revere | May 18, 2007WHO's Director General is talking tough, but is she talking tough to the right people? We don't know, but we can keep our eye open for results:
Addressing concerns raised by developing countries such as Indonesia, Chan said she was committed to finding ways of distributing potentially life-saving vaccines in the event of a human influenza pandemic.
"WHO recognises the concern of many developing countries and I am fully behind you. That's why we are taking a series of actions to make sure that developing countries have equitable access to affordable pandemic vaccines," she said.
Chan also…
revere | May 17, 2007Jerry Falwell is no more. I won't mourn him, but I won't rejoice either. I always thought it a bit creepy to be glad when someone dies, or if not creepy, unseemly. Anyway, there are plenty more where he came from, wherever that is.
Like Pastor Rick Warren, televangelist of the huge California Saddleback Church with a huge parish of 20,000 and a wallet to match. Pastor Rick has a reputation to keep, so having it known his richest parishioner is a pornographer is bad PR. Not just a rich parishioner, but the publisher of Warren's devotional self help book, The Purpose Driven Life. Not just his…
revere | May 16, 2007"Promise them anything, but give them Arpege" was a famous perfume ad campaign of the 1960s. Indonesia is free with promises, but what it is actually handing out doesn't smell like Arpege. After promising (for at least the third time since January) to resume sharing of viral isolates, we find only three clinical specimens, not isolates, have arrived in Japan but the provision of specimens or isolates from another 12 known and confirmed cases from Indonesia is unclear.
After refusing to share H5N1 avian flu viruses with the World Health Organization since the start of the year, Indonesian…
revere | May 16, 2007The squabble about viral isolates originating within the borders of Indonesia notwithstanding, the simple fact is that if there were a pandemic there is only a fraction of the needed productive vaccine capacity necessary globally. What fraction? Good question.
The earth is home to 6 billion people, give or take a few hundred million. And a few hundred million doses is our global vaccine capacity in the event of a pandemic. The annual capacity is estimated around 300 - 400 million, possibly 500 million if pushed. That's annual production. If we had to ramp up a specific pandemic strain from…
revere | May 15, 2007News on the benzene-in-softdrinks front (for background see here, here, here, here, here and the Environmental Working Group site). The dominoes are starting to fall and the first was a big one, Coca Cola:
Consumer lawyers and The Coca-Cola Company announced today a legal settlement involving Fanta Pineapple and Vault Zero products.
"We are very pleased to join with The Coca-Cola Company in announcing this settlement," said Boston attorney Andrew Rainer and Florida attorney and Northeastern University Law and Policy Professor Tim Howard, who represented the consumers.
Although the FDA and…
revere | May 15, 2007Indonesia has just registered its 76th death and 95th case of bird flu, making it the country with more of each than any other nation. Not that you would know it by looking at the current WHO count of confirmed cases. That's because Indonesia hasn't sent WHO any viral isolates for confirmation since January. We've covered this too often to repeat the details (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for some background), but the issue is now front and center in this week's World Health Assembly, the official governing body of WHO convened in Geneva:
The issue of sharing…
revere | May 14, 2007You might wonder what this video (hat tip Boingboing) has to do with bird flu. Nothing. Except this. If this guy and another 40% of his buddies are out sick, who's going to do his job if the high voltage lines go down in an ice or wind storm. I'd like to think I'd help sick people. But this? Forget it.
glumbert.com - High Power Job
revere | May 14, 2007Taxes, national service, diplomacy. A far cry from immunology and virology. Unless you are a blogger or interested in words. Then you get to bring them together.
First, taxes and national service. In Rome of old, these were things you owed to the Republic (as opposed to the Rome of today, the things you are expected to evade). The Latin word was munis, "sense of duty" (cf., "municipal"). Not everyone has a sense of duty (you noticed?). Even today -- imagine -- some people don't have to serve (they are given foreign policy roles in Republican administrations) or are exempt from paying their…
revere | May 13, 2007Nebraska is a pretty red state (meaning Republican and conservative, not lefty as it did in my youth). All the statewide office holders are Republicans except for junior Senator Ben Nelson who might as well be a Republican. The state went two to one for Bush in 2004. Two to one. This is God's country. Well, not quite. At least not in the religion section of the Lincoln Journal Star this weekend which carried a long story about freethinker and Lincoln, Nebraska citizen Rob McEntarffer, 38 years old, and working in the Lincoln Public Schools District Office. He describes the first time, in…
revere | May 12, 2007Suppose there were a stadium built with too few bathrooms (hard to imagine?). As the place became more popular, say 26% more people gathering there, 9% of the bathrooms disappeared and there were too few plumbers to keep them working. Suppose, too, that even though there are more people coming to the stadium, the number of seats had dropped 17%, so people used the toilets as a place to sit until a seat opened up. Most people don't go to a stadium to use the bathroom, but you'll have to admit, "when ya gotta go ya gotta go." It's an emergency.
That's the situation in US emergency departments.…
revere | May 12, 2007The problem of melamine in the food chain continues to be discussed, so we thought we'd do a follow-up of our earlier post. The mechanism whereby melamine, or melamine plus some other factor, or something else entirely is the cause of pet deaths remains unclear. The latest theory is that a co-precipitate of melamine and cyanuric acid might be the cause of the apparent renal failure in cats and dogs who ate pet food contaminated with melamine and like compounds. Here's what I have been able to make out at this point.
To recap, melamine is a nitrogen-rich chemical added surreptitiously to…
revere | May 11, 2007Too hilarious. Mitt Romney, one of the most successful fundraisers of the Republican dopefuls who still can't get any traction even among the right wing Republican base, may be one of the more gullible. No, I guess the three scientific midgets who publicly declared they don't believe in evolution (Brownback, Tancredo, Huckabee) have to take that prize. But he's at least a runner-up. We honor him because he actually believes the French have instituted a seven year marriage renewal option:
"It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking," Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000…
revere | May 11, 2007The US military didn't plan for the aftermath of Iraq. You know, controlling the civilian population? So they've learned their lesson. You gotta plan for it:
The US military has begun to plan for a possible avian flu pandemic that could kill as many as three million people in the United States in as little as six weeks, a Pentagon planning document said.
The Defense Department's "Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza," which was posted Wednesday on a Pentagon website, lays out guidelines and planning assumptions for US military services and combatant commands.
Possible scenarios include…
revere | May 10, 2007Stories like this always seem to end badly. But they keep happening:
Imported red fire ants have plagued farmers, ranchers and others for decades. Now the reviled pests are facing a bug of their own.
Researchers have pinpointed a naturally occurring virus that kills the ants, which arrived in the U.S. in the 1930s and now cause $6 billion in damage annually nationwide, including about $1.2 billion in Texas.
The virus caught the attention of U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers in Florida in 2002. The agency is now seeking commercial partners to develop the virus into a pesticide to…
revere | May 10, 2007The stand-off between Indonesia and the rest of the world over sharing of viral isolates obtained within its borders continues. Indonesia has identified a problem, but in our opinion, has no standing to impose its proffered unworkable solution. Everyone tends to see this from their own particular perspective, so we'll give you ours. We aren't WHO (and have had no contact with them on this matter) and we aren't citizens of Indonesia or any other developing country. We are citizens of a rich, developed country. But we are also long time, committed public health professionals. I think we have…
revere | May 9, 2007An article by Norwegian researchers in the UK medical journal, The Lancet, takes WHO to task for making issuing guidelines without adequate reference to existing evidence.
The study was conducted by Dr. Andrew Oxman and Dr. Atle Fretheim, of the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Health Services, and Dr. John Lavis at McMaster University in Hamilton. They interviewed senior WHO officials and analyzed various guidelines to determine how they were produced. What they found was a distinctly non-transparent process.
"It's difficult to judge how much confidence you can have in WHO guidelines if you're…
revere | May 9, 2007Last week another mathematical modeling paper made the newswires. If you wonder how this happens, the answer is that universities and companies have PR departments that put out press releases. Services like ScienceDaily aggregate and package these press releases for journalists and others (like us). Since a mathematical paper in a specialized journal (in this case it is PLoS Computational Biology) is not likely to be read by a reporter, especially a reporter on deadline, it isn't surprising the news stories follow the press release rather than the paper. In this case, I am sorry to say, the…
revere | May 8, 2007The US government wants to build yet another high containment laboratory to "research" agents of high risk. This one is supposed to replace the aging facility at Plum Island, New York. Maybe your state is one of the ones bidding for this laboratory. You might even have read about it in your local newspaper or heard about in on your local TV station, like this one in North Carolina:
A dozen states including North Carolina are competing for a government research lab full of killer germs like anthrax, avian flu and foot-and-mouth disease -- a prospect some of their residents want to avoid like…