bioterrorism
pronald | February 5, 2013Today @ Colorado State University - CSU rice researcher tapped for national policy board to help prevent bioterrorism.
sb admin | July 8, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: Instead of responding to last week's commentaries on this book club blog about my book, Inside the Outbreaks, I want to throw out a controversial idea that runs counter to what many public health commentators apparently believe. So I expect some disagreement here. (I will post responses to the commentaries as "comments" on each commentary. So go back and take a look at what I wrote there, please.)
Fears of bioterrorism are overblown. We should be spending much more money, time, effort, and print (including e-print) on naturally occurring outbreaks, epidemics,…
mpendergrast | July 8, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: Instead of responding to last week's commentaries on this book club blog about my book, Inside the Outbreaks, I want to throw out a controversial idea that runs counter to what many public health commentators apparently believe. So I expect some disagreement here. (I will post responses to the commentaries as "comments" on each commentary. So go back and take a look at what I wrote there, please.)
Fears of bioterrorism are overblown. We should be spending much more money, time, effort, and print (including e-print) on naturally occurring outbreaks, epidemics,…
sb admin | July 7, 2010Karen Starko writes: Several basic questions related to Reye's syndrome (RS) have come to me from readers of Mark's book, Inside the Outbreaks. These show the importance of continued education on health issues. (For example, some physicians thought that fever was essential to getting RS). Again, thanks to Mark Pendergrast for a wonderful addition to our public health knowledge.
Is an influenza or chickenpox infection necessary to acquire RS?
The answer is no. RS generally has two phases: the antecedent illness and usually, within a few days of this, the syndrome of vomiting and…
sb admin | July 6, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: I wrote last week about how federal agencies can solve the problems that create conditions for disease outbreaks - or fail to solve them, as is too often the case. This week, I wanted to focus on the role Congress plays in public health agencies' effectiveness, because that's another angle that crops up repeatedly in Inside the Outbreaks.
Congress's creation of federal agencies is clearly a huge achievement, and they've also periodically given new powers to already existing agencies. For instance, Mark Pendergrast tells the story of the Dalkon Shield, an IUD that turned…
sb admin | July 2, 2010Steve Schoenbaum writes: In his blog this week, Mark Pendergrast challenges someone/anyone to take on explaining the differences between case-control studies vs. cohort studies. As an EIS officer, back in late May/early June 1968, I did a case-control study as part of the investigation of a common source outbreak of hepatitis in Ogemaw County, Michigan, so I will try to pick up the challenge. I believe it was only the second time case-control methods were used in a CDC epidemic investigation. In using this method I learned about the power of comparison, not just that numerators need…
sb admin | June 30, 2010Karen Starko writes: When the "financial crisis" started and the news media started throwing around numbers in the trillions and projected fixes in the billions, I realized I just didn't get it. So I got a little yellow post-it, labeled it "understanding trillions," and started a list of examples. And when I learned that the US GDP in 2006 was 13T and the derivative market, estimated in June 2007, was valued at 500T, I quickly got a sense of the potential drain of the derivative market (in which money is spent on items without real value...my definition, please correct me if I am wrong). I…
sb admin | June 29, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the solution to the Reye's Syndrome puzzle - which was solved by Karen Starko, who's also one of the Book Club bloggers! - but didn't get into the larger issue: there can be a big difference between solving the puzzle and solving the problem. In yesterday's post, Mark writes:
Although Karen's and subsequent CDC studies clearly demonstrated that giving children aspirin…
sb admin | June 28, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: Thanks to commentators Liz Borkowski, Karen Starko, Steve Schoenbaum, and Mark Rosenberg for their thoughtful posts, though it appears that Mark Rosenberg's post got cut off after his first-paragraph query asking why anyone would go into the field of public health. I will wait to respond to his post once I see him answer his own question! In the meantime, there is much to talk about. I (Mark Pendergrast) will respond to parts of what Liz, Karen, and Steve wrote in order, along with other blogger comments.
Let me respond first to a blog comment from John Willis, who…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
revere | March 31, 2010The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano is asking academics to work with her agency to develop "innovative initiatives" to protect the nation from terrorist threats. This is what I would call a faith-based initiative, in this case, faith in the technological fix. DHS could certainly use some help. It's one of the most clueless and incompetent agency in the federal government. But I don't think the answer to the problem is going to be found in nanotechnology, computer science or micrcomputer circuitry:
The DHS noted that the cooperation between its departments and…
revere | February 22, 2010This is our 10th post on the anthrax attacks. Will it be our last? Yes, if the FBI has anything to say about it. They are closing the case. A case they messed up pretty thoroughly from the outset but now want us to believe they've solved, even though the culprit they fingered, Dr. Bruce Ivins, a bioweapons researcher at Fort Detrick, allegedly committed suicide and wasn't available to interrogate. I say "allegedly" because there are other explanations for his demise, most plausibly in our view, an accident involving interaction of alcohol and acetaminophen which caused liver failure. But the…
revere | July 29, 2009When the Bush Administration awarded a construction grant to put a Level 4 laboratory in Galveston, Texas to work on the most dangerous biological agents, a lot of people, including we here at Effect Measure, thought it was pretty stupid siting. Isn't Galveston open to Gulf hurricanes? Wasn't it the site of one of the most devastating storm floods in US history? Then came Hurricane Ike. It didn't seem that a hazardous agents lab could be more stupidly sited than Galveston (see here and here). That was an error in judgement on our part.
The thing about a lot of agents used in Level 4 labs is…
revere | April 8, 2009A Reuters piece under the headline, "Biotechnology Boom Raises Security Fears: Mild Diseases Could Be Turned Into Deadly Ones, Experts Caution" we see the biotech Frankenstein/terrorist bogeyman raised once again by "experts" in the area at a scientific conference in Casablanca. The weekend conference was run by a tiny group (budget of less than $250K) with a big name, the International Council for the Life Sciences (ICLS). Their sole mission is biological biosecurity, so it is understandable that their conclusion is that this is a big problem. But is it?
On the surface the proposition is…
revere | April 6, 2009When an Ebola virus related lab accident in German occurred, special pathogens researchers girded themselves for bad news. Working with agents for which there is currently no treatment of vaccine requires high containment laboratories, often touted as being virtually fail safe. While engineering and procedural controls can be instituted to minimize accidents, the wild card is always the human element, so accidents in these laboratories happen. There has already been an Ebola related death in such circumstances, and when the German woman pricked her finger with a needle containing Ebola virus…
revere | April 5, 2009My public health colleague DemFromCT continues his public health interview series on the front page of DailyKos today, talking to Dr. Georges Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Dem clearly likes Dr. Benjamin, which is not a surprise. He is a very likable person. I have been a member of APHA (on and off; I keep forgetting to renew) for over 40 years, have served on one of its top policy boards and been a member of its Governing Council. But in recent years I have had little to do with APHA, and Dem's interview today illustrates one of the reasons.…
revere | February 27, 2009When the FBI said that they had conclusive scientific evidence that biodefense scientists Bruce Ivins of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) was the 2001 anthrax attacker, many people asked to see the evidence. Don't worry, we were told. It will be published for all to see in the peer reviewed scientific literature and then everyone will be convinced that the organisms used in the attacks came from a flask in the laboratory of Dr. Ivins. We're still waiting for the scientific papers, but some of the evidence is now being presented at scientific meetings.…
revere | February 14, 2009Among the many things going on (or not going on) the last couple of weeks is a total "stand down" of the country's main biodefense research laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Here's the inter memo, dated February 4:
I will institute a stand down of all biological select agents and toxin (BSAT) activities beginning on Friday, the 6th. This is necessary to conduct a complete inventory to identify all BSAT in USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases]. The standard we have employed for 100% accountability has been the ability to find every sample listed in the…
revere | November 26, 2008My Scibling Mark H. over at the Denialism blog has reproduced an internal NIH memo that is something to behold:
If you aren't used to the conventions of scientific collegiality you might not realize at first the unbelievable stupidity of this. A visiting international scientist (a Canadian or someone from Latin America, a European, often an Asian or African visitor) can't get a snack or go outside for a smoke unless someone goes with them. Or to the bathroom. If your visitor is a member of the opposite sex you'll have to find someone to go into the restrooms with them.
And the computer part…
revere | November 10, 2008One resource the incoming Obama administration is certainly to find no shortage of is advice. We don't know whom they will listen to, although we know much of it -- maybe most of it -- is likely to be of the self-serving variety. How to separate the wheat from the chaff will be a delicate task. Powerful people who give lousy advice still get bent out of shape when it isn't followed. So we'll have to see. Meanwhile we will be scanning whatever advice is made public. An example is a report from the Defense Science Board, issued on Election Day, no less. It purports to give the next…