revere | December 18, 2009Tomas Young is a veteran in a wheel chair. He was shot in the spine by a sniper in Iraq. His story was featured in Phil Donahue's film, "Body of War," the story of Young's conversion from soldier to anti-Iraq war activist. You can see Young and others in the slides taken back stage at the Lollapalooza concert in Chicago, 2007.
This is a tribute to Tomas Young by Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam:
revere | December 18, 2009I'm an epidemiologist and I train epidemiologists so you expect me to think epidemiology is important to public health. Epidemiology describes the pattern of diseases in the community and tries to figure out why some patterns exist and not others. It is used for both applied health research (causes of disease and disease outbreaks), disease control and for administrative purposes (how many hospital beds will we need, for example). When I was in medical school most epidemiology, such as there was, was done by medical doctors or employees of federal, state and local health departments. Starting…
revere | December 17, 2009While the Obama administration makes its choices, ordinary people in the rest of the world don't want more trouble:
revere | December 17, 2009Irony isn't dead. But it's on a ventilator. No wait. There aren't enough ventilators. So maybe it's just having labored breathing. From February 9:
The target grew out of discussions among a group of moderate Republicans, led by Sen. [Susan] Collins [of Maine], aimed at reining in costs and better targeting federal funds toward job creation. The effort amounts to "rebuilding" the Obama package, according to an individual familiar with the talks. The package would include tax cuts and investments intended to create jobs, such as infrastructure projects, but it would step back from spending…
revere | December 16, 2009The truth of this is disheartening. But truth often is:
Hat tip reader Erin.
revere | December 16, 2009A spot-on column in CIDRAP Business Source [subscription] by Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy's (CIDRAP) Director, Mike Osterholm, reminded me to say something I've wanted to say for a long time. We should banish the word "mild" from the influenza lexicon. There's no such thing as a mild case of influenza, any more than there are "mild" auto accidents. There are cases that for reasons we don't understand don't make you very sick (or sick at all), and there are cases that can lay you lower than you ever want to be, including six feet under. What Osterholm does with great…
revere | December 15, 2009A reminder that many nations fight stupid wars. Remember the Falklands?
Mark Knopfler's version of the Dire Straits song, Brothers in Arms.
revere | December 15, 2009There's a lot to like about Canada (their health care system, for starters) but there are some things that are less than praiseworthy (I understate), and towards the top of that list would have to be a hundred years of peddling, with government support, protection and outright lying, a product that brought the world one of the 20th century's greatest public health catastrophes: asbestos.
Asbestos is a fibrous mineral that exists in two main categories, the serpentine minerals and amphibole group. Asbestos saw myriad uses and 90% of those used the serpentine form whose main representative is…
revere | December 14, 2009Bob Dylan recorded this in 1962 but it wasn't released until decades later. By then there were many more John Browns. And we are producing them in quantity in Afghanistan.
revere | December 14, 2009I am not a Christian (not now, not ever) but I have always liked Christmas. It's my favorite (secular) holiday and when the time comes (Christmas Eve or Christmas Day) we Reveres will likely write our traditional Christmas post explaining just why we aren't the obligatory curmudgeons on the issue. But that's for then. There is something I really hate about Christmas, although it's not really about Christmas specifically. It is a public health problem and it's probably worse on Christmas Day than any other day of the year. It's clamshell packaging.
I thought about it (for the umpteenth time)…
revere | December 13, 2009Obama's election opened Pandora's Box and one of the things that flew out was Hope. No good change comes without Hope as one of its wellsprings. There is much justified anger at Obama's War on Afghanistan. You've seen it here and you'll see more of it as the Afghanistan debacle continues to take and spoil lives and sap our strength as a people.
But Hope remains a necessary ingredient for those of us who oppose this war. We know it will draw cynical comments from those who see it as pie-in-the-sky utopianism (although pie-in-the-sky pushed by religion or politicians is OK?). Cynicism for them…
revere | December 13, 2009Red wine has been touted for its health benefits but these don't seem to extend to warding off swine flu. The virology laboratory in Bordeaux in the southwest of France tested via RT-PCR over 1200 nasopharyngeal swabs between May 1 and the first week in October and found 186 positive for the new pandemic strain. They looked at five of these cases more closely, monitoring them for duration of viral shedding. Two of the five kept shedding for 2 to 4 weeks (paper in Eurosurveillance by Fleury et al., v. 14, #49, December 10, 2009).
The first case was a non-obese previously healthy male in his…
revere | December 13, 2009It would take us too far afield to describe how the following reached me (far afield but entertaining; sorry, no dice, just a hat tip to SR). Whatever its provenance, it concerns matters of medical importance as framed by one of the better known doctors in the country, Dr. Laura Schlesinger (or as her mother refers to her, "My daughter the doctor"). Dr. Laura is an observant Orthodox Jew who believes everything she reads in the Torah. The Torah is what Jews call the first five books of the Old Testament. The third of those books is Leviticus, wherein Dr. Laura read and then preached from her…
revere | December 12, 2009I usually choose music clips featuring the performer and the song. I prefer live performances. I don't like videos with graphic or powerful images because they often distract from the music and I am powerfully affected by the music itself. But this is an exception in two ways. First, this is contemporary music, a 2009 Dash Berlin remix video of the still extant 1980s alternative band, Depeche Mode; and this time it is the powerful video that takes center stage, not the music.
Long after there is peace on the battlefield the war will go on in the lives of its victims, on both sides. This hit…
revere | December 12, 2009We complain when there isn't enough swine flu vaccine and we complain when our health departments don't count all the cases. It's probably good so many people are out of work and can't eat in restaurants, because they aren't getting inspected because all available staff are trying to deal with the flu pandemic:
The current swine-flu wave may have peaked, but thousands of public health workers are trying to vaccinate millions of people against the new disease, fearing that another wave could emerge in the new year. Yet recession-driven budget cuts have thinned their ranks so far that they are…
revere | December 11, 2009President Obama made his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech yesterday. Full of irony, thoughtful, analytic, nuanced, humble. So much more elegant than George Bush could ever hope to do. Other than that, same bottom line, only now it's the Obama Doctrine, dressed up. I'm not buying it. I'm as angry as ever. I'm not ready to make nice:
revere | December 11, 2009I got an email yesterday about "a disturbing undercover video showing sick and injured pigs being dragged, beaten, pushed with forklifts and shocked with electric prods by workers to get them onto slaughterhouse kill floors." I'm glad I didn't see it as the whole thing disturbs me enough. I'm not a vegetarian, although for about a year and half Mrs. R. and I decided the only meat we would eat was fish (that's when I discovered I liked fish; for most of my life I thought I didn't and never ate it). The occasion for that meatless except for fish interlude was reading a long New York Times…
revere | December 10, 2009We're saving lives on the battlefield. Lives that would have been lost in previous wars. That's good. War takes too many lives. But there are ways to take lives that don't involve killing someone. And we're taking a lot of lives that way, many more than before. Here's Liam Clancy with the great song by Australian singer-song writer Eric Bogle:
revere | December 10, 2009The other day the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a clutch of articles about whether Tamiflu was as useful a drug as some have touted. I read the main article, another one of the Cochrane Collaborative meta-analyses of the studies they deem useful about any particular subject, and it didn't seem to make much news. It confirmed what their previous review had said about the neuriminidase inhibitor antivirals for influenza (Tamiflu and Relenza): these drugs work but their effect is modest. We've been saying the same thing for years here, not because we did a fancy meta-analysis, but…
revere | December 9, 2009We're talking about sending 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan. We're not talking about the ones that are coming home. I used to work for the VA. There's lots to talk about. Let's start now: