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Beyond the sequence

Dan MacArthur's post, Can't find your disease gene? Just sequence them all..., is worth a read. He concludes: But sequencing won't be enough: we need much better methods for sifting out the truly function-altering genetic variants from the biological noise. This is already difficult enough for protein-coding regions (as this study demonstrates); we currently have virtually no way of picking out disease-causing variants in the remaining 98% of the genome. There's a clear need for developing highly accurate and comprehensive maps of the functional importance of each and every base in the human…

Has it awakened?

Mars Rover Disoriented Somewhat After Glitch: More strangely, the Spirit had no memory of what it had done for that part of Sol 1800. The rover did not record actions, as it otherwise always does, to the part of its computer memory that retains information even when power is turned off, the so-called nonvolatile memory. "It's almost as if the rover had a bout of amnesia," said John Callas, the project manager for the rovers. Another rover system did record that power was being drawn from the batteries for an hour and a half. "Meaning the rover is awake doing something," Dr. Callas said. But…

Mental Illness - a personal perspective.

This is an edited repost of something I wrote nearly three years ago. You can see the original post and comments here. Over at Dr. Isis's blog, there's a post answering a reader's question about whether to tell her postdoc advisor about her troubles with clinical depression. I agree with Isis's advice - without knowing the advisor really well, you can't be sure of how they'll react. If the postdoc had become ill due to something like a diabetic episode, where the change in schedule and environment caused by taking a new job messed up the PDs control of their blood sugar - well, there wouldn…

Two-Three Trees: a different approach to balance

This post is very delayed, but things have been busy. I'm working my way up to finger trees, which are a wonderful functional data structure. They're based on trees - and like many tree-based structures, their performance relies heavily on the balance of the tree. The more balanced the tree is, the better they perform. In general, my preference when I need a balanced tree is a red-black tree, which I wrote about before. But there are other kinds of balanced trees, and for finger trees, many people prefer a kind of tree called a 2/3 tree. A two-three tree is basically a B-tree with a…

Gap Buffers, or, Don't Get Tied Up With Ropes?

Last week, I promised to continue my discussion of ropes. I'm going to break that promise. But it's in a good cause. If you're a decent engineer, one of the basic principles you should follow is keeping this as simple as possible. One of the essential skills for keeping things simple is realizing when you're making something overly complicated - even if it's cool, and fun, and interesting. Working out the rope code for more complex operations, I found myself thinking that it really seemed complex for what I was doing. What I'm doing is writing myself a text editor. I'm not writing a string…

Idiot Math Professors, Fractions, and the Fun of Math

A bunch of people have been sending me links to a USA Today article about a math professor who wants to change math education. Specifically, he wants to stop teaching fractions, and de-emphasize manual computation like multiplication and long division. Frankly, reading about it, I'm pissed off by both sides of the argument. On one side, you've got Professor DeTurck, who wants to abolish fractions, in favor of teaching children only decimals. This is a perfect example of an out-of-touch academic making idiotic proposals. To be abundantly clear, I don't think that academics are, in general…

Religion and Pessimism

Commenting on this post by John Horgan about religion and defeatism, PZ writes: John Horgan criticizes Francis Collins for his defeatism in thinking that human beings will always be evil to one another: Christians castigate atheists such as Richard Dawkins for propagating a dark, nihilistic view of human existence. But Dawkins is Pollyanna compared to Christians like Collins, who has so little faith in human reason and decency that he thinks we'll kill each other until the end of time. I'm not quite as optimistic as Dawkins--I don't think that the disappearance of religion would necessarily…

Krauthammer: We Are All Popperians Now?

While I'm away, I'll leave you with this introduction to likelihood theory (originally published Nov. 22, 2005). In the Washington Post last week, Charles Krauthammer boldly opposed the Tin Foil Helmet wing of the Republican Party by calling intelligent design a "fraud." The best part of his column was when he pointed out that, just like biology, chemistry and physics are also godless: The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernible direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided…

World religions - numbers over time....

Well, it turns out that there isn't a handy-dandy reference for the numbers for various religions in the past. Mark Kirkorian over at The Corner linked to my earlier post where I expressed skepticism about the contention by the Vatican demographer that a larger number of Muslims than Roman Catholics is new. Other people have contacted me as well. In any case, my hunch is that in fact Muslims were more numerous than Roman Catholics in the period between 950 and 1750, though the window could be shorter. My reasoning below the fold.... 1) By about 1000 most of the core Islamic lands had…

Evolution is not the change in allele frequencies?

In The Hopeless Monster? Not so fast! Bora says: In a back-and-forth with a commenter, Coyne defends himself that he is talking about the changes in genes, not evolution. This just shows his bias - he truly believes that evolution - all of it - can be explained entirely by genetics, particularly population genetics. His preferred definition of evolution is probably the genocentric nonsense like "evolution is a change of gene frequencies in a population over time". I prefer to think of it as "evolution is change in development due to ecology" (a softening of Van Valen's overly-strong…

God lives, deal with it!

I'm an atheist. Just like some people who are Christians but weren't always tell me that they "always believed in Christ," myself, I've never believed in God. Before the age of 7 I did avow a belief in God, but in hindsight I see only the most minimal of deisms in my conception of the world aside from the times when I was at the mosque with my family. Religion wasn't talked about in my family much aside from major festivals, and it wasn't something I ever really thought about. When I was 7 I was in the library, reading some books on astronomy, and it struck me that there was no reason for…

Family walking on all fours....

I commented on the "throwback family" a few days ago, well, The Times (of London) has two articles which reduce the likelihood of this being a hoax in my mind. It seems clear that there is a family, highly inbred, which lives in Turkey where a number of the children walk on all fours and exhibit other forms of impairment. Nevertheless, the exact details of what is going on here is problematic to me. As usual, the newspapers tend to garble and confuse many issues. Consider this sentence: "All five are brain-damaged because of a mutation in a gene 17p, located on chromosome 17, which…

Being abnormal

In Unequal by nature: A geneticist's perspective on human differences, James F. Crow states: Two populations may have a large overlap and differ only slightly in their means. Still, the most outstanding individuals will tend to come from the population with the higher mean. This is a trivial observation. It is biologically relevant because heritable quantitative traits are to a great extent the raw material for evolution, and, they generally follow an approximate normal distribution. The reasoning is simple, many loci of small independent additive effects are a good approximation of the…

The spirit and the law

A few days ago I posted on "Islamic finance," which to non-Muslim eyes looks an awful lot like an intellectually dishonest "work around." This sort of thing is not limited to Muslims, at one point the Catholic Church took the ban upon usury seriously, opening up a niche for Jews as moneylenders. But what about financial transactions amongst the Jews themselves? The reality is that Orthodox Judaism is not nearly as friendly toward exploitative financial transactions between Jews, in a manner not dissimilar to Islam, and so naturally "work arounds" emerged which followed the letter of the…

Ambassador Kurtzer: A Jewish View of Israel and Obama We Never Hear in the U.S.

Last week, Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel from 2001-2005, came out in support of Sen. Obama. In light of the Republican propaganda about how Obama would be 'anti-Israel' or some other hooey, it's worth noting why Kurtzer supports Obama (italics mine): We have one candidate who is prepared to do diplomacy. Only one candidate. We have two candidates who have told us all the countries they don't want to talk to. They don't want to talk to Iran because Iran has a really awful government. And Iran does have a really awful government. And Iran is pursuing policies that are not on…

NEJM Blasts Bush's Stand on S-CHIP

In the most recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, there is a perspective piece by Sara Rosenbaum that bluntly describes how the Bush Administration's opposition to S-CHIP (the State Children's Health Insurance Program) is based on ideology and not economic cost (italics mine): Why would the President veto bipartisan legislation that does precisely what he insisted on -- namely, aggressively enroll the poorest children? One might blame the poisonous atmosphere that pervades Washington these days, but other important social policy reforms have managed to get through. One answer…

Poverty and Learning in Massachusetts

I've described before how there is a significant correlation between poverty and educational performance when we use state-level data. But as I pointed out, one of the interesting things is that the residual--the difference between the expected scores for a given state and the actual scores--can be quite large for some states (e.g., Massachusetts does much better than expected, Arkansas much worse). We can learn a lot from these differences (i.e., what does MA do differently from Arkansas). But if we look at only one state, can we determine what the effect of poverty is? To do this, I've…

Peterson Field Guide to the Birds of North America

tags: book review, Peterson Field Guide, field guide to the birds, birding, North American birds, Roger Tory Peterson No one has done more to advance and popularize birdwatching than artist and naturalist, Roger Tory Peterson (RTP), who published his first field guide to the birds in 1934 at the ripe old age of 26. No doubt, many of you probably grew up using RTP's seminal field guides to identify wild birds, but did you know that the Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds and the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds were combined into one large Sibley-esque type volume for the first time?…

Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World

tags: book review, Plastic Fantastic, How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, physics, ethics, fraud, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Jan Hendrik Schön, Eugenie Samuel Reich Physicist Jan Hendrik Schön was too good to be true. After graduating from the University of Konstanz in 1997, he was hired by Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he quickly rose to scientific fame. By 2000, he had published eight papers in the world's most prestigious journals, Nature and Science. One year later at the height of his career, he was publishing one scientific paper every eight days --…

Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Law signed by Bush

This week President Bush signed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (S. 3678). It has generally gotten favorable reviews from public health professionals concerned with preparedness, including the Clinicians Biosecurity Network and The Trust for America's Health. We've taken a look, too, and find much to like, but whether this will indeed be useful will depend on how it's implemented. We have a few observations of our own, as well. The law has four Titles, each dealing with a separate but related topic. Title I. pertains to " National Preparedness and Response, Leadership,…

How does flu spread?

In this week's Science magazine Stephen Morse calls attention to what we have been saying here for a long time. We don't really know how influenza spreds from person to person. A recent review of the aerosol transmission route by Tellier in Emerging Infectious Diseases provides some additional information of interest. There are four possible modes of transmission: aerosol, large droplet, direct contact via inanimate objects (called fomites in epidemiological jargon) and the gastrointestinal route. At this point we know very little about the gastrointestinal route, although some H5N1 cases…

University Professors Teach Too Much

This series of four posts by William M. Briggs is pretty interesting stuff. The kind of thing where I'm torn: is it the most brilliant and perceptive thing I've ever read about higher education or is it a series of slightly early April 1st posts? Dear Internet, I really need all you people out there to help me figure this one out. Which way does it go. And by the way, you really have to read all four posts to get the complete message. The comment streams are interesting too. University Professors Teach Too Much: Part I Here is what everybody knows: the best researchers are often not the…

Computer Science & Academia: Two views on staying or leaving

Via my York University Computer Science & Engineering colleague Andrew Eckford, two contrasting blog posts by two different Harvard computer science profs. One has decided to leave academia for greener pastures at Google and the other has decided to stay. First, Matt Welsh on leaving. There is one simple reason that I'm leaving academia: I simply love work I'm doing at Google. I get to hack all day, working on problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more interesting than I can work on at any university. That is really hard to beat, and is worth more to me than having "Prof." in…

The Canadian War on Science 2013: A year in advocacy

2012 was a year of Open Access advocacy for me. I published a ton of posts that year generally around the loose theme of making the scholarly communications ecosystem fairer and more open. In 2013 I did a little of that too, for sure. But with a lot of the effects of the Conservative government's 2012 omnibus Bill C-38 coming home to roost with numerous cuts and closures and yet more policy changes, the thing that really motivated me to blog in an otherwise very slow blogging year was Canadian science policy. More precisely, advocating for a fairer, more just system of government funded…

Peak Water in the American West

  Dropping water levels in Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. (Source: Peter Gleick 2013) It is no surprise, of course, that the western United States is dry. The entire history of the West can be told (and has been, in great books like Cadillac Desert [Reisner] and Rivers of Empire [Worster] and The Great Thirst [Hundley]) in large part through the story of the hydrology of the West, the role of the federal and state governments in developing water infrastructure, the evidence of droughts and floods on the land, and the politics of water allocations and use. But the story of water in the West…

The Promise and Threat of Ethiopia’s Dam on the Nile: 21st century Water Conflicts

The Nile River – river of legend – is not just a river in Egypt. It is the lifeblood of 11 different African nations and the longest river in the world, extending over 6,500 kilometers long and draining a watershed of over 3 million square kilometers. The eleven nations that share the Nile are Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan and South Sudan, Kenya, Eritrea, the DR of Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda. The river is really two major rivers: the White Nile and the Blue Nile, which meet near Khartoum and become the mainstem of the Nile, flowing north to Egypt and the Mediterranean.  The…

Climate change, snow and ice, and water resources

One of the reasons that climate change is such a big issue is because the global climate is an integral part of the Earth’s entire ecosystem, tied to so many of the big and little things that society cares about. Figuring out how all these complicated pieces tie together is hard, as is linking these pieces together in the minds of the public so that we – and our policy makers – can grasp the true implications of a changing climate and plan for them. Because this is so important, I expect that many of my future posts here will address this issue, but let me start with one example: the…

A surprisingly subversive look at what the coming energy transformation will look like

The Conference Board of Canada, usually described as a business-friendly think tank, has come out with a report that is refreshingly honest, and even a bit subversive — especially if you pay extra attention to some sidebars, consider what the authors deliberately left out, and are at least a little familiar with the science of power consumption and generation. The full report, which is behind a freewall — it is downloadable for the cost of supplying your contact information — concludes that converting Canada's economy to a carbon-free energy mix won't actually cost all that much. But what I…

Can we build it? Yes we can!

As a father of a four-year-old, I'm a big fan of Bob the Builder. The basic plot of each episode of the charming stop-motion children's series revolves around one or more pieces of heavy machinery learning self-discipline, which, as a new PNAS study shows, is a key skill associated with success and happiness later in life. I also like the optimism embedded in the catch-phrase that Bob's machine team invariably declares: "Can we build it? Yes we can!" If only that can-do spirit were as evident in the public debate over how to respond to the threat of climate change. Recently a spate of reports…

Thank you to Nifty Fifty Speaker Dr. Margaret Hamburg!

By Lisa Matthews Bladensburg High School and the biomedical sciences program welcomed Dr. Margaret Hamburg, Commissioner of the FDA, on Wednesday January 15th as a Nifty Fifty Speaker, sponsored by InfoComm International.  She was honored with a color guard, musical presentation and was presented by the Mayor of Bladensburg with a proclamation honoring her accomplishments.  She reciprocated with a compelling and interesting discussion of her career path and opportunities with the FDA, and a message to the student of Bladensburg to continue on the path they have taken that focuses on math and…

Beep..beeep....It's Moscow calling!

By Joe Schwarcz PhD, Author, USASEF Expo Performer, AT&T Sponsored Nifty Fifty Program Speaker The "beep..beep..beep" sounded innocent enough, but it shook America to its very core. Why? Because it was coming from outer space! No, the military personnel monitoring radio signals did not pick up a transmission from aliens. This beep was coming from a transmitter placed inside a twenty-three inch diameter ball made of aluminum, titanium and magnesium. A ball that was orbiting the earth, passing over Washington DC every hour, emitting an irritating signal that sent a clear message: We…

An Interview with Alex of The Daily Transcript

Meet Alex Palazzo, cellular biologist and "postdoctoral fellow-at-large" of The Daily Transcript. What do you do when you're not blogging? I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard medical school. There I spend my time poking cells and in the process I hope to learn a bit about how cells handle mRNA, how the endoplasmic reticulum works and what are all those other intracellular animacules are doing. Why's your blog called The Daily Transcript? OK let's start at the beginning. Each cell is loaded with DNA that is stored in this specialized compartment, the nucleus. This DNA contains all…

The next generation science standards meet nanopore sequencing

Scale, proportion, and quantity belong to one of the cross cutting concepts in the next generation science standards (NGSS).  According to Volume 2 of the NGSS, "in engineering, no structure could be conceived much less constructed without the engineer's precise sense of scale."  The authors go on to note that scale and proportion are best understood using the scientific practice of working with models. When scientists and engineers work with these concepts at a molecular scale, new kinds of technologies can be created to advance our understanding of the natural world. One example is DNA…

What This Blog Is NOT About: Biorhythms

One of th efirst posts on Circadiana, just defining what the blog was about (January 17, 2005): ----------------------------------------------- When I first took a class on Biological Clocks (eleven years ago), the instructor explained why biorhythms are not science. This was done with such fun, and as aside, I did not take it seriously. I did not realize I was supposed to study this exercise in Baloney Detection. I was surprised when I saw the question on the first mid-term exam, asking us to debunk biorhythms point-by-point. I lost several points there. I have learned since then to pay…

Lab accident

I wrote the post on Texas A&M that appears below while sitting in an airport lounge, sans connection. In the car on the way home from the airport late last night I heard on the BBC World Service the following story, to which I found links provided by two kind readers upon being reconnected (hat tip PM and KR). Consider this BBC story a preamble to the Texas A&M post that follow it: The strain of foot-and-mouth disease found at a Surrey farm has been identified, [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)] has said. The strain in infected cattle is identical to…

Wherein I try to defend the indefensible

I'm going to defend the poor guy who flew on a commercial airliner against CDC advice. The one now in the National Jewish Hospital in Denver being treated for XDR-TB. Someone has to, so it might as well be me. He made a big mistake and the consequences are catastrophic for him and his family. Unlike lots of catastrophic mistakes, however, probably few others will be hurt by it. That's for another post. If it was a big mistake, why defend him? I'll blame it on my mother. Like all mothers, she tried to teach me a lot of stuff, some of which was pretty useless or wrong, some of which was nice…

Respiratory disease outbreaks in nursing homes

Nursing homes (Long Term Care Facilities, LTCFs) are a favorite hunting ground for respiratory viruses, including flu. They are open to the general community, where visitors and employees mingle freely with the residents. The residents are usually of an advanced age, have other sicknesses that make them vulnerable and often have less active immune defenses. So when the swine flu pandemic began at the end of April, the Public Health Laboratory at Ontario's Agency for Health Protection and Promotion ramped up their respiratory infection outbreak registration system with the prospect that LCTFs…

Flu, handwashing and disinfecting the world

Most people are either indifferent to swine flu or fearful, but the makers of Purell hand sanitizer and Chlorox are happy. It's been a boon to the business of sanitizing everything in sight as a way to ward off swine flu. Here's a story about Chlorox (bleach): The company has secured additional suppliers and will increase production if needed, says Benno Dorer, senior vice president- general manager of Clorox’s cleaning division. Some retailers have already asked for more bleach, he said in a Sept. 4 telephone interview, declining to name specific companies. An outbreak of the flu may add 2…

Swine flu: the overreaction overreaction

Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations and a well-known authority on emerging infectious diseases was on PBS's Newshour last night and she made a very important but little appreciated point. Mexico has made a major national sacrifice for global public health by shutting down its country and interrupting transmission of disease. The cost to Mexico has already been enormous it will continue to pay in other ways. The reputation of the government has suffered because of the way it handled this -- the lack of transparency, the initial slow footedness (which of course it denies), its…

No news isn't good news but new forms of news might be

It turns out that we were not the only ones musing on the relationship between the news business and the flu business. Dr. Michael Osterholm, is the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy (CIDRAP), and also Editor-in-Chief of the CIDRAP Business Source, a subscription newsletter offered to the business community on pandemic (and similar) matters. Dr. Osterholm's name has appeared here often, perhaps most memorably as the author of the "We're screwed" observation. A couple of weeks before my recent post he had written to the business community: The collapsing…

Anthrax and credibility

The unfolding anthrax story may not unfold much because the government seems to be in a hurry to keep it folded. They claim -- not officially but through the news media -- to have found the nutjob who did it. He had opportunity, means and motive (he was a nutjob). Now he's dead and can't defend himself. Case closed. Maybe. But neither the news media nor the government who feeds them crapola have track records for credibility, so I'm not yet willing to lay this vicious homicide automatically on his grave. Yes, we are getting all sorts of leaked info but then we got a lot of leaked info when…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 31 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: High-Pitched Notes during Vocal Contests Signal Genetic Diversity in Ocellated Antbirds: Animals use honest signals to assess the quality of competitors during aggressive interactions. Current theory…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 19 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Structures of KaiC Circadian Clock Mutant Proteins: A New Phosphorylation Site at T426 and Mechanisms of Kinase, ATPase and Phosphatase: The circadian clock of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus can…

The MoveOn ad

I'm tired of hearing people with usually progressive views (like Mark Shields or John Kerry) complain the latest MoveOn ad in the New York Times asking if General Petraeus has Betrayed Us is counter-productive, "alienating those who would otherwise agree with us." It's the same bogus argument we hear about forthright atheists saying what needs to be said. I doubt anyone who genuinely questions this war will be led to support it because Move On ran an ad in the NYT some are uncomfortable with. Of course the Right Wing Noise Machine is in full throttle: A political group supporting President…

Genocentrism aids Anti-Abortion Arguments

From October 09, 2004. I'd write it differently today, but the main point still stands. Life begins, takes its course, and ends. The course of Life determines the directionality of Time. Without Life, it would be impossible to determine which way the Time goes, what is Past and what is Future. Every living organism dies, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Life becomes Non-Life. But, when does Non-Life become Life? This seems to be the key question in the discussions about abortion, stem-cell research, and other touchy political/religious topics. Usual answers: at the time of fertilization, or 40…

Mild pandemic? Bite your tongue.

A spot-on column in CIDRAP Business Source [subscription] by Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy's (CIDRAP) Director, Mike Osterholm, reminded me to say something I've wanted to say for a long time. We should banish the word "mild" from the influenza lexicon. There's no such thing as a mild case of influenza, any more than there are "mild" auto accidents. There are cases that for reasons we don't understand don't make you very sick (or sick at all), and there are cases that can lay you lower than you ever want to be, including six feet under. What Osterholm does with great…

WHO, swine flu in the Ukraine and bin Laden's beard

We were asked repeatedly offline and in the comments for our views on what was or was not going on in the Ukraine, but we steadfastly declined to post on it. We didn't know any more than you can find out from news sources, so we had nothing to add in the way of hard information, We did know there was a WHO team on the ground and we thought it best to wait to find out more. We still don't know much, except that news reports are suggesting that the health care system in the Ukraine is a shambles and its likely the chaos and panic were self-inflicted more than virally inflicted. Mike Coston over…

Twenty-three years and millions served: CDC’s National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program

Next time someone asks you what exactly public health does, repeat this number: 4.3 million. That’s the number of women — mothers, sisters, wives, aunts, grandmothers, daughters and friends — who might have otherwise gone without timely breast and cervical cancer screenings if it weren’t for public health and its commitment to prevention. This year marks the 23rd anniversary of the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched in 1991 to ensure that low-income women would have the same opportunity to detect cancers…

New research estimates that one in eight U.S. children will experience maltreatment

Researcher Christopher Wildeman has spent his whole career describing and quantifying the more unpleasant parts of people’s lives and his latest study on the surprising prevalence of childhood maltreatment is no exception. Still, there is a bit of a silver lining, he told me. “This is the sort of issue that both the right and left shouldn’t have a hard time supporting,” said Wildeman, an assistant professor of sociology at Yale University. “It’s the sort of thing that once we become more aware of it, designing interventions that could diminish maltreatment rates is something anyone can get…

Study: Public input can offer valuable insights during pandemic flu planning

Despite our best preparedness efforts, a real-life flu pandemic would require some difficult and uncomfortable decisions. And perhaps the most uncomfortable will be deciding who among us gets priority access to our limited health care resources. How do we decide whose life is worth saving? There are so many different ways to view such a scenario; so many different values and ethical dilemmas to consider. In the chaos of a pandemic, life-saving allocation decisions would not only impact the patient in question — the repercussions would likely ripple throughout families and entire communities.…