revere
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At 3:50 am EDST I received the welcome news, via Declan Butler, that the Tripoli 6 were free and on the tarmac in Sofia, Bulgaria. All are Bulgarian citizens and were released by the Libyan prison authorities as part of an extradition arrangement. Their life sentences were immediately pardoned by…
Just as the safety of the food supply is coming under increased scrutiny we have the Castleberry Foods botulism recall, now involving a variety of brands of Hot Dog Chili Sauce and dog foods. Both have something in common you wouldn't necessarily think of at first (unless you knew about botulism).…
This morning we discussed mosquito-borne disease in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But arboviruses are not the only potential hazard faced by displaced hurricane residents. There is also the dreaded FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), an agency that didn't do so many things it…
Bird flu isn't the only virus dangerous to humans that finds its primary home in birds. West Nile Virus (WNV) and other arbovirus infections do, too. WNV is now on the rise in California and seems worse than last year:
There were 18 new human cases of West Nile virus reported this week by the…
Cuba has announced it has established a monitoring system for bird flu. I don't know any of the details except that they have trained personnel for the purpose and they say they have invested millions of dollars and are following what goes on elsewhere closely. The US can say the same thing and has…
The story of North Carolina uber Christian Coy Privette, arrested on charges of aiding and abetting prostitution (being a "john") is, on its surface, just another tale of hypocrisy, one among many:
Privette, the president of the Christian Action League in North Carolina, was charged July 19 with…
When I was a young-un no one ever heard about food allergies. Of course there were food allergies. We just never heard much about them. But now we not only hear about them, we hear about people, often children, who die from food allergy. Often peanut allergy. What's really weird about this is that…
If you work for Tyson foods, one of the US's largest poultry producers, you probably aren't very worried about bird flu. That's because you are too busy worrying about not getting cut to pieces, electrocuted, maimed from a fall or burned to death. As part of a strategy of increased attention to…
The first of the putative "universal" vaccines against influenza A is entering Phase I (small scale safety and efficacy) testing. Manufactured by UK vaccine company Acambis, the vaccine is designed to protect against a wide range of influenza A viruses of many subtypes and many strains. Here's the…
The US public just doesn't get this terrorist threat business, according to John P. Wlaters, the President's drug czar:
The nation's top anti-drug official said people need to overcome their "reefer blindness" and see that illicit marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and…
This is a follow-up to the Salmonella outbreak at the Taste of Chicago 2007 outdoor food festival we reported a couple of days ago. The size of the outbreak continues to grow, with 636 reported illnesses, 66 of them laboratory confirmed as Salmonella serotype Heidelberg (one of the more common…
Yesterday the Libyan Supreme Council commuted the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-Bulgarian doctor to life in prison. The Tripoli 6 have become a cause celebre in the scientific and diplomatic communities when Libyan courts, after holding them in prison for eight years,…
A "cytokine storm" as the lethal element in H5N1 infection is back, not with a bang but a whimper. Maybe. Here's the gist, from the ever reliable Helen Branswell:
New research suggests successful treatment of the H5N1 avian flu virus requires targeting the virus, not the overwhelming immune…
The case of the Tripoli 6 -- five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor now a Bulgarian citizen (for background see here) -- is in its final throes. It is not pretty. After a day's delay, word has come the Supreme Council has commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, but with…
In the world of opera a diva is a prima donna, often problematic in behavior, but in the world of bird flu, DIVA stands for differentiating infected from vaccinated animals (DIVA). The bird flu DIVA relates to a problematic behavior of vaccinating poultry: after you've artificially induced them to…
Many Republicans and most Democrats in Congress seem to agree on at least one thing: President Bush is full of crap. Not about Iraq. Virtually all Republicans disagree with the rest of us on that. No, what they agree on is that the federal government should expand, not deep six, the Children's…
So now we can all rest easy because we know where the 6 year old girl (not a boy as the Indon Ministry of Health previously reported) who died recently of H5N1 infection acquired the virus. The source of all H5N1 infections: birds. How do we know? Because an official of the Indonesian bird flu…
I must confess to a (possibly unhealthy) fascination for the topic of food poisoning. You know the kind. First you're afraid you're going to die. Then you're afraid you're not going to die. When I taught the food sanitation course I loved showing 1960s US Army "barf films" meant to train food…
A couple of days ago my SciBling, PZ, at Pharyngula, posted a characteristically funny and on target rant about the preternaturally religious country we both live in. Displaying a map of the US, thematically colored by frequency of religious affiliation, he commented:
It shows the concentration of…
When last we looked at the benzene-in-soda lawsuit the dominoes were starting to fall as Coca Cola settled (for general background see here, here, here, here, here and the Environmental Working Group site). Sure enough, the rest of the soft drink makers have now settled.
PepsiCo and several other…
Michael Moore, whose movie on US health care, Sicko, is said to be a devastating indictment of said system (haven't seen it yet), had a bit of dust up recently with CNN's health correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. You can see it on the video linked below. Here's the scenario. With Moore as an upcoming…
The bird flu stories from Indonesia have a sameness to them so it is sometimes hard to remember these are real people. Someone's little girl or boy, sister, brother, father, cousin, best friend. They are just another "6-year-old boy died of bird flu at the weekend, a health official said on…
Maybe someday I'll get tired of posting stories like this, but that day has yet to come. This is from BoingBoing, on how to smuggle dangerous liquids onto an airplane. The dangerous liquid in this case was a bottle of Vidalia Onion salad dressing. It is dangerous because it was more than 3 ounces…
Oh, good. We're going to have more high containment (BSL4) laboratories to handle the world's most dangerous organisms, the ones for which there is no cure and usually no vaccine. Also bioweapons agents like anthrax and smallpox. Lovely. Where? We don't know yet. The list of candidates was narrowed…
I'd like to support someone who speaks out againstmuzzling of science by political hacks. Which is just what Bush's last Surgeon General, Richard Carmona did today at a congressional hearing. But frankly, it's a bit late. Many of us were quite critical of the "invisible Surgeon General," the person…
The final act in the drama of five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor imprisoned for seven years and sentenced to death by firing squad in Libya after being accused of deliberately infecting over 400 chidren with HIV in a children's hospital in Bengazi (see posts here) is now being played…
If you aren't worried about bird flu you probably aren't in the poultry business. The pandemic that has yet to materialize for humans is already here for birds, where it is called a panzootic. And it is taking a toll. When highly pathogenic H5N1 surfaced again in Germany and France in the heart of…
When terrorists attacked the symbolic center of American economic power on September 11 it wasn't the first time:
On 16 September 1920, throngs of brokers, clerks, and office workers poured from the buildings lining New York City's Wall Street as a nearby church bell struck twelve o'clock. The…
CDC recommends (MMWR Recomm Rep. 2005 Jul 29;54(RR-8):1-40) hospitalized patients with influenza A be placed under standard and droplet isolation precautions for 5 days after the onset of their symptoms. This is based on studies of volunteers who received live attenuated flu vaccine drops in their…
Caffeine doesn't bother me. I seem to be able to drink it at bedtime and then go right to sleep. But there are a lot of people caffeine does bother. A lot. So how much caffeine is in various foodstuffs, like carbonated beverages, is a matter of interest. It is added intentionally for its CNS…