revere | February 24, 2007The American Public Health Association is the organizational voice of American public health. I've been a member for almost 40 years and served on its Governing Council and on one of its top policy boards. Admittedly I've not been very active for the last number of years, especially as APHA has become neutered and politically marginalized. But I have a soft spot in my heart for it and its tens of thousands of members, mostly dedicated, hardworking and underpaid public sector professionals. So it pains me to say their just announced pandemic flu "prescription" is a prescription for an obsolete…
revere | February 23, 2007If you are attracted to leaving your body to science but still want to be buried au naturel, now you can have it both ways. Just bequeath yourself to the Anthropological Research Facility at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. There you can quietly decompose on their peaceful three acre facility, where perforated pipes from you buried corpse bring up the gasses produced as microorganisms busily break down your complex molecules to smaller ones. The idea is to discover what dead bodies smell like:
It's not a pleasant smell," Vass said. "You never get used to it."
It takes about 17 days…
revere | February 23, 2007In August of 2005, Dr. Oleg Kiselyov bravely predicted that a bird flu outbreak in Russia would fade away in two weeks:
A senior World Health Organization official said the bird flu epidemic in Russia will "die down completely in 10 to 15 days," and that bird flu vaccine for humans will start being tested in September and might come into use in October.
"Anti-epidemic measures have localized the [bird flu] outbreak," and recent weather changes will help localize the disease, Oleg Kiselyov, head of the WHO National Influenza Center, told a news conference in St. Petersburg. (Interfax, our…
revere | February 22, 2007This has been going on for years but it doesn't make it more acceptable:
More than 3,000 Jewish settlement housing units are being built in the occupied West Bank where the Jewish population is growing steadily, Israel's anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now said Wednesday.
In its annual report on settlements -- considered illegal under international law -- the organisation said the largest sites of construction were in Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, Modiin Illit and Beitar Illit.
In addition, another 90 caravans were added to wildcat outposts -- which unlike full settlements are not…
revere | February 22, 2007It is easy to lose track of the various outbreaks of bird flu in poultry since the first of the year, but WHO has a nice map to remind you:
Since it's a bit small in this format, I'll read it off for you: UK, Russia (various places), Hungary, Turkey, Pakistan, South Korea, Japan, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia. A large format version can be seen here. We need to add Afghanistan, China/Hong Kong (not shown on the map).
Here is a bar chart listing the countries that have had poultry or wild bird cases and the number of outbreaks in each:
Source: World Organization for…
revere | February 21, 2007Here are two separate but related stories. One is about lunch boxes (h/t Melanie of Just a Bump in the Beltway fame). One is about cronyism and sucking up to business in the Bush Administration. First lunch boxes:
Story #1, lunchboxes:
In 2005, when government scientists tested 60 soft, vinyl lunchboxes, they found that one in five contained amounts of lead that medical experts consider unsafe -- and several had more than 10 times hazardous levels.
But that's not what they told the public.
Instead, the Consumer Product Safety Commission released a statement that they found "no instances of…
revere | February 21, 2007Good idea, but is it new? When I read (hat tip easyhiker) that computer scientists at the University of Maryland were suggesting logging onto a social networking site as a useful adjunct to official information in the event of a pandemic, I thought this was not a new idea. The grandaddy/mama of sites like this, The Flu Wiki, has been up since June of 2005. It regularly logs thousands of daily visitors sharing information and tips on pandemic prepping. Other sites, in bulletin board format, have also been up for a long time. Flublogia is already well-populated.
But an examination of their…
revere | February 20, 2007Every time I post something here about those bastards at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and their record company cronies I get a comment about how a teenie downloading music is a thief. Those poor movie producers and record companies! Mugging victims.
Look over on the left sidebar at the badge under the blogroll. You'll see we are licensed under a Creative Commons license. The license I chose has some of my rights reserved, but allows anyone to:
Share -- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work,
or to
Remix -- to make derivative works
But only under the following…
revere | February 20, 2007It is now clear someone will be punished for the bird flu debacle at Bernard Matthews turkey farm in the UK. Several hundred factory workers:
Around 130 workers at a Bernard Matthews site face being laid off in the wake of the bird flu outbreak, a union has reported.
The employees at Great Witchingham, near Norwich, will be stood down for 20 days from Tuesday, according to the Transport and General Workers' Union.
The firm is preparing to lay off a total of 500 workers, the TGWU claimed.
Environment Secretary David Miliband is expected to make a Commons statement on bird flu later this…
revere | February 19, 2007Sarah Silverman is a comedienne on cable's Comedy Central, and although I haven't seen her new show, I've seen the trailers while watching The Daily Show. On one of them she is talking to school children and saying something like, "If they can put a man on the moon, they can put a man with AIDS on the moon." Then there's a pause while the times for her show are hyped. When she returns she adds, "And then maybe they can put everyone with AIDS on the moon." Or something like that. It's funny. Sort of. Until you read the latest report of Congress's non-partisan investigative arm, The General…
revere | February 19, 2007Here is another dispatch from our continuing series, Notes from a Parallel Universe (parts I and II here and here). In this universe there is a confirmed H5N1 outbreak near Moscow.
In The Parallel Universe this is impossible:
MOSCOW. Feb 18 (Interfax) - Experts from Rosptitsesoyuz, Russia's poultry producers association, say poultry farms in the Moscow region are immune to the bird flu virus.
"All poultry farms in the Moscow region, and in the rest of Russia, have been working under a tight closed regime since August 2005, which rules out the spread of the bird flu virus to…
revere | February 18, 2007The mess up at the Bernard Matthews H5N1 infected turkey farm just gets worse by the day.
Health officials are urgently investigating fears that the disposal of contaminated waste from the Bernard Matthews plant at the centre of the bird flu outbreak may have allowed the virus to spread to other parts of the country.
Experts fear that meat and packaging contaminated with the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus from the Bernard Matthews processing plant at Holton, Suffolk, may have found its way on to landfill sites, where wild birds might become infected. Meat carrying the virus could also have been…
revere | February 18, 2007The American electorate is apparently not too keen on having a Mormon as the next President. Compared to an atheist, however, a Mormon is a Highly Desirable Personage.
Gallup Poll, 2/9- 11, 2007:
If your party nominated a well-qualified Candidate for the White House in 2008 who was a ___, would you vote for that person? (h/t DailyKos)
Yes
No
Catholic
95%
4%
Black
94
5
Jewish
92
7
A woman
88
11
Hispanic
87
12
Mormon
72
24
Married for third time
67
30
72 years…
revere | February 17, 2007One thing at which WHO is spectacularly successful -- sending mixed messages. In October avian influenza was a major public health threat and the world needed to do more.
While the deadly bird flu virus has not spread as widely as feared in Africa, vigilance is still needed across the world to counter its advance and deal with its impact on humans, the United Nations coordinator for the disease said today, expressing in particular "very great concern" over Indonesia, where practically the whole country has been affected. (UN's David Nabarro, October 2006)
Now we are on the verge of having an…
revere | February 16, 2007The smell of coins. I can't resist blogging this. It's science.
The signature metallic smell of a handful of coins isn't the scent of pure metal. According to Virginia Tech organic chemist Dietmar Glindemann, most people wouldn't even recognize the acrid smell of a vat of copper. But in a recent experiment, Glindemann showed that when we handle metal objects like coins (most U.S. coins are about 75 percent copper), our sweat begins corroding them immediately, creating a film of unstable ions that behave like partially oxidized rust. Fatty acids from oils on the skin are decomposed by these…
revere | February 16, 2007I rarely plumb Effect Measure's archives except when I think the material has some point for today. And today we are treated almost daily to reports of bird flu outside of asia: Turkey, the UK, Nigeria, Hungary, Egypt. What's going on?
Sometimes it's useful to look back. Here's our post from one year ago today.
Lots of places plus Indonesia
The reports of H5N1 infectedwild birds (mainly swans) in new countries are coming almost too fast to keep track of. Denmark is the latest (confirmation pending), but we can add Hungary and Dagestan (Russian Federation north of the Caucasus), too.…
revere | February 15, 2007If you hanker after the good old days when things were simpler, times when we knew who are enemies were, you still have a home. It's the folks at Accuracy in Media, a conservative group dedicated to the principle that no amount of disinformation is too patriotic. They are now exercised about the "media reform movement," described as an insidious attempt to muzzle conservatives by resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine, a doctrine designed to "force conservative media to incorporate 'progressive' views into shows like the O'Reilly Factor on cable news and the Rush Limbaugh program on radio." Who's…
revere | February 15, 2007Health Care Renewal is an excellent blog with a special interest in medical conflict of interest issues. Last week one of the HCR bloggers, Roy Poses, posted about "The Threat of Pseudoevidence-Based Medicine." The occasion was a article by Smith in the UK journal Clinical Governance (2007; 12: 42-52), which I don't have access to, but there is enough in the excerpts and commentary at HCR to get the basic idea.
We hear a lot about Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), using the best available evidence to inform clinical practice. The gold standard for evidence is a randomized clinical trial,…
revere | February 14, 2007Many years ago, so long ago she says she never remembers any such thing, Mrs. R. said to me that if I ever brought her flowers she'd think I'd done something wrong. I suspect this was prompted by the fact I wasn't much in the habit of bringing her flowers, but I chose to interpret it more literally and felt excused. Even on Valentine's Day. Even though she is really and truly my special Valentine.
And now I have another excuse:
It's probably the last thing most people think about when buying roses: By the time the bright, velvety flowers reach your valentine, they will have been sprayed,…
revere | February 14, 2007A new paper has just appeared in PLoS Medicine on an old topic: whether seasonal influenza vaccines might also cause enough cross-reactivity to protect against H5N1. The basic idea is simple. The immune system "sees" the surface proteins on the flu virus and makes protective antibodies against them. The major stimulant for this is the hemagglutinin protein (HA), the H part of H5N1. There are 16 different immunological flavors of HA that cross-react very little. Since the human population has never had widespread infection with a flu virus that has the H5 subtype (we have had H1, H2 and H3…