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Clock Tutorial #10: Entrainment

This is the second in a series of posts on the analysis of entrainment, originally written on April 10, 2005. The natural, endogenous period of circadian rhythms, as measured in constant conditions, is almost never exactly 24 hours. In the real world, however, the light-dark cycle provided by the Earth's rotation around its axis is exactly 24 hours long. Utility of biological clocks is in retaining a constant phase between environmental cycles and activities of the organism (so the organism always "does" stuff at the same, most appropriate time of day). Thus, a mechanism must exist to…

Nikola Tesla - approaching the Big Anniversary

The big day - 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikola Tesla - is approaching fast - July 10th. I am sure that I will remind you of this a couple of more times until then - I have a couple of posts about him in the making - but first look at the older posts in which I have mentioned him so far....[more under the fold] Just the other day, I wrote about the significance of Bryant Park in NYC - you'll have to click to see what it has to do with Tesla. Then, I wrote how much I am eagerly anticipating the new movie in which David Bowie will play Tesla. It was based on the book "Prestige" which (…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: food intolerance and food for thought

This week we've got a substantive story and a video (also substantive). No snark in either. The first has to do with a school principal who censored the student newspaper because it ran a story that the company contracted to provide its food service was on a "mission to serve God": Orange County High School of the Arts hired a cafeteria provider whose “mission” is to “serve God.” You would have heard about it yesterday, too, were you a student at the school, had it not been for the intervention of the principal. Sue Vaughn, the school’s principal, says she halted the student paper’s…

Thinking about hospital surge

The Reveres have been around a long time and we know a lot of public health people in different states. Recently we were talking with a colleague about the problem of hospital surge capacity -- the ability to handle a sudden demand for services -- and she described her first job working for a state health department in the early 1980s. Her job was to compile a health resources report, essentially a yearly compilation of licensed and operating beds for all manner of health facilities, including hospitals, nursing homes, psychiatric facilities, outpatient clinics, rest homes, group homes and…

Placing a vaccine order with crooks and liars

Ten days ago Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced that the US government was allocating $1 billion to help companies with production costs for a swine flu vaccine. Among the beneficiaries was French vaccine giant, Sanofi-Aventis, whose Sanofi Pasteur unit got a $190 million order. It was likely only the first in a series of expected orders for the company. Sanofi knows how to make vaccines. So what could go wrong? Drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis has agreed to pay nearly $100 million to settle allegations it cheated Medicaid on the cost of nasal sprays. The Justice…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: I discover I'm not such a space shot

[Freethinker Sermonette is a regular Sunday feature here.] When you don't exist any more as a functioning mechanism, worrying about what happens to your parts is not something to fret much about. And indeed I don't much care. Well, maybe I care a little bit. Truth be told, there are some things I don't want, something I realized only when I read about a company that will take 1 gram of my ashes (I would like to be burned, by the way) and fly this 1/28-th of an ounce of combustion products of my former self to the moon: Leaving Earth to touch the cosmos is an experience few have ever known,…

The Egyptian toddler case conundrum

A tantalizing Reuters story yesterday called attention to the uptick in human bird flu cases in Egypt, the African country with more cases than any other (although far behind Asian countries like Indonesia). The observation prompting renewed expressions of concern are that new cases seem to be in the very young (toddlers) but adult cases have almost disappeared. So where are these toddlers picking up the virus? A possibility that is consistent with the observations is that adults are giving it to the toddlers but are themselves symptomless carriers. It's not impossible, because we know that…

Mixed bag for public health in new spending bill

There is a good summary by Robert Roos at CIDRAP News about the $420 billion spending bill signed by President Obama this week to cover the next six months. The good news edges out the bad news, so the net is positive, a welcome change from the kind of deeply depressing budget news to which we became accustomed during the Bush years. Bush took a teetering public health system whose decline started with Reagan and continued through Clinton and put it on life support. Now a couple of items in the spending bill have upped the oxygen slightly but don't increase the circulation in all the critical…

Annals of peanut butter: tiptoe through the peanuts

Nothing like a massive food contamination outbreak from a plant in your state to concentrate the minds of state legislators (more here and links therein). Especially when an important industry is involved. We're talking Georgia peanuts, of course. Peanuts employ an estimated 50,000 workers in Georgia, accounting for some $2.5 billion in the state's economy. So yesterday the Georgia Senate unanimously passed a food safety bill and sent it on to the Georgia House. On the surface it seems like a good move, but its chief sponsor was a Republican, so that automatically makes me look closer. I'm…

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) season

It's influenza-like illness ("ILI") season again. We just call it flu season but in fact there are a lot of respiratory viruses running around besides the flu virus that look like flu. Recently we discussed one of the others, the human metapneumovirus (HMNV). It's been around infecting us for over a century but wasn't identified until 2001. One we've known about a little longer (1956) is respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a major cause of respiratory infections in children and increasingly in adults, especially the elderly. Like influenza and HMNV, RSV is a negative sense single stranded RNA…

Key NIH institute gets a new Director

Environmental health researchers got some good news yesterday. The NIH's only institute that focusses almost entirely on public health and environmental science, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), got a new Director after years of chaotic and controversial regime of former Director David Schwartz, who left under a cloud of alleged conflicts of interest and mismanagement. For the last year NIEHS has been under very capable and stabilizing direction of an Acting Director, Sam Wilson, but there were limits on what could be done by a Director and his Deputy who didn…

Pig disease in swine workers

Three years ago we discussed (we were still on blogspot then) a spreading outbreak of a mysterious disease in Sichuan (Szechuan), China. Any mysterious disease outbreak in China always raises warning flags since southern China is the incubator for influenza. The Chinese discounted the possibility of bird flu, saying it was instead a massive outbreak caused by the bacterium Streptococcus suis, Type 2, an important cause of disease in pigs. S. suis sometimes causes human menigitis or septic shock, but the final total of 215 cases and 38 deaths seemed atypical. But it turned out Chinese…

Annals of McCain - Palin, IV: did I say that?

So with socialism Republican style (socialize the losses, privatize the profits) both Obama and McCain are saying the saw the meltdown coming. We know Barack Obama gave a prescient speech on the financial markets 6 months ago. It wasn't covered much because it wasn't a very interesting sounding topic. Now John McCain tells us he was concerned, too: "Two years ago, I warned that the oversight of Fannie and Freddie was terrible, that we were facing a crisis because of it, or certainly serious problems," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told CBS this morning. "The influence that Fannie and Freddie had…

Palin comparison, II: teen pregnancy and sex education

This is another in our Daily Dose of Sarah Palin, because even if John McCain didn't think it was that important to learn a lot about the person who might be the next President should some medical event befall the 72 year old cancer survivor who would occupy the position should he be elected, most people want more information. Previous installments here. What we see is that Palin is a perfect fit for the most extreme right wing Republican platform in that party's history. I'm not interested in Sarah Palin's family joys and sorrows. Not my business. But I am interested in her version of…

A new class of air pollutant?

I used to joke that the only plan the Bush administration had for dealing with air pollution was to put all the free radicals in jail. If you don't know what a free radical is, it is a highly reactive form of a chemical, usually involving an unpaired electron. Radicals often are short lived intermediates in other reactions and can have half lives in the microseconds or less. In any event we're talking seconds. It is free radicals that are formed by ionizing radiation. They quickly react with whatever chemicals are in their vicinity and if that chemical happens to be your genetic material, you…

Occupied Palestine and mathematics

I belong to a number of professional societies and one of them is the American Mathematical Society. The September issue of one of their publications, the Notices, just arrived and I read with interest a statement by one of the world's most distinguished mathematicians, Brown University's David Mumford. While most members of the public have never heard of him, Mumford has been a famous in mathematical circles for many years, having received the Fields Medal in 1974 for his work in algebraic geometry. The Fields Medal is an extraordinary recognition, perhaps the most prestigious in mathematics…

EPA gets the doubt of the benefits

We frequently observe here that almost everything in public health, from the societal level to the molecular level, is a balancing act. With most benefits comes a risk and with many risks a benefit. Of course there is a problem when the benefits and risks accrue to different parties as when the public runs the risks and the corporation gets the benefits. So that's one problem in making the trade-offs. Another is when the risks and benefits are completely different, essentially non-comparable. We often try to solve this by measuring them on a common scale like total number of lives saved or…

A patch for flu vaccine production

While we are all waiting for the other shoe to drop and a nasty, rip roaring flu pandemic to come rushing down the tracks at us, lots of companies have jumped into the pandemic vaccine sweepstakes. Reuters reports that at least 16 companies are testing flu vaccines and probably even more are involved in some technical aspect of vaccine production. That's good, although whether it will make any significant difference except around the margins remains to be seen. Timing is everything. Meanwhile, though, work is going forward on many vaccine fronts. The one to hit the PR wires today is a report…

Medical science done right

Things are changing. And here's some evidence. This is a great story (hat tip Boingboing). It's about a new test for African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), a disease carried by the tse-tse fly that afflicts an estimated 66 million people in 36 countries. Not a nice disease: At first, the main clinical signs of human trypanosomiasis are high fever, weakness and headache, joint pains and pruritus (itching). Gradually, the immune defence mechanisms and the patient's resistance are exhausted. As the parasite develops in the lymph and blood of the patient, the initial symptoms become more…

Toughening a community for a pandemic

A recently published Commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) raises some interesting and serious questions about conventional efforts for pandemic flu preparedness. The author is John Middaugh of the Florida State Health Department, a long time public health professional. The last I saw him he was in Alaska, so he seems to have put quite a bit of distance between his current and former places of employment. Indeed the question of people distancing themselves from each other is a central theme of the Commentary: Although continuing to invest in diverse aspects of…

Raising my glass

Year's end. We don't disclose how many Reveres there are or where they are (we don't even correct the rife speculation and usually incorrect assumptions in the Comments), but one thing we/I will reveal: there's only one Revere at a time. So it falls to this one to look back on the past year, which for me, personally, was a year of milestones. A new grandson came into our lives. He is beautiful and 7 months old. It helps make up for the one that didn't quite make it. On the other side of the ledger, my mother died this year. It was the day before Thanksgiving. She, too, was a beautiful person…

Spinning bird flu: clockwise or counterclockwise?

We have occasion to comment often here about how the same bird flu story is spun different ways. A case in point is reporting on statements made by the head of Indonesia's National Avian Influenza Committee, Bayu Krisnamurthi and the two different directions Agence France Presse and Reuters took the story. Here's AFP: Indonesian bird flu officials said Tuesday they were investigating several recent avian influenza deaths where the victims were believed to have not come into contact with infected poultry. "In the last three to four months, we have had four cases where the poultry in the…

Poisons by the barrel full.

Pesticides are one of the few kinds of chemicals specially designed to kill living things that we intentionally put into our environment in high volume. A large class of pesticides are the organophosphates (OPs), agents that affect the normal process of nerve impulse transmission. What we call pests are one kind of organism they can kill, but OPs are unaware of our human categories like "pest." They are also adept at killing and sickening other organisms. Like us. They do it frighteningly often in the developing world, and they do it in the developed world as well. There is a nice Jack…

500 terror suspects identified yesterday

And today, too. So they're keeping a list, but unlike Santa Claus they're not checking it twice. Or even once. The list is the US government's terrorist watch list that today -- like yesterday and the day before and tomorrow -- grew by over 500 names. The terrorists are either being created at record rates or there are an awful lot of terrorists out there. Already the list has three quarters of a million names on it. Maybe yours. Or someone with the same name as yours. The list is used to check people entering the country at airports and border crossings. But if Leonard Boyle, director of…

No plan for all seasons (flu)

Almost everyone now seems to think the Iraq debacle was, well, a debacle. Many of us thought invading Iraq was a terrible idea to begin with. Others are silent on that issue (or approved) but think it was carried out poorly. No planning. Failure to plan, however, is a hallmark of the Bush administration. Their intentions are pre-programmed but they never seem to plan for the consequences of those actions. It's not just Iraq. Or Katrina, for that matter. It's also pandemic flu: When you ask federal officials around the country if they are prepared for a pandemic flu, the answers are unsettling…

. . . and breathe normally

Flying on an airplane used to be something special. Now it's just another means of mass transit, with all that implies. So our attention is more and more directed to the unpleasant parts of flying, which, for many is the lousy air quality. Modern pressurized airliners fly high -- very high indeed. Stratospherically, literally. When you are up 35,000 or 40,000 feet you are in the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere where there is little vertical movement of air (it is essentially a temperature inversion) and high ozone levels. Those ozone levels are a good thing for those of us at on the…

NIEHS Director (temporarily) steps aside

In an email letter sent internally to all National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) personnel, its Director, Dr. David Schwartz, has announced he is temporarily stepping aside while the NIH Director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, conducts an internal review of NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program (NATP), both of which have come under fire from congressional, internal and outside critics (see our posts, here, here and here). Here is the text of Dr. Schwartz's email, as we received it: Dear Colleagues: As you know, there have been recent inquiries by members of Congress and others…

Flu in Australia: no tears

This is about the particularly severe flu season being endured by our friends in Australia. Southern hemisphere, so the flu season is in full swing there, the reverse of the northern hemisphere. But "full swing" doesn't quite describe it, so I'm going to do this one in two parts ((all links from Flu Wiki Front Page, news for August 18). The great epidemiologist Irving Selikoff once described statistics as people with the tears wiped away. So the first post today will be statistics, or the equivalent, without the tears . Later today I'll do the other part: As the flu epidemic continues to…

Clock News

Melatonin improves mood in winter depression: Alfred Lewy and his colleagues in the OHSU Sleep and Mood Disorders Lab set out to test the hypothesis that circadian physiological rhythms become misaligned with the sleep/wake cycle during the short days of winter, causing some people to become depressed. Usually these rhythms track to the later dawn in winter, resulting in a circadian phase delay with respect to sleep similar to what happens flying westward. Some people appear to be tracking to the earlier dusk of winter, causing a similar amount of misalignment but in the phase-advance…

The Power of the Thousand Electrodes

Mapping The Neural Landscape Of Hunger The compelling urge to satisfy one's hunger enlists structures throughout the brain, as might be expected in a process so necessary for survival. But until now, studies of those structures and of the feeding cycle have been only fragmentary--measuring brain regions only at specific times in the feeding cycle. --------------snip------------------ In their paper, Ivan de Araujo and colleagues implanted bundles of infinitesimal recording electrodes in areas of rat brain known to be involved in feeding, motivation, and behavior. Those areas include the…

More on Elizabeth Edwards

On Thursday night, I posted a large linkfest about the press-conference by John and Elizabeth Edwards and the revelation that her cancer has returned. Those were mostly first responses. There have been literally thousands of blog posts written since then, but I chose to link only to a couple of dozen that really deserve your attention due to quality, novel perspective, or information content (scroll below). While there were certainly some very nice posts coming form the Right, wishing Elizabeth well and agreeing that the decision to continue campaigning is none of anyone's but the Edwards'…

Big Plans for NC (and Triangle) Blogging in the New Year

So, whats' cookin' in the local blogging world? Quite a lot, actually. First, our little group, BlogTogether is growing, growing. Instead of being just a little " target="_blank" title="">Anton's sideproject, we are thinking of turning it into a non-profit organization - so if you have experience with founding non-profits please let us know ASAP. Also, apart from Anton, several others (including myself) are now able to post there. This will make the blog much more active and interactive this year than it was ever before. We are also looking for a nice-looking logo for it so we can slap…

"What God Created on the Fourth Day?" is not an SAT question, sorry!

Most of our anti-Creationist battles are over efforts to infuse Christian religion into K-12 education. One common battlefield is the courtroom where our side has (so far, until/unless the benches get filled with more clones of Priscilla Owen) won. But another place where we can stop them is the college admission office. Sara Robinson of the Orcinus blog (which everybody should read daily) revisits, in more detail than I ever saw on any science blogs at the time this first started, the legal battle between the University of California and the Calvary Chapel Christian School over what…

Keep your prayers to yourself, Nurse

A nurse on a home visit decided to offer her services as a personal intermediary to a deity and pray for her patient. The patient objected and complained to the health organization — after all, the patient may not like her nasty bronze age god, and may feel put upon that a presumed professional is proposing to waste her time on chanted magic spells. It's also a matter of courtesy: when I'm teaching, I don't hector my students on matters outside the course content, like atheism, and when I'm being treated by a nurse or doctor, I expect them to leave irrelevant superstitions out of the…

Sou feliz sem crer em nenhum deus

Buses must be militant atheists, because pretty soon they're all going to be sporting declarations of godlessness. The latest nation to jump on the bandwagon is Brazil. If you can read Portuguese, you can go direct to the source and read all about it. Otherwise, I've put a translation below the fold. In the first week of this year was launched the first advertising campaign in the UK about atheism, promoted by the British Humanist Association. The campaign has its own website (where shirts can be purchased) and is attracting great attention from the media since its launch in October -…

Washing our hands of a difficult (or not so difficult) decision

As the flu pandemic ramped up with no vaccine in sight, attention turned to more prosaic things people might do to avoid infection. At the top of most lists was hand washing. I think hand washing is a good thing to do, although the evidence it does much against influenza specifically is weak or non-existent. Hand washing has been shown effective in some studies involving other respiratory viruses and intestinal pathogens, so even it doesn't work for flu you gain something. And now it appears there are other effects of hand washing. Long a metaphor for having done with something, new research…

Coping with swine flu down under last year

What are we to make of the swine flu pandemic? The only thing I feel confident about is that it will be some time before we really know. A great deal of data and experience was gained in the year since the pandemic H1N1 took everyone by surprise but it will be a while before we can harvest all of it. Meanwhile I can say things were better than we thought they might be and certainly better than everyone's worst fears, but how much better -- better, how bad -- they were we just don't know. It was a very good year for people in my age category (over 65) as for reasons now becoming a bit clearer…

How technology can drive down health care costs

With health care costs growing without bounds, the medical devices industry and President Obama are hard at work. Not hard at work reducing costs. Hard at work convincing us that the solution to the cost crisis is more technology. Right, Mr. President. And John McCain is a maverick and Sarah Palin is a genius. Almost everyone else believes advanced technology is a significant driver of health care costs and the idea that it will drive down costs is not just a fantasy but steaming pile of crap. That doesn't mean there's no room for innovation to lower costs. On the contrary: Nobody knows…

Living through a revolution

Markos Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of DailyKos, the world's largest political blog. He travels quite a bit and is dependent on his laptop and the internet. So I read his first experience with the iPad with a great deal of interest. Go read it (like they need the traffic; on a quiet Sunday night they are running 35,000 visits an hour!). Bottom line: overwhelmingly positive for someone who has a few, routine but critical functions handled by email and Microsoft Office level programs. I've already written about my own plans to get one later in the year, after the kinks are worked out…

Bad flu and underlying medical conditions

It is becoming conventional wisdom that the 2009 H1N1 pandemic was not as severe as a bad seasonal flu year. That might be true, although I don't find it much comfort because a bad seasonal flu year is no less bad for being more familiar. But I am not yet willing to assent to the conventional wisdom yet. I don't think we have had sufficient time to collate all the information that would enable us to make that kind of judgment, which sometimes takes years to evaluate. However bad it was or wasn't, the pandemic flu strain could kill you just as dead as any other flu. CDC has just released…

Slandered doctor threatens to sue libel accusers and they fold

The UK has some of the worst libel laws in the world, heavily stacked in favor of those claiming almost any criticism is libel. Perhaps it is a carry over from the days when the upper class brooked no criticism, I don't know, but I was glad to sign a petition calling for reform of these ridiculous laws. The reason I, as a science blogger, would object are well illustrated by two high profile cases, one involving a science writer, Simon Singh, the other a Danish scientist, Henrik Thomsen. Here is the merest sketch of the Singh case, followed by the Thomsen case, including developments in the…

The global swine flu vaccine shortage

The US has ordered 250 million doses of swine flu vaccine, mainly from foreign manufacturers. That's a large proportion of the world's productive capacity. A couple of the biggest vaccine makers, Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur, have promised to make donations to WHO for use in the poorer countries and with some smaller donations that's maybe 160 million doses. Countries like the US that earlier had pledged 10% of their supply have yet to do so, and given the political problems of sending overseas vaccine when there's not enough for US citizens, well, good luck with that. So at best…

Assistant fatally burned in UCLA professor’s lab, not an obstacle in receiving NIH grants

The June 2014 news on UCLA chemistry professor Patrick G. Harran’s website announces his lab’s award of an NIH grant. I wonder if it will be updated with his other news for the month? Last week, Harran settled criminal charges with the Los Angeles County district attorney (DA) for the work-related death of Sheri Sangji, 23. Sangji was a research assistant in Harran’s lab. She'd only been on the job a few months. She was hired primarily to set up lab equipment, but on Dec. 29, 2008 she was assigned to use tert-butyllithium (tBuLi). The highly reactive liquid ignites spontaneously when exposed…

Vaccination and other matters of trust

by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA As an editor of the Journal of Public Health Policy, I have been following developments where public health intersects with the activities and policies of espionage agencies. New happenings appear regularly. First there was the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) creation of a special immunization campaign in Pakistan, where the only purpose of the program was to collect material containing DNA that stuck on the needles used to deliver hepatitis vaccine. The Agency hoped to find Osama Bin Laden. We published an editorial that predicted the terrible damage that…

WHO warns antibiotic resistance is a "serious, worldwide threat to public health"

For the first time, the World Health Organization has examined antimicrobial resistance globally, and the grim findings won't be surprising to anyone who's been following this issue. (Last year, the US CDC and UK's Chief Medical Officer issued reports with similarly alarming warnings.) The WHO authors write in the report summary: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an increasingly serious threat to global public health. AMR develops when a microorganism (bacteria, fungus, virus or parasite) no longer responds to a drug to which it was originally sensitive. This means that standard treatments no…

Study: New fathers struggle with depression, need interventions, too

Women aren’t the only ones at risk for depression and in need of screening services when a new baby comes into their lives. Young fathers face significant mental health challenges as well, according to a new study. Published in the May issue of Pediatrics, researchers found that fathers who live in the same households as their children experience a decrease in depressive symptoms in the period immediately before their children are born. However, depressive symptoms among young fathers, who were around 25 years old when they became fathers, increased an average of 68 percent throughout their…

Housing assistance and the shifting geography of poverty

As Kim Krisberg reported earlier this year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition has found that in no state can full-time workers earning minimum wage afford the average rent for two-bedroom apartments without spending more than 30% of their income on housing. The combination of rising rents and stagnating wages has left many families struggling to afford basic necessities, and unstable housing situations negatively affect health and children's school performance. The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program allows low-income tenants to rent apartments and pay 30% of their income for…

Senator Gillibrand introduces “Safe Meat & Poultry Act,” recognizes hazards for plant workers

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced last week the Safe Meat and Poultry Act (S. 1502).  The bill would require USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) to take new steps  to decrease foodborne pathogens, including authority to compel producers to recall contaminated meat and poultry. The legislative text is 73 pages long, but one short paragraph caught my eye: a provision addressing the serious health and safety hazards to which meat and poultry workers are exposed.  It's an issue that we've written about many times (e.g.. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here).  It…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Fast-food workers in several Midwestern cities and New York held one-day strikes last week to protest poverty wages. Jeff Schuhrke reports for In These Times, with a focus on the Chicago protests: Hundreds of fast-food and retail workers in Chicago are on strike today and tomorrow, joining thousands of other workers walking off the job this week in at least seven cities across the country, including New York, Detroit and St. Louis. For most of these cities, this is the second time in recent months that low-wage employees—primarily in the fast-food industry—have staged single-day walkouts…

IoM proposes national public health research agenda to prevent gun violence

by Kim Krisberg It seems we barely go a week now without news of another violent gun incident. Last week's shooting rampage in Santa Monica, Calif., has resulted in the deaths of five people. And since the Newtown school shooting last December — in the span of less than six months — thousands of Americans have been killed by guns. Just a couple days before the Santa Monica shooting, the Institute of Medicine (IoM) and National Research Council released a new report proposing priority research areas for better understanding gun-related violence, its causes, health effects and possible…