Effect Measure
ddobbs | October 5, 2009Lots of flu news out there. Here's my short list for the day:
Helen Branswell reports that WHO is unpersuaded by the unpublished paper showing seasonal flu vaccine may raise chance of getting swine flu. (Anomalies are usually anomalies.) Canada has been thrown into quite a bit of confusion by this report, with some provinces holding off on seasonal flu vaccines.
Meanwhile, an OB notes an extraordinary death toll of H5N1 among pregnant women.
Greg Laden has an extremely short post suggesting how difficult these two bits of news are when you (or your wife) are actually pregnant. The gist: The…
ddobbs | October 2, 2009Been a while, so these cover a span of reading.
I'm in the midst of my friend Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, and can report that Mr. M is quite a poisonous but complicated handful -- a dark and deadly echo of his hero and model, Alexander -- and this reconstruction a splendid read.
A few weeks ago I finished Thomas Ricks' The Gamble, an excellent account of the surge in Iraq. Ricks -- who earlier wrote Fiasco, a devastating indictment of the run-up to the war, makes three things quite clear:
The surge was not about more soldiers…
ddobbs | September 17, 2009
My latest piece for Slate examines the unsettling consequences of the United States' choice of swine flu vaccines.
The good news about these vaccines is that, to judge by the first vaccine trial results, published last week, they appear to work fast, safely â and at about a half to a quarter of the doses that the CDC expected. This means we effectively have about two to four times as many vaccines as we had figured we would. Since we ordered 195 million doses, we could vaccinate damn near the whole country.
If the fast-tracking efforts continue to work and the flu peaks closer to Christmas…
ddobbs | May 22, 2009
Having lived with fire ants, stepped in fire ants, laid down with fire ants, and been bit just about everywhere by fire ants, the news that parasitic flies turn fire ants them into zombies by eating their brains pleases me immensely.
Speaking of pleasure: Vaughn whacks the dopamine = pleasure meme.
Sharon Begley says Obama may get a lot done, but he can't erase stereotype threat (so far).
We may be dozing, but Europe is ordering its swine flu vaccine. D'oh! Update: We're getting a start too.
"Good night, sleep tight, I love you." Why consistent bedtime routines work.
Why the best…
ddobbs | May 7, 2009
I should just have a permanent pointer from here to Effect Measure. But as I've not figured out how to do that, here's some more sensible thinking from Revere:
No one on the public health side has over reacted. When an outbreak or pandemic is unfolding, you get only one chance. The window is a narrow one. CDC (and WHO) have acquitted themselves well, so far. CDC's daily briefings have been straightforward and informative. The public, understandably, has bounced back and forth from fear to relief and back again. I don't think either pole is avoidable. If the scientists are baffled and…
ddobbs | May 6, 2009I've noted several times here how more measured heads keep emphasizing that a) we're working on partial information in responding to the current swine flu outbreak and b) new developments may complicate things at any point along the line.
Here's a great example of what these folks (like Effect Measure, Crof, and Avian Flu Diary) are talking about.
From Reuters :
Second strain of flu may complicate picture-study
06 May 2009 15:02:09 GMT
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) - A second strain of influenza, one of the seasonal strains, may have mutated and may…
ddobbs | May 1, 2009Theme of the day (again, sort of): managing expectation, or Do I panic or just ignore this thing and scoff at those who express concern?
Neither, of course.
I'm personally provisionally encouraged at the aggregated news from yesterday -- meaning I was glad to see that though the virus is spreading, its pace doesn't seem to be wildly accelerating and, more important, there are some signs that it's not (at this point) horrifically virulent; some experts are saying it might not be much worse than a regular seasonal flu, and the warming weather is on our side.
Same time, it makes sense to take…
ddobbs | April 29, 2009This swine flu business is moving fast now, with confirmed or reported cases popping up everywhere and the first reported death outside Mexico -- a 23-month-old child in Texas -- reported this morning. As Effect Measure notes
Some of the fear [generated in the U.S. by this deat] will be lessened by the new knowledge that the baby contracted the disease in another country. The empathy remains, as it should. Mexican babies are still babies, loved by their parents and grandparents even while being hostages to fortune like everyone.
As this outbreak moves forward we will be barraged by numbers…
ddobbs | April 28, 2009The excellent blog H5N1 (now covering H1N1 as well, and all over it), points us to the New York Times for an op-ed by John M. Barry, author of the definitive history of the Spanish flu in the US: Where Will the Swine Flu Go Next? Excerpt:
As the swine flu threatens to become the next pandemic, the biggest questions are whether its transmission from human to human will be sustained and, if so, how virulent it might become.
But even if this virus were to peter out soon, there is a strong possibility it would only go underground, quietly continuing to infect some people while becoming…
ddobbs | February 7, 2009Effect Measure -- inspired by a thoughtful note from bird-flu ace reporter Helen Branswell -- ponders the implications of the increasing lack of specialization, and thus deep subject-specific expertise, among MSM reporters.
The conclusion we draw from this is that if you really want to know what's going on
in the flu world you shouldn't depend on newspapers as a source of information but go to the next (meta)level, where news, comment, the peer reviewed science literature and the gray literature of official reports, press releases, and rumor filters are done better (or at least different…