public health
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2008In most cases, assuming that the Bush Administration is up to no good and plans to do the exact opposite of what it claims to be doing is a good first principle (unless you have a "kick me" sign staple gunned to your ass). The CDC alerting passengers that they were seated near a symptomatic TB patient is not the slippery slope of tyranny, but a responsible public health response. At firedoglake, there is an idiotic post about the CDC's response to a person infected with TB on an airplane:
TB on planes: another excuse to restrict our civil liberties? You heard it here first....
This is great…
j7uy5 | January 7, 2008Several of the candidates have been found to have made egregious
misstatements in the
href="http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/05/nh.debates/?iref=mpstoryview">New
Hampshire debates. FactCheck.org, the organization
made famous by Dick Cheney when he
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12901-2004Oct6.html">erroneously
referred to it as Factcheck.com, has
href="http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/nh_debate_the_gop_field.html">an
analysis of the Republican candidates' statements.
There is a lot of material there. The one that really stands
out for me…
mikethemadbiologist | January 4, 2008PhRMA, the lobbying group for the pharmaceutical companies, claims that drug companies spend more on research than on advertising. A recent study from PLoS Medicine debunks this claim:
The value of our estimate over these others is that it is not based on extrapolating from annual reports of firms that are both diversified and multinational. Our estimate is driven by quantifiable data from highly reliable sources and concerns only the promotion of pharmaceutical products in the US. The derivation of our figure is thus transparent and can form the basis for a vigorous debate.
From this new…
mikethemadbiologist | January 2, 2008...and scuttle one of the best efforts going to reduce the problem of antibiotic resistance. I discussed before how the antibiotic resistance problem is, in the context of hospital infections, an infection control problem:
One of the hidden stories in the rise in the frequency of antibiotic resistant bacterial strains is that this has also been accompanied by an absolute increase in the number of infections. In other words, it's not the case that you used to have 90 sensitive infections and 10 resistant infections per year in your hospital, and now, you have 50 sensitive and 50 resistant…
tsmith | December 30, 2007 As another Ebola outbreak simmers in Uganda (and appears to be increasing), I recently was in touch with Zoe Young, a water and sanitation expert with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF*, known in the US as Doctors without Borders), who was working in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the DRC Ebola outbreak earlier this fall (and blogging it!)
Regular readers know of my interest in this virus, but I'm obviously geographically removed from any of the outbreaks. As such, Zoe and her colleague, physician Armand Sprecher, were generous enough to answer my questions about their work with…
mikethemadbiologist | December 28, 2007Revere proposes a simple healthcare plan: "Medicare for all." He bases this on the finding that the healthcare outcomes of people aged 55 to 64 don't become worse once they turn 65, even though that would be expected with chronic conditions. Why? Access to healthcare through the Medicare system:
If you have heart disease or diabetes and you are uninsured you are worse off than those who are insured by several measures. Those are the kinds of health conditions that usually worsen with age, too, so you would expect this to be a bigger problem for the uninsured near elderly. But they don't…
tsmith | December 21, 2007 It's been awhile since I wrote anything on influenza. It's certainly not that nothing interesting has happened recently--far from it, there are new stories on influenza out every day. Rather, there are just a lot of people out there covering it, and covering it well. However, it's been an unusually busy few days on the influenza front, so I thought I'd update after the jump.
First, though much of the mainstream media has lost interest in avian influenza, scientists are still busy keeping an eye on things--and H5N1 is still spreading. Human cases have now been reported in Pakistan,…
tsmith | December 17, 2007 In my field, many things that cause the average man-on-the-street to get a bit squeamish or squicked are rather commonplace. My own studies include two types of bacteria that are carried rectally in humans (and other animals), so I spend an absurd amount of time thinking about, well, shit, and the lifeforms that inhabit it and collectively make up our normal gut flora. The vast majority of these species don't harm us at all, and many are even beneficial: priming our immune system; assisting in digestion; and filling niches that could be colonized by their nastier bacterial brethren.
It…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007If you visit ScienceBlogs regularly, you've probably read about ScienceBloglings Sheril Kirshenbaum's and Chris Mooney's proposal for a presidential debate about science. There's a lot I like about this proposal, but the reality of what could happen bothers me. First, what I like about the idea.
For much of the last two and half years, I worked at a non-profit organization that focused on infectious disease policy and programs. Science policy--and politics--are important. The idea that every political candidate would actually have to devise a science policy, and perhaps even be judged by…
tsmith | December 10, 2007Still playing end-of-year catch-up with grants and manuscripts so posting will be sporadic, but I'd be remiss not to mention this story regarding presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's past views on HIV/AIDS:
In 1992, Huckabee wrote, "If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague."
"It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population…
terrasig | December 5, 2007Yet another example in today's press about dietary supplements contaminated, intentionally or accidentally, with prescription or unapproved drugs - in this case, anabolic steroids showing up in about 20% of supplements tested.
I was asked by a major news organization if this is the first time that anabolic steroids have been found in supplements. Nope, look at this FDA action from March 2004 or March 2006.
Ugggh, this is a very old story that I've discussed here many times, mostly relative to erectile dysfunction supplements:
Potentially life-threatening adulteration of erectile dysfunction…
j7uy5 | December 1, 2007You would think it would take a sociopath to put
rel="tag" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos">asbestos
in a children's toy. You'd be right. Yet, it has
happened. Stranger yet, Canada has adopted legislation that
explicitly permits this.
Asbestos became infamous when it was linked to
href="http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec05/ch057/ch057c.html#sec05-ch057-ch057c-1022"
rel="tag">mesothelioma, an otherwise rare form of
cancer affecting the lining of the lung cavity. It is
considered to be incurable. It takes an average of thirty
years to show up, after exposure to asbestos…
tsmith | November 30, 2007Since its discovery, only a few countries have really been affected by Ebola. The virus has surfaced multiple times in the Democractic Republic of Congo, in Sudan, in Gabon, and now in Uganda. This country was last hit (and hit hard) by Ebola in 2000, when an outbreak there caused at least 425 cases, and killed more than half of those it infected. Now it's currently causing yet another outbreak, just weeks after the outbreak in the DRC was confirmed to have ended--and the strain that's causing this one seems to be distinct from the four known types of virus we've seen to date. More after…
tsmith | November 29, 2007Over at Correlations, I have a post up describing the case of a Liberian immigrant who's been jailed in New York for the importation of bushmeat. She's arguing that to punish her for this is in violation of her first amendment right to freedom of religion. More at the link...
tsmith | November 28, 2007 Revere has been covering the situation in Indonesia regarding sharing of influenza viruses with the US and other countries. For those of you who don't follow these issues, Indonesia has been the country hardest hit thus far by H5N1 (113 cases and 91 deaths as of 11/12/07). However, while one might think they would welcome outside help with diagnostics and strain typing, they've been very reluctant to share their viruses. Revere explains:
But Indonesia still refuses to share its human H5N1 isolates, contending they get nothing tangible from an arrangement which is likely to lead to…
j7uy5 | November 17, 2007
rel="tag">Simon N. Young, PhD, the Editor-in-chief
of the Journal of
Psychiatry and Neuroscience, has written an editorial: How
To
Increase Serotonin In The Human Brain Without Drugs.
In is
published in this month's edition of the Journal of
Psychiatry and Neuroscience.
The Journal is an open-access journal, so anyone can read it.
The PDF is
href="http://www.cma.ca/multimedia/staticContent/HTML/N0/l2/jpn/vol-32/issue-6/pdf/pg394.pdf">here.
I have to admit, I was both surprised and skeptical when I first saw
this. Although there are many converging lines of evidence
associating…
tsmith | November 15, 2007Two recent stories highlight the good and the bad when it comes to infectious disease prevention.
The good
Death rates for vaccine-preventable diseases are at an all-time low:
The study, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (link), is the first time that the agency has searched historical records going back to 1900 to compile estimates of cases, hospitalizations and deaths for all the diseases children are routinely vaccinated against.
In nine of the diseases, rates of death or hospitalization…
purepedantry | November 14, 2007Yay us?
More than 1 million cases of chlamydia were reported in the United States last year -- the most ever reported for a sexually transmitted disease, federal health officials said Tuesday. "A new U.S. record," said Dr. John M. Douglas Jr. of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More bad news: Gonorrhea rates are jumping again after hitting a record low, and an increasing number of cases are caused by a "superbug" version resistant to common antibiotics, federal officials said Tuesday.
Syphilis is rising, too. The rate of congenital syphilis -- which can deform or kill babies…
j7uy5 | November 14, 2007The Department of Defense appears to be making a real effort
to
determine the scope of the problem. They now have published
the results of a second screening of 88,235 returning soldiers.
In their most recent study, they acknowledge that the prior
study missed a lot. Moreover, they now worry that even the
second study is missing some. In a nice gesture, the
style="font-style: italic;">Journal of the American Medical
Association has made the results openly accessible. (The
results of the first study also are openly accessible,
href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/295/9/…
tsmith | November 13, 2007 Over the summer, I wrote about Vinay Chakravarthy, a doctor of South Asian descent who had been recently diagnosed (at the age of 28 and fresh out of medical school) with leukemia and was in need of a bone marrow transplant. However, as Razib and others noted, the odds of him finding a match were quite slim (~1 in 20,000), given the small donor pool that was most genetically similar. Vinay's friends and families took his misfortune and turned it into something positive, organizing bone marrow drives in several states, and concentrating on getting additional minority donors to join the…