CDC
mikethemadbiologist | February 6, 2009Via Greg Sargent, we learn that Blue Dog Democrat Senator Ben Nelson is still a repulsive person.
Total Reductions: $80 billion
Eliminations:
Head Start, Education for the Disadvantaged, School improvement, Child Nutrition, Firefighters, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Prisons, COPS Hiring, Violence Against Women, NASA, NSF, Western Area Power Administration, CDC, Food Stamps
*****************************
Reductions:
Public Transit $3.4 billion, School Construction $60 billion
Fucking unbelievable. Intelligent Designer knows that Democrats can be pretty screwed up, but,…
revere | January 30, 2009CIDRAP News carried a short piece about the new CDC Acting Director, Dr. Richard Besser. We don't learn a lot new beyond the official facts. The Bush CDC Director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, resigned as the Obama Presidency began. The CDC Director is a non-career appointment, which means that it is made by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But there is as yet only a nominee for that post, Tom Daschle. The Besser appointment was thus made by the acting secretary of DHHS, Charles Johnson. Besser is a pediatrician and former Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer whose last position…
mikethemadbiologist | January 25, 2009I doubt he'll become the new director--although I think he would be a very good choice--but, until the CDC gets a new director, Richard Besser is the Acting CDC Director:
Richard Besser, who headed the CDC's public health emergency preparedness and response functions, succeeds Julie Gerberding, who stepped down with the change in administration after six years of leading the federal agency.
It wasn't clear whether Dr. Besser would be Dr. Gerberding's permanent successor. An email to CDC employees Thursday said that Dr. Besser would serve as acting director until a permanent director is named…
revere | January 18, 2009The four month old salmonella outbreak (here, here) that has already claimed at least five lives seems now to be an "ingredient" affair. The ingredient is peanut butter made in a Georgia plant of the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) and sold to food distributors in bulk for use in institutions and not to consumers but also as as a peanut paste ingredient used other foods like cookies, crackers, cereal, candy, ice cream, baked goods or cooking sauces that are sold to consumers. As a result, CDC is now advising consumers to postpone eating products that contain peanut butter (such as cookies…
revere | January 12, 2009DemFromCt's excellent post at DailyKos alerted us to the fact that this year's vaccine appears to have a mismatched influenza B component. Each year vaccine makers try to anticipate the strains that will be circulating 6 months hence, based on surveillance data. They have been fairly good with their guesses but things seem to be getting more complicated in recent years and mismatched strains are becoming more common, that is, the vaccines don't protect as well or at all against the strains that are actually circulating. There are three strains in the yearly "flu shot," two influenza A strains…
mikethemadbiologist | January 11, 2009This is change I can believe in. Gerberding has been awful. Not only has morale dropped on her watch (something that I observed anecdotally, and is backed up by these reports), but she also didn't stand up for the science when that science was politically incorrect.
More from CNN:
Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will leave her post by noon on January 20, the day President-elect Barack Obama is to be sworn in to office.
In an e-mail to the staff at the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC, outgoing HHS Secretary…
revere | January 11, 2009A genuine fear among many in the public health community was that Obama would not replace Dr. Julie Gerberding as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (aka, the CDC). I am relieved to report that she will be out in 9 days, although she isn't going willingly and will wring every last second of power and salary out of it: literally. Her requested resignation is effective at noon on January 20 just as Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States:
CDC Director Julie Gerberding's controversial tenure will end Jan. 20 -- after Barack Obama is sworn in as president,…
revere | January 9, 2009You may be surprised to learn (I was) that the US is having a large (almost 400 people) multistate (42) salmonella outbreak (S. typhimurium, often but not always associated with poultry and dairy products). So far 67 hospitalizations, with patients spanning the age spectrum (ages 1 to 103).DNA fingerprinting has established all cases are related (a common source or sources). Oh, and one more thing. It didn't just begin. Apparently it's been going on since sometime in September.
Like the plat du jour, this is the salmonella outbreak du jour. Last summer we were treated to the tomatoes-cilantro…
revere | November 18, 2008It's now two and half months since CDC and US FDA declared an end to the infamous tomatoes-no-it's-peppers salmonella outbreak of last summer. The outbreak itself was even longer: 3 months. There were some 1400 reported cases but probably many more that escaped detection. That's typical for foodborne disease outbreaks.
In case you've forgotten, here's a summary, courtesy Georgetown University's Produce Safety Project (PSP):
Although CDC and FDA initially pointed in early June to tomatoes as the cause of the outbreak based on epidemiological data, no contaminated tomato was ever found. In…
mikethemadbiologist | November 13, 2008In light of all the executive branch changes people are hoping for, I wonder how much longer CDC Director Julie Gerberding has. I'm guessing she's there until late January....
I don't claim to speak for CDC employees, but, in some divisions, morale is incredibly low--people are considering leaving as soon as they can*. This doesn't sound like a well run organization to me.
As far as I can tell, Gerberding has never stood up to Congress, which means when everything becomes a priority, or at least the priority du jour, then nothing is a priority. I've also heard her prattle on about the need…
revere | November 7, 2008So we have more Salmonella contamination out and about. This one is in dry pet food. But it wasn't the pets that were getting the Salmonella:
Salmonella-contaminated dry pet food sickened at least 79 people, including many young children, and could still be dangerous, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.
Even though the affected brands have been recalled and the factory in Pennsylvania closed, pet owners could still have the cat and dog kibble in their homes, the CDC said.
[snip]
"Dry pet food has a 1-year shelf life. Contaminated products identified in…
revere | September 20, 2008Generals are often said to be fighting the last war and public health officials likewise are managing the last crisis. At the end of May 2007 we had the notorious flying lawyer with TB flap (see our multiple posts here), so in June 2007 CDC quietly instituted their public health version of the "No Fly" list. I guess because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) No Fly list has been so incompetently and dangerously implemented CDC didn't want to taint their version with the same name, so they are calling it the Do Not Board (ENB) list. The DHS list is pushing a million entries. Pretty soon…
revere | August 27, 2008I have been severely critical (many posts among those here) of the Indonesian government's irresponsible assertions of ownership of potentially pandemic pathogenic viruses isolated from their citizens. The question of Intellectual Property is a difficult one in many instances but when it comes to a public good involving a global scourge, some of the gray areas become more black and white. The world has been struggling with the issue regarding the global influenza surveillance system for two years now, precipitated by Indonesia's refusal to cooperate any longer, resulting in a significant gap…
revere | August 14, 2008The headline was kind of strange: Doctor pays for 'letting polio out of hospital'. It sounded like a hospital doctor had negligently let an infectious polio case out into the community. But in fact the doctor was the hero of the story:
A Samundri Tehsil Headquarters Hospital child specialist, who spilled the beans of polio cases before the media, has been awarded suspension from service, Dawn learnt on Tuesday.
The district administration hastened to take the decision after the doctor informed journalists about the suspected cases of polio at Samundri's villages. (Dawn [Pakistan])
This sorry…
revere | August 10, 2008There are 163 days left in the Bush administration and we can hope that there are that number -- or less -- left in the Gerberding era at CDC. Julie Gerberding is the CDC Director and her abrasive, brutal and incompetent management style have taken the agency that was the jewel in the crown of federal public health and made it into a second rate, muscle-bound bureaucracy. The CDC-Gerberding slide has been going on for a long time and we have talked about it often here, almost from the start of this blog in 2004. Even though she is presumably in the final months of her tenure (she's a…
revere | July 21, 2008Lots of bloggers follow HIV/AIDS, although we haven't. Maybe because it's no longer an automatic death sentence, it has fallen off the public radar screen, but not because it isn't a huge public health problem. Just how big a problem seems to be a matter of some sensitivity for the Bush administration:
Since the fall of last year, rumors have been circulating that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will release revised statistics indicating that the number of people with new HIV infections living with HIV in the United States is actually higher than previously reported. Some…
revere | July 20, 2008The US FDA is lifting the warning on eating tomatoes it issued on June 7 because of the country's largest produce-associated foodborne Salmonella outbreak. The source of the Salmonella infections, all said to be "genetically identical" isolates of an uncommon serovar is still to be discovered, although epidemiological evidence associated it with salsa containing fresh tomatoes. Later the possibility that other salsa ingredients such as jalapeno peppers or cilantro might be the culprit has been raised. So far no one seems to know how that thousand plus cases became infected with the Salmonella…
revere | July 14, 2008CDC has discovered a new way a bird can cause bird flu: its own incompetence:
A laboratory building that contains a deadly strain of avian flu and other germs is among four that lost power for more than an hour Friday when a backup generator system failed again at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Alison Young, Atlanta Journal Constitution)
The outage was due to a bird causing a Georgia Power transformer to fail.
As Tom Skinner, CDC spokesperson/flack points out, power outages happen and at a complex campus like CDC's they are unavoidable. Powered systems are not the only…
revere | July 6, 2008It's not bad enough that the professional heart of CDC is heading for the exits as fast as they can get there in response to the high handed, abrasive and incompetent management of its Director, Dr. Julie Gerberding. Not bad enough at all. Dr. Gerberding now is getting rid of good people who haven't voluntarily jumped ship. Celeste Montforton at the public health blog, The Pump Handle, where we sometimes post and which is one of the mainstays of the public health blogosphere, brings us news that Dr. John Howard, Director for the last six years of the National Institute of Occupational Health…
revere | July 5, 2008Three food safety stories in the news this Fourth of July weekend. All three are worrisome but the third is the most worrisome of all. What are the first two?
You know them. The first is the largest produce associated multistate Salmonella outbreak on record (now over 900 cases in 40 states) rages on. Have they found the contaminated tomatoes? No. But now they think the tomatoes might be jalapeno peppers. Or maybe cilantro:
Investigators are seeing more signs that the salmonella outbreak blamed on tomatoes might have been caused by tainted jalapeno peppers and have begun collecting samples…