revere | July 29, 2007There is an apocryphal story of a politician during the Revolution of 1848 desperately running after a crowd in Paris's Jardin du Luxembourg. "I'm their leader," he cried. "I must follow them!" A couple of years ago most national pandemic planners were occupied with procuring stockpiles of antivirals, worrying about the lack of a vaccine and reassuring people that they had the matter under control if a pandemic were to strike. No one believed them and they knew they were whistling past the graveyard, but the poverty of vision was amazing. There has been much progress since then. Now there is…
revere | July 29, 2007The lecherous and hypersexed pizza delivery boy might be a porn movie cliche but not likely welcome in Ave Maria, Florida:
If Domino's Pizza founder Thomas S. Monaghan has his way, a new town being built in Florida will be governed according to strict Roman Catholic principles, with no place to get an abortion, pornography or birth control.
The pizza magnate is bankrolling the project with at least $250 million and calls it "God's will."
Civil libertarians say the plan is unconstitutional and are threatening to sue.
The town of Ave Maria is being constructed around Ave Maria University, the…
revere | July 28, 2007If your country had thousands of cases of a potentially fatal disease, spread by mosquitoes, would you panic? Not if you lived in the US, apparently. Last year there were over 4200 cases of West Nile virus infections with 177 deaths. I don't remember panic gripping the nation. So I had to laugh when Canadian public health officials tell their citizens that with a particularly bad West Nile Virus (WNV) season underway south of the border, "There is no need to panic":
"There's no need to panic," Jean Riverin, a [Public Health Agency of Canada] spokesperson, told CBC News. "Many variables need…
revere | July 27, 2007This may be the most hilarious headline I have ever seen:
Insane donor 'rational to give to Tories'
I'm not sure if it is exactly correct to call Britain's Tories (the Conservative Party) the counterpart to the Republicans in the US, but they are at least the primary opposition to the Labour Party, which bears a faint resemblance to the US Democratic Party (including having had a Bush enabler at the helm). So I'll make the comparison anyway, even though I know someone is going to comment how I "know nothing" about British politics. I'll give you my riposte ahead of time: Get a life. Anyway.…
revere | July 27, 2007One of the gross abuses that triggered the Reformation was the corrupt practice of Catholic priests of selling "indulgences," get-out-of-jail free cards for your sins in this world. Since the Bush administration is always willing to learn from history where corruption is the prize, they have come up with a new idea to sell climate change indulgences to a public increasingly worried about how today's sins will punish their grandchildren. This latest Bush administration proposal for offsetting the build-up of greenhouse gases characteristically (for them) doesn't operate on the source side --…
revere | July 26, 2007You can't count on defenders of US health care for much, but you can always count on them to allege that in Canada and other "socialized health care" systems there are long waits for elective surgery. Wait times for a hip replacement in Canada have been alleged as long as 6 months, although I don't know if that is generally true or not. Whatever the wait times, most Canadians seem satisfied. From Statistics Canada:
The results for 2005 indicate that waiting for care remains the number one barrier for those having difficulties accessing care. Median waiting times for all specialized services…
revere | July 26, 2007In my early to mid career it fell to me to teach large lecture courses that surveyed all of environmental health. Everything. Air polllution. Wastewater. Food sanitation. Radiation protection. Over the years I learned a lot beyond my particular specialty (environmental epidemiology) and it has stood me in good stead in many ways. Students seemed to enjoy learning about it, too, and one of their most frequent reactions was surprise at how suddenly newspapers had all sorts of stories about environmental topics. Of course those stories had always been there. They just never noticed them. I am…
revere | July 25, 2007The cliché that when life hands you a lemon, make lemonade wasn't meant to cover the case where a nation's politicians refuse to deal with the lemon that is its health system. There are now a lot of stories in the news media about the catastrophe that is US health care, but few of them get beyond the superficial. So the story of 12 year old Wesley Arnold is typical. Instead of the dismaying and pathetic story it is it is written to be heartwarming:
There's really not much a 12-year-old can do when he finds out his dad has cancer - or is there?
Wesley Arnold decided he was going to help out…
revere | July 25, 2007Small steps but steps in the right direction. It's taking time, but there is progress:
Every household in Fairfax County [Virginia] should receive a pamphlet from the county's health department by the end of the month about protecting against a flu pandemic.
Health department staff began mailing the guide to 440,000 households in the county on July 16, and will also be available from the health department in different languages. It is part of the county's endeavor to prepare residents to cope with pandemic influenza, according to Gloria Addo-Ayensu, the county's health director
"Management…
revere | July 24, 2007Here is Max Blumenthal's Unofficial Tour of the College Republican Convention. It's both funny and appalling. Take your pick. Or just laugh through your tears.
On the other hand, if you are offended and under the age of 42, you can sign up and take your anger out on the Iraqis:
revere | July 24, 2007At 3:50 am EDST I received the welcome news, via Declan Butler, that the Tripoli 6 were free and on the tarmac in Sofia, Bulgaria. All are Bulgarian citizens and were released by the Libyan prison authorities as part of an extradition arrangement. Their life sentences were immediately pardoned by Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov. Our six medical colleague had been accused of deliberately infecting over 400 children in a hospital in Benghazi, Libya and sentenced to death. They have been imprisoned for 8 years, through two trials and numerous appeals. Genetic analysis of the infecting…
revere | July 24, 2007Just as the safety of the food supply is coming under increased scrutiny we have the Castleberry Foods botulism recall, now involving a variety of brands of Hot Dog Chili Sauce and dog foods. Both have something in common you wouldn't necessarily think of at first (unless you knew about botulism). Both chili sauce, which you put on your cooked hot dog just before eating, and dog food are eaten by their respective consumers without further cooking. This is characteristic of foodborne botulism because the botulism toxin, one of the most deadly and potent toxins known, is also heat labile.…
revere | July 23, 2007This morning we discussed mosquito-borne disease in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But arboviruses are not the only potential hazard faced by displaced hurricane residents. There is also the dreaded FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), an agency that didn't do so many things it should of and did do many they shouldn't have. Like providing 120,000 trailers to residents of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, many of which off gas formaldehyde into the living space, making the occupants sick. 60,000 trailers are still be used. Formaldehyde is the main ingredient in embalming…
revere | July 23, 2007Bird flu isn't the only virus dangerous to humans that finds its primary home in birds. West Nile Virus (WNV) and other arbovirus infections do, too. WNV is now on the rise in California and seems worse than last year:
There were 18 new human cases of West Nile virus reported this week by the California Department of Public Health, double the number counted since the first case of the year was confirmed on June 20. That brings the state total to 27, and puts the California count slightly ahead of 2005, when the virus sickened 935 and killed 19. Last year, there were only 292 cases statewide…
revere | July 22, 2007Cuba has announced it has established a monitoring system for bird flu. I don't know any of the details except that they have trained personnel for the purpose and they say they have invested millions of dollars and are following what goes on elsewhere closely. The US can say the same thing and has health indices not unlike Cuba's. So is there any reason to think Cuban citizens will be any better off than Americans if a pandemic strikes? Yes.
Because Cuba has universal health care and an efficient public health system that accomplishes a great deal despite a cruel embargo imposed by a…
revere | July 22, 2007The story of North Carolina uber Christian Coy Privette, arrested on charges of aiding and abetting prostitution (being a "john") is, on its surface, just another tale of hypocrisy, one among many:
Privette, the president of the Christian Action League in North Carolina, was charged July 19 with six counts of aiding and abetting prostitution.
According to arrest documents secured by the Biblical Recorder, Privette's alleged actions took place in a Rowan County hotel between May 4 and June 25. Tiffany Denise Summers, 32, of Salisbury, N.C., was charged with six counts of prostitution in…
revere | July 21, 2007When I was a young-un no one ever heard about food allergies. Of course there were food allergies. We just never heard much about them. But now we not only hear about them, we hear about people, often children, who die from food allergy. Often peanut allergy. What's really weird about this is that in my day kids lived on peanut butter. Now some of them die with the slightest whiff of peanut antigen. And there seems to be peanut antigen in a lot of things, either by design or by cross contamination of equipment. Peanut antigen, you might think, is one of the most potent food allergy proteins…
revere | July 20, 2007If you work for Tyson foods, one of the US's largest poultry producers, you probably aren't very worried about bird flu. That's because you are too busy worrying about not getting cut to pieces, electrocuted, maimed from a fall or burned to death. As part of a strategy of increased attention to workplaces with higher than usual worker injury rates the US Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) inspected the Tyson poultry processing plant in Noel, Missouri, and found "serious, willful, and repeat" health and safety violations. The plant was fined almost $350,000 as a result.…
revere | July 20, 2007The first of the putative "universal" vaccines against influenza A is entering Phase I (small scale safety and efficacy) testing. Manufactured by UK vaccine company Acambis, the vaccine is designed to protect against a wide range of influenza A viruses of many subtypes and many strains. Here's the idea. The immune system mainly "sees" viral proteins on the outside of the virus. The most visible of these is the hamagglutinin (HA) protein which gives its initial letter to the H-subtypes like H5N1 and H3N2, etc. The other visible protein is the neuraminidase (NA) protein, the initial letter of…
revere | July 19, 2007The US public just doesn't get this terrorist threat business, according to John P. Wlaters, the President's drug czar:
The nation's top anti-drug official said people need to overcome their "reefer blindness" and see that illicit marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and safety, as well as to the environment.
John P. Walters, President Bush's drug czar, said the people who plant and tend the gardens are terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties. Walters made the comments at a Thursday press…