revere | April 28, 2007The Atlanata Journal Constitution, hometown paper of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (aka, "CDC") continues to lift the rocks and uncover the stuff beneath. In the latest installment it has obtained an internal memo from CDC's international health office to CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding about the problems in filling overseas posts (see also this post summarizing things at DailyKos by my Wiki partner, DemFromCT). The memo is long but revealing. One of the chief obstacles resides in a political office at the Department of Health and Human Services headed by George H.…
revere | April 27, 2007I will admit to having a soft spot in my heart for one of the NIH institutes, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. NIEHS is on a separate campus in Research Triangle Park, NC, away from the main NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. It is separated in other ways, too, having a decidedly more public health focus than the other institutes. Its mission, like other NIH institutes, is to ferret out the basic causes of illness, in NIEHS's case, environmentally caused or influenced illness. Its interest in cancer caused by industrial chemicals, asthma from air pollution, reproductive and…
revere | April 27, 2007It was inevitable. Roche is now planning to cut production of its antiviral Tamiflu because, they say, supply is exceeding demand:
Swiss pharmaceutical group Roche said Thursday it would trim production of the frontline bird flu drug Tamiflu unless demand picked up, but warned that the world was still not ready for a pandemic.
Manufacturing capacity for the antiviral treatment has reached 400 million treatment courses a year and is outstripping demand, William Burns, the chief executive of the group's pharmaceuticals division told journalists.
Roche has received orders for 215 million…
revere | April 26, 2007The wound opened by Indonesia's balk on supplying H5N1 viral isolates to WHO for vaccine surveillance (see here and here) has now been fixed -- with a band-aid:
Indonesia and other five countries are being awarded grants by the World Health Organization to establish in-country manufacturing capacity for influenza vaccine, according to Indonesian branch of WHO.
As part of a concerted effort to ensure more equitable access to a potential pandemic influenza vaccine, up to 2.5 million U.S. dollars sponsored by the governments of Japan and the United States will go towards Brazil, India, Mexico,…
revere | April 26, 2007This isn't just about solidarity with one of my SciBlings, Shelley at Retrospectacle, although I am glad and proud to stand with her on this. It's about a matter of principle. I still have steam coming out of my ears. Here's the story.
A couple of days ago Shelley posted about antioxidants in fruit drinks. She knew about it because the publishers of the journal, the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, the execrable publicrats John Wiley & Sons, broadcast press releases that said adding alcohol to fruits makes them healthier by boosting natural antioxidant action. Not…
revere | April 25, 2007Yesterday a new medical journal was launched, Open Medicine. It's the product of Drs. John Hoey and Anne Marie Todkill, former editors of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, who were fired last year in a conflict over editorial independence. Their publisher, the Canadian Medical Association, tried to exert editorial direction and the editors resisted. It was, as they say, un scandale.
The editors have risen, souls and reputations intact. Moreover, OM will be joining the growing ranks of Open Access journals with open review policies:
Open Medicine is a new general medical journal. It…
revere | April 25, 2007The stuff you read in the newspapers. Jeez. First a story about Des Moines, Iowa officials looking for someplace to quarantine people in the event of a bird flu outbreak. Yes, that's right. Quarantine. Lots of times when you read that they really mean, isolation, the segregation of sick people. Quarantine is the segregation of possibly exposed people who aren't sick. And in Des Moines they really mean "quarantine":
One of the toughest challenges would be to quarantine people who were exposed to the virus but weren't showing symptoms. Most would be asked to stay home for about a week. Those…
revere | April 24, 2007Excitement, then irritation. That was my reaction to a news article in Nature about a technique using a protein to switch off nerve firing when activated by light:
There were audible gasps and spontaneous applause at a neuroscience meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, in February, when Ed Boyden described a protein that switches off nerve firing when activated by light. And when Karl Deisseroth told the fuller story of the protein, called NpHR and published in this week's Nature, at Cold Spring Harbor in New York late last month, there was talk of a revolution in neuroscience. It is perhaps no…
revere | April 24, 2007The Bernard Matthews company, Europe's largest turkey (producer), had a nasty brush with bird flu and had to kill 160,000 birds, amidst many questions about its biosecurity measures (or not). But the company didn't suffer. It will get £600,000 compensation, courtesy UK taxpayers. The 250 workers the company laid off aren't so lucky. They get squat.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the compensation system was designed to encourage farmers to report potentially deadly outbreaks.
"Early reporting is essential to preventing disease spread, which would result in a far…
revere | April 23, 2007Lab accidents happen. Usually they happen because the technician, student or senior scientist thinks he or she is working with something safe. But they happen even if everyone knows there is dangerous stuff around. Like in a bioweapons laboratory. And when that happens, you don't want to publicize it. Even if you are required to:
An aerosol chamber mishap at Texas A&M University in February 2006 caused a researcher to be infected with the bioweapons agent brucella. Texas A&M University then violated federal law by not reporting the brucellosis case to the Centers for Disease Control (…
revere | April 23, 2007If you travel at all, and I have to travel a fair amount, you know how brittle the air traffic system is. Last week I did an out-and-back one day affair of around 500 miles each way. Weather was good and I made it to my destination on time. The meeting went from 10 am to 1:45 pm. Then a dash to the airport for a 2:35 pm flight home. Except that higher than usual winds at my destination set in motion a cascade of air traffic delays as the number of available runways shrank and I was 3 hours late. Not terrible, but just a measure of how sensitive the system is to the slightest upset.
The…
revere | April 22, 2007A mashup, in online talk, is a site or application that combines content from several sources. Google Map is a favorite matrix for mashups and one of the most intriguing (for us) is one called "Who is Sick?" It's a voluntary geographically-based reporting system for sickness:
A new Google Maps mashup helps you track colds, flus and other bugs in your community.
Start by entering your city or ZIP code to see if other users have reported any sicknesses. You'll see a Google map dotted with icons that indicate symptoms like runny nose, cough, fever and headache. You can also post your own illness…
revere | April 22, 2007I missed it in December when PZ alerted us to the challenge of an afterlifetime: The Blasphemy Challenge. The "challenge" (scare quotes here because some of us find this pretty easy) is to declare your lack of faith with a YouTube video. The only requirement is that at some point you must utter the words, "I deny the Holy Spirit."
According to the Challenge's sponsors, the "Holy Spirit" is an invisible ghost who Christians believe dwells on Earth as God's representative. Denying that this Holy Harvey exists is considered the ultimate sin: "Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never…
revere | April 21, 2007If you have ever driven or lived in Boston you know that signage is not one of the city's strong points. In fact, it is almost impossible for an outsider to comprehend how bad the sign situation it is. Often you can only tell what street you are not on, because many main streets don't have street signs, although the cross streets do. And a street is likely to change it crosses over one of the invisible boundaries that mark the divisions between the state's 351 cities and towns. Each city and town borders others. There is no unincorporated land in Massachusetts, every square inch being in…
revere | April 20, 2007Recently we posted on the risks encountered by workers working in the tunnels beneath the nation's capitol. You heard it from me. Now you can hear it and see it from the workers themselves on this video. You will also see pictures of the tunnels and the conditions there and hear about their lack of protection despite the fact the danger was known to the Architect of the Capitol.
The streaming video is 15 minutes long, part of a new program by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO), dedicated to serving as the voice of asbestos victims. Every minute has a new outrage on it,…
revere | April 20, 2007Bird flu clinicians -- the handful of doctors that have actually treated human cases of bird flu -- met in Turkey last month, and upon comparing notes made new recommendations. Among them, don't use steroids:
Doctors caring for H5N1 patients should not treat them with corticosteroids, the World Health Organization said Thursday, noting the drugs don't help and sometimes harm patients trying to battle the often severe infection.
Corticosteroids should only be used on patients with persistent septic shock, a condition in which blood pressure drops to dangerous levels because of an infection in…
revere | April 19, 2007It's a common observation that kids don't have a good sense of their own mortality. Whether it's from a deficit of wisdom, a surfeit of impulsiveness or adventurousness or even evolutionary reasons has been debated. I have my own ideas.
I thought about them again in the wake of the melancholy events at Virginia Tech where 33 students and faculty died in a mass shooting in which the shooter took his own life. As a parent it was hard not to think first of the mothers and fathers who had sent their children to a good university in a safe environment, only to see their lives snuffed out by being…
revere | April 19, 2007An excellent article on the CIDRAP site by Maryn McKenna (late of the Atlanta Journal Constitution where she had the CDC beat) won't be news to readers here, but it is news that it is news. The subject is efforts by non public health types in preparing for pandemic influenza. McKenna notes that recent reports by two different but highly regarded groups has noted that governmental planners are not making full use of grass roots groups outside of professional boundaries. In fact they aren't making use of them at all. Communication with the public is one way.
The first report, "Community…
revere | April 18, 2007I wasn't going to post on the announcement yesterday by the US FDA that it had approved the Sanofi Pasteur H5N1 vaccine. We've discussed it before. It was pretty much a failure, requiring too much viral antigen, two doses, and resulting in putative protection of less than half of those who receive it. There is a stockpile (or will be) of about 3 million doses in the national stockpile, only enough for a tiny fraction of those who would need it, with doubtful value for many of them. It was approved because, like the crooked gambling wheel, it's the only game in town. Who would get it isn't…
revere | April 18, 2007The jury is still out on the value of statins in H5N1 (see posts here and here). But these drugs seem to have many beneficial effects and are taken by a huge proportion of the at risk population to lower their cholesterol. But a new study suggests not as many are taking them as want to or might. The barrier is money.:
Many patients taking statins to lower their cholesterol stop taking the drugs because of co-payments and shared drug costs, a new study found.
These drugs, which have been shown to prevent heart attacks, should be fully covered by insurance, said study lead researcher Dr.…