Search Content

Displaying results 54501 - 54550 of 87947

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Report for 6/24-30/2009

A wrap up of the week's volcanism, brought to you by Sally Kuhn Sennert and the USGS/SI Global Volcanism Program. Highlights, not including Sarychev Peak, Redoubt and Shiveluch (busy week in the north Pacific), include: A small ash cloud was spotted at Bagana in Papua New Guinea. The Tavurvur cone at Rabaul (PNG) continues to glow at night and produce small ash/steam plumes. The Santiaguito dome at Santa Maria in Guatemala produced 8,000-10,000 foot / ~2.9-3.3 km ash plumes, along with a lahar that carried blocks over 1.5 m downstream from the volcano. A 25,000 foot / 7.6 km ash plume was…

More Chilean rumblings

If Chaiten, Llaima and Puyehue weren't enough, the Chilean Regional Emergency Office is placing seismometers on Peteroa volcano after its shown signs of increasing activity. The volcano is located out on the border with Chile and Argentina and has a number of glaciers that start from the edifice. Looking at the eruptive history of Peteroa, it seems that it has spasms every 30 years or so, although the last known eruption was ~10 years ago. The eruptions are mostly phreatic explosions (related to magma-water interaction) and the last known eruption that produced significant lava, ash and…

Jaws, as seen by a global warming denier

From Denial Depot, Jaws: A movie review: A group of so-called government funded "experts" whip up alarmist fears of a killer shark off the coast of Amity, a sea side town. Their goal is to destroy the local tourist industry, send Amity back to the dark ages and thus achieve their underlying socialist agenda of wealth redistribution. The heroes of this tale are the local major and business leaders who lead a successful audit of the alarmist claims and by doing so manage to delay action long enough that the beach remains open. In the end it turns out a shark has been eating people. Read the…

Lost World, 2009

The story about the giant rat discovered in an isolated crater in Papua New Guinea is fascinating. It's kind of atypical in these days, but if you read through really old copies of National Geographic from the early 20th century it you observe that it occurred all the time back then. I would of course much rather live now at the turn of the 21st century than the turn of the 20th, but there's a certain amount of zoological and anthropological wonder that we'll not be able to attain because so much of the sample space of possibilities has been mapped out.

Elite Republicans & Democrats vs. the masses

Over at Secular Right I break down attitudes toward a host of issues as a function of class and party identification. It is interesting to see the issues where class matters more than party, and those where party matters more than class, and where one segment is an outlier. Below the fold are a few questions of possible specific interest to ScienceBlogs readers. Lower = No high school to some college Higher = Bachelor's degree or higher   Repub or lean Repub Dem or lean Dem   Lower Higher Lower Higher Humans evolved from animals 29.7 47.1 43.7 79.6 Will not eat genetically…

People don't like the word atheist

The American Religious Identification Survey 2008 is out. It is complementary to the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, and seems to confirm its findings. But its main advantage is that there was a survey in 1990 and 2001, so you have three points in time from which to observe trends. As you can see, the number of atheists & agnostics tracks the general increase in the number with no religion, it's doubled in the past generation. But, though only 2% of the population identifies as atheist & agnostic, around ~10% of the population holds to beliefs which are atheistic or agnostic.…

Correlation between wine quality and price negative?

A new working paper, Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings. After some regressions: In sum, in a large sample of blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative. Unless they are experts, individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. Our results suggest that both price tags and expert recommendations may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers who care about the intrinsic qualities of the wine. You already know this, but can't hurt to repeat in these times when we are…

Bill O'Reilly on Life Expectancy: Dumbest Man on Earth?

An alert reader just sent me, via "Media Matters", the single dumbest real-life video clip that I have ever seen. In case you've been living under a rock, Bill O'Reilly is a conservative radio and TV talk-show host. He's known for doing a lot of really obnoxious things, ranging from sexually harassing at least one female employee, to sending some of his employees to stalk people who he doesn't like, to shutting off the microphones of guests on his show if he's losing an argument. In short, he's a loudmouthed asshole who gets off on bullying people. But that's just background. As a…

More Deceptive Graphs: Scales Matter

Yet More Deceptive Graphs As you've probably heard, there was a horrible incident in Pittsburgh this weekend, in which a crazed white supremacist who believed that Obama was coming to take his guns shot and killed three policemen. Markos Moulitsas, of Daily Kos, pointed out lunatics like this shooter are acting on conspiracy theories that are being relentlessly promoted by the likes of Glen Beck and Michelle Bachman. It's not an unreasonable thing to point out, given the amount of time that Beck and Bachman have spent lately talking about the impending socialist/fascist crackdowns that will…

From Sets to Arithmetic

Even though this post seems to be shifting back to axiomatic set theory, don't go thinking that we're done with type theory yet. Type theory will make its triumphant return before too long. But before that, I want to take a bit of time to go through some basic constructions using set theory. We've seen, roughly, how to create natural numbers using nothing but sets - that's basically what the ordinal and cardinal number stuff is about. Even doing that much is tricky - witness my gaffe about ordinals and cardinals and countability. (What I was thinking of is the difference between the ε…

"Children of the Holocaust" and Stem Cell Research

I'm going to NYC this weekend, and I was wondering what I would leave on the autoblogger thingee (I really do like that ScienceBlogs feature). Fortunately, some idiocy regarding stem cells came bubbling up from the comments. The commentor writes: I find it incredible that a child of holocaust survivors would be so dismissive of those who have concerns about experimentation on humans, even if they are embryos. Sure, you think they are wrong, but your baseless arrogance and attitude of superiority to them is, well, just stupid. This is then followed by his(?) usual screed about the…

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, religion and reflection

Chris at Mixing Memory has a post up, Respecting the Religious (or the A-Religious), pointing to a Simon Blackburn working paper, Respect and Religion. I enjoyed Blackburn's Think, but the chapter on God left me a bit cold. Blackburn is a philosopher, and his thoughts reflect that training. If I believed that religiosity was grounded in the sorts of arguments presented in Summa Theologica, I would take more interest in philosophical deconstructions of theism. As it is, I doubt that this is the case, a reality which Summa Theologica's author, St. Thomas Aquinas, acknowledges as well.…

Here we stand against decency

From the BBC: Muhammad cartoon row intensifies: Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage. I have posted comments over at Ed Brayton's weblog on this topic, they are verbose, but they encapsulate many slivers of my thinking. I will assume you know the general outline of this story, so, from the BBC piece: Newspapers across Europe are reprinting the offensive cartoons to show solidarity with the Danish paper. An editor at a French newspaper was sacked over this by the owner, his…

Christopher Maloney: still a quack

That quack, Christopher Maloney, has written to me now…with a nice little edge of hysteria and paranoia. Let the witch trials begin! Michael Hawkins and Rev. Myers presiding Dear "Reverend" PZ Meyers, How fitting that, three hundred years later, the witch trials continue. If you recall, it was the herbalists that were burned then as well. Your flock has spoken to me, Reverend Meyers, with the shrieking common to all fundamentalist cults. I believe if you check you will find that fundamentalism involves a closed mind while doing science requires an open mind. It also involves a thing they…

Problems With Teacher Evaluation: The Value Added Testing Edition

One of the supposed key innovations in educational 'reform' is the adoption of value added testing. Basically, students are tested at the start of the school year (or at the end of the previous year) and then at the end of the year. The improvement in scores is supposed to reflect the effect of the teacher on student learning*. I've discussed some of the methodological problems with value added testing before, and the Economic Policy Institute has a good overview of the subject. But what I want to discuss is a very serious flaw--what I would call fatal--with value added testing that stems…

Land of the Lost Souls: My Life on the Streets

tags: book review, memoir, homelessness, unemployment, Cadillac Man, Thomas Wagner The homeless are everywhere in New York City. I run across them every day while riding public transit, while walking around the city and while using wireless in the public libraries. After a few conversations with homeless people, I've learned that most of them avoid shelters because of the risk of violent crime there. So where do they sleep? Where do they go to get a shower and clean clothes? Are all homeless people either crazy or crackheads? How did these people end up living on the streets in the first…

Five abandoned Olympic sports [SciencePunk]

There is only one truly kosher sport when it comes to the Olympics: athletics. All those ancient Greeks did was run around in the dirt butt naked. It took over fifty years for them to add a second sport: more running, but in a wild twist, a race over twice the distance as before. Over the years more sports were added, including one involving running in full armour, which much have provided much-needed advertising canvas for Classical games sponsors. After the revival of the games in 1894, various sports have been added, some successfully, whilst others fell by the wayside. Take a tour…

#ArsenicLife #Fail: A teachable moment

For those that haven't heard about the NASA/arsenic bacteria story that's been exploding all over the science blogosphere over the last couple of weeks, I like the summary over at Jonathan Eisen's Tree of Life blog: NASA announced a major press conference at the conference they discussed a new Science paper claiming to show the discovery of a microbe that could replace much/some of its phosphate with arsenic initial press coverage of the paper was very positive and discussed the work as having profound implications for understanding of life in the universe - though some scientists in some of…

Caves of Ideas

Guest Blog By David Bolinsky Founder and Creative Director of e*mersion Studio In 1962, when I was ten, my family and I had the rare privilege of exploring the ancient caves of Lascaux in southern France to see 17,000 year-old Paleolithic paintings close up. Though sadly no longer open for public viewing, these iconic works changed me forever. In his film ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’, Werner Herzog documented limestone galleries of astonishing thirty-thousand-year-old artwork in the French Chauvet Pont d’Arc. Having practiced the visualization of science for nearly forty years, I resonate with…

Surfaces, ammonia, ozone and scientific destiny

Ask an informed layman what he or she thinks is the greatest science-based industrial discovery or invention of all time and the person will likely name the computer, the transistor, the telephone, the incandescent light or perhaps even the blast furnace. But key as all these inventions were to humanity's progress, there is perhaps one industrial discovery that surpasses them in the sheer earth-shattering and fundamental change it brought about not only in the struggles of human survival but in the bedrock of our very existence on this planet. That discovery is the discovery of the means to…

An Interview with Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science

For those of you who have been thirsting for more details on our newest ScienceBlogger since the introduction of his blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, here Page 3.14 offers an interview with Ed Yong. Among other juicy tidbits, Ed reveals that he once worked in research science but gave it up for writing. We can't help but be glad that he did! Starting out easy: What's your name? Ed Yong. I have no pseudonym and automatically incline towards people who write and post under their own names. Ed stands for Edmund, which apparently means "wealthy protector," and I have a Chinese name that…

Learning styles and science labs

Science labs are not for all people. I've always enjoyed teaching lab courses, so some of you might find it strange that I agree with some of the comments from Steve Gimbel and fellow Sb'ers on the questionable benefits of laboratory courses in introductory physics. But you see, I wasn't very impressed with the undergraduate physics labs that I took either. And with a little reminiscing, it's pretty easy to pick out example labs where the kindest description is "time-waster." This wasn't true of all my lab courses. My biochemistry and microbiology lab courses were phenomenal, and, it's…

Small minds thinking tiny department

When it comes to controversial reports, one that said it would be good to include combatting widespead disease as an element in foreign policy would hardly seem to qualify. And ordinary person might be forgiven for thinking that was already something that was considered. You'd think. But then you'd think a lot of things that wouldn't be true, for example, that if you were going to start a major war you'd have thought it through pretty carefully. Back to global health: The draft report itself, in language linking public health problems with violence and other social ills, says "we cannot…

Tamiflu resistance again

There's been a bit of a buzz about a paper by Australian researcher Jennifer McKimm-Breschkin at the Toronto flu meetings last week. McKimm-Breschkin told the gathering of 1500 flu obsessed scientists just what they didn't want to hear: that she and her colleagues had evidence from the laboratory that clade 2 H5N1 avian influenza virus isolated from birds in Indonesia were becoming resistant to the only oral antiviral effective against the virus, oseltamivir (Tamiflu). In comparison to clade 1 (southeast asian) virus from a few years back, the sensitivity was 20 to 30 times less. We'll have…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: a logical explanation for why God is screwing us all the time

Epicurus' old questions are yet to be answered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil? -- David Hume, quoted in Konner, The Atheist's Bible The tremendous number of bad things that happen to innocent people has always been a problem for flacks for an All Powerful and All Loving God. I'm always curious to see how they explain it. The latest contribution from Dr. John Pearrell, pastor of Gateway Community Church in Covington, Georgia is both refreshing in its…

The Swiss Army Knife of Public Health Preparedness

We spend a lot of time on bird flu here because, as I have explained, it is a useful lens through which to look at the void in public health leadership as well as preparedness issues of the system that allegedly protects us from bird flu and much else. We don't spend all this time on bird flu because we believe it is the most important public health problem in the world. It could become so, but it isn't now. Our view is that if it ever does, we should be ready for it, and it takes leadership for that to happen. But there are other gigantic problems, too, and we want to highlight one of them…

Clock Tutorial #7: Circadian Organization in Mammals

This February 06, 2005 post describes the basic elements of the circadian system in mammals. The principal mammalian circadian pacemaker is located in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) of the hypothalamus. The general area was first discovered in 1948 by Curt Richter who systematically lesioned a number of endocrine glands and brain areas in rats. The only time he saw an effect on circadian rhythms was when he lesioned a frontal part of hypothalamus (which is at the base of the brain) immediatelly above the optic chiasm (the spot where two optic nerves cross). Later studies in the 1970s…

The Three Rs

This is my first ever post on education. I wrote it on the John Edwards' primary campaign blog on December 23, 2003, and later re-posted it on http://www.jregrassroots.org/ forums. I republished it on August 23, 2004 on Science And Politics and republished it again on December 05, 2005 on The Magic School Bus. It's time for it to move into the new archives here: Why does one so often hear that education can be improved by concentration on three Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic? The way this is usually implemented is by giving students exercises in these three areas, then giving them…

Swine flu and environmental arsenic

Back in May there were some stories on the wires and flublogia regarding a new study about arsenic exposure and risk of flu. I didn't write about it at the time for purely arbitrary reasons (I was writing about other things), but I noticed it and in fact I know the senior author and his work fairly well. For reasons having nothing to do with flu I revisited the paper the other day, along with a bunch of others on arsenic toxicity from the same group up at Dartmouth (the senior author, Josh Hamilton, has now moved to the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, but I think…

Bug bomb illnesses and injuries

If Mrs. R. is typical, it's a good thing there are no atomic bug bombs or thermonuclear mouse traps or our neighborhood would be a radioactive dead zone. In our case her malevolent vibrations are sufficient to sterilize the area of vermin (that and our dog) but many people resort to chemical bug bombs, called total release foggers (TRFs). These are canisters that release enough pesticide to fill a living area with chemical fog that kills bugs like cockroaches, fleas and flying insects. The pesticides are usually relatively non-toxic to humans, primarily pyrethrins, derived from chrysanthemums…

"Braised enterovirus" and "Fuck the spring chicken"

Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD, not to be confused with a disease of cattle, Foot and Mouth Disease) is the result of an infection by one of several intestinal viruses, the most common being Coxsackie A and Enterovirus 71 (Ev71). HFMD is a fairly common contagious infection of infants and children that often appears in outbreak form in schools and daycare centers. Children with HFMD have fever, sore throat and characteristic lesions around the mouth and in the throat. Recently some very sizable outbreaks caused by Ev71 have been reported in China, Singapore and Mongolia, with thousands of…

Flu vaccine, the elderly and the CDC

If you are in the elderly population (over 65 years of age) you are in the crosshairs of CDC's influenza vaccination program. The reasons seem clear -- at first, anyway. Risk of influenza-related death (as measured by a specific statistical technique to estimate excess mortality during influenza seasons) increases dramatically after 65 tears of age. If you are over 80, for example, your risks of being in the excess death category is more than ten times those in the age 65 - 69 age group. Three-quaters of the flu related deaths in a normal flu season are in the 65 plus group and more than half…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Landscape Corridors Promote Plant Diversity By Preventing Species Loss: Landscape corridors - thin strips of habitat that connect isolated patches of habitat -- are lifelines for native plants that live in the connected patches and therefore are a useful tool for conserving biodiversity. That's the result of the first replicated, large-scale study of plants and how they survive in both connected patches of habitat -- those utilizing landscape corridors -- and unconnected patches. I've heard a lot about this study (and several others at the same site) over the years because Nick and Ellen are…

FAMILY Act would reduce pressure on workers to choose between their jobs and their families’ health

Today, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced the Family and Medical Leave Insurance Act, or FAMILY Act, federal legislation to create a "social insurance" system for paid medical and family leave. A new office within the Social Security Administration would administer the system, which would be funded by a payroll tax (two-tenths of one percent of workers' wages, or $1.50 per week for the average worker). Eligible employees could receive 66% of their monthly wages, up to a capped amount, for up to 12 weeks while dealing with their own serious…

Despite poverty’s persistence, food stamp benefits drop

According to the latest figures from the Census Bureau, 15% of the US population lives in poverty. The figure’s even worse for children: 22% of those under 18 are living in households with incomes below the federal poverty level. The US economy is officially out of the recession, but an estimated 95% of all the income gains since 2009 have gone to the 1% of the US population with the highest incomes. For millions of people, food stamps (technically, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) make the difference between buying groceries and going hungry. Yet Congress has allowed…

Scenes from Here

So I somehow forgot to mention when I went on maternity leave and promised to post on Thursdays that I meant I would start this Thursday, since I was on vacation last week.  Sorry 'bout that.  I will shamelessly blame the baby and sleep deprivation again. We spent much of last week visiting family near Boston, which was lovely - the transition with K. and C. really took it out of us.  I'm not a high-stress person, I tend to be pretty relaxed, but we really needed a break after two very hectic weeks and a lot of emotion.  Among other things, we had sent K. and C. home two days before the movie…

John Michael Greer on Whether Or Not We Can Change

I'm obviously always a fan of Greer's work, but I thought this week's post was particularly apt - he addresses the larger question of whether we must keep up industrial civilization until it falls apart (note, I do not say "if it falls apart" - implicit in the keeping up is that it brings us faster to collapse), or whether we can change. George Monbiot, who's carved out a niche for himself as the staff pseudoenvironmentalist of The Guardian, had a blog post of his own on much the same theme. His argument is simply that most people in today's industrial societies are not going to accept…

Academic freedom at San Jose/Evergreen Community College?

June Sheldon was an adjunct professor of biology at San Jose/Evergreen Community College, teaching genetics. Here's one account of a lecture she gave. On June 21, 2007, June Sheldon, an adjunct professor teaching a human heredity course, answered a question about how heredity affects homosexual behavior by citing the class textbook and a well-known German scientist. She noted that the scientist found a correlation between maternal stress and homosexual behavior in males but that the scientist's views are only one set of theories in the nature-versus-nurture debate mentioned by the textbook…

ExSSII: death and destruction

Final day of Extreme Solar Systems II here at Jackson Lake, and what a beautiful day it is.. And we are live for session 8 of day 5. Thursday night there was, again, an after dinner informal discussion, with the topic being "planets in binary systems" - the panel highlighted the theoretical difficulties with forming and retaining planets in binary systems, and there then followed a very lievely discussion. Doug Lin, as it happens, with a collaborator, had used the generous 2 hour break for dinner to come up with and run a model for Kepler-16b formation, and a number of people had great fund…

"From Ship to Shore" - Reforming the National Contingency Plan to protect oil spill response workers, Center for Progressive Reform weighs in

by Elizabeth Grossman In mid-June, while reporting from the Gulf Coast, I asked the Deepwater Horizon Incident's Joint Information Center (JIC) who the federal on-scene coordinator had appointed to serve as site safety officer, and for a copy of the Regional Contingency Plan's health and safety plan. Both are requirements under the National Contingency Plan - developed in the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill - that establishes the framework for the emergency response to an oil spill. Neither the first Coast Guard officer I spoke with, nor the officer who handled the follow-up call…

In Praise of Toilets

I noted in my post about Pakistan that a shortage of clean water for millions of flood victims may lead to outbreaks of diarrheal diseases. It's worth getting into the issue of how unclean water causes these diseases. Basically, the problem is water contaminated by human feces. In Clinical Microbiology Reviews, Qadri et al list the major agents behind the estimated annual toll of 1.5 million deaths from diarrheal disease: Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli, or ETEC (the group of E. coli that produce toxins that cause diarrhea); Vibrio cholerae; Shigella; and rotavirus. These three bacteria and…

Crane Industry Disgusted with OSHA Delay

Updated below ( 6/18/08 ) Earlier this month I wrote in "Crashing Cranes, Deaths and the White House's Edict" about the inexcusable inaction by the US Department of Labor and OSHA to address the decades-old problem of crane-related deaths.  I am not alone in my disgust at this regulatory system, which yet again is failing to protect our nation's workers.  I'm pleased to report that two parties familiar with an attempt at crane safety rulemaking have strongly expressed their own dissapointment with OSHA's failure to act.  First are members of the negotiated rulemaking committee (…

Comments Galore on DOL's Risk Rule

Despite a short 30-day comment period, dozens of interested individuals and organizations provided comments to Asst. Secretary Leon Sequeira about his proposed so-called risk assessment policy.  I've pulled some of my favorite excerpts for your consideration: "The proposed rule is a parting gift from an outgoing administration to its supporters in industry and should be withdrawn." (Public Citizen, full comments here) "The Asst Secretary for Policy has no legal authority to issue this proposal or to finalize it.  ...The authorities granted to him all involve performing economic reports and…

New homebirth statistics show it's way too dangerous, and Mike Shermer on liberal denialism

Two links today for denialism blog readers, both are pretty thought provoking. The first, from Amy Tuteur, on the newly-released statistics on homebirth in Oregon. It seems that her crusade to have the midwives share their mortality data is justified, as when they were forced to release this data in Oregon, planned homebirth was about 7-10 times more likely to result in neonatal mortality than planned hospital birth. I'm sure Tuteur won't mind me stealing her figure and showing it here (original source of data is Judith Rooks testimony): Oregon homebirth neonatal mortality statistics, from…

Conservatives crow over push for privatization in British NHS, compare apples to oranges

Hot Air and the daily caller are excited to pronounce socialized medicine dead as the British NHS plans to contract with private hospitals and providers on top of socialized care. From The Caller: Joseph A. Morris, a former Reagan White House lawyer who now serves on the board of the American Conservative Union, told TheDC that socialized medicine has turned out to be a threat to Britons' health, and to their economy as well. "Europe's message to the world is no longer that the socialist dream of the cradle-to-grave welfare state is an easy achievement," Morris said. "Rather, it is the…

HIV denial: alive and well in 2014 [UPDATED]

Everything old is new again. For years on this blog, I wrote about HIV denial and the few fringe scientists and journalists who espoused it. I attracted a host of trolls, some of whom repeatedly attacked my credibility, my appearance, even showed up at my academic office. One of the most prolific of these was Henry Bauer, who posts long-debunked ideas on HIV/AIDS (and the Loch Ness Monster to boot). That was, oh, 2007-ish and prior. In that same year Steven Novella and I co-authored an article on HIV denial for PLoS Medicine. In 2008, a leader of the denial movement, Christine Maggiore of "…

Student guest post: Challenges and Progresses in HIV Vaccine Research

It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Third one this round is by Jack Walsh.  The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection is one of the most significant global health challenges of this 21st century. Since the isolation of the virus in 1983, it has infected 70 million people among whom 35 million have died of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS).1 Although important progresses have been made in slowing down the pandemic and reducing the morbidity and mortality related to HIV/AIDS with the highly…

What's Google got to do with emerging diseases?

As I mentioned Friday, the good folks from Google were part of the crowd at this year's ICEID. This included a talk by Larry Brilliant, described on his wikipedia page as "...medical doctor, epidemiologist, technologist, author and philanthropist, and the director of Google's philanthropic arm Google.org." His talk discussed not only stopping outbreaks in their tracks--as current outbreak investigations seek to do, and Brilliant himself as worked on, as part of his background in vaccination campaigns for polio and smallpox--but to pay attention to "the left of the epidemic curve" as part…

Emerging Disease and Zoonoses #27: Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever

I had a strange worry as a kid. I was very scared of getting bit by a tick and developing Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF). I know, weird--even for nerdy kids like me, who knows about Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever? How many readers are even familiar with it? For those who aren't, RMSF is a zoonotic rickettsial disease transmitted by several species of ticks. Though the disease is named after the geographical region where it was first described back in the late 1800s, the bacterium that causes it, Rickettsia rickettsii (an obligate intracellular pathogen), has been found in almost all…

Influenza: the year in review, and looking forward

Influenza season is wrapping up here in the United States, and it seems so far that the 2006-7 season was pretty typical. The first cases of the disease were reported in late October, and cases were sporadic throughout November and early December. After increasing a bit in mid-late December of 2006, outbreaks declined slightly in January, and then picked up again later that month, increasing again in February before falling again, and continuing to do so in March. Early reports suggest that the vaccine matched the circulating strains pretty well, and that most of the isolates which were…