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Wreckers

Some guy named Quentin Letts made a list of the 50 people who wrecked Britain. I'm a bit handicapped in reading it, since I don't know who Quentin Letts is, and I have never heard of 9/10ths of the people being damned by him, but I did recognize a few, like Tony Blair and this guy: Anti-religionist Dawkins, the best-known English dissenter since Darwin, is the merciless demander of provable fact. He is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and tours the world lecturing the elites of the West that they are stupid to believe in any god. He proselytises…

An Interview with Martin Rundkvist of Aardvarchaeology

Page 3.14 interviews are back! Somehow it's taken many moons for veteran SciBling Martin Rundkvist, of Aardvarchaeology, to answer our barrage of questions. The Swedish archaeologist (pictured at right with his daughter) made headlines recently when he discovered, while metal-detecting on the island of Djurö, a 92-centimeter, 16th-century sword. Much more below the fold... What's your name? Martin Rundkvist What do you do when you're not blogging? Four days a week, I'm a threadbare gentleman scholar doing research in the 1st Millennium AD archaeology of Sweden. One day a week, I'm the…

Communicating the wonder and joy of science

"Wake up, wake up!" My father shook me gently and indicated to follow him into the living room early in the morning July 1969. There in a remote town in central Africa, a group of people were gathered around a radio avidly listening. "Listen, remember this moment the rest of your life," Dad said, "Man is landing on the moon right now." Well, I certainly did remember that moment for the rest of my life. I confess I do not remember the actual radio broadcast, but I do remember my father's exhortation. He was a science teacher and Africa was our playground. I remember expeditions along remote…

Understanding the CRISPR Cas9 system

On Sept. 30th, I'm going to be co-presenting a Bio-Link webinar on Genome Engineering with CRISPR-Cas9 with Dr. Thomas Tubon from Madison College.  If you're interested, Register here.  Since my part will be to help our audience understand the basics of this system, I prepared a short tutorial with Molecule World .  Enjoy! A Quick CRISPR Tutorial Go to the Digital World Biology CRISPR Structure Collection. Download the second item in the list, 5F9R, by clicking the link in the Download structure column. Identify the three components of the CRISPR - Cas system:  The Cas9 protein, the guide…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Red Is For Hummingbirds, Yellow For Moths: Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that the future of red and yellow varieties of a San Diego wildflower may depend on the fates of two different animals. They report in the current issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology that monkeyflowers have two different animal pollinators. The red form, common along the coast, is strongly preferred by hummingbirds, while yellow monkeyflowers, found east of I-15, are favored by hawkmoths. Study Suggests Earlier Crop Plantings Could Curb Future Yields: In an ongoing bid to…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Animals Resistant To Drunken Behavior Offer Clues To Alcoholism's Roots: Animals with a remarkable ability to hold their liquor may point the way toward the genetic underpinnings of alcohol addiction, two separate research teams reported in the October 6, 2006 issue of the journal Cell. Earlier studies have shown that people with a greater tolerance for alcohol have a greater risk of becoming alcoholics, according to the researchers. What about natural species differences? Home, Home On The Range: How Much Space Does An Animal Really Need?: Instead of wandering around aimlessly, most animals…

Math for Biologists: which courses add up?

tags: math, math for biologists Keith Robison from Omics! Omics! and that fellow Evolgen, with a curious fixation on manatees, have been reminiscing about their college math requirements and speculating on which math courses biologists should take. They've raised some interesting questions that, I think, make a good meme. If you answer the questions, let me know, and I will add your link at the bottom of the page. Here are the questions: Are you a biologist, if so what kind? What math did you take in college? What math do you use?  What math do you wish you'd studied? How do you…

Finding scientific papers for free, part III: my new favorite method

tags: PubMed, PubMed Central, medical informatics, bioinformatics, finding scientific articles This is the third, and last part in a three part series on finding free scientific papers. You can read the first part here: Part I: A day in the life of an English physician and the second part, where I compare different methods, here. Today, I will show you how to use my new favorite method. How to find free scientific publications 1. Go to the NCBI. 2. Choose the link to PubMed. (It's in the top blue bar, under the DNA icon) 3. Click the Limits tab (circled below). 4. Click the box…

Basics: How do you sequence a genome, part II

Considering that several genomes that have been sequenced in the past decade, it seems amazing in retrospect, that the first complete bacterial genome sequence was only published 12 years ago (1). Now, the Genome database at the NCBI lists 450 complete microbial genomes (procaryotes and archea), 1476 genomes from eucaryotes, 2145 viruses, and genome sequences from 407 phage. Much of the methodology used for sequencing DNA is designed to confront one big technical hurdle. That is, we can only determine the sequence of small pieces of DNA at a time. This means that you must break a larger…

TB but not the TB they thought

It now turns out that the XDR-TB case which caused such an uproar last month (see our posts here) wasn't XDR-TB at all but MDR-TB, a treatable form of the disease: Andrew Speaker was diagnosed in May with extensively drug resistant TB, based on an analysis of a sample taken in March by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The XDR-TB, as it is called, is considered dangerously difficult to treat. But three later tests have all shown Speaker's TB to be a milder form of the disease, multidrug-resistant TB, a federal health official said on condition of anonymity before a news…

Birth of the Barclay Beast

Many years ago a strange organism appeared outside a branch of Barclays Bank north of London. The first member of the public to encounter it in the wild was an actor from a TV series. We know how old it is from documentary evidence, but if we didn't we could still carbon date it. Carbon dating uses a weakly radioactive isotope of carbon, carbon-14. If we know the proportion of C-14 in the organism when it was born, we could use the known rate of decay of C-14 to determine the organism's age. The organism in question apparently had a strong survival advantage and has since proliferated to an…

Pandemic planning tunnel vision

So much of what goes under the name of pandemic planning at the governmental level iks extremely narrowly construed. Should a pre-pandemic (not precisely matched) vaccine that might offer some cross protection be used? What should be the mix with antivirals (and which one)? Should antivirals be stockpiled, and if so where and for what purpose? Just treatment or should prophylaxis be part of the plan? And who should get the antivirals? When should schools be closed and what should trigger a closing? Air travel? Quarantine? Isolation? Etc., etc. Restricted as they are as pandemic planning goes…

Trying to solve the pandemic vaccine problem: too little, too late

One of the big issues over sharing of viral isolates from Indonesia was the contention, probably well justified, that the poor nations would be last in lie for any vaccine that might be available in the event of a pandemic. While a well matched vaccine has to await the emergence of a pandemic strain, there are good reasons to think vaccines made from pre-pandemic strains would provide some cross-protection, and such vaccines are already in production, although in small quantities. The choke point is the clearly inadequate global production capacity for influenza vaccine. Even if there were a…

The Indonesian vaccine solution (again)

So the vaccine sharing summit in Jakarta is over and Indonesia says they will begin sharing virus again. The proviso is that they can't be shared with pharmaceutical companies until a vaccine-sharing agreement is hammered out with WHO and that will take an estimated 3 months. I'll be surprised if it is done that quickly, but Hope springs Eternal. Meanwhile the scientific community will be able to see the sequences (at least that's how I read it) and WHO can prepare seed strains but not distribute them. The agreement should also allow determination if any markers of antiviral resistance have…

More on the Indonesian vaccine affair

I sympathize with the Indonesians up to a point. Their outrage over what they perceive as the plundering by vaccine makers of their natural resources (in this case a lethal virus isolated from Indonesian bird flu cases) is understandable -- barely. Their subsequent actions to stop sharing samples of the virus with WHO and their attempt to justify it by blaming WHO is not understandable. Nor is it intelligent. But then very little in the way of effective and intelligent bird flu policies has come out of Indonesia anyway. This is part of the package, alas. The complaint of the Indonesian…

Violet Fire - the Tesla Opera

As I have noted before, there is an opera about Tesla, called Violet Fire in preperation for the grand opening in the Belgrade's National Theater on July 9th, on the eve of 150th birthday of Nikola Tesla. I have since received a little bit more information about it. Here I translated some snippets from Belgrade press: Violet Fire ("Ljubicasta Vatra") is a multi-media opera composed by John Gibson. It was co-produced by by Belgrade's summer festival BELEF and American non-profit organization Violet Fire. Director is Terry O'Reilly. The conductor, Ana Zorana Brajovic told reporters that…

The shape of man hole covers (reprise)

The Revere troop is still on the road (we arrive at our beach destination later today), and while WiFi in motels is convenient, it's not so easy to blog without the usual creature comforts (a library, good coffee, my own workspace and lots of unread/half read papers with great sounding titles that might become blog posts). However I do have Mrs. R. for company and our old and hobbling dog is along to be a literal creature comfort for both of us. So I'm going to reprise an oldie but goodie from the archives (January 2007), this one the follow-up to an earlier post asking "why are man hole…

New Ebola virus

At least one little corner of the biodiversity problem seems to be doing well: biodiversity among deadly diseases. An outbreak of Ebola disease in Uganda in 2007 has now been shown to be caused by a previously unknown variant, now called Bundibugyo ebolavirus. Ebola virus produces a particularly nasty kind of hemorrhagic fever. Richard Preston gave some gory descriptions in his 1999 bestseller, The Hot Zone. Case fatality ratios for Ebola are well over 50%, exceeding 90% [typo corrected] in some outbreaks. Ebola viruses are part of a viral family called filoviruses, that also includes Marburg…

Spilt milk in China

The Chinese food contamination scandal continues to widen. The European Union (EU) is now banning imports of all Chinese baby foods that contain milk. The problem is the presence of melamine, a cheap chemical used to make plastics that looks like protein in the screening assays used to see if food products meet standards for protein content. It was added by unscrupulous Chinese pet food manufacturers a year ago, resulting in the illness and deaths of thousands of cats and dogs in the US and Canada. The thinking is that melamine combines with cyanuric acid in urine to produce lattice crystals…

A vignette of research life in the Department of Veterans Affairs (a.k.a. the VA)

As blogger Roy Poses at Health Care Renewal wrote, some things you can't make up. Trying to compete with the Department of Veterans Affairs in the "can you imagine what they did" sweepstakes i fruitless, as I have cause to know. They are perhaps the most dysfunctional federal agency I have ever encountered, although admittedly my experiences working for them predated the Department of Homeland Security, which from all evidence is the all time champion in incompetence and dysfunctionality. Back to the VA: U.S. House members on Tuesday admonished Veterans Affairs officials from Pittsburgh for…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Quantification of Circadian Rhythms in Single Cells: Earth's 24-h-rotation around its axis is mirrored in the circadian clock that resides within each of our cells, controlling expression of ~10% of all genes. The circadian clock is constructed as a negative feedback loop, in which clock proteins inhibit their own synthesis. During the last decade, a picture has emerged in which each cell is a self-sustained circadian oscillator that runs even without synchronizing cues. Here, we investigated state-of-the-art single-cell bioluminescence recordings of clock gene expression. It turns out that…

Do You Believe In Angels?

The gullibility of the religious is amazing…but they always seem to be rewarded with the fawning affirmations of other believers, and more publishing opportunities. Yet again, the Huffington Post flaunts its absurdl woo side with a piece of tripe from Therese Borchard claiming that angels exist. As you sit there reading this--whether you believe it or not--there is an angel by your side: it is your guardian angel, and it never leaves you. Each one of us have been given a gift, a shield made from the energy of light. It is a part of the guardian angel's task to put this shield around us. To…

Indonesia and collateral damage of their flu policy

We've covered the Indonesian refusal to cooperate with international influenza surveillance system to a fare thee well (see posts posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and links therein), so this is just an update with some additional observations how Indonesia's deplorable behavior isn't that different than the US's deplorable behavior in the Middle East. First, Indonesia. When last we checked in Indonesia had sent off half a dozen flu specimens from the period after the end of January 2007 when it started its boycott. The hope was that the…

There's more bird flu than we thought. That's good news.

You'd think finding that there were some bird flu infections that went undetected would be bad news but it is actually good news. Not tremendous good news but better than no news, and that's unusual in the bird flu world. For some time the absence of mild or inapparent infections has been worrying. It means that the current case fatality ratio of over 60% is the real CFR, not one based on just the most serious cases coming to the attention of the surveillance system. Now scientists gathered in Bangkok at one of the many gatherings of those studying the disease have heard some new data…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Bible Class

The religious are all a-twitter these days about "the New Atheism," usually referring to polemics by the likes of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens et al. I doubt most atheists have read these books (why should they?) and while I'd like to think they have converted many of the faithful, I rather doubt that, too. They are not a cause but a sign of the times. The two most powerful forces stimulating the new and higher public status of non-belief are 9-11 and Creationism, both for the same reasons: they are graphic illustrations of the evils of religious fanaticism and delusion. Once a person starts to…

Osama visits Bush in Oz, says it's all a misunderstanding

Dear Leader is away in Australia, visiting his lapdog, Oz Prime Minister John Howard and attending the Asia-Pacific economic (APEC) summit. At the summit he chatted easily with his soulmates: U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday told reporters that talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao were "constructive" and centered on Iran, China-made product recalls, global climate change and civilian religious freedoms. "He's an easy man to talk to. I'm very comfortable in my discussions with President Hu," Bush said. (CNN) Whatever. But the main story doesn't seem to have made it into the US media…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: the High Priest's vestments

I've been thinking more about the significance of the Dawkins-Harris-Dennett-Hitchens-PZ genre of atheism writing. Matt Nisbet and other folks seem to feel very threatened by it, worrying about an anti-secular backlash. Just saying it that way makes me want to laugh. Oh, those uppity atheists! But that's just one of the anti-Dawkins tropes. Another is that the "New Atheist" (itself an invidious term) is intellectually unsophisticated and ignorant about religion and theology. I'll freely admit I am not an expert on theology. Why would I want to waste my time? I'm not an expert in astrology,…

Facebook Eating Crow

This is what you see when you log in to Facebook today: An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg: We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now. When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Social Tolerance Allows Bonobos To Outperform Chimpanzees On A Cooperative Task: In experiments designed to deepen our understanding of how cooperative behavior evolves, researchers have found that bonobos, a particularly sociable relative of the chimpanzee, are more successful than chimpanzees at cooperating to retrieve food, even though chimpanzees exhibit strong cooperative hunting behavior in the wild. Researchers Discover Breakthrough In Malaria Treatment: An article published in 'The Lancet' by researchers from the Menzies School of Health Research (MSHR) in Darwin has revealed a…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Boosting Brain Power -- With Chocolate: Eating chocolate could help to sharpen up the mind and give a short-term boost to cognitive skills, a University of Nottingham expert has found. A study led by Professor Ian Macdonald found that consumption of a cocoa drink rich in flavanols -- a key ingredient of dark chocolate -- boosts blood flow to key areas of the brain for two to three hours. Environment And Exercise May Affect Research Results, Study Shows: A recently completed study at The University of Arizona may have implications for the thousands of scientists worldwide who use "knockout"…

Small Arctic Mammals Entrain to Something during the Long Summer Day

There are several journals dedicated to biological rhythms or sleep. Of those I regularly check only two or three of the best, so I often miss interesting papers that occur in lower-tier journals. Here is one from December 2006 that caught my eye the other day: Mammalian activity - rest rhythms in Arctic continuous daylight: Activity - rest (circadian) rhythms were studied in two species of Arctic mammals living in Arctic continuous daylight with all human-induced regular environmental cues (zeitgebers) removed. The two Arctic species (porcupine and ground squirrel) lived outdoors in large…

Sleep Deprivation - Societal Causes and Effects

Here is the second guest-post by Heinrich (from March 20, 2005): -------------------------------------------------------- Here is the #2 guest contribution by Heinrich (not Heindrocket) of She Flies With Her Own Wings (http://coeruleus.blogspot.com/): Most of this post was inspired by a grand rounds / journal club given by David Dinges about two weeks ago based on years of his own research and large surveys. One line of argument in the presentation that I thought was particularly interesting - one that we as sleep researchers might want to remember when we write grants and perform our…

At US's favorite water park, 20 year old fatally crushed in wave machine, his fifth week on the job

[Update below (April 10, 2015)] "They sure kept that quiet." My neighbors had that reaction when I told them about the 20-year old worker who was killed on-the-job at one of the Schlitterbahn water parks. This particular amusement-park company has four large water resorts in Texas and Kansas. My neighbors frequent the one in New Braunfels, TX, along with 900,000 other annual visitors, during central Texas' hot spring and summer months. I knew they'd want to know this story. In March 2013, Nicolas "Nico" Benavides, 20, had been hired as a lifeguard, and had only been working a few weeks at the…

Harsh working conditions in US poultry and meatpacking plants violate human rights, OAS Commission to review the claim

Civil rights groups filed a petition today with the Organization of American States' (OAS) Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asserting that the U.S. government has failed to protect poultry and meatpacking workers from permanently disabling and life altering work-related injuries and other abuses. “The United States has not acted with due diligence nor has it taken proper steps to prevent abuses of meatpacking and poultry processing workers’ human rights, and is inasmuch violating the rights of workers in the poultry industry through its negligence." The petition was filed by the…

Worker safety provisions in Senate immigration reform bill

A comprehensive, bi-partisan immigration reform bill was filed today by the "gang of eight" U.S. Senators.   We've written previously about the abuses endured by many workers under the existing guest worker programs (here, here, here, here) and I am particularly curious to see the remedies proposed in the bill.  It will take me a few weeks to digest the 844-page bill, but I took a quick peek for provisions related to labor' rights and workplace safety.   Here is some of what I read: (1) The bill would create a new visa program (a W-visa) for low-skilled immigrant workers.  (See Subtitle G at…

But the Economy is Getting Better and Better...

Shockingly (or not so much, if you read here regularly), despite the supposed improvements in the economy, more and more American families are struggling to put meals on the table.  The USDA reports a record 46.7 million American households are on food stamps.  17.9 % of American households (up 700,000 from 2010) didn't have enough food at least some of the time.  In addition, the number of households with "very low food security"  - meaning people regularly go hungry rose by almost half a million households - as high as at the height of the economic crisis.  Notably, this is data that covers…

Snow Envy

So for those of you getting ready for Snowpocalypse, as the mid-Atlantic faces, gasp - a whole foot of snow, I have to tell you something. I'm jealous. I mean really, really jealous. I want your snow. A general pattern of winter storms in my area (upstate NY) is that they come down from Canada and across the Great Lakes. We are at the very eastern edge of the snow belt in New York, and we don't usually get the giant lake-effect snows that Buffalo and other areas get, but we can generally expect to spend the winter with a solid several feet on the ground. But not this year. Somehow, all…

Suing over vapor

I'm always tickled and disturbed when I hear news about JZ Knight. Knight, as some of you may already know, is a New Age charlatan who claims to "channel" a 35,000 year old Atlantean warrior, and dispenses ludicrous advice in a growly voice and gets paid big bucks by the gullible. However, now one of her former students dared to turn around and use moldy wisdom she learned from a hokey old invisible friend, and fleece some rubes of her own. So what does Knight do? Sue, of course. The only thing that could make the trial sillier is if the court put Ramtha on the witness stand. Ooops, it's…

effects of extremes of economic outliers

Why you might sometimes care about the sex lives of strangers. A snarky comment over on an evanescent social media site lead me to shoot back from the hip, but on reflection, unusually enough, I decided I liked the retort enough to preserve it in more permanent intertoobz form. The discussion was on oligarchy and extremes of wealth, and the comment was essentially that this was a private matter, and that the income, or wealth, of an individual was not a matter of public interest - that it was a prurient obsession of no more relevance than the identity of their sexual partners or preferences…

Remembering 11 Oil Rig Victims

On today's Morning Edition, Russell Lewis reported on the memorial service held in Jackson, Mississippi for the 11 workers who died when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20th. Host David Greene noted that they've been called the "Forgotten 11," because so much attention has been focused on the oil leak rather than the lost workers. The following workers were killed in the explosion: Jason Anderson, 35, Bay City, TX Aaron Dale Burkeen, 37, Philadelphia, MS Donald Clark, 49, Newellton, LA Stephen Curtis, 39, Georgetown, LA Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, Jonesville, LA Karl Kleppinger…

Occupational Health News Roundup

The New York Times' Clifford J. Levy reports on violence against at journalists investigating corruption in the Moscow suburbs: Mikhail Beketov had been warned, but would not stop writing. About dubious land deals. Crooked loans. Under-the-table hush money. All evidence, he argued in his newspaper, of rampant corruption in this Moscow suburb. "Last spring, I called for the resignation of the city's leadership," Mr. Beketov said in one of his final editorials. "A few days later, my automobile was blown up. What is next for me?" Not long after, he was savagely beaten outside his home and left…

Sequestered Science: Oil Cleanup Workers' Health

Elizabeth Weise's USA Today article about potential health effects of the Gulf oil disaster and its cleanup notes that we don't have a whole lot of research to draw on about this kind of exposure. Residents and cleanup workers alike will be exposed both to the oil itself and to cleanup agents, particularly the chemical dispersants. Weise references a Korean study conducted following the 2007 sinking of an oil tanker of the Korean coast, which found that residents had an increased risk of headaches, nauseau, and neurological and respiratory symptoms. With regards to the dispersants, she…

What would Carolyn Merritt say?

The Associated Press is reporting that urgent recommendations proposed by the Chemical Safety Board's (CSB) hands-on investigators of the ConAgra Slim Jim factory explosion, which killed three workers in June 2009, were rejected by the CSB's Board.  The AP story reads: "Documents obtained by The Associated Press show that staff members of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board wanted the agency to immediately distribute a safety bulletin and recommendations, saying the June blast exposed weaknesses in nationwide standards.  The staff proposed guidelines that would require more controls on how…

Calculating Costs of Labor Law Violations

The New York Times editorial page draws attention to a new report that provides details about just how badly our system of workplace protections is failing workers in low-wage industries. Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in Americaâs Cities provides the results of extensive research by the Center for Urban Economic Development, the National Employment Law Project and the U.C.L.A. Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Researchers surveyed 4,387 front-line workers (i.e., excluding managers and professional and technical workers) in low-wage…

Legal Victory for ACGIH

In the final leg of a long and costly lawsuit against the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH), U.S. district judge Hugh Lawson ruled in favor of ACGIH, dismissing claims by the National Mining Association and others* that the non-profit, scientific organization violated Georgia's Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act.  (A complete case study on this matter appears at DefendingScience.org.)  The court also rejected the industry-plaintiff's attempt to resurrect related claims against the Department of Labor, reprimanding them with:  "The Court disagrees with…

Environmental Health's Role in Sustainability

by Kas Approximately 100 people from Washington, DC-area universities, local government, and private industry shared an organic experience at the 2009 Policy Greenhouse held this morning at The George Washington University.  The Greenhouse provided a forum for people to present, in five minutes or less, their ideas for innovative, sustainable solutions for local problems.  The solutions may be addressed now, using some portion of the millions of stimulus dollars received by DC, or in the near future through changes to existing or development of new DC-specific environmental policies.  The…

Is a meeting "public" if they don't tell us: Part II

A few days ago, I expressed my annoyance with OSHA about its SBREFA meeting on the  draft proposed rule on diacetyl, the lung-damaging, butter-tasting food additive.   OSHA had announced earlier in the year that this pre-proposal dialogue with small employer would be "open to the public."  I anxiously awaited public notification about the open meeting, only to find out on Wednesday afternoon it had already taken place.  I asked myself: Did OSHA make an announcement about the date, time and place of the meeting and I just failed to see it?  I contacted OSHA's Office of…

A New Idea in Malaria Prevention

The latest issue of the Economist highlights a new idea in malaria prevention. Traditional prevention efforts emphasize spraying, but mosquitoes evolve resistance to insecticides. Now, Penn State Universityâs Andrew Read offers this insight, which can help avoid the resistance problem: To stop malaria, we only need to kill the old mosquitoes. Once an adult female Anopheles mosquito feeds on a human already infected with malaria, it still takes 10-14 days for the parasite to mature and migrate to the mosquitoâs salivary glands, at which point she can infect another human. Since most female…

Call for OSHA to Update its Lead Standard

University of California Berkeley's Health Research for Action is calling on OSHA to revise its occupational health standard on lead, which is now 30 years old.  In a report entitled "Indecent Exposure: Lead Puts Workers and Families at Risk," the authors describe the adverse health effects of lead in workers with blood-lead levels of 5-10 ug/dL---a fraction of OSHA's medical removal trigger of 60 ug/dL.  They note: "...extensive research has shown that lead causes significant health problems in adults at much lower levels.  Cumulative exposure to low to moderate levels of lead has been…

Spilt milk in China

by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure The Chinese food contamination scandal continues to widen. The European Union (EU) is now banning imports of all Chinese baby foods that contain milk. The problem is the presence of melamine, a cheap chemical used to make plastics that looks like protein in the screening assays used to see if food products meet standards for protein content. It was added by unscrupulous Chinese pet food manufacturers a year ago, resulting in the illness and deaths of thousands of cats and dogs in the US and Canada. The thinking is that melamine combines with cyanuric…