revere | September 9, 2007A few days ago we brought you Word from Australia that Osama bin Laden had driven through several high security checkppoints on the way to Bush's hotel in Sydney, Australia. He just wanted to tell him it was "all a misunderstanding." Given the heavy security for Bush's visit, making it through these checkpoints was like a miracle.
Well, it turns out, sadly, it wasn't really a miracle. Osama wasn't really Osama, but a member of the cast of Australian Broadcasting's TV show, The Chasers. "The Miracle of the Checkpoints" just wasn't in the script of Australian security theater. But The Chasers…
revere | September 8, 2007I'm not a fish ecologist (you noticed?), so maybe there are things about this story I don't get. I'm looking for an explanation, which I assume a knowledgeable ecologist could give me. It seems that a decades long program to restore the endangered and almost extinct greenback cutthroat trout (Colorado's official state fish) has run afoul of a discovery that the restocking was being done with a closely related subspecies native to the other side of the mountain, the Colorado river cutthroat.
The first thing I don't understand is this sentence in the (otherwise excellent) Rocky Mountain News…
revere | September 7, 2007Chemical & Engineering News, a publication of the American Chemical Society, has issued a news release about one of their news items. And this is a news piece about their news release about their news item. Think you can remember that? If not, you might want to read their news release about their news item, but in the meantime, here is my news piece about their news release about their news item:
In our aging society, with an increased urgency to develop new compounds that target serious illnesses like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, memory enhancement drugs are becoming a big…
revere | September 7, 2007There's a lot to know about influenza that we don't know. Unfortunately a lot of is things you thought we knew but don't. Like whether there is a risk from influenza virus in drinking water. Admittedly this hasn't been at the top of the list for seasonal flu, since the main reservoir for this virus is other people and that's who you catch it from. But with avian viruses there is the problem of aquatic birds (the main reservoir in the wild) shedding virus into ocean littorals and surface waters, including drinking water reservoirs. In addition, agricultural run-off, including fecal waste from…
revere | September 6, 2007Dear Leader is away in Australia, visiting his lapdog, Oz Prime Minister John Howard and attending the Asia-Pacific economic (APEC) summit. At the summit he chatted easily with his soulmates:
U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday told reporters that talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao were "constructive" and centered on Iran, China-made product recalls, global climate change and civilian religious freedoms.
"He's an easy man to talk to. I'm very comfortable in my discussions with President Hu," Bush said. (CNN)
Whatever.
But the main story doesn't seem to have made it into the US media…
revere | September 6, 2007Australia's severe flu season reminds us, in dramatic fashion, that "regular" (seasonal) influenza can still be a severe disease. It's not just the elderly, but children, too. What about children in the developing world? What would you find if you went into one of Bangladesh's urban slums? We now have some information, presented as a Letter to the Editor in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases. Children under the age of 13 with fever and symptoms of an influenza-like illness (dengue fever was excluded) in 2001 were tested for acute infection via antibodies to H1N1 or H3N2 influenza,…
revere | September 5, 2007Yesterday we did a post on a breaking story about popcorn lung. It's not just workers. Consumers are also at risk, although how much risk is hard to say. Casual consumption of microwave popcorn using the artificial butter flavoring diacetyl is probably not very risky, but day in and day out consumption may be. You can read about one such consumer in this story in the New York Times. What you won't read about in the Times is that the story was broken by a blogger, our colleague Dr. David Michaels over at The Pump Handle. As a result of Michaels' blog post the story was picked up by major media…
revere | September 5, 2007What seemed pretty obvious at first, that wild birds could be and were long distance carriers of H5N1 is, like the birds themselves, still up in the air. The problem is that existing data on migrating wild birds has failed to show convincing evidence they are infected:
FAO officials last year voiced concerns that bird migration patterns might have spread disease Asia and Europe to Africa. But as elsewhere in the world, very few cases have been found among wild birds in Africa.
The Wildlife Conservation Society Field Veterinary Program Director William Karesh is among those attending the…
revere | September 4, 2007The argument about whether bloggers ever do real reporting is not very interesting to us, but suffice it to say there are numerous instances where they do the same thing as journalists, even in the tiny public health blogosphere. A case in point is my colleague. Dr. David Michaels at The Pump Handle (TPH), who has been dogging the story of flavoring workers lung (aka popcorn workers lung) from the outset, and has even broken a few stories. Today's post at TPH may be the most significant entry yet. But first, some background.
It is now known that an ingredient in microwave popcorn with…
revere | September 4, 2007Recently we posted on the paper by scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington (Seattle) reporting a new statistical tool for evaluating the likelihood that a cluster of bird flu cases in a small geographic area was spread from person to person or the result of a common source, usually poultry. Two clusters were looked at, one in Turkey and the other in Indonesia (the so-called Karo cluster). It is fairly well established there was human to human transmission in this cluster, as there has been in others. It makes sense. If a person can become infected by…
revere | September 3, 2007Labor Day, 2007. Arlo Guthrie and Emmy Lou Harris singing a song written by Arlo's father, Woody Guthrie.
On January 29, 1948 a plane, carrying 28 Mexican workers crashed in Los Gatos Canyon near Fresno, California, killing all aboard:
The crash resulted in the deaths of four Americans and 28 illegal immigrant farm workers who were being deported from California back to Mexico.
Guthrie was reportedly struck by the fact that radio and newspaper coverage of the event did not give the victims' names, but referred to them merely as "deportees." He responded with a poem, assigning symbolic names…
revere | September 2, 2007Politics aside, Mrs. R. and I are real Americans in one important way. We like to shop. Not shop as in "buy." We couldn't afford that. Shop as in entertainment. We like each other's company (we've had many years to get used to it), so when we go to a new place we wander in and out of shops, looking at things. Maybe not the most uplifting of pursuits -- better we should be going to museums, I suppose -- but we like it. So a new study by The Nielsen Company (TV ratings) piqued our interest. Essentially it wanted to know what went into brand loyalty and why that loyalty seemed to be more…
revere | September 1, 2007I've been thinking more about the significance of the Dawkins-Harris-Dennett-Hitchens-PZ genre of atheism writing. Matt Nisbet and other folks seem to feel very threatened by it, worrying about an anti-secular backlash. Just saying it that way makes me want to laugh. Oh, those uppity atheists! But that's just one of the anti-Dawkins tropes. Another is that the "New Atheist" (itself an invidious term) is intellectually unsophisticated and ignorant about religion and theology. I'll freely admit I am not an expert on theology. Why would I want to waste my time? I'm not an expert in astrology,…
revere | September 1, 2007There are a lot of industries that will suffer mightily if there were an influenza pandemic so it's hard to single out any one that will be hit harder. But among the most vulnerable certainly must be the travel industry. At the height of a pandemic the problem is probably moot. By that time even the people in the travel industry will have other things to think about. But a pandemic doesn't start in an instant. It starts somewhere and depending upon surveillance systems we will have more or less time to react depending upon where we are. There will also likely be a period of uncertainty when…
revere | August 31, 2007Because swatting the climate change denier gnats is an endless task, we are glad to help our SciBling John Lynch provide the swatter for yet another boring attempt to breach the walls of scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. In 2004 Naomi Orestes, a fine historian of science known personnally to a number of us, published a survey in Science establishing that consensus. It has been a target of the climate change contrarians ever since. The latest entry in the "it's wrong even if almost all scientists think it's true" sweepstakes comes in the journal Energy and Environment (aka…
revere | August 31, 2007A couple of weeks ago CDC's peer reviewed journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, published online an ahead-of-print paper by Yang et al., "Detecting Human-to-Human Transmission of Avian Influenza A (H5N1)." The paper has now been published in the journal and predictably, it made news. It's an interesting paper, but we think some people are going beyond what it says. First, the gist according to Reuters:
A mathematical analysis has confirmed that H5N1 avian influenza spread from person to person in Indonesia in April, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
They said they had developed a tool to…
revere | August 30, 2007I don't suppose I can sue somebody for negligence resulting in impairment of my mental health. But if I could, I would surely go after the assholes at the PRISM coalition, an alleged grassroots group (such front groups for industry are often called astroturf groups) whose task in life is to lock up tax payer financed research under copyright laws they and their cronies wrote for their own benefit. And THEY ARE MAKING ME CRAZY! So there was at least some therapeutic benefit to the discovery of my SciBling Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily that these hypocrites were violating copyright on their…
revere | August 30, 2007If you want a good snapshot of how poorly prepared Indonesia is for coping with bird flu, look no further than the Letter column of The Jakarta Post:
On Aug. 26 I found a dead wild bird in my yard. I am living in Bali near the area where bird flu related deaths have occurred.
Since I was worried about the possible risk connected with dead birds, I tried to contact some authority to guide me on how to handle this situation.
I tried to reach the main hospital in Bali, Sanglah, and the answer was to go there if sick but they do not know anything regarding dead birds or chickens.
Next I tried to…
revere | August 29, 2007The walking TB problem is in the news again. This time it's not a well to do lawyer from Atlanta but a Mexican born resident of Norcross, Georgia, a healthy appearing teen ager told last Friday he had tuberculosis and would have to undergo treatment. We don't know exactly what he was said to him about the nature of the treatment or his disease, but whatever it was, he wasn't having any of it. He refused treatment and wanted to go home to Mexico. The lawyer was told not to travel while in Europe and he headed home to the US. In both cases a bewildered and scared patient wanted to go home. Only…