revere | May 29, 2007Congress passed the supplemental spending bill last week and Bush signed it immediately. It was a terrible bill, both for what it contained and what it didn't. You all know what it contained: more money for this rotten war in Iraq. What it didn't contain was the paltry $650 million for pandemic preparedness that had been in an earlier version.
Bush's Office of Management and Budget is being blamed in some quarters (CIDRAP: someone in the Office of Management and Budget or elsewhere in the administration "might have made the call that there was less of a sense of urgency"), but I won't let the…
revere | May 28, 2007The thread that Indonesia pulled when it demanded certain rights to vaccines made from a seed virus isolated within its national borders is threatening to unravel the fabric of the half century seasonal influenza surveillance system. At the core of the dispute is the question of whether there is such a thing as an intellectual property right over a virus, a part of a virus or a viral gene:
During the recently concluded World Health Assembly - the annual meeting of the WHO's 193 member states - it became clear some countries are keen to explore whether they have intellectual property rights to…
revere | May 28, 2007Memorial Day in the United States, a day to remember 'The Fallen,' those who have died in the service of their country, their community, their families. Historically and by tradition The Fallen have been soldiers. But why? There are so many more. Firefighters, police, social workers, nurses, doctors, "ordinary" working people who have died on the job in the service of their country, community and families.
About 100 years ago steelworker Andrew Kovaly, a Slovak immigrant -- I don't know (or care) if he was "legal" (can a person ever be "illegal"?) -- was working in the hellish mills of…
revere | May 27, 2007Just this month three prominent members of the flu science establishment warned their colleagues that predicting an influenza pandemic was not really possible (Taubenberger, Morens and Fauci, JAMA. 2007 May 9;297(18):2025-7). Not just the time frame is unpredictable, but also the subtype. H5N1 is the bogeyman, and rightly given its horrific case fatality rate (60%), but influenza is primarily a disease of birds. There is therefore a huge reservoir and other subtypes can cause trouble. As if to add an exclamation mark to a well timed warning, this week saw an outbreak of H7N2 in a poultry…
revere | May 27, 2007You know atheism is making headway when it starts to elicit new, and more desperate, forms of push back. It's no longer possible burn atheists at the stake, at least not in the US, but you can tar and feather them with accusations that they are as bad as -- what? As bad as the intensely religious? Yes. That's the new tactic. Richard Dawkins is a Fundamentalist:
Despite its minority status, atheism has enjoyed the spotlight of late, with several books that feature vehement arguments against religion topping the bestseller lists.
But some now say secularists should embrace more than the…
revere | May 26, 2007After saying yesterday morning that China has not shared any of its human viral isolates, along comes an Associated Press report that two isolates were just sent and will shortly arrive at a WHO reference lab in the US. I'd love to say this demonstrates the power of Effect Measure, but . . . Anyway:
The sample updates of the H5N1 virus from China's Health Ministry are awaiting customs clearance, said Joanna Brent, a spokeswoman for WHO's Beijing office.
They include specimens from a 2006 case in Xinjiang in China's far west, and a case in the southern province of Fujian in 2007, Brent said. (…
revere | May 25, 2007A hundred years ago Sir William Osler described acute pneumonia as "The Captain of the Men of Death," a phrase he remembered from John Bunyan's The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (the actual phrase is "Captain Consumption, with all his men of death"). In 17th century England it was indeed "consumption," an older term for tuberculosis, which deserved the rank in Death's Legion, and the day may come again when it will come out of retirement to lead a new regiment against us. Beginning in the late 1940s tuberculosis began to recede from the consciousness of the industrialized West, and now it is…
revere | May 25, 2007A couple of days ago the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) suggested we may have turned a corner in the bird flu fight. Whenever I see something like that it sends a chill down my spine, because invariably within a few days things happen to put the lie to this eternally springing hope, and this was no exception. We've got bird flu appearing in Vietnam (including the first confirmed human case since November 2005), China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ghana, etc. Thirty countries so far this year (out of a total of 59 that have ever reported outbreaks). Yet another human case in Indonesia (…
revere | May 24, 2007I like bananas. But not that much. So when I buy them I usually buy little ones, called baby bananas in the market although I don't like to think of myself as eating defenseless little underage bananas so I just think of them as bananas. Yesterday Mrs. R. and I went shopping and I saw these little green bananas, labeled "Thai bananas." I bought them, but now I have o idea if they are meant to be eaten fresh" or cooked or fired like plantains. If you know, leave a comment. But there were some bananas I didn't buy there. The ones from multinational Chiquita fruit company. Why not?
Multinational…
revere | May 24, 2007Reuters Health has a short note on a survey of 169 nurses, doctors and other health care workers (HCWs in the jargon) about whether they would report for duty during a pandemic. It was done by Dr. Charlene Irvin of St. John Hospital and Medical Center in Detroit, Michigan. I don't know where it was published or what its methods were, so it is hard to say how representative of all HCWs the results are. But it probably isn't very far off. Remember, though, I'm an epidemiologist. We are infamous for blithely acting as if numbers like 84 and 86 are the same. Some of you may remember a sign along…
revere | May 23, 2007Thailand wants to provide free medicines for drugs and heart disease to its poorest citizens. That sounds good to me. Apparently my government doesn't agree:
Thailand's Public Health Minister said U.S. trade officials didn't relent on their opposition to his plan to copy drugs made by companies including Abbott Laboratories and Merck & Co. after meetings in Washington.
Mongkol Na Songkhla met with Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and Deputy U.S. Trade Representative John K. Veroneau yesterday in an effort to avoid retaliation against a plan to invoke a World Trade Organization…
revere | May 23, 2007A new experiment in flu communications was noted yesterday by my wiki partner and fellow blogger (The Next Hurrah) DemFromCT over at the mega-blog, DailyKos:
Recognizing the need for people to take pandemic flu preparations more seriously, and recognizing that blogging is a powerful and effective two-way communications tool, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt is hosting a Pandemic Flu Leadership Conference in Washington DC on June 13, to which I've been invited (based on work done at Flu Wiki and here). And as part of the effort to reach as many people as possible, a blog has…
revere | May 22, 2007The word "vaccine" comes from the Latin word for cow (vacca), as many people know. Infecting people with cowpox (whose medical name is now vaccinia) cross protected them against smallpox, a piece of folk knowledge exploited by Jenner in 1796, when he introduced the practice of inoculating people with cowpox as a preventative for smallpox, then one of world's most deadly scourges. Originally called vaccine inoculation it was quickly shortened to vaccination, and Pasteur later employed "vaccine" for another preventative prepared from infectious material to protect against disease. The back and…
revere | May 22, 2007Sometimes it's good to have a "coordinated message" and sometimes it isn't. The UN agencies dealing with bird flu certainly don't have a coordinated message and that's just fine with me. I don't trust anybody to have the right "message" and we're better served by each agency calling it as they see it. Even if the way the see it seems, well, distinctly odd:
Avian Flu Virus May Be Nearing End as Fewer Birds Die, OIE Says
The avian flu virus that threatens to spark the first pandemic in almost four decades may be nearing the end of its natural cycle after it killed fewer wild and migratory…
revere | May 21, 2007I really like this story, which I got from Medgadget (hat tip). It's about a new product, designed by a student, Mr. Edwin Yau of the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. It was the winner of the (Australian) Dyson Design Awards, and it looks like it deserved it.
Mr. Yau's design for the StairbustA addresses a major problem in any emergency evacuation and also in just moving sick people from one spot to another. I know about this because I worked my way through school as a "transporter" in a hospital radiology department. Here's the description of the StairbustA:
The StairbustA is an…
revere | May 21, 2007One of the enduring scientific mysteries about influenza is what causes its marked seasonal pattern. A new paper in the Journal of Virology provides a useful mini-review of the many theories. [PubMed says its free online, but it seems to be behind a subscription firewall; maybe that will change. Here's the cite: Lofgren E, Fefferman NH, Naumov YN, Gorski J, Naumova EN., "Influenza seasonality: underlying causes and modeling theories", J Virol. 2007 Jun;81(11):5429-36. I have a print copy only.] The most surprising thing to most people who don't follow this is that this is still a mystery. We'…
revere | May 20, 2007Indonesia's Health Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has joined WHO's Executive Board.
The Detikcom news website reports Siti Fadilah Supari has been elected unanimously during the 60th World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva,
The health minister says the nomination represents world recognition and appreciation of Indonesia's active role in coping with global health problems. (Radio Australia)
Sort of like George Bush giving the Medal of Freedom to the architects of the Iraq War, I guess.
I had a hard time deciding what tag to put on this, although "Humor? (sarcasm)" seemed the most appropriate…
revere | May 20, 2007Mutatis mutandis is a Latin phrase used by philosophers to indicate that an argument made in one circumstance carries over to another, "the necessary changes having been made."
Most of us don't know much about Sikhs, which is why this dispute, which has escalated into violence and civil disorder in the Punjab, displays its irrationality to us so easily. We aren't burdened by any associations, historical resonances, political nuances. The whole thing can be seen in its pristinely pure stupidity:
Sikhs are angered over an advertisement in local newspapers earlier this week showing the head of a…
revere | May 19, 2007Influenza is primarily a disease of birds. Most emerging infectious diseases in humans are started out as diseases of animals, what are called zoonoses. We worry about zoonoses for that reason. It is one of the hardwired tendencies of any species to think of their own survival first -- that's natural -- but humans are only one species amongst many. And while we worry about viruses we might catch from animals, the animals are also getting sick. It's not just influenza we share with birds. Birds suffer from other diseases they can pass on to humans, too, and one of these is West Nile virus (WNV…
revere | May 18, 2007One difference between city dwellers in bird flu afflicted areas like Indonesia and southeast asia and the US is that many of the former keep poultry as companion animals (aka, pets) or sources of protein (eggs, meat). But some people in the US think it sounds like a pretty good idea:
Last year, two parents living in the city of Madison, Wisconsin decided it was time to get their kids a pet. But they didn't want a cat. Not a dog, either. Not even a rabbit. They wanted a chicken. Twenty-five chickens, actually. All were shipped at one day old, and arrived in a tiny, cheeping package delivered…