public health
tsmith | May 10, 2011Maryn McKenna was awesome enough to take some time out of her vacation to blog about our recent ST398 paper, finding "livestock-associated" S. aureus in a daycare worker. She raised one question I didn't really address previously, regarding our participation by kids and workers at the facility (eight kids out of 168, and 24 out of 60 staff members).
(Staph screening is very non-invasive, by the way; it effectively involves twirling a long-handled Q-tip inside the front of your nostrils. Kinda makes you wonder why families would not have wanted to participate. On the other hand, since Iowa is…
mikethemadbiologist | May 8, 2011We read about "the dumbest-ass things that any state could possibly do" according to one retired New Orleans judge to prevent prostitution:
In their neighborhoods, they are sometimes taunted with dirty looks and jeers. Their pictures hang on the walls of local community centers where their children and grandchildren play. And their names and addresses are listed in newspapers and mailed out on postcards to everyone in the neighborhood.
Landing a job or even finding a landlord willing to give them a place to stay is a challenge.
These women wear a scarlet letter -- rather, 11 letters --…
mikethemadbiologist | May 6, 2011There's a recent study that examines the effect of pollution on educational performance in Michigan. Basically, the authors found that test scores were significantly lower for the two 'most polluted' quintiles of schools (i.e., the worst forty percent), even after controlling for income, school absence, school location, and other factors.
But there's something else obvious that jumps out at you. In the appendix, tables 2 and 3 examine the effects of a bunch of different variables on math and English NAEP scores (the NAEP is widely considered to be the gold standard for testing student…
mikethemadbiologist | April 30, 2011Or at least, antivaxxer idiocy isn't correlated with political leanings. Last week, in response to a post by Chris Mooney I argued that liberals weren't more likely to refuse vaccination, despite the stereotype that vaccination denialism is more prevalent among the left (that's always struck me as a 'limousine liberal' type of canard). Kevin Drum, David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, and Josh Rosenau all chimed in. Chris Mooney, with an assist from Brendan Nyhan, discusses two more polls that indicate political affiliation has little to do with vaccination denialism. First, the response to anti-…
tsmith | April 29, 2011Maryn McKenna has an excellent post on 2008's measles outbreak in Arizona. 14 confirmed patients, 8,321 individuals tracked down, 15,120 work hours lost at 7 Arizona hospitals due to furloughs of staff who were not appropriately vaccinated, and almost $800,000 spent by 2 hospitals just to contain the disease--and it all could have been prevented.
tsmith | April 25, 2011The Times Square Jumbotron ad keeps trucking, and with it frustration from the medical and public health community. The American Academy of Pediatrics sent a letter to CBS Outdoors, asking them to pull the ad, to no avail. Rahul Parikh thinks it's time to do more:
We in medicine need more than letters and passive education for parents on a website. What we really need are some Mad Men of our own. If you want guidance, look at what the folks at the the American Legacy Foundation have done with their anti-smoking campaign, The Truth. Who can forget the TV commercial where a truck pulls up to…
lborkowski | April 21, 2011By Kim Krisberg
I've had this conversation more times than I can count.
You're a reporter? What do you write about?
Public health.
(Blank stare.) Oh. What's public health? Is that like universal health care or something?
How do you describe public health? It's a tricky question. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines public health as the "art and science dealing with the protection and improvement of community health by organized community effort and including preventive medicine and sanitary and social science." Others describe it as a profession dedicated to the prevention of disease and…
mikethemadbiologist | April 21, 2011When I read this otherwise excellent article by Chris Mooney about why scientific evidence often doesn't persuade people*, I had the exact same reaction Kevin Drum did:
But be prepared to be annoyed when Chris wrenches his spine out of shape bending over backward to find an example of liberals denying science as much as conservatives. It might be true that you can find vaccine deniers in the aisles of Whole Foods, but if there's any rigorous evidence that belief in the vaccine-autism link is especially pronounced or widespread among liberals, I haven't seen it. Surely there's a better, more…
mikethemadbiologist | April 15, 2011Since I'm going on vacation, I might not get to it right away, but the NY Times has a good article about two studies that appear to contradict each other about various effects to control hospital-associated MRSA infections.
I haven't given the two article an in-depth reading yet, but it seems to me that the article which showed no effect seemed to have much higher baseline rates of infection (I'm comparing the infection/1000 patient days in the ICU).
Anybody?
Also, it seems that without knowing the strains of MRSA involved, one could legitimately get different answers.
lborkowski | April 14, 2011At her Washington Post blog 2chambers, Felicia Sonmez reports that the House has passed legislation repealing the section of the Affordable Care Act that created the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which gives the Department of Health and Human Services $15 billion over the next 10 years to fund prevention and public health.
The Republican complaint? Sonmez reports, "Republicans have criticized the account as a "slush fund" that gives Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wide latitude in administering federal money without congressional oversight." This is an odd critique…
tsmith | April 10, 2011There has been a lot of commentary this week about the GOP-led proposal to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Commentators such as Ezra Klein note the irrationality of this stance, since Planned Parenthood itself estimates it prevents more than 620,000 unintended pregnancies each year, and 220,000 abortions. Why wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd support this increase in contraception, and subsequent prevention of abortions?
What's missing in this rationale is that many on the far right perceive most forms of contraception *as being equivalent to abortion.* So by their logic, Planned Parenthood isn't…
tsmith | April 4, 2011Next to Ebola, my favorite virus would probably be smallpox (Variola virus). I mean, now that it's eradicated in nature, what's not to love about the mysteries it's left us--where it came from, why it was so deadly (or, not so deadly, as in the emergence of the "mild" form, variola minor), and will a new poxvirus emerge to take its place? The topic is particularly germane since the debate still rages on about the fate of the world's smallpox stocks. Smallpox has killed untold millions and influenced the destiny of societies; and as Michael Willrich details in his new book, Pox: An American…
tsmith | March 29, 2011One of the reasons I've not been blogging as much over the past 2 years or so is that it's been just insane in the lab. As I was still living off start-up funds and pilot grants, I didn't have anyone full-time to take care of everything, so all the work has been done by myself and a handful of excellent graduate & undergrad students. Happily, some of the initial projects are wrapping up, and publications are starting to come out (I'll be blogging about others in the coming days/weeks). One of them was published yesterday in Emerging Infectious Diseases: Livestock-associated…
tsmith | March 28, 2011There has been a surge of interest recently in science denial, particularly revolving around the issue of vaccines. Last year saw the release of Michael Specter's Denialism; in the last few months, three others have been released: Seth Mnookin's Panic Virus, Robert Goldberg's Tabloid Medicine, and Paul Offit's "Deadly Choices." More about each of them after the jump.
"The Panic Virus" by Seth Mnookin focuses on the general topic of media-fueled science denial, using vaccines as the case study. Like Offit's recent "Autism's False Prophets, Mnookin details a bit of the history of the anti-…
tsmith | March 24, 2011Over at the Worms and Germs blog, Scott Weese has a great post on MRSA testing. He notes the he's frequently asked by human MRSA patients whether their pet should be tested as well, since several studies have documented transmission of MRSA between humans and their companion animals. His first response is always, "why?"
One big question I ask is 'why do you want to know and what would you do with the results?' Sometimes people want to know their pet's status to see if the pet was the source of their infection. However, MRSA in pets is typically human-associated, and if a pet is carrying…
mikethemadbiologist | March 5, 2011Kirsten Powers attempts to debunk the claim that increased access to contraception prevents unwanted abortions:
In the U.S., the story isn't much different. A January 2011 fact sheet by the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute listed all the reasons that women who have had an abortion give for their unexpected pregnancy, and not one of them is lack of access to contraception. In fact, 54 percent of women who had abortions had used a contraceptive method, if incorrectly, in the month they got pregnant. For the 46 percent who had not used contraception, 33 percent had perceived themselves…
mikethemadbiologist | February 21, 2011A couple of weeks ago, I found a post, "Is HIV 'fingerprinting' junk courtroom science?", which argues:
But calling the comparison of HIV strains' genes "fingerprinting" -- calling to mind the more-familiar matching of human suspects' DNA to blood at a crime scene -- is dangerously misleading, they warn.
"By calling such investigations HIV fingerprinting, scientists raise unrealistic expectations" about the method's accuracy among juries and judges, the write. "Unlike for (human) DNA fingerprinting, where a likelihood can be calculated for a full match between the evidential DNA and the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 14, 2011You might have heard of by now rightwing activist Lila Rose's attempted sting operation of Planned Parenthood, which resulted in the shocking finding that Planned Parenthood workers follow the law (and don't endanger themselves or their patients by physically confronting potentially dangerous people). Suffice it to say, it was a bullshit smear, but that's not stopping Planned Parenthood from catching flak. I have a personal reason for supporting Planned Parenthood (no, I'm not coming out of the closet or announcing that I am HIV-positive)--but, first, here's the breakdown of what Planned…
mikethemadbiologist | February 10, 2011I've always thought that if Bill Gates really wanted to make his mark, he should build sewer systems in the developing world (and provide endowments to maintain them). Because I'm getting tired of reading excellent articles like this:
The recent outbreaks of cholera in Haiti, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe suggest that our current global action plans against cholera are failing. This issue contains two important articles that will help inform our discussions on ways to respond to the global cholera situation. Cholera is a severely dehydrating illness caused by Vibrio cholerae, a Gram-negative…
mikethemadbiologist | January 31, 2011By way of Atrios, we find that Massachusetts is the second safest state for drivers. No, really:
The safest places to drive in the USA are Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts. Among the most dangerous: Montana, Wyoming, Louisiana and Mississippi. Those conclusions are based on federal data of traffic fatalities per 100,000 population and per 100 million miles driven.
The primary reason for the difference: Urban roads are safer than rural roads.
Even in states with low overall road death rates, rural areas often have rates twice as high as urban ones. That's because urban areas usually have…