revere | August 19, 2007It seems like just a few weeks ago (maybe because it was just a few weeks ago) we brought you the stupidity of the South Carolina couple who saw angels in the clouds. Not that this kind of thing is so uncommon. People have a tendency to organize their sense data into patterns and those patterns clearly have a learned and cultural component. What was so stupid was the local news station reporting this as "news." If the couple had seen a giant scrotum and penis in the sky, would the TV station have reported a Big Prick in the Sky? The willingness of the mainstream news media to broadcast this…
revere | August 18, 2007[Another post from two years ago. Everybody is talking universal health care now. Two years ago, nada. Well, almost nada. Below is what we said then (and continue to say, now). But first this, to show the original post is still current:
Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.
A major factor in the U.S. lagging in life expectancy is that 45 million Americans lack health insurance, experts say.
For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and…
revere | August 17, 2007[This is from two years ago. Since I just got through driving 1000 miles to reach a beach with no internet access -- imagine that -- I thought it was appropriate. Or not. Just don't read it while you are driving. Please.]
In the 1930s my uncle got a car that had a radio in it. The family was aghast at the foolhardiness of this recipe for disaster. Now the same arguments are being played out with mobile phones. But is it the same? I think not.
Research to be published soon in Applied Cognitive Psychology shows what a number of other studies have shown: talking on a car phone while driving is…
revere | August 17, 2007I'm not sure which is worse. Pandemic flu preparation which puts most of its eggs (pathogen-free, of course) in the vaccine basket or the one that plans to distribute the non-existent vaccine in a way that it misses the most needy and vulnerable. I guess it's obvious that if the first is bad, the second is very bad so it's worse, but it also a warning that other kinds of preparation may also be seriously flawed from the equity point of view. I know many of you don't care about these folks -- undocumented immigrants, substance users, the homeless, homebound elderly, and minorities. Many…
revere | August 16, 2007Either there are more lab accidents in biodefense laboratories or we are hearing about them more (see here, here, here, here, here.). Since there are always lab accident but there is a lot more "biodfense" laboratory work, it is probably both. I think we can look forward to the Bush administration solving this problem by declaring lab accidents in biodefense labs a state secret. That way we won't have to worry about hearing about them any more. But until that happens, we can look forward to more of stuff like this:
A graduate student at Jackson's University Medical Center had to be treated…
revere | August 16, 2007A new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine underlines a point we have tried to make multiple times (e.g., see here, here and here). Naive and unthought out therapeutic responses to the idea that bird flu kills via a "cytokine storm" is a bad idea. Cytokine storm is also a common feature of sepsis, which accompanies some pneumonia and other infections and has a high case fatality ratio. I haven't read the original paper because I am at the beach where the Annals of Internal Medicine isn't carried at the local convenience store and my internet connection is barely adequate for email, but I…
revere | August 15, 2007[Another piece from two years ago, August. Since we recently posted on personal prepping, I thought I'd give you the extreme version.]
We all know from the last election that security is a major preoccupation of the American public. Hell, that theme won the last election for a guy who not only is a danger to the country, but a danger to the world. So I'm guessing there is a good market for this:
For Sale By Owner - The Ultimate Secure Home
Strategically located in the awesome San Juan mountains of Southwest Colorado, this patented steel-reinforced concrete earth home was built to withstand…
revere | August 15, 2007As more and more people take their meals already prepared ("ready to eat" or RTE) from supermarkets and delicatessens, so will more and more people take their pathogens the same way. It's not that the kitchens that prepare RTE food are more dangerous than home kitchens. On the contrary, they are probably safer, as there is a strong incentive to use good food preparation hygiene. Indeed in the past most foodborne infection came from improperly prepared and cooked food in the home. Now, however, with so many meals either eaten or prepared outside the home, this is changing. And while the…
revere | August 14, 2007There may still be some who see the multiply disgraced Paul Wolfowitz as an intellectually hardnosed neoconservative who called them as he saw them (despite being egregiously wrong and morally bankrupt in how he saw them), but the more we see of the real person who obtained a lucrative sinecure and inappropriate pay raises for his girlfriend when he was head of the World Bank, the more he looks like any other unprincipled political hack. Take this bit of water carrying for the Bush administration on climate change:
The Bush administration has consistently thwarted efforts by the World Bank to…
revere | August 14, 2007We write so much here about influenza A virus that you might get the idea it is an especially clever virus, always changing genetically in ways that allow it to perform new and nastier tricks. But other viruses are capable of doing the same thing, and one of them West Nile Virus (WNV), is currently becoming a a more persistent and serious public health hazard, all because of a clever little genetic trick it learned in the last decade or so.
WNV has been around longer than that, although we didn't have a problem with it in North America until 1999, when this mosquito-borne disease showed up,…
revere | August 13, 2007Bird flu in Indonesia and elsewhere keeps simmering away. Little stuff, here and there. Constant noise, so much so you wonder if you will hear the signal, if and when it sounds. Will it suddenly become so loud it is unmistakable? Or will it be there, growing louder and louder until everyone can hear it and in retrospect, see that it was there before we recognized it? I don't know the answer. Lots of worrisome sounding things I ignore and wait for a couple of days more information to sort them out. That's my inclination for the latest Indon case on the resort island of Bali:
Bali has recorded…
revere | August 13, 2007Another food recall, although this one is for spoilage:
Kraft Foods voluntarily recalled their Knudsen cottage cheese in seven states, but told consumers not to worry: the affected cheese isn't making people sick, it just doesn't taste right.
The cartons affected include nonfat, low fat and small curd cottage cheese, and low fat cottage cheese with pineapple bearing a "sell-by" date of Aug. 31 or earlier, company spokeswoman Elisabeth Wenner said Thursday.
The cheese, processed at a plant in Tulare, was spoiling before that date. Eating it wouldn't make consumers sick, but it might taste bad…
revere | August 12, 2007Another press release on a vaccine breakthrough from NIH. This one allegedly predicts the mutations that will result in enhanced transmissibility. Just published as a paper in the journal Science, the focus was on mutations of the HA protein (the "H" part of H5N1) that are related to binding to human cells versus bird cells. We have discussed this pretty often here (for the science background see the posts here):
The research group compared the structural proteins on the surface of bird-adapted H5N1 influenza virus with those on the surface of the human-adapted strain that caused the 1918…
revere | August 12, 2007Everyone knows Fred Phelps is a vile, obnoxious, cruel and probably psychopathic Christofascist (one of the well known subdivisions of the worldwide fascist movement, which includes Islamofascists, Judeofascists, Hindufascists and many other religiofascists; it is an ecumenical movement, which even includes godless fascists like Christopher Hitchens). For those of you lucky enough never to have heard of him, Phelps is pastor of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, famous for picketing the funerals of Iraqi war soldiers with the claim that they died because the military…
revere | August 11, 2007We accidentally put up Sunday's Sermonette this morning (Saturday) but now I've moved it to its proper place on Sunday (tomorrow). This happened because the Reveres are on the road (literally) headed for the beach for a few weeks and I wrote the Sermonette late at night after driving all day. At the beach we won't have internet connection, although we are told there is a wifi hot spot not too far away, so we'll check in periodically.
We're not settled on how we are going to handle blogging under these conditions. We will try to put up all the things you know and love to hate (like the…
revere | August 11, 2007If the Chinese team in the 2008 Olympics works half as hard as its government to perform spectacular and intuition-defying acrobatics, it should have the gold Medal sewed up. Consider the latest in the "China is taking food safety very, very seriously but it's no big deal" event. China has announced it is banning 18 food products, including preserved fruits, candied garlic, grilled crab, peanuts and a fruit drink.
"After many years of joint efforts, China has enhanced its food safety levels by a large margin. Food safety qualification rates are continuously increasing," said China's health…
revere | August 10, 2007We've written a lot about US high containment laboratories for potential biowarfare agents and extremely dangerous pathogens for which there is no vaccine or cure. But the UK likes to build these labs, too. In fact they have five of them. Where? Nah, nah. The UK's Health and Safety Executive is not gonna tell you. The terrorists might find out, and I'm sure there's no way they could obtain that information -- unless of course, they read the UK's TimesOnLine, which says they "include the Health Protection Agency Centre for Infections at Colin-dale, northwest London, the Centre for Emergency…
revere | August 10, 2007The turkeys were doomed anyway, so the discovery they had a "mild strain of bird flu" didn't seal their fate, which had already been hermetically sealed. The birds showed no sign of illness. The evidence for infection came from finding the presence of antibodies to the low pathogenic strain prior to being sent to slaughter. The US Department of Agriculture reassured everyone: no human has ever caught bird flu after eating properly cooked poultry or eggs. So who cares? It turns out lots of people in the poultry industry elsewhere care a great deal:
But officials in Japan, Russia, Turkey, the…
revere | August 9, 2007For all you Second Amendment-is-the-most-precious-freedom-we-have folks out there, take heart. We are spreading freedom in Iraq:
The US military cannot account for 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to the Iraqi security forces, an official US report says.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the Pentagon cannot track about 30% of the weapons distributed in Iraq over the past three years.
The Pentagon did not dispute the figures, but said it was reviewing arms deliveries procedures. (BBC)
Yes,that's right. 110,000 AK-47s and 80,000 pistols, along with 135,000 pieces of…
revere | August 9, 2007We've written here frequently about the ineffectiveness of quarantine for stopping the spread of influenza, but now a piece comes out in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that claims quarantine was an effective mitigation method for influenza in 1918. Time Magazine, for example, had an article with the headline: "Study: Quarantines Work Against Pandemics":
To plan for the future, researchers in Michigan went straight to the past. Led by Dr. Howard Markel, director of the University of Michigan Medical School's Center for the History of Medicine, a team of public-health…