revere
Posts by this author
October 11, 2009
The Reveres finally knew the blog had become an established site on the internet when we started getting regular publicity emails from commercial sites and people with products they thought "our readers would be especially interested in." We get quite a few, now, and we almost never yield. Almost.…
October 10, 2009
When swine flu poked its head above water in the northern hemisphere in April our "normal" flu season was just ending. A surge of swine flu cases during a time when influenza was not usually seen was bewildering and confusing, not to mention alarming. We didn't know what to expect nor were we sure…
October 9, 2009
Skeptical, but Hope Springs Eternal.
The heaviest of the heavy-hitter science journals in the US is Science Magazine, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It publishes in all aspects of science. Its main competitor is the venerable Nature magazine in the…
October 8, 2009
A Catholic hospital system in Arkansas seems to have come up with an innovative solution to encouraging health care workers be vaccinated while allowing them the autonomy to make their own decision. When we last brought up this question one of our commenters said he'd like to see a button on health…
October 7, 2009
This is the internet. Like the newspaper, you shouldn't automatically believe everything you read on it, and when it comes to some of the more outlandish stuff, most people don't. But there are a lot of sites that appear quite legitimate, and maybe for some of the material on them they are fine,…
October 6, 2009
Vaccines is a topic I don't like writing about so much for many reasons. Vaccination programs are important to public health but we (all the Reveres, including this one) have always interested either in basic science or programs that are applied to the whole population at once, such as clean water…
October 5, 2009
In an earlier post I said I opposed mandatory vaccination for adults (but not for children), the one exception being for health care workers because they come in contact with people at high risk. My view then was that if you work in a health care institution and won't get vaccinated against flu,…
October 4, 2009
This is about a paper published Friday. The post is long because the paper provides practical advice on a problem of importance, the issue of school closures. The advice is based on data and could be implemented at the level of a school district or even a single school without requiring a lot of…
October 4, 2009
When life is hard, you need to get a grip on it:
Bonus: Watch Bill Maher interview a Senator. This man is not an idiot Republican. He's an idiot Democrat. The video isn't embeddable but you can watch it here.
October 3, 2009
As Mrs. R. remarked, it's American ingenuity at work. Or something. She was referring to the winner of the 2009 Public Health IgNobel Award. For those of you who don't know about the IgNobel Prizes given each year in a variety of categories for scientific or engineering achievements (as documented…
October 2, 2009
I should be writing a substantive blog post, but I'm dead tired after 14 hours spent listening to very stimulating science presented by talented grad students, post-docs and residents at a large medical center, after which they were in turn subjected to an invited lecture from me, a lecture I've…
October 1, 2009
A couple of days ago Dr. Marion Koopmans, chief of virology in the infectious diseases laboratory of the National Institute of Public Health, The Netherlands, notified the infectious disease community through the website/email list ProMed that two of their swine flu isolates showed a particular…
September 30, 2009
For the first time in medical history we may be seeing an influenza pandemic unfold in real time, but that doesn't mean we know what we are seeing. There remains some uncertainty about virulence, both in terms of how often it kills and how it kills when it does kill. You'd think both would be easy…
September 29, 2009
Hand gel sanitizers are making an appearance all over our medical center. There's one right next to the elevator on the ground floor of the building where my office is and don't have to touch a thing. Just put your hand under it and it dispenses a cool alcohol-based gel that sanitizers my hands and…
September 28, 2009
A good story by the AP's Lauran Neergaard yesterday highlighted the need for better public health surveillance and the efforts being made to improve it so as to keep track of possible rare side effects from the swine flu vaccine. This is an issue we've talked about a lot here, most recently in the…
September 27, 2009
We don't do vaccines so much here, so I missed it last Sunday (Sept. 20) when it was posted over at JustTheVax, but there's an excellent summary of this year's swine flu vaccine offerings by Science Mom. It's hard to keep track of all this stuff so this is really valuable, and I know many readers…
September 27, 2009
Flu season has started in earnest, even though it's not "officially" flu season until week 40 (first week in October this year). How do we know it's flu season if we don't test everyone and can't count flu? We use a surveillance system. The flu surveillance system has lots of moving parts and five…
September 27, 2009
Lewis Black answers the question, "Is nothing sacred?"
September 26, 2009
I'm afraid I have to complain about crappy journalism again. AlterNet is an online newsmagazine I quite like. We've been linked by them numerous times and know their influence. Sometimes, though, some very smart writers write some very dumb things, even if they do it in a smart way. Alas, Joshua…
September 25, 2009
There's hopeful news about the possibility of an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine and a weird story from Canada about "preliminary results" saying that you are more at risk from swine flu if you get the seasonal flu vaccine. With flu, anything is possible, but that is more than a little counterintuitive…
September 24, 2009
Bats are no doubt fascinating animals. They also carry rabies. And I'll be honest with you. Rabies scares the crap out of me. Most people know that rabies is caused by a virus that is spread through the saliva of an infected animal. Because the virus attacks the nervous system, rabid animals often…
September 23, 2009
People complain that ministers in the cabinet Iran's recently selected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government will say things so outlandish no one else would even think of saying them, but Declan Butler over at the Nature blog, The Great Beyond, begs to differ. Take Iran's Science Minister,…
September 22, 2009
There are multiple trials of swine flu vaccine in different countries and involving different subpopulations. Recent news strongly suggests that -- surprisingly -- a single dose of viral antigen (i.e., one injection) may be sufficient to raise antibody against swine flu to protective levels. There…
September 21, 2009
One of my healthier, but alas more expensive habits, is that I walk a mile or so several times a week to my neighborhood shopping area and visit one or another bookstore. I live in a college town, so my neighborhood shopping area has some of the best bookstores anywhere. Not just a university…
September 20, 2009
I suppose under the theory that when dog bites man it's not news but when man bites dog it is, CDC's publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR) recently ran an outbreak report about people getting baked by brownies:
On April 8, 2009, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) notified…
September 20, 2009
A few weeks ago we posted about a bunch of crazy rabbis flying over Israel and blowing horns to save their countrymen (and the women, as long as they stayed segregated) from swine flu. We got a few comments, mostly respectful but with the common theme that we were being culturally insensitive, if…
September 19, 2009
It's a virus that kills someone every 20 minutes in this world, usually a child. A vaccine is on the way but isn't here yet. The good news is that what usually requires multiple doses may only require a single dose. It's big news. It's also not about swine flu vaccine:
A replication-deficient…
September 18, 2009
Most people are either indifferent to swine flu or fearful, but the makers of Purell hand sanitizer and Chlorox are happy. It's been a boon to the business of sanitizing everything in sight as a way to ward off swine flu. Here's a story about Chlorox (bleach):
The company has secured additional…
September 17, 2009
It's been a hard year or two. First Miriam Makeba. Then Odetta. Now we've lost another one, Mary Travers, the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary. Mary died Wednesday of leukemia in Connecticut. Even before Mary, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow formed one of the iconic sixties folk groups in 1961, Mary sang…
September 17, 2009
I just got my seasonal flu shot. It was free and my medical center is encouraging everyone to get one. I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said I didn't feel it at all, but in all honesty, I hardly felt it. They must be using smaller needles these days. Anyway, given that most circulating flu…