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Is the pandemic flu vaccine glass half empty or half full?

A just released report on world wide vaccine production capacity says . . . if you don't have access to the report (and I don't, as yet), what it says depends on which news source you want to read. For example you can read Reuters (the glass half full wire service stroy) or Agence France Presse (the glass half empty wire service study). Here are the ledes in each: Reuters: Drug companies have increased their capacity to make bird flu vaccines by 300% in the past two years but will still need four years to meet global demand in the event of a pandemic, a study says. It also said doses of…

Flu beats sex

Every disease has a website, it seems, and common diseases may have many. The UK has a charity devoted to asthma that has a site, AsthmaUK.com, with an interesting feature, an "asthma trigger" section that discussed things that may bring on asthma symptoms in people with asthma. Asthma is a disease involving airway dysfunction where it becomes difficult to exhale. You can get an idea of how debilitating this can be by taking an ordinary drinking straw and while breathing in normally only breathe out through the straw. Try it. Very distressing, you'll find. So you don't want to trigger the…

One door closes, another one opens

The US election is over. Now comes the battle over what it means. The right wing of the Democratic Party aside, it seems pretty clear this was one of the periodic "realignment" elections that are of historic significance. Obama's base, overwhelmingly the progressive heart of the Democratic Party, is a powerful coalition of the younger generation, racial and ethnic "minorities" (each probably constituting larger voting blocks than the right wing linchpin of white evangelicals), GLBT groups, women, young professionals, those deeply concerned about the environment, traditional Democratic…

California's Proposition Hate [Updated with clarification on dates]

Proposition 8, a ballot initiative in California, would make marriage an institution confined to one man and one woman (as opposed to what? many men and one woman or one man and many women? Someone should tell the Mormon Church, the chief bankrollers of this vile initiative, about that!). It is appropriately called Proposition Hate. Polling indicates it is very close in California and this legislative bigotry may well pass, which would be a terrible tragedy. But let's face it. This war is over, even if some skirmishes are left to fight and we may lose some of them. The current younger…

Red flag on the flu vaccine front

A story in CIDRAP News by the always excellent science journalist Maryn McKenna provides food for thought:. A flu vaccine manufacturer's decision not to build a US facility has highlighted the perpetual mismatch between flu-shot supply and demand--and the reality that the mismatch may undermine plans for pandemic flu vaccines. On Tuesday, Solvay Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Marietta, Ga., announced that it was canceling plans to build a US flu-vaccine manufacturing plant, a $386 million project that Birmingham, Ala., and Athens, Ga., have been competing for. The plant would have made both seasonal…

More hilarity from "junk science expert" Stephen Milloy

Earlier in the month there was a hilarious piece on Fox News (where else?) by hack lawyer turned hack commentator Steven Milloy trying to counter the extremely bad publicity one of his closest friends was getting. This close friend was a chemical, bisphenol A (BPA; see here and here) which just got panned by the Canadian government, the US National Toxicology Program, Walmart, Nalgene (maker of BPA containing water bottles) and even the Washington Post. Here's Milloy turning away from the scientific evidence and standing on his head, a contortion guaranteed to bring you face to face with an…

Bad behavior in the world of flu science

Last week WHO's flu maven, Keiji Fukuda, said what we and others have been saying for a long time. Flu scientists need to change their research ethics. The world of flu virology has developed a mandarinate that is impeding progress for its own benefit. And their bad behavior is enabled and imitated by some public health agencies, like CDC. Researchers and CDC are sitting on H5N1 genetic and other flu sequences of public health importance. They treat their data as proprietary, to be used for their own benefit in scientific publications. This isn't unusual. It is the normal way of doing…

Religion and non-religion to be excluded from South Carolina classrooms

A new bill has been proposed in Scarolina. Here it is: TO AMEND ARTICLE 1, CHAPTER 29 OF TITLE 59 OF THE 1976 CODE, RELATING TO GENERAL PROVISIONS CONCERNING SUBJECTS OF INSTRUCTION IN THE STATE'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS, BY ADDING SECTION 59-29-15, TO PROVIDE THAT CURRICULUM USED TO TEACH STUDENTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF MANKIND MUST MAINTAIN NEUTRALITY BETWEEN RELIGIOUS FAITHS AND BETWEEN RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION, AND TO PROVIDE THAT CURRICULUM THAT DOES NOT MAINTAIN THE REQUIRED NEUTRALITY MUST BE REVISED OR REPLACED AS SOON AS PRACTICABLE. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of South…

Dis-appointment

In all the news about Obama's choice of an appointment to the Supreme Court, there's another possibility looming: Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, is close to taking over the top spot at the National Institutes of Health, according to areport by Bloomberg News. Collins, who was the director of the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 to 2008, is in the final stages of being screened by the administration of US President Barack Obama, an unnamed source told Bloomberg. Elias Zerhouni, Collins' would-be predecessor, voiced his approval for…

WHO embargoes health information

This post is about something I've wanted to write about for a while, but never found the time. That's still true, but I've just spent five days as a natural environment for a norovirus or something similar. The good news is I lost 5 pounds. But the bad news -- and there was a lot of it -- is that as I recover I am desperately trying to catch up on too many urgent things that didn't get done. Still, this story is something I want to write about, so I'll do it more briefly now and come back at some later point for more analysis. What's bothering me? Press embargoes: The World Health…

NIOSH has a blog

Blog is short for weblog, originally a chronological set of postings about, well, about whatever. Blogs are/were journals that were published publicly but also allowed readers to comment, read, react and in some ways affect the content. How much dialog and two way communication there was depended on the blog. Some have virtually none, although monitoring traffic and interest is one kind of reader feedback that doesn't depend on a formal comment facility. Others are highly interactive, with lots of comment, a community feeling and vigorous discussion. The big innovation, though, was that the…

EPA approves methyl iodide use. No surprise.

Fumigating the soil before planting pretty much kills any pests that might be in it. Unfortunately the fumigant tends to seep up through the soil and expose workers and others nearby. When the highly toxic fumigant methyl bromide was banned under the Montreal protocol as a greenhouse gas an ozone depleting gas, growers started looking for a replacement. Now the EPA has approved one, methyl iodide. If you know any chemistry, you might suspect that replacing one halogen with another might not solve the problem. Indeed methyl iodide is nasty. If you want to use it you must employ a certified…

American Psychological Association flunks ethical litmus test

One of my colleagues (a clinical psychologist) was once asked the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist. "You have to understand," he said, "that a psychiatrist doesn't have a PhD." It turns out there is at least one more difference. The professional association of psychiatrists have rejected the idea it is ethical for a medical doctor to be complicit in interrogation abuse or abusive conditions under which interrogations are conducted. The professional association of psychologists have twice declined to take that step. I think that's a more telling difference than the nature…

I still don't know what women want

The NY Times ran an interesting article on sexology a short while ago, focusing on the differences in arousal between men and women. Like any guy, I read it hoping to discover the magic switch that turns women on, but as expected, the message is that female arousal is very, very complicated. This was not a surprise. One of the curious results, though, was that not only do men and women differ in the specificity of stimuli that induce arousal, but women's brains (measured by self-reporting) and women's bodies (measured by plethysmograph) don't agree — vaginal arousal was measured when subjects…

Abortion and the world that is

When CBS-TV decided to run an anti-abortion ad during the Superbowl there was a lot of talk about the propriety of airing highly polarizing advocacy advertising in such a highly visible media slot. There has been less talk about the content of the ad beyond the obvious fact it was making an implied argument against abortion. Since I wrote a pro abortion post yesterday I was thinking about the issue and thought I'd revisit the ad from a different point of view, the weird (but common) anti-abortion counterfactual argument. First a brief summary of the ad. Tim Tebow is a talented college…

A strange case of presumptive rabies

Rabies is one of those diseases that scares the crap out of me. Once clinical symptoms start, it is essentially a death sentence. "Essentially" because there are 6 cases of survival in the medial record, but 5 of the 6 had had rabies vaccination prior to illness. A single case of survival in an unvaccinated case is on record, but only after a long period in intensive care. Now CDC is reporting an unusual case they are calling "abortive rabies." The patient was a 17 year old girl who had multiple hospitalizations for a variety of neurologic symptoms, including severe headache, vomiting and…

CDC's 2009 flu wrap up presser

Yesterday CDC had its last press conference of this calendar year on the flu pandemic (.mp3 here). CDC's Anne Schuchat did her usual competent job and was generally upbeat while trying to maintain the need for urgency in the vaccination campaign. She cited numbers of over 100 million swine flu and 100 million seasonal flu doses having been produced for consumption in the US and this is a real accomplishment. She also noted that availability of swine flu vaccine was now much greater. Indeed my medical center notified us that it was generally available regardless of previous priorities. Hence I…

New research finds that drinking soda may lead to cell aging and disease, regardless of obesity

At this point, it’s pretty clear that soda is bad for your health. But a new study has found that it may be even worse than we thought. Published yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health, the study found that drinking sugar-sweetened beverages may be associated with cell aging. More specifically, researchers studied the effect that soda has on telomeres, which are the protective units of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes inside human cells. Previously, the length of telomeres within white blood cells has been tied to shorter lifespans as well as the development of chronic…

Study: People who work long hours in low-wage jobs experience higher risk of diabetes

A recent study has uncovered another possible risk factor for the development of type 2 diabetes: working long hours in low-paying jobs. In a study published this week in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, researchers found that people who work more than 55 hours per week performing manual work or other low socioeconomic status jobs face a 30 percent greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes when compared to those working between 35 and 40 hours per week. The association remained even after researchers accounted for risk factors such as smoking, physical activity levels, age, sex and…

Bringing perspective to ACA-related insurance cancellations

Late last year as many Americans purchased affordable health insurance for the first time, others opened their mailboxes to find notification that their coverage had been cancelled. The story erupted across media channels, as President Obama had promised that people could keep their plans, but the overall issue was presented with little perspective. Thankfully, a new study offers something that’s become seemingly rare these days: context. Published in May in the journal Health Affairs, the study examined the stability of the nonemployer-based insurance market in the years before the…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Earlier this month, county officials in Hammond, Indiana declared a state of emergency due to extreme weather -- but, reports Salon's Josh Eidelson, Linc Logistics employees doing warehouse work for Walmart were told to stay on the job, despite working in temperatures that organizers say reached negative 15 degrees. After reportedly having multiple requests for early departure denied, workers stopped working and started looking up weather information on their phones. Their boss eventually sent them home, and shut the warehouse the next day, but a worker reportedly suffered frostbite after…

Not Deficit Reductionism, Misplaced Priorities

Like my colleague Mike the Mad Biologist, I'm horrified by a story out of Indiana in which parents of disabled children who are no longer receiving state aid due to the state budget crisis, were told that they could drop the kids off at homeless shelters if they were unable to care for them at home: However, that's exactly what Becky Holladay of Battle Ground, Ind., said a bureau worker told her when she called to ask about the waiver she's seeking for her 22-year-old son, Cameron Dunn, who has epilepsy, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "We are people and they are people…

Stratification and Winter Sowing: Tools for Your Toolbox

Yesterday, I spent a long time filling seed flats and pressing seeds into dirt - and then I took them outside and set them to germinate. The temps were hovering right around freezing, and there was light snow coming down - the perfect conditions for growing things. Or at least, for winter sowing (Note, there was originally a link and short quote from a website about the subject, but the owner of the site apparently took offense because I attempted to drive traffic to her, so I strongly recommend you avoid her site, to avoid offending her. I will go out of my way never to mention it or any…

Starting Over After the Worst Garden Year Ever

The best estimate I've seen is that in 2009 alone, we had more than 2 million first time gardeners, and from 2007 on, we've added 8 million new vegetable gardens. This is one heck of a movement. Unfortunately, it also meant that millions of people started gardening in what was, in the Northeast, the crappiest garden year ever. Well, maybe not ever. There was eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death when volcanic activity meant hard frost in July. But at least in 40 years, according to CR Lawn, head of Fedco Seeds. Here in the Northeast it rained - I don't mean a little. We got 23 inches of…

Finding the Alien

We know now that there are planets out there. Lots and lots of planets. We are still pinning down the exact incidence over all stellar populations, and we are barely at the point where we can directly confirm the presence of terrestrial planets, but if parameter space is smooth and the universe does not conspire against us, then terrestrial planets must be quite common. 10% incidence would not be a bad conservative guess, but I would not be surprised if the incidence is 30-50%. We will know for sure soon. We don't know how life starts. We have some well founded suspicions, and every year the…

What to Do About Dangerous Consumer Products

As the recent problems with tainted food, drugs, toys, and other consumer products have made clear, our regulatory system has a lot of holes in it. Part of the problem is the current reluctance of agency appointees to do anything that might burden the industries in question, but thatâs not the whole story. Itâs also the case that the laws we rely on to protect us from dangerous products simply arenât strong enough. The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (at the University of Massachusetts Lowell) has just issued two reports that pinpoint the policy problems weâre facing and offer…

Milwaukee J-S earns top environmental journalism award

Susanne Rust, Meg Kissinger and Cary Spivak of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel were awarded last week the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism from Columbia University.  The three journalists close-out their excellent year of reporting with "EPA Veils Hazardous Substances" explaining how the U.S. EPA allows chemical manufacturers to skirt around disclosure requirements with claims of 'confidentiality' and 'trade secret'---even though the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) expressly prohibits manufacturers to withhold information when it pertains to health and…

Good OSHA Rule on Personal Protective Equipment

OSHA issued a good final rule on Friday, Dec 12 designed to clarify employers' duty to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) and train employees on the proper use of the PPE (link here).  It will take effect on January 12, 2009.  The rule was necessary because of some down-right awful and/or inconsistent OSH Review Commission decisions, and an adverse majority ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.  It was one particular outrageous case of an employer's disregard for workers' health that was the straw that finally broke OSHA's back.  More on that below; …

Congratulations to Occupational Health & Safety Awardees

The American Public Health Association is holding its annual meeting this week in San Diego (check out their conference blog here), and members of the occupational health section will be gathering today to congratulate the winners of this yearâs awards. (Read about last yearâs awards here.) Here are some of the outstanding individuals who are working tirelessly for safe, healthy workplaces: David Kotelchuck, PhD, MPH, CIH is the recipient of the Alice Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement.  Dr. Kotelchuck is professor emeritus at Hunter College School of Health Sciences at the City…

MSHA Hits Galatia Mine with $1.46M Penalty

"American Coal Co. repeatedly demonstrated its failure to comply with basic safety laws over a number of months, and for that it must be held accountable."  (Asst. Secretary of Labor for MSHA Richard Stickler) Yesterday, MSHA issued a news release announcing that the operator of the Galatia Mine in Saline County, Illinois was receving $1.46 million in penalties for scores of safety and health violations it's wracked up over the last year.  The underground coal mine is owned by American Coal Company, a subsidiary of Murray Energy Corp--the same corporate controller of the Utah Crandall…

Pesticides, Salmon, and Endangered Species Consultation

In todayâs Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Robert McClure highlights a case involving a consultation under the Endangered Species Act â the very aspect of the ESA that the Bush Administration wants to slash. EPA has approved three pesticides â chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion â for use in areas where they will affect several species of salmon that are listed as threatened or endangered under the ESA. A coalition of fishing and environmental groups filed a lawsuit, and U.S. District Judge John Coughenour ordered the National Marine Fisheries Service to conduct a study on the pesticidesâ…

OSHA's Reg Agenda Coming Soon

It's that time of year---time for the Secretary of Labor to issue her semi-annual regulatory agenda.   Look for its publication in the Federal Register around the second week of December. I'll be curious to see OSHA's timetable for action on diacetyl, the butter-flavoring agent associated with severe lung disease in exposed workers. Will OSHA list diacetyl on its reg agenda? Will it provide a target date for publishing a proposed rule?    I'll also be eager to see OSHA's latest schedule for proposed rules to address: Hearing conservation for construction workers (who are…

Living in a Chemical World

Mondayâs edition of the On Point radio show (a production of WBUR in Boston) focused on the issue of the chemicals that surround us, and the movement for âgreen chemistry.â The first guest was Pete Myers, who produces the indispensable Environmental Health News and co-authored the book Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival?; John Warner, president and CTO of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, joined the show part way through. Myers gave concise, easy-to-understand explanations of the concerns surrounding phthalates and bispehnol A; the…

Carnival of the Liberals #10

I received 45 submissions for this edition of The Carnival of the Liberals, and the carnival rules required me to select only a final ten. That was harsh; there were many excellent links sent in, and I struggled with the need to reject so many. Ultimately, I just had to let my own biases rule my decision, so if you sent in a submission and I didn't use it, it's nothing personal and it says nothing about a lack of quality in your work—it just means it didn't fit my narrow criteria for what I wanted to read this time around. As you'll see, I tend to promote godless secularism and grappling…

Medscape reversal---Gardasil is great again

Last week, Orac reported on Medscape's execrable article regarding Gardasil. As a reminder, the article spouted every antivaccination lie imaginable. The link subsequently disappeared, although a poll later appeared that parroted the article's misinformation. Well, today Medscape has a new Gardasil article. It's definitely an improvement, but still has some problems... The article appears with the following note: Editor's note: This article replaces "HPV Vaccine Adverse Events Worrisome Says Key Investigator," which was posted on July 26, 2008, and was removed after editorial review. Not…

The Arrogance of Power---The Corrupt Mayor of Motown

I usually don't stray into strictly political issues, but today's action by the Mayor of Detroit has me fuming. I've been avoiding blogging on this topic, but Kwame Kilpatrick always has a new criminal exploit fueled by his overwhelming arrogance. His latest idiocy will land him in jail for the night. Here's the basic story. Kilpatrick is a bright and imposing young man (elected at 31) who had an unlimited political future. Detroit has a long history of producing brilliant African American political leaders, and Kilpatrick comes out of this tradition. His mother is Carolyn Cheeks…

The APS should have known better

Those reading Deltoid's coverage of the APS fiasco are probably up to date on this issue, but I feel like we need to discuss the APS failure in more detail. For those unaware of the latest in global warming denialist nonsense, the American Physical Society made the foolish mistake of entertaining global warming denialists by giving Christopher Monckton space in their newsletter to "challenge" global warming. As Lambert demonstrates in his post, the factual and calculation errors are a joke, but the strategy error is demonstrated by the fact that every global warming crank from tobacco…

Where did we go wrong? Framing vaccination

I've had a bit of writer's block lately, but I've learned to take my own advice and just wait it out. And so I did. Then, today, I read Orac's piece on framing the vaccine problem. It set my mind a-whirring, so I've put the coffee on, and I'm setting fingers to keyboard. I don't care about the whole "framing science" thing. The systematic evaluation of science communication is too far outside my field. I am stuck being a "empiric framer." (Jargon alert! Outside of the blogosphere, my communications are basically one-on-one, doctor and patient. My framing is the equivalent of a RCT n=1…

More inanity from our friend Null

OK, so it's a repost from the old blog. I'm on vacation so gimme a break. --PalMD When I get bored, I sift through the "articles" section of Gary Null's site to see what kind of stupidity he is willing to host. Thankfully, it never takes long to find the stupid. This time, it was more on the so-called blood type diet. The article (not written by Null, just hosted on his site) is one of those wonderful oeuvres whose very title contains an unfounded assertion. Exposing falsehoods such as this may have its own benefits, but I would like to show how poor logic can easily lead to poor…

Crank Convergence

Keeping quiet for the last few days has given me the advantage of seeing patterns in my firefox tabs. I see news stories in my feed that I'm interested in, open them in tabs and figure maybe I can blog about them later. Well, the result of doing this for the last week has led to a couple of nice crank convergences. The first is this crank attack on scientific consensus from John West at ID the future. It follows a pretty standard crank script. First a misstatement of what scientific consensus means Should the consensus view of science always prevail? Darwinists often claim science…

Fire Blackwater

Have people seen the coverage of these Blackwater hearings? The police officer, whom CNN is identifying only as Sarhan, said the Blackwater guards "seemed nervous" as they entered the square, throwing water bottles at the Iraqi police posted there and driving in the wrong direction. He said traffic police halted civilian traffic to clear the way for the Blackwater team. Then, he said, the guards fired five or six shots in an apparent attempt to scare people away, but one of the rounds struck a car and killed a young man who was sitting next to his mother, a doctor. Sarhan said he and an…

Is the surge working? (or why I need more metrics)

Here's an excellent opportunity to use the hive mind to look for classic techniques of deception for political benefit on the question of the "surge". Reading the news stories about the progress in Iraq, I can't help but notice a certain partisan nature to interpretation of events. You have the conservative Washington Times saying The Surge is Working, meanwhile, the liberal Washington Post (although as supporters of the Iraq war I feel this designation is non-descriptive for WaPo) indicates the results are at best mixed. We have a GAO report indicating poor performance with only a bare…

Environmentalists caused 9/11!

Is it the 9/11 cranks saying it? Of course not. Instead it's the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page featuring Peter Hoekstra. And you wonder why we call the WSJ editorial page a denialist organization? In the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton's first Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, declared that environmental concerns and national security would share equal status in U.S. foreign policy. Immediately following that announcement, CIA Director John Deutch said in July 1996 that the U.S. was diverting spy satellites to photograph "ecologically sensitive" sites. ... Instead of focusing on looming…

Logical Fallacies

Almost everybody knows about the fallacies of logic, formal and informal, that are routinely used in arguments with denialists. While these fallacies aren't perfect examples of logic that show when an argument is always wrong, they are good rules of thumb to tell when you're listening to bunk, and if you listen to denialists you'll hear plenty. I wish they'd teach these to high school students as a required part of their curriculum, but it probably would decrease the efficacy of advertisement on future consumers. The problem comes when the denialists get a hold of the fallacies then accuse…

Unpacking a bit more

Yesterday's post was frustrating. However, if anything good came out of it, it was some sharing of stories and mutual affirmations on the Twitters that yes, this happens to women all too frequently; yes, it's obnoxious; and that hopefully some people viewing it thought about their own internalized biases, and how those may reflect in behavior toward women. I'm reminded at times like these how important social media networks have been to me, both in introducing me to new people (I've already found many new scientists to follow because of this) and in having an outlet to discuss and commiserate…

Huckabee supported isolation for HIV+ individuals

Still playing end-of-year catch-up with grants and manuscripts so posting will be sporadic, but I'd be remiss not to mention this story regarding presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's past views on HIV/AIDS: In 1992, Huckabee wrote, "If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague." "It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population…

Ebola outbreak confirmed in Democratic Republic of Congo

I mentioned in this post on Marburg virus that another outbreak of hemorrhagic fever had been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire). It's now been officially reported by labs in Congo and Gabon that, indeed, this new outbreak is due to the Ebola virus. More on this after the jump. As I've written previously, the DRC has been especially hard-hit by filovirus outbreaks. This was one of the places where Ebola first made its appearance in the human population, and was also the site of large outbreaks of the virus in 1995 and 2001 (with another Marburg outbreak…

Influenza and masks, redux

It's difficult to believe that it's been over a year since I last wrote a post on the use of masks in the event of an influenza pandemic. Since then, there's been a virtual glut of information out there, and from what I've seen at least, people, businesses, organizations, government, etc. interested in preparation seem to be taking more of a structured approach, rather than a knee-jerk reaction that we saw last year with Tamiflu hoarding and stockpiling masks, which, as I mentioned in the post linked above, have uncertain effectiveness in the event of a pandemic. I also noted that one big…

Panel Has "Some Concern" About BPA

The expert panel evaluating the chemical bisphenol A for the National Toxicology Program has âsome concernâ that BPA exposure causes neural and behavioral effects in developing fetuses, infants, and children. The panel has âminimal concernâ or ânegligible concernâ that BPA affects the prostate or causes premature puberty or birth defects. (PDF draft meeting summary here) Several scientists and health advocates have expressed far more concern about the effects of BPA, an estrogen-like compound thatâs found in plastic and also in most of our bodies. Last week, 38 scientists published a…

School children running the School

by PotomacFeverish  The Washington Post announced what we already knew.  That the lame duck sessions of Congress (one already past, one this week) will not accomplish much.  So what, you say?  They hadnât accomplished much for the last year, why should we care now? Jonathan Weisman reports: Congress will convene on Tuesday for what some fear will be the lamest of lame-duck sessions, and GOP leaders have decided to take a minimalist approach before turning over the reins of power to the Democrats. Rather than a final surge of legislative activity, Congress will probably wrap up things…