infectious disease
tsmith | September 20, 2006 The seventh chapter of Wells' book could be summed up in a single sentence: "biology doesn't need no steeekin' evolution!" Wells argues that, because medicine and agriculture were already doing just fine prior to Darwin's publication of Origin, clearly then, these fields (and others) haven't benefited from an application of evolutionary principles in the time from 1859 to present day, and that Dobzhansky's "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" is one big joke.
Wells focuses on medicine and agriculture because these are two fields that we all benefit from, and…
tsmith | September 19, 2006From the New York Times:
The last of the anthrax-laced letters was still making its way through the mail in late 2001 when top Bush administration officials reached an obvious conclusion: the nation desperately needed to expand its medical stockpile to prepare for another biological attack.
The result was Project BioShield, a $5.6 billion effort to exploit the country's top medical and scientific brains and fill an emergency medical cabinet with new drugs and vaccines for a host of threats. "We will rally the great promise of American science and innovation to confront the greatest danger of…
tsmith | September 18, 2006And who said spinach was boring?
If the ongoing E. coli outbreak due to spinach has done one thing, it's highlight the mystery that revolves around Salinas, California:
The sunny Salinas Valley holds a dark mystery: Why, in the past decade, have nine Escherichia coli outbreaks been linked to produce grown here?
It's still unknown why this fertile land has been hit by what an FDA official calls "significant" crop contamination.
Throughout the picturesque terrain here, questions swirl.
Has cattle waste contaminated irrigation water? Does contaminated soil blow in the wind? Do birds feeding on…
tsmith | September 18, 2006It seems like every other story that comes out about H5N1 contradicts the previous one. I've blogged previously about some reasons to think that the diagnosed cases of H5N1 are only the tip of the iceberg (see here, here, and here, for instance). Though there I present some evidence to suggest that we may be missing asymptomatic or mild influenza cases, other stories have come to the opposite conclusion. For example, a recent news story from Cambodia reports that no mild or asymptomatic cases of H5N1 infection were found:
Researchers who tested 351 Cambodian villagers after they had…
tsmith | September 15, 2006I mentioned Mike also wrote on the E. coli outbreak. Additionally, Carl, who's working on an upcoming book on E. coli (woo hoo!) also has more, including a bit on the evolution of E. coli O157:H7 (while Mike talks about E. coli in general and the bad rap it sometimes gets). Check 'em out.
tsmith | September 15, 2006E. coli outbreak traced to tainted spinach
An outbreak of E. coli in eight states has left at least one person dead and 50 others sick, federal health officials said Thursday in warning consumers nationwide not to eat bagged fresh spinach.
The death occurred in Wisconsin, where 20 others were also sickened, said Dr. David Acheson of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The outbreak has sickened others -- eight of them seriously -- in Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah.
FDA officials do not know the source of the…
revere | September 15, 2006The spin, at least in the headlines, has been that a new study shows treatments for SARS didn't work. Some of the headlines are technically more accurate (e.g., SARS: No evidence that any of the treatments worked), but the impression from media reports remains that researchers found SARS treatments didn't work. In fact, however, that's not what the new study, published in PLoS Medicine, says.
By way of background, SARS is caused by a Corona virus (SARS-CoV). SARS is a frequently serious respiratory disease with prominent risk of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and features of an…
tsmith | September 14, 2006The new vaccine against the human papilloma virus is something I've discussed a time or ten here. Reaction to the vaccine by many religious groups has morphed with time, from outright resistance to a more common stance right now that they're accepting of the vaccine, but don't want it to be mandatory. Well...
Michigan legislation would require girls to get HPV vaccine
Michigan girls entering the sixth grade next year would have to be vaccinated against cervical cancer under legislation backed Tuesday by a bipartisan group of female lawmakers.
The legislation is the first of its kind in the…
tsmith | September 13, 2006 You may or may not be familiar with the name Ignaz Semmelweis. It's not one that's typically taught to school children, like Koch or Pasteur may be. He even tends to get glossed over in upper-level biology courses. But Semmelweis was an important figure in the history of microbiology (indeed, I picked his work as the greatest experiment in my field). Here's what I wrote about him in that post:
Semmelweis was a physician in Vienna in the 1840s, with an interested in "childbed fever," a leading cause of mortality in women who'd given birth. During this time, he noticed that the mortality…
tsmith | September 7, 2006Drug-Resistant TB in South Africa Draws Attention From U.N.
The World Health Organization will hold an urgent meeting this week to seek ways to deal with deadly strains of tuberculosis that are virtually untreatable with standard drugs.
The meeting, in Johannesburg on Thursday and Friday, comes in response to recent reports from a number of the world's regions about a small but growing number of cases of the deadly strains, known as extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB.
"XDR-TB poses a grave public health threat, especially in populations with high rates of H.I.V." and few health…
tsmith | September 4, 2006Regular readers are very familiar with my refrain that many science deniers use the same tactics: bad arguments, quote-mining, appeals to authority, castigation of originators of respective theories, etc. etc. Another common thread is the complete bastardization of statistical analysis. Mark Chu-Carroll elaborates on Peter Duesberg's misuse of statistics here, while mathematician John Allen Paulos destroys creationist/ID analysis here. I'll highlight some of the best parts below:
For those of you who are familiar with creationist/ID arguments, you know that they take an event (say, the…
tsmith | August 30, 2006 Yesterday's New York Times had an excellent story on the discovery of the human papilloma virus as the cause of cervical cancer, and ultimately, the development of a vaccine against it. It's also a good lesson in how, while solid evidence triumphs over anecdotes, even folk stories can be useful in ultimately pointing to a cause if they're rigorously investigated.
If you're curious about what all this has to do with the messed-up looking rabbit in the picture, click on through...
I've written previously about the new cervical cancer vaccine, and its potential to lessen dramatically the…
tsmith | August 25, 2006Seed's Jacob Klein has a video up from his time at the AIDS conference last week: link. It includes short interviews with Kay and Rick Warren, evangelical Christians and founders of Saddleback Church, the grandaddy of all mega-churches. (Warren is also the author of The Purpose-Driven Life, which I've admittedly not read). It's interesting to hear their views, but as noted in this SF Gate article, there's still a lot of skepticism about their motivations and methods. (For example, while they discuss treatment and dealing the HIV, they don't pass out condoms, and their ABC's emphasize "…
tsmith | August 25, 2006Most of the stories I blog about here regarding sex (and sexually-transmitted infections) have bad news to offer. People are still poorly educated about STDs, or worse, actively misinform to try to scare people away from sex. Admittedly, good news about sexual issues are few and far between, but there actually have been a few positive stories in the news recently:
In the first article, the good news is that rates of sexual activity in teenagers have decreased a bit since 1991:
Some 46.8 percent of students said they engaged in sexual intercourse in a 2005 survey, down from 54.1 percent in…
tsmith | August 24, 2006Carl Zimmer has a few excellent micro-focused posts that you shouldn't miss. Yesterday the topic was new research demonstrating kin selection in amoebae, and earlier in the week, he wrote about Wolbachia, a fascinating bacteria that infects a large number of insects. (Those of you who've read Margulis' "Acquiring Genomes" may remember that infection with this bacterium can decrease fertility between individual insects who are differential in the presence of Wolbachia, potentially leading to reproductive isolation. Josh has more on this).
tsmith | August 23, 2006So, you may or may not be aware of the latest "challenge" to evolutionary theory--DI Fellow Jonathan Wells' new book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design." Following in the footsteps of Tom Bethell's "Politically Incorrect Guide to Science" (whose terrible chapter on AIDS I reviewed here), the book is just all shades of terrible. (As has been pointed out by many others who've read books in the "Politically Incorrect" series, they should just drop the pretense of "Politically"--simply "Incorrect" sums them up much better). I'll have a more comprehensive…
tsmith | August 22, 2006 The International AIDS conference is barely over, but already it's getting results when it comes to working against stigma and combatting denial--and is receiving help from one U.S. politician. Stories after the fold...
First, from Buisness Day comes harsh words for South Africa's leaders:
Former International AIDS Society president Mark Wainberg has launched a blistering attack on the South African government for failing to contain the country's HIV epi demic, widely acknowledged to be one of the world's worst.
Describing the government as "obtuse, dilatory and negligent" on the treatment…
revere | August 22, 2006With all the talk about non avian reservoirs for H5N1, a little talk about flies might be in order, not because we think they are vectors for H5N1 (so far no evidence of that), but just because we like to talk about them. The subject came up recently in a New Zealand Medical Journal article (authors B. Harris and W Nelson), about which we've only seen news reports (we are away from our home base library, on vacation, which is one of the reasons we are slow on comments and light on posting; using a slow dial-up is pure torture).
Anyway. Flies.
According to the New Zealand docs, flies and too…
tsmith | August 21, 2006I've blogged several times on here about the connection between microbes and obesity (aka "infectobesity;" previous posts here, here, and here.). It's an interesting area of study, with two general directions: investigating which of our gut flora (alone or in combination with others) affect our metabolism; and how other types of infections (such as adenovirus serotype 36) can play a role in this process as well.
A recent story in the New York Times Magazine by Robin Marantz Henig provides a nice introduction to this whole area, weaving in the threads I mentioned above (as far as the…
tsmith | August 19, 2006Razib over at Gene Expression has an excellent post* about cultural issues affecting HIV and circumcision, elaborating on Lindsay's mention here of the limitations of trying to increase circumcision as a way to reduce viral spread:
There was a strong undercurrent of resistance to the approach throughout the session. It finally erupted during the question period. One man asked the panelists whether they considered circumcision a form of mutilation, and what kind of counseling or support services they would put in place to offset the traumatic effects of the surgery? When Auvert pointed out…