revere | September 19, 2007Biodefense laboratories at Texas universities operated for years without a single reported incident of laboratory acquired infection or even exposure. That is absolutely true and it sounds reassuring and it is similar to biodefense laboratores elsewhere. Don't worry. Be happy. But when it comes to claims of safety in biodefense laboratories -- multiplying like mosquitoes after the Bush administration rained dollars on their terrorist obsession -- you need to parse the statements carefully: "without a single reported incident" doesn't mean there were no incidents. It means none were reported.…
revere | September 19, 2007The bird flu influenza subtype, H5N1, that has been infecting humans with high mortality is the highly pathogenic (HPAI) version of a virus that also exists in a low pathogenic form (LPAI). The high and low path designations refer to effects on poultry, not humans, but only the HPAI versions have been of public health importance. On the other hand, the HPAI strains have all come from LPAI ones via a variety of genetic mechanisms and LPAI strains are themselves of importance to the poultry industry where they decrease productivity of the flock. For these and other reasons there is a need to…
revere | September 18, 2007When you use as part of your daily work a unit of measure that Wired magazine lists as among the Best Obscure Units, you know you are in trouble. Thus I found pack-year, one of an epidemiologist's favorite smoking exposure measures listed there along with a couple of other units I knew about. Pack-years is a cumulative measure calculated by multiplying the number of packs of cigarettes a person smoked per day by the number of years they smoked them. Thus a 25 pack-year smoking history can be accrued by smoking a pack a day for 25 years, or, heaven forbid, 25 packs a day for one year.…
revere | September 18, 200710,000 ducks in Guangdong Province in the south of China have died of bird flu and 100,000 more culled in an attempt to stop the spread of the disease. Massive bird flu outbreaks are not exactly a novelty these days but the Chinese incident is noteworthy because it is now reported the ducks were in vaccinated flocks:
According to Guangdong Animal Epidemic Prevention Center director Yu Yedong, the 9,800 ducks that died at Sixian village had been vaccinated. But he added the first vaccination could only be 65 percent effective, while a second shot would have made it 90 percent.
He believed the…
revere | September 17, 2007More and more places around the world are following the US lead and banning smoking in public places. When they are proposed, we usually hear about all sorts of dire consequences on business from these bans, In the US this hasn't happened to any significant extent and many businesses are reporting increased patronage now that the annoyance of second hand smoke has been eliminated. So whenever I hear news reports that some industry or other has just taken a big hit from a smoking ban I look at it closely. Spin is part of the game in the political battle. The latest example comes from Australia…
revere | September 17, 2007War's travel companion, Disease, is stalking Baghdad. This disease, cholera, is totally preventable and easily treatable under ordinary circumstances. Of course these aren't ordinary circumstances. Thanks to the invasion and the subsequent US occupation and the resistance to it there has been a total breakdown in civil order. The result is the kind of epidemic disease one associates with Victorian London or mid-19th century America, not a 21st century (once) developed country:
A cholera epidemic in northern Iraq has infected approximately 7,000 people and could reach Baghdad within weeks as…
revere | September 16, 2007I'm tired of hearing people with usually progressive views (like Mark Shields or John Kerry) complain the latest MoveOn ad in the New York Times asking if General Petraeus has Betrayed Us is counter-productive, "alienating those who would otherwise agree with us." It's the same bogus argument we hear about forthright atheists saying what needs to be said. I doubt anyone who genuinely questions this war will be led to support it because Move On ran an ad in the NYT some are uncomfortable with. Of course the Right Wing Noise Machine is in full throttle:
A political group supporting President…
revere | September 16, 2007This little rant has been around for a while, but since it can't be said too often, I'll let Marcus Brigstocke say it again. Seven minutes of Truth:
revere | September 15, 2007I spend some of my time working with citizen groups from contaminated communities. There are a frightful number of them in the United States, as there are everywhere. The stories are frequently heartbreaking and the polluters heartless. So it's good to remind myself that things could be worse. A lot worse. In fact the US is much better off than most other countries in the world, including European countries when it comes to a polluted environment. The main reason government environmental protection regulations. I'm not saying they have done the job they need to do, and under the Bush…
revere | September 14, 2007I just watched Dear Leader tell his fellow citizens why we will have to wait until the next President before there is any hope for extricating the country from the quicksand of the Iraq Debacle. It was not a surprise, but no less dismaying for being expected. But I've been dismayed before. Vietnam.
In 1969 our leaders were the same kind of lying bastards who did whatever they wanted. That year Pete Seeger appeared on the David Steinberg TV show and sang this song. The country was divided on the war, much more divided than today, something he acknowledges when he says no one need sing with…
revere | September 14, 2007&In Europe and North America pets -- what veterinarians call companion animals -- are usually dogs or cats. In other countries (e.g., Korea) dogs are raised for food like livestock. Birds are a sort of cross over creature. Birds as companions are fairly common in Europe and America but they are most often exotic. But even people who raise birds for food frequently develop an attachment to them, and having a chicken or turkey as a pet is far from rare. But chickens get bird flu. It turns out that and dogs can also become infected, although at the moment they are not known to be…
revere | September 13, 2007Being right isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes I wish I were wrong. But CDC does it to me time and again. On April 14, 2005 I posted on the fiasco involving the distribution as a routine test reagent of a non-contemporary pandemic influenza strain (H2N2, responsible for the 1957 pandemic). This one hadn't been circulating for over 40 years so few people had immunity. But here it was, being sent to thousands of clinical laboratories in the US and abroad to see if they could identify influenza A in a blind sample: proficiency testing. There followed a mad scramble to retrieve the…
revere | September 13, 2007Texas A&M's work on agents of interest to biodefense has its two month suspension continued by CDC because of persistent and extensive violation of safety rules (posts here, here, here, here and here).
The violations alleged by the CDC include the university's inability to account for at least three vials of microbes, which the CDC described as "missing." In addition, one researcher was working to develop antibiotic-resistant strains of a regulated bacterium even though he had not received the CDC's permission.
What's more, laboratory workers did not don proper laboratory clothing or face…
revere | September 12, 2007There are a lot of nasty viruses out there, many with strange names that suggest they are mainly problems for remote sections of the rain forest.Since I don't go to remote sections of the rain forest they have been mostly an object of academic interest for me. One of these viruses is an arthopodborne beauty called chikungunya, which has been ably and informatively blogged by my SciBling Tara Smith at Aetiology. But every autumn I head off to a scientific meeting in northern Italy (Emilia Romagna) and now I find that chikungunya has arrived there ahead of me:
A recent outbreak of the…
revere | September 12, 2007The war in Iraq has been going on in earnest since March of 2003, which is about how long the war on bird flu has been going on. Yes, there were some preliminary skirmishes in the bird flu war in 1997, but it wasn't until it burst out of southern China with a vengeance that full scale hostilities started. In both wars there have been a lot of innocent bystanders. In neither are seeing a lot of progress, despite claims to the contrary. The war in Iraq, at least, is susceptible to human control. The war against H5N1 doesn't seem to be. The number of human casualties in the bird flu war is…
revere | September 11, 2007When smoking bans in public places were first broached, some of the fiercest opposition came from bar and restaurant lobbyists who predicted it would be their ruination. In March of this year 2006 Scotland instituted a ban and the rest of the UK on July 1. What's the verdict so far? If you read the business news, you might be a bit confused. Here are five headlines about pub chain, JD Weatherspoon:
Wetherspoon sales slump on smoking ban (TimesOnline)
Wetherspoon Says Pub Sales Growth Slowed After Smoking Ban (Bloomberg)
Wetherspoon warns on smoking ban (Daily Telegraph)
Wetherspoon cautious…
revere | September 11, 2007It's September 11, so time to do a "security" post. Sigh. The current dopiness concerns the lessons we can learned for making das Vaterland safe after the recent Atlanta lawyer TB incident. Since learning the wrong lesson seems to be standard operating procedure for both Republicans and Democrats, not to mention "professional" public health types like the CDC, I'm not surprised to read crap like this:
A congressional investigation into officials' inability to stop a tuberculosis patient from leaving the country found significant security gaps, heightening concern about vulnerability to…
revere | September 10, 2007I try not to make mistakes on this blog but sometimes I do. When I find out about them, I correct them. But what do I know. I'm only a blogger, not a journalist. I thought you were supposed to correct your mistakes:
Almost half of the articles published by daily newspapers in the US contain one or more factual errors, and less than two per cent end up being corrected.
The findings are from a forthcoming research paper by Scott R Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication. The findings challenge how well journalism's "corrections box"…
revere | September 10, 2007In the last five years the Veterans Administration has figured out a way to decrease cancer cases amongst veterans by a lot: 40,000 to 70,000 are the estimates. The breakthrough was initiated by the Bush administration, which has used the same technique to make an impact on other problems, from military casualties to the environment: they just don't bother to tell anyone about the cases. Presto: they disappear:
Stonewalling by the Veterans Administration is putting U.S. cancer surveillance and research in jeopardy, according to many of the researchers involved in those fields.
After decades…
revere | September 9, 2007Flying on an airplane used to be something special. Now it's just another means of mass transit, with all that implies. So our attention is more and more directed to the unpleasant parts of flying, which, for many is the lousy air quality. Modern pressurized airliners fly high -- very high indeed. Stratospherically, literally. When you are up 35,000 or 40,000 feet you are in the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere where there is little vertical movement of air (it is essentially a temperature inversion) and high ozone levels. Those ozone levels are a good thing for those of us at on the…