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The Healthy Hospitals Act of 2007: A Good Start, but Not Enough

One piece of infection control legislation moving (slowly) through Congress is the Healthy Hospitals Act, H.R. 1174 (it's so slow that it's, erm, an act of 2007). H.R. 1174 would amend "the Social Security Act to require public reporting of health care-associated infections data by hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers and to permit the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish a pilot program to provide incentives to hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers to eliminate the rate of occurrence of such infections." There are many good provisions in this legislation: Hospitals…

Unscientific America and Positive Versus Normative Statements

I've been meaning to follow up on some more thoughts about Unscientific America. I suppose what bothers me about the book is that there is no distinction between positive statements--the way things are or will be--and normative statements--the way things ought to be. As an example, consider yesterday's post about type I diabetes. When someone (often a child) is diagnosed with type I diabetes, we have several options: Provide the resources to treat the disease and enable the diabetic to live as best as one can with the disease. Let him sink or swim on his own--if he (or his parents) have…

Public Health in a Time of CholeraInfluenza: In Defense of Frieden's 'Moralizing'

I came across this post decrying the choice of Ralph Frieden as CDC director due to his "bluenose moralizing." Here's part of the argument: What can't be denied is that Dr. Frieden and Mayor Bloomberg together promoted the myth that bad health is purely a matter of bad behavior. The myth was an alarming break with the reality of the real causes of poor health, but it played well. There was the ban on smoking in bars, the ban on serving trans fats, the constant hectoring about what we eat and how much of it, and the finger wagging about AIDS "complacency" and our failure to use condoms.…

The Economic Tyranny of Double Entry Accounting

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is that our entire political class (both politicians and the mandarin hangers-on) still does not comprehend that the balance of accounts must sum to zero. That is, aggregate savings (all the stuff private entities, from corporations to individuals to non-profits, own) require government deficits (one way around this is trade surpluses, but we try to deal with the real world around here). It is impossible for the government and the entire private sector to both run surpluses. This isn't political theory or ideology, it's arithmetic. So when…

Note to Weisberg: If You're Going to Hector the Public About Being Ignorant...

...make sure you know what the hell you're talking about. Jacob Weisberg had a recent post at Slate, "Down With the People: Blame the childish, ignorant American public--not politicians--for our political and economic crisis", which argues, well, what the title says. Now, we do have a longstanding tradition of calling idiots fucking morons in this humble bloggy abode, so we can't be upset with Weisberg's attempt (although, as usual, Lance Mannion does it far better than Weisberg, albeit with nuance, which is very French). First, I actually don't agree with Weisberg when he writes, "We…

In State of the Union, Obama Advocates Creationist/Flat-Earth Economics

Sure, there were some nice parts in Obama's State of the Union speech. But this part is the equivalent of flat-eartherism and creationism (italics mine): Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don't. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will. We will continue to go through…

Bernie, You're Great, but You're Missing the Point...

...about President Obama. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) seems to be one of the few politicians in the Democratic caucus (not party, though) who understands just how dire the Democrats' prospects are: In my view, the Democrats--including the president--have absurdly continued to stumble along the path of "bipartisanship" at exactly the same time the Republicans have waged the most vigorous partisan and obstructionist strategy in recent history. Instead of making it clear that the first two years of the Obama administration would be about digging the country out of the incredible mess that…

Start a new life in the offworld colonies

That Stephen Hawking guy is saying that we need to get colonies out there in space to preserve the human race. I'm a space opera fan, I think space exploration is a worthy endeavor, but I have to admit that watching Chris Clarke whomp on Hawking is very entertaining, and I agree. Hawking has it all wrong. When fans of technology start preaching about escaping disaster on earth by setting up space stations and moon colonies and terraforming Mars, an image comes to mind: a dying hanged man, kicking and squirming, ejaculating reflexively and dribbling a few pitiful drops of semen into the dirt.…

Grant Milestones, Credit, and Why Democratic Politicians Are Idiots

Many grants have what are known as milestones: dates by which certain activities are supposed to occur; with some grants, failure to meet these milestones (or does one pass milestones?) can ultimately result in withdrawal of the grant. There is a lot of grantsmanship involved in milestones. For obvious reasons, you don't want to set lots of impossible-to-reach milestones. Likewise, you want some low hanging fruit in there too (to confuse images and metaphors). For example, let's say a Mad Biologist were to sequence a bunch of bacterial genomes. Here are three milestones: 1) Get all of…

About That Slate Antibiotic Resistance Article...

Yesterday, four people emailed me, asking about Brian Palmer's Slate article about antibiotic resistance. Since I'll probably get more such emails (and thank you for sending them), I'll offer my thoughts below: 1) Palmer's basic point about antibiotic development not being the answer is right. All a new drug does is kick the can down the road, since resistance will evolve to the new drug. Having said that, we currently do need new drugs, so we shouldn't stop developing them. 2) Palmer is not correct about plasmid curing as being a solution to antibiotic resistance. If we come up with a…

Instead of Using Public Funds to Subsidize Stadiums, We Should Help...

...drug stores, hardware stores, and supermarkets.. By way of ScienceBlogling Dr. Isis, we learn of The Great Brooklyn Tampon Shortage: You see, in Brooklyn, we have to deal with the problem of tampon scarcity. How, you may be wondering, can a product be scarce when it is a necessity of approximately half the population in any given area? Why wouldn't a commodity always be readily available when it is something that this large consumer base will never NOT need -- barring a Village-of-the-Damned style mass impregnation of women?? ...In Brooklyn, there are no Walmart Superstores. No Targets,…

Aren't they cute when they unashamedly reveal their plans?

Bryan Fischer, a host on Christian Hate Radio sponsored by the American Patriarchy Association, recently received mail from a listener appalled at his suggestion that homosexuals ought to be imprisoned. Fischer was quick to reassure his listener that yes, he really does believe that, he will happily repeat the claim multiple times, and that you aren't a True Christian™ if you don't agree that homosexuals ought to be treated like murderers or slavers. Hi! Thanks for writing me about my comments on my program regarding homosexuality. It might be worth noting that what I actually suggested…

A 'Balance Sheet' Recession or an Unemployment-Based One?

I've decried before the lack of natural history in economics, and I'm thinking Mark Thoma, with whom I usually agree, seems to be doing just that. Thoma on the ongoing recession: There are different types of recessions, and this one can be termed "a balance sheet" recession. It had a big impact not just on bank balance sheets, but on household (and, for that matter firm) balance sheets as well. Households were particularly hard hit due to declines in stock prices and declines in the value of housing. These losses were large, they upset plans for things such as retirement, and households…

Stanley Fish's Distortion of Why Does College Cost So Much Obscures a Critical Point

Brad DeLong, Scott Lemieux, and Felix Salmon all take Stanley Fish's absurd discussion of Why Does College Cost So Much by Robert Archibald and David Feldman to task--and are right in doing so. It's a shame because Archibald and Feldman actually do have some key insights into where the money goes. The arguments they make aren't Fish's arguments either. How one can claim that college costs haven't risen faster than inflation boggles my mind: it simply involves division (college costs have risen much faster than the median household income). Of course, this is Stanley Fish, so numerical…

I'm beautiful—on the inside

I'm not a particularly attractive person. I'm your typical middle-aged schlub, someone you wouldn't look at twice on the street. But I have a secret: there's a part of me that is spectacularly beautiful, and every once in a while I get to take it out and admire it. Tonight, while I was preparing dinner, I slipped and gouged out a small chunk of my thumb with a knife—it stung for a moment, but it was nothing serious, just large enough and deep enough to bleed copiously. It was gorgeous. It welled in cycles with my pulse, and it was like I was dripping rubies. Brilliant, scarlet rubies…

Yellow Tail Fail Wines Sucked in by HSUS Scam

tags: humane society of the united states, HSUS, H$U$, Yellow Tail wine, Casella Wines Pty Ltd, animal rights, animal welfare, animal shelters, Wayne Pacellestreaming video Yellow Tail wines are produced by Casella Wines Pty Ltd., based in Yenda, Australia. The Casella family produced wine in their native Italy since the 1820s, but moved to Australia to pursue a better life. But Yellow Tail has failed in their goal to pursue the better life in at least one way: they donated $100,000 to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). This was a huge mistake, Yellow Tail. If you'd done your…

Neutering our kids' exposure to science

Hey, gang! Who remembers these? I know that Gary does, and of course, so does the Disgruntled Chemist. Those old sheet metal boxes containing an assortment of strange chemicals in vials and test tubes and alcohol burners were a rite of passage for my generation and thereabouts. There was stuff in there that would burn, or blow up, or stain the furniture irreparably, or kill someone…that was the fun and the thrill of it all. I had one, although I quickly moved on to more ghoulish occupations (most of the boys I knew could be separated into several tracks: the ones fascinated with road kill,…

Selenium Overdose Caused Deaths of Polo Horses

tags: polo horses, poisoned polo ponies, Florida, International Polo Club Palm Beach, Lechuza Caracas, Franck's Pharmacy, Biodyl, selenium A Lechuza pony stands ready for play. Image: New York Social Diary (2008). The mysterious deaths of twenty-one Venezuelan polo horses was apparently due to a mistake by the pharmacy that incorrectly prepared the vitamin-and-electrolyte cocktail that was injected into these horses prior to their match on Sunday. A chemist at Franck's Pharmacy in Ocala, Florida added ten times the requested dosage of selenium to the cocktail. It appears this was an error…

Zimmer and Carroll say adios to Bloggingheads

I've always rather liked Bloggingheads — at least the idea of it, with one-on-one discussions between interesting people. It flops in execution often, since some of the participants wouldn't recognize reason and evidence if it walked up and slapped them in the face with a large and pungent haddock (the right-winger political discussions are unwatchable, and it's always had this problem of giving people like Jonah Goldberg a platform), but their Science Saturday has been generally good. I don't always agree with the people they have on, but at least they're interesting and provocative. And…

Birdbooker Report 81

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…

Love This Blog? Help Keep it on the Intertubes!

tags: NYC Life, NYPL, public services, public education, public libraries If you are broke and unemployed in any city of this nation, including NYC, you would have very few free public resources at your disposal to help you find work because of the massive budget cuts that have been made to this nation's public libraries. I find this situation outrageous. I have a special request to make of you: if you read this blog, consider the fact that all my wireless access is provided by the NYPL, and wireless access is one service that will be cut or discontinued. If Mayor Bloomberg, the eighth…

Canadian Tamiflu warnings

Health Canada is following the US FDA in warning of adverse neurobehavioral effects of the influenza antiviral, Tamiflu. The drug is prescribed much more often in Japan, where it is used in seasonal flu, than in the US. The effects have been reported mainly in children and have included some suicides. It isn't known whether the drug was responsible for these deaths and if so, how. The US FDA has not made any determinations but issued the warning as a precautionary measure. The Vancouver Sun ran the story under the headline, "Bird flu vaccine leaves 10 Canadians dead." (hat tip,…

Artificial Sweeteners, Your Gut Bacteria and You

Could artificial sweeteners be helping cause the very thing they are supposed to prevent? They may well do so, and you can probably blame your microbiota – those masses of mostly-friendly bacteria that live in your gut. According to a paper by Weizmann Institute scientists that appeared today in Nature, artificial sweeteners not only encourage the wrong kind of bacteria to expand their numbers, they also induce mix-ups in the cross-communication between these bacteria and your body. Those mix-ups can lead to glucose intolerance – the first step toward metabolic syndrome and diabetes. So,…

Reading Diary: Dinosaur Art: The World's Greatest Paleoart edited by Steve White

Every once in a while a review copy of a book comes over the transom and it just makes your day. Nothing else that could happen is going to put a damper on the bright sunny mood that springs from such a happy moment. One that arrived a few days ago that I can wait to read is Lance Fortnow's The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible. Now that made my day! It's definitely next in line for reading. A few months ago the book that definitely made such an impact when it arrived was Steve White's Dinosaur Art: The World's Greatest Paleoart. It immediately jumped out as an…

From the Archives: Books by Samuel Florman, Tim Berners-Lee and Ellen Ullman.

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one includes three shorter reviews: The Introspective Engineer by Samuel C. Florman (June 1, 2003) Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti (…

From the Archives: The science of evolution and the myth of creationism by Ardea Skybreak

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing What's Real and Why It Matters, is from June 8, 2007. ======= The whole raison d'etre of this book is to counter creationists' arguments against…

Ask A ScienceBlogger, Round Three: the Results are In!

This week, the ScienceBloggers lined up to take a crack at this fine question: "If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?" Below the fold, in their own words, twelve ScienceBloggers name the ideas they'd be happier if we all grasped firmly. But first, an above-the-fold reminder to send your Ask A ScienceBlogger questions to askablogger@seedmediagroup.com. Razib at Gene Expression would have the public understand that the essence of science isn't findings, but process: "my reply is that the public needs to know that the most important idea…

Reading Diary: How to fake a moon landing: Exposing the myths of science denial by Darryl Cunningham

Darryl Cunningham's How to Fake a Moon Landing: Exposing the Myths of Science Denial is a bit different from most of the graphic novels I've reviewed in this space. Most of the earlier books I've reviewed have been biographical or historical in nature with the more expository ones at least having some fictional narrative wrapped around the scientific content. I guess you could say there's quite a bit of sugar to make the medicine go down a bit more smoothly. This book however is really nothing but exposition with just enough bare-bones narrative to keep the facts rolling. It's a series of…

Weizmann Institute Scientist Chosen

TThe Institute's Prof. Ruth Arnon was elected President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and the Humanities (IASH) last week - the first woman ever elected to the post. We spoke with her briefly: You have held a number of leadership positions over the years. How is this one different? My previous posts were mostly appointments; the president of the IASH is chosen by the entire body (of 100 elected members; 55 in the natural sciences and 45 in the humanities). I've served as vice president for the last six years. My name was brought forward by the search committee, but their recommendation…

On the back of an envelope: Brush your teeth, but turn the water off

The Pacific Institute has done extensive and groundbreaking research over the past 25 years on a wide range of water, climate, energy, and environmental issues. One focus has been on how to use water more efficiently to do the things we want to do – a focus on “efficiency” and “productivity” – not deprivation. Society could certainly cut water use by removing urban lawns, or never washing our cars again, or eliminating irrigated alfalfa in the desert. But we've never recommended these things. Why? Not because the water savings from such changes are small: some of these things can produce vast…

If kids are responsible for climate change ...

How many kids should you have? Used to be the answer was "none of anyone's damn business." But that's not the approach a pair of sustainability experts took in a new paper that concludes the single-most powerful thing anyone can do about climate change is having fewer offspring. In "The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions" (Environmental Research Letters, 12 July 2017) Seth Wynes of Sweden's Lund University the University of British Columbia and Kimerbley Nicholas of UBC find that the greenhouse gas emissions associated…

The fate of the Amazon is in doubt

Last year much was made by climate-change deniers of a poorly referenced section of one of the IPCC reports of 2007 that said "up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall." It turned out that the claim was based on solid science, despite the best efforts of those who just can't bring themselves to trust professional climatologists. You can read the whole sordid tale here. I revisit the issue because of a new paper about to be published by the American Geophysical Union that bears on this question. "Widespread Decline in Greenness of Amazonian Vegetation…

A comprehensive plan for the enhancement of sexual morality among the people

The Reverend Peter Mullin doesn't like those darn pushy homosexuals — they must make him feel uncomfortable and all squirmy deep down inside. He wrote some amazingly stupid things about gays. The Rev Dr Peter Mullen said in an blog that homosexuality was "clearly unnatural, a perversion and corruption of natural instincts and affections" and "a cause of fatal disease". He recommended that homosexual practices be discouraged "after the style of warnings on cigarette packets". He wrote: "Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN…

An Interview with Steinn of Dynamics of Cats

This time around, the 3.14 Interview tackles the "excessively outspoken and sardonic" Steinn Sigurdsson of Dynamics of Cats. What do you do when you're not blogging? Paperwork—proposals, forms and occasional actual research papers; herding and tending of kids and cats; in between I read and sleep, in that order. What is your blog called? Dynamics of Cats What's up with that name? Well, in about 1993, a colleague at CERN sent me an e-mail with a "heads-up" on this new network protocol called http, a significant improvement on previous distributed data protocols. He also said this group at…

Searching for Giant Squid Under the Sea With William Gilly

Yes, I admit it, I'm pretty spoiled to be living in San Diego. Eighty Degrees today and perfect blue skies was a picture perfect day to go out on a whale watching adventure. Armed with my camera I didn't know what might be out there. Would the whales be out playing? I hoped so. During the trip we spotted 3 Fin Whales (the second largest whale behind the blue whale), some sea lions and HUNDREDS of dolphins. This massive pod of dolphins we encountered were curious about the ship and came and played in our wake. It was an utmost amazing experience. But it got me thinking about what else is out…

A useful guide for the bioinformatics tool builders

I often get questions about bioinformatics, bioinformatics jobs and career paths. Most of the questions reflect a general sense of confusion between creating bioinformatics resources and using them. Bioinformatics is unique in this sense. No one confuses writing a package like Photoshop with being a photographer, yet for some odd reason, people seem to expect this of biologists. In the same respect, even the programmers and database administrators who work in bioinformatics, are unfairly assumed to have had graduate level training in biology. In many ways, it's easiest to understand…

BIO-ITEST, live in Seattle this summer!

I don't usually publish press releases, but I'm making an exception for this one, since your's truly is one of the Co-PI's. If you're a teacher within commuting distance of Seattle, the schedule and sign up information is here. NSF AWARDS $1.3 MILLION TO NWABR FOR BIOINFORMATICS EDUCATION Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) brings the understanding of how biology and information technology interact to teachers and their students Seattle, WA - March 26, 2009 - The Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (NWABR) has been awarded a $1.3 million dollar…

Informed Consent and "An Inconvenient Truth"

I recently completed a long trip out-of-town, giving a presentation at a Bio-Link conference in Berkeley, and teaching a couple of bioinformatics classes at the University of Texas, through the National Science Foundation's Chautauqua program. The Human Subjects Protection Course Before I left town, I had to take a class on how to treat human subjects. It seems strange, in some ways, to be doing this now, several years after completing graduate school, but my experimental subjects have generally been plants, protozoans, and bacteria; with a few rabbits, rats, and mice thrown in as antibody…

Watching every cell of the developing zebrafish

How can I respond to a story about zebrafish, development, and new imaging and visualization techniques? Total incoherent nerdgasm is how. Keller et al. are using a technique called digital scanned laser light sheet fluorescence microscopy (DSLM) to do fast, high-resolution, 3-D scans through developing embryos over time; using a GFP-histone fusion protein marker, they localize the nucleus of every single cell in the embryo. Some of the geeky specs: 1500x1500 pixel 2-D resolution 12 bits per pixel dynamic range Imaging speed of 10 million voxels per second Complete scan of a 1 cubic…

Bilateral symmetry in a sea anemone

There are quite a few genes that are known to be highly conserved in both sequence and function in animals. Among these are the various Hox genes, which are expressed in an ordered pattern along the length of the organism and which define positional information along the anterior-posterior axis; and another is decapentaplegic (dpp) which is one of several conserved genes that define the dorsal-ventral axis. Together, these sets of genes establish the front-back and top-bottom axes of the animal, which in turn establishes bilaterality—this specifically laid out three-dimensional organization…

Finding scientific papers for free, part I

tags: PubMed, PubMed Central, medical informatics, bioinformatics, finding scientific articles This three part series covers the problem of finding scientific articles, compares results from a few different methods, and presents instructions for the best method. A day in the life of an English physician In April, I had the great fortune to attend (and speak at) a conference on scientific publishing sponsored by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. One of the first speakers was an English physician who described his trials and a typical ordeal in trying to use the…

Mosquito-borne disease in droughts and hurricanes

Bird 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…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Reverend Colson preaches a sermon

What's the US's largest Protestant denomination? The Southern Baptist Convention. If you want to make a bigoted remark about Islam or atheism, where do you go to do it? The Southern Baptist Convention. Comments about Islam have generated controversy at past Southern Baptist meetings. In 2002, a former Southern Baptist Convention president, the Rev. Jerry Vines, called Muhammad, the Muslim prophet, a "demon-possessed pedophile." (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) Along comes Watergate criminal, Chuck Colson. Colson went to the clink after pleading no contest to obstruction of justice. In prison he…

Accurate and timely bird flu reporting: hope springs eternal

Table top exercises are supposed to be realistic. I've taken part in them and I can tell you they are. So it's not surprising this realism, often including simulated notices and documents, can combine with the speed of information dissemination of the internet in ways that are, well, not surprising: UNICEF and the Maldivian government are today reassuring people that reports of a bird flu outbreak in the Maldives are untrue. The reports were spread after documents forming part of a UNICEF simulation training exercise were doctored and leaked by a third party. A document detailing the…

Presenteeism: spreading disease at work

Whenever the topic of sick leave comes up, employers are quick to raise the specter of malingering to get out of work. But a recent report on CNN suggests that showing up when sick may be costing plenty, too. "Presenteeism" is not just a financial problem but a public health one particularly germane to influenza: Practically every workplace has one - the employee who comes to the job aching, coughing and sneezing. So-called "presenteeism," or going to work when sick, is a persistent problem at more than half of U.S. workplaces and costs U.S. business a whopping $180 billion a year, research…

Friday Weird Sex Blogging - Deepest Lovin'

According to the referrers pages of my Sitemeter, a lot of you are excited by strange penises, strange penises, strange penises and strange penises (or something like it). So, today we have to move to a different topic, traffic-be-damned, for those without phallic fixations. So, read on.... If science is all you care for you can skip to the bottom of the post because the main character of today's story will be introduced with a poem (also found here): The Conjugation of the Paramecium by Muriel Rukeyser This has nothing to do with propagating The species is continued as so many are (among…

Hot Peppers - Why Are They Hot?

Some plants do not want to get eaten. They may grow in places difficult to approach, they may look unappetizing, or they may evolve vile smells. Some have a fuzzy, hairy or sticky surface, others evolve thorns. Animals need to eat those plants to survive and plants need not be eaten by animals to survive, so a co-evolutionary arms-race leads to ever more bizzare adaptations by plants to deter the animals and ever more ingenious adaptations by animals to get around the deterrents. One of the most efficient ways for a plant to deter a herbivore is to divert one of its existing biochemical…

Scurrilous attacks on Obama's OSHA nominee (no surprise)

It was only a matter of time before the Right Wing smear machine set its sites on Obama's nominee for Director of OSHA, Dr. David Michaels. And now that time has come. David is a friend and colleague and his name is not a stranger here (and here, here, here and probably other posts as well). His name comes up not because he's my friend but because of his contributions to public health. His PhD is in occupational epidemiology and he's made important contributions in the area of popcorn workers lung (despite the humorous name, it is a deadly disease) and beryllium poisoning. He knows government…

Swine flu: case reports of 3 pregnant women

Flu can be a nasty illness, nasty enough to kill you. Pregnant women are at more risk than others because their physiology is altered. They are carrying a foreign body (the fetus) so their immune response is not the same, and their cardiovascular and respiratory physiology are also different. CDC is reporting about 20 swine flu cases in pregnant women, and late yesterday they gave a more detailed description of three cases, one of which ended fatally: Patient A. On April 15, a woman aged 33 years at 35 weeks' gestation with a 1-day history of myalgias, dry cough, and low-grade fever was…

Swine flu: I beat a dead horse

A student once complained that no horse was too dead for me to stop beating it. Long time readers are familiar with that here. Over the years I have said that the best way to prepare for a pandemic -- or any other grave threat to our communities -- is to strengthen its public health and social service infrastructures. While some progress along those lines have been made (the additional training and upgrading of the national laboratory system is what allows us to find swine flu cases), in the main public health and social services have continued to deteriorate and weaken. And with the day of…