, the systemic complications like orchitis (inflamed testicles) that can sometimes cause sterility in young males. It can also inflame the ovaries or breasts in females. It is contagious through the respiratory route and infected people shed virus three days before they get symptoms until up to nine days after symptoms start. So vaccination is the…
revere | September 26, 2007The Department of Defense is not the only Bush agency with a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Apparently CDC has one too:
For three years, inspectors from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found warning signs in Texas A&M University's biodefense program ? everything from unauthorized lab workers with access to dangerous agents to problems with how pathogens were stored.
But the federal agency's annual inspections, obtained by The Dallas Morning News last week, failed to turn up cases of human illness and exposure to some of the world's most infectious diseases. The…
revere | September 26, 2007If you are in the elderly population (over 65 years of age) you are in the crosshairs of CDC's influenza vaccination program. The reasons seem clear -- at first, anyway. Risk of influenza-related death (as measured by a specific statistical technique to estimate excess mortality during influenza seasons) increases dramatically after 65 tears of age. If you are over 80, for example, your risks of being in the excess death category is more than ten times those in the age 65 - 69 age group. Three-quaters of the flu related deaths in a normal flu season are in the 65 plus group and more than half…
revere | September 25, 2007In my other life (science) I've been reading about measurement theory (Dover just reprinted the multivolume set, Foundations of Measurement by Krantz et al.). It's pretty abstract stuff (Archimedean simply ordered groups make an early appearance) but the problem is not at all abstract: how do you assign quantitative representations to qualitative structures. Some things are pretty hard to measure and recently I ran across an interesting example: what determines the perception of "crumbliness" in food. Food researchers wanted to know what determined that perception in whey proteins and…
revere | September 25, 2007Lots of stories on the wires (e.g., here) about a Nature Medicine paper describing a handheld microfluidic lab-on-a-chip to detect H5N1 inexpensively in less than 30 minutes. It was hard to understand what was involved from the news articles so I retrieved the paper (published online in advance of regular appearance in the journal hardcopy). It wasn't a particularly easy read, but here is what I was able to decipher.
This device makes use of microfluidics technologies, essentially an emerging set of techniques for manipulating very tiny volumes of material -- tiny as in millionths to…
revere | September 24, 2007I thought the saga of The Harvard Coop would be over once the inanity of its claim that the ISBN numbers of books used in Harvard courses were their intellectual property. The ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, is a 13 digit number and barcode used by publishers to identify books uniquely. Harvard students were going to the text book section of the Coop (the original name of the Harvard Cooperative, later bought by the Barnes and Noble College Division), copying down the ISBN numbers and then making them available online via CrimsonReading.org, a service that automates comparison…
revere | September 24, 2007The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is the major source of information about the health of noninstitutionalized Americans -- you and me and our neighbors. Data collection started in 1956 and consists of ongoing data collection and special studies on illness and disability and their trends. Data is done using a questionnaire given to a representative household probability sample of the US population. If you want the gory details you can find them here. A recent report, presented in the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR) QuickStats format, gives the estimated percentage…
revere | September 23, 2007Before the invasion there was cholera in Iraq but at a fairly low level: 30 cases a year reported or about one in a million population. Cholera is entirely preventable with clean water and easily treatable with oral rehydration therapy. But it can also kill a person in less than a day. The bug's toxin opens the floodgates in the intestines and the victim becomes rapidly and often fatally dehydrated. People alive and apparently well in the morning can be dead by nightfall. It is a frightening disease. There are now a reported 30,000 cases of diarrhea and 1500 confirmed diagnoses of cholera in…
revere | September 23, 2007Sometimes you read things in the newspaper that leave you gasping for air. Religious twaddle is a never ending source of this kind of crap, so you'd think I would be immune. The particular pathology I present to you today isn't even near the top of the steaming pile of shit that newspapers print as if they were scraps of coherent thought, but for some reason it hit some kind of resonant frequency in my patience circuit, threatening to tear it apart. It appeared in the North West Arkansas News in Mr. John Terry's (economist/minister/veteran) column, On the Economy:
Not long ago the Arkansas…
revere | September 22, 2007The Harvard Cooperative ("The Coop," pronounced like the coop in chicken coop) is a venerable institution whose main branch in Harvard Square is the principal retail outlet for textbooks to Harvard students. Generations have bought their texts and other books there. Like many college bookstores the old co-operative was bought out by a modern chain and the Harvard Coop is now a Barnes and Noble College Bookstore. The subsumption by a book retail giant some years ago was only one sign of a change in the book business, however. Now we have the internet which gives the modern cost conscious…
revere | September 21, 2007I post occasionally on climate change here but other SBers do it much better (e.g., Chris Mooney at The Intersection). When I have posted on it I have neglected to mention the amount of money I make from the climate change issue. The subject just "didn't come up." Well now it has, so honesty requires me to disclose that I make $0 from my position on climate change. I mention it now because Patrick Michaels, one of the news media's favorite climate change deniers (no relation to my friend David Michaels from The Pump Handle), has withdrawn as an expert witness in a court case rather than…
revere | September 21, 2007We've talked here fairly often (see, for example, here) that the way and how far influenza virus spreads isn't understood or known precisely. That seems to be a big surprise, not only to the public but to many in the public health community who should know better. That's why I was pleased to see that this dirty little secret is finding its way into the public press (hat tip from one of our many readers in Oz, RobT):
It was a simple question: how far could a virus spluttered out of someone's mouth travel?
When Professor Lidia Morawska went looking for an answer, she was staggered to find…
revere | September 20, 2007OJ Simpson is back in the news, following hard on the heels of other celebrities in legal entanglements: Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Martha Stewart, etc., etc. Yawn. Were they treated more harshly beacuse they were celebrities? Yawn. The other side of the coin, of course, is the privilege of the famous and powerful. We know they often get off when lesser mortals wouldn't. So what does that have to do with what we usually talk about here, public health, infectious disease, bird flu, research? This.
Yesterday we brought you the latest in an ongoing series of posts about accidents in…
revere | September 20, 2007For whatever reason, TB control is back on the front burner. TB remains a worldwide scourge and has always had a dedicated cadre of public health professionals battling it. Now they are getting some new ammunition and reinforcements. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is weighing in with a substantial $280 million five year program, most of which goes to vaccine development. An effective TB vaccine is the Holy Grail of TB control. We know much more about the immune system than in the past, so maybe soon we'll see the breakthrough everyone in the field has been hoping for. Until preventive…