One of my longtime readers (LR) came to meet up with me in Beantown and we went to hit the American Craft Beer Festival that happened this past weekend in Boston’s World Trade Center complex. Apparently the turnout for our session (there were three) was 3,300+, and it certainly felt like trudging through a slough of human bodies to get to the goodies.

Despite the crowd, the $40 entrance fee was totally worth it. We found quite a few new drinks to our liking. Descriptions from the program and (my) ratings out of four are as follows:

4/4

• 21st Amendment Brewery’s Brew Free or Die IPA (American India Pale Ale / 7.0%) – I usually don’t like IPAs, but this one had an incredible flavor!
• Brooklyn Brewery’s Intensified Coffee Stout (Stout w/ coffee from Stumptown Coffee Roasters, raw demerara and Malavi sugar / 8.0%) – a truly excellent coffee stout that, unlike many others, tastes of both coffee and stout, yet without the ridiculous overdose of hops that predominates the American stouts
• Cambridge Brewing Co’s Biére de Miel (Belgian-style Honey Ale / 8.6%) – the accent is wrong (it should have been bière), but the taste is spot on – light, yet full of yeasty and meady goodness
• Sherwood Forest Brewers’ Maiden’s Blueberry Ale (5.3%) – Most decidedly not a fruit bomb – has incredible aroma of blueberries, and drinks like a real ale with just a hint of fruit. I could drink this one all day.
• Southern Tier Brewing Co’s Mokah (Imperial Stout brewed w/ coffee & chocolate / 11.0%) – If you could distill all the yumminess of quality dark, 70% chocolate into an abstract taste and fragrance, and brew it with a rich, full-bodied (but not burnt!) arabica coffee, and make stout of it, this would be very close to that abstract, perfect ideal.
• Weyerbacher Brewing Co’s XIV (Belgian Wheat Wine / 11.8%) – I have never had wheat wine before, but this is incredibly potent and smooth, and dangerously addictive.

3/4

• Berkshire Brewing Co’s Nitro Coffee (Nitrogenated Porter w/ organic coffee beans from Dean’s Beans / 6.2%) – The nitrogenation, I assume, was not of the electrophilic substitution type, but merely the much tamer deaeration process to remove dissolve gasses. At any rate the Coffee was smooth and well brewed, almost like a good cuppa joe, if you could make it with cold, delicious beer instead of hot water.
• Brewery Ommegang’s Three Philosophers (Abbey Style Quadrupel / 9.8%) – I can remember little more other than mmmm!! and wanting to drink more, more, MOAR!!
• Paper City Brewery’s Radler Brau (Pale Ale w/ natural lemon flavoring / 6.2%) – Amazingly refreshing and light, and unbelievably drinkable. It did taste, however, like a good ale with lemon dunked in it, just without the pith and seeds to futz around with.

2/4

• High and Mighty’s Two-Headed Beast (Chocolate Stout brewed w/ organic raw cacao / 4.8%) – by far and away the best chocolate stout at the festival. The chocolaty flavor stood out very strongly.
• Left Hand’s Juju Ginger Ale (Herb/Spice Beer / 4.0%) – Yummy.
• Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project’s Confounded Mister Sisyphus (Saison w/ Balaton cherries / 7.0%) – the cherries added a very pleasant tart berryness to the drink.
• Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project’s Jack D’Or (Saison Americain / 6.5%) – Light, smooth, and drinkable.
• Weyerbacher Brewing Co’s Zotten (Belgian-style Pale Ale / 6.0%) – Had a pleasantly strong kick to it. Full-bodied but still eminently drinkable.
• Woodstock Inn Brewery’s Pigs Ear Brown Ale (4.3%) – Another full-bodied ale that’s fun to down.

1/4

• 21st Amendment Brewery’s Hell or High Watermelon (Wheat beer / 5.0%) – The watermelon wasn’t as crazy an idea as we’d thought. It was served with a heaped tablespoonful of diced watermelon, which made it gimmicky, but it was a fun drink nonetheless. LR thinks it rates at least a 2/4, partly for the whimsy, but there’s no accounting for tastes.
• High & Mighty’s St. Hubbins Alley (Unfiltered Golden w/ coriander & orange peel / 5.0%) – light and refreshing, but that was about it.
• Sixpoint Craft Ales’s Northern Lights (Wormwood saison / 6.3%) – This past weekend was the first time I have had saison, and I have no idea what the wormwood added to this one. It was decent though.
• Surly Brewing Co’s Coffee Bender (Bender / Guatemalan coffee beans / 5.2%) – My first Bender, although I still have no idea what the defining characteristics of this variety are. LR liked it, and regarded it like a slightly bitterer McCoffee. I didn’t care for the overroasted, burnt taste and dumped the rest of it out.
• Surly Brewing Co’s CynicAle (saison / 6.6%) – I tried this mostly because I had no idea what a saison was. It was not bad, although LR was unimpressed, and thought it was merely an expensive imitation of Tiger Beer.

Missed Connection: we wanted to try Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project’s Baby Tree (Abbey Quadrupel w/ dried plums / 8.7%), but it was all out by the time we got there, which was just one hour after the doors opened! We wondered if it would taste like sng mui, or Yomeishu, or if it were indeed a genuinely better creation than the aforementioned Asian Auntie Articles™.

There were many “meh” drinks, and many drinks that were just plain bad. However we also have to give kudos to the few that were genuinely awful:

• Brookyln Brewery’s Cuvée de Cardoz (Belgian-style Wheat Beer w/ ginger, tamarind, mace, black pepper, coriander, fennel, fenugreek, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, chilies and toasted coconut / 8.0%) – There was only a slim chance of this not turning into some kind of alcoholic herbal poultice-slurry, and indeed our initial expectations were spot on. It was more out of morbid curiosity than optimism that we actually bothered to try this one. As it turns out, cuvée is jargon for beer blended to achieve a particular taste. It’s clear that the intention was to evoke sophisticated reminisces of Indian curry, but in our opinions merely produced a concoction of random herbs a cat knocked off a supermarket spice rack and then proceeded to pee on.
  
• Smuttynose Brewing Co’s Gravitation Ale (Belgian quad w/ raisin puree / 8.5%) – tasted like mildly sweetened puke, and has the singular distinction of being the only beer I’ve had so far that elicited a visceral reaction from me – I felt like retching.
• Southern Tier Brewing Co’s Jah-va (Imperial Coffee Stout w/ Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee beans) Tasted like soy sauce, and was not unlike expired Bovril too.

From Commencement

Congratulations to all my fellow graduates!

Lee Wei Ling recently wrote to the Straits Times’s forum, suggesting to relax quarantine policies in response to the inevitable spread of the current swine flu virus. In response, Ng E-Jay writes what presumably was intended as a scathing indictment of a member of the Lee family, by accusing her of “practicing bad statistics and horrible science”.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While Professor Lee is not an epidemiologist, her suggestions are in accord with (and indeed, come directly from) the current prevailing opinions of leading epidemiologists. According to spokesman Gregory Herzl, the World Health Organization’s post mortem analyses of the most recent avian flu outbreak showed that policies designed to curb international travel were completely ineffective in halting the transmission of avian flu. Lee’s suggestion is quite simple: since such policies don’t work, we might as well accept the inevitable; besides, there is a side benefit in exposing the population to a mild virus since they are then prepared for related but more deadly viruses in the future. This is essentially the same idea behind vaccination, translated from the individual level to that of entire populations. Let the current H1N1 flu virus vaccinate people against more deadly and virulent forms that are more likely to evolve and arise in the future, and if enough people are resistant, there won’t be enough chains of infection for an epidemic of the deadlier (and as yet hypothetical) virus to develop.

In contrast, Ng E-Jay doesn’t like this idea at all, and the raison d’être for his Lee-bashing post appears to be his claim that contrary to claims by the media and the health care professionals, the H1N1 influenza virus is actually 100 times more fatal than the common flu. To substantiate this claim, Ng computes the fatality rate of the current swine flu outbreak as 56 reported deaths in Mexico out of 2,003 confirmed cases = 2.8%. To estimate the fatality rate of the common flu, Ng estimates “conservatively” that 150 million Americans get the common flu annually, and based on CDC estimates of 36,000 deaths in the US annually as a result of flu, gets a rate of 0.024% for the common flu.

Unfortunately, it is clear that Ng didn’t do his homework. His analysis is greatly flawed for a number of reasons which are outlined above.

• The actual number of H1N1 infections in Mexico is likely to be much greater than the officially reported numbers.

To count as a documented case, a number of things must happen:

1. A person is infected by the H1N1 virus.
2. The infected person gets sick and exhibits flu symptoms.
3. The sick person goes to the doctor.
4. The doctor diagnoses flu and suspects H1N1.
5. The doctor sends samples out to labs for a microbiological assay.
6. The lab result must turn out positive for H1N1.

All these events must happen to count. Unfortunately, they don’t always happen. Infected persons don’t necessary become sick, sick people may not have access to reliable health care or choose not to see a doctor, doctors need to decide if it’s worth the extra trouble and money for extra testing, and labs can make mistakes. This is discounting other important distorting factors such as the incubation time of a disease and sometimes even deliberate cover-ups by various authorities, as did occur in China during the SARS outbreak not too long ago.

A useful rule of thumb was posited by Dr. Gordon Dickinson, chief of infectious diseases at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and the Miami Veterans’ Association, who noted that “For every confirmed case, however, there are probably hundreds of unconfirmed cases”. [ref. 6]

• When an epidemic first gets going, cases are underreported.

The Mexican data are severely skewed because when a breakout first occurs, people aren’t prepared to document a new epidemic. In fact, virologists estimate that the current H1N1 flu virus arose as early as September 2008, and thus at least half a year’s worth of cases went unreported in Mexico. Furthermore, the first reported cases in Mexico were thought to have originated in the commuter town of La Gloria, Veracruz, a remote mountain town that nonetheless has a large transient workforce that works in Mexico City. If this is indeed the origin of swine flu, it is likely that many of these patients could have sustained many lines of transmission before they became documented cases of swine flu. The demographics also suggest that these people may have been too poor to afford the time or money to seek health care.

• Ng should have compared US data for common flu with US data for swine flu, not Mexican data for swine flu.

A far more accurate comparison of the type Ng is attempting can be made using US data because

1. Mexico’s current estimate of the fatality rate is 2.8%, but this is likely to be a severe overestimate because many cases would have gone unreported.
2. Such a comparison controls for other important factors such as the accessibility of health care, demographic variations in age (and thus resistance to disease), and geographic distribution, etc. that vary greatly from the US to Mexico.
3. The US health care system is better equipped for accurate reporting and dissemination, and they have also been alerted by the outbreak in Mexico and have been on full alert since very close to the onset of outbreaks within the US.

In fact, the CDC’s latest numbers suggest that the US fatality rate is 4 deaths / 4,714 cases = 0.085%, which is far less than the 3% that Ng bandies about. This number isn’t too accurate because more sick patients may die as the disease progresses, which would raise the fatality rate by ca. 0.02% per new death; however, the US is much better prepared to make accurate records of documented cases, and the error in the denominator is likely to be quite small. Interestingly, there are more documented cases of swine flu in the US than in Mexico, but again this is to be expected because of underreporting in Mexico.

• Ng overestimates the number of common flu cases in the US.

The CDC website provides numbers to suggest that the actual number of common flu cases to be 5 – 20% of the population annually, which translates to 15 to 60 million cases annually. Thus the fatality rate of common flu in the US is about 36,000/15,000,000 to 60,000,000 = 0.06% to 0.24%. Thus Ng’s use of 150 million cases is off by a factor of 2.5 to 10 – not too bad for a number pulled out of thin air, but still not great.

Summary and Conclusion

Ng’s main bone of contention is that swine flu is more deadly than regular flu, and therefore it makes no sense to abandon our current policies to risk exposure to the current H1N1 epidemic. Furthermore, Ng estimates the fatality rate of swine flu to be 3% and that of common flu to be 0.024%. In contrast, an analysis based on available data online, which took all of ten minutes to collect and verify, gave rates of 0.08 – 0.1% for swine flu versus 0.06% – 0.24% for common flu in the United States. While some of these numbers are quite rough, this shows quite conclusively that there is no compelling evidence to support the claim that swine flu is significantly more fatal than the common flu. The person who is really doing “practicing bad statistics and horrible science” is not Lee, but Ng, for his incredibly sloppy comparison of apples and oranges, and using very poor estimates to boot.

Disclaimers

I am not an epidemiologist, nor am I a doctor. My qualifications in microbiology and epidemiology are limited to a term paper on the mathematics of epidemic spreads and conversations with PhD students in those fields

If you experience flu-like symptoms, call a doctor.

References

1. Lee Wei Ling, Straits Times, Let it in while benign to develop herd immunity, 2009-05-12.
2. Ng E-Jay, Sgpolitics.net, Prof Lee Wei Ling is practicing bad statistics and horrible science, 2009-05-15.
3. Latin American Herald Tribune, Swine-Flu Deaths Reach 56 in Mexico.
4. CDC H1N1 Flu Update, accessed 2009-05-15.
5. Joe Cohen and Martin Enserink, Science, As Swine Flu Circles Globe, Scientists Grapple With Basic Questions, 324 (5927), 2009, 572-573. doi:10.1126/science.324_572.
6. HealthDay news, Study Supports Swine Flu’s Pandemic Potential, 2009-05-12.

For the rest of you who have been tireless supporters of the AcidFlask banner, thank you! Your support over the years have been very much appreciated.

It is also time to retire the old blog address and move to this shiny new address at acfsk.com, hosted by NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Hopefully all the redirections have been done correctly to make this move as painless as possible.

And so Chapter III of the AcidFlask Chronicles is hereby concluded.

Best moments

Best Rosa Parks tribute: NMP Siew Kum Hong, for having been asked by Josie Lau to sit in the area reserved for associate members, and refusing, thus precipitating the first open scuffle of the meeting between the Old Guard and New Guard.

Most quotable New Guard: Sally Ang, for her “shut up and sit down” outburst.

Most poignant audience address: A tudung clad Malay-Muslim woman, expressing her discomfort over AWARE being led by an exclusively Chinese, predominantly Christian exco. “Where’s the diversity?”

Honorable mention: Irene Ang, “I have no confidence and just for the record, I’m a Christian and I love God like you do.”

Most offbeat moment: A man taking the audience microphone, only to announce that he was looking for his mother.

Honorable mention: the man who complained that for the $40 he paid, the food wasn’t that great.

Honorable mention: the woman who knitted her way through the fracas surrounding Josie Lau’s opening speech.

Greatest advance in homophobia research: The former AWARE Exco and organizers, for having the microphones mysteriously switch off in the middle of questions about the new exco’s policies and attitudes toward homosexuality.

Best epic delusion: Thio Su Mien: “I believe I’m a feminist mentor because you have put me in your book! All of you have been asked to read about women who are (sic) first in the field, and I’m so charmed when I discovered that I’m even in this book! – it was the one given to me – that I’m in this book on page 73! So you may have to tear this book up – [our article - hope you've all read it]* And also [interrupts self] Please be polite, people. Show some respect for your elders, OK?” The entire speech on Vimeo is just priceless. (Disclaimer: my transcription, made harder by the heckling. Sentence in [*] is my wild guess at what was actually said.)

The Page 73 Speech from missbossy on Vimeo.

Most embarrassing leak: Josie Lau admitting that Thio Su Mien was responsible for masterminding the takeover and controlling much of the new committee.

Most persistent question: the woman who got escorted out after asking repeatedly for the new exco to disclose how much they spent on the meeting.

Best vanishing act: Josie Lau and the Pussy Cats, for sneaking out of the meeting by the back door after losing the vote of no confidence.

Most afflicted English accent: Josie Lau. Enough said.

Best twitter coverage: @patlaw. This one was really tough – other very close honorable mentions: @dominicsoon @kaitentoshi @Germaine @euniqueflair @unfluff.

Best liveblog: Wayang Party blew The Online Citizen out of the water for its meticulous transcripting, whereas the latter’s site succumbed more often to bandwidth quota errors and server crashes.

Best photographic coverage: @gniliep’s blow-by-blow twitpic stream.

Best video coverage: @stuartkoe, for his youtube vids.

Most exotic correspondence location: @skinnylatte, for following the news all the way from Damascus, Syria!

Most irrelevant news coverage: CNA for being quick to file the opening report, having it picked up by the local news twitbots, then have it rapidly fall off the radar into obsolescence.

Funniest twit: @feministmentor.

Worst pun: @jerrzt, replying to @mrbrown “I am suprised police never make folks at AWARE EOGM surrender their shoes. Heels can hurt leh”, with “heels don’t matter when their soles are at stake! ”

Entrepreneurship awards

Most enterprising twit: @bionic_creative for masterminding the AWARE EGM T-shirts. Get them from a Singapore or US supplier.

Most profitable venture: Suntec City, for taking $18k in booking fees for 3 hours of Rm 402, plus presumably a whole lot more for the 4+ hours of overtime.

Most unexpected benefactor: Harvey Norman. as @JoeAugustin put it, “In unrelated news Harvey Norman does brisk business in Suntec as hundreds of husbands and boyfriends wait around for other halfs.” (sic)

Boston calls.

June.

soon.

Acidflask: i am starting the AcidFlask Fan Club. Only $50 for ordinary member, $100 will get you Honorable Mention on my blog and $1000 will buy you my undying love. on or not?
Cowboy Caleb: depends if you are a foreigner who has exploited the system or not
Cowboy Caleb: or if you are an oppresive meta-blogger
Acidflask: neither, i’m just a blogwhore
Cowboy Caleb: Oh I am starting The Non-Blogger’s Association of Singapore & Bangladesh
Cowboy Caleb: only 3 goats and a chicken to join
Cowboy Caleb: then a yearly subscription fee of a dozen eggs
Acidflask: gotta have a Member With Work Permit bundle
Acidflask: WPs for first 50 members
Acidflask: plus free timeshare package for housing under your kelong
Acidflask: for an extra cow you can get a bj from a rockson girl
Cowboy Caleb: Hey, are our associations subject to government audits or not? Later people say we NKF due to all those crazy bling bling product reviews then how?!
Acidflask: nah i’m gonna just register it here in the US
Acidflask: tax-free leh
Cowboy Caleb: You fucking foreign freeloader oppressing our local blogosphere!
Acidflask: I bathe in your tears BUAHAHA
Cowboy Caleb: buahahahha
Cowboy Caleb: for chrissakes blog this conversation
Acidflask: oh wait i got another idea
Acidflask: The Association of Totally Atas Singaporeans (A.T.A.S.)
Acidflask: opt-in system
Acidflask: you have to pay $50 to get out
Cowboy Caleb: sounds like a MLM!
Acidflask: plus must write in a petition countersigned by your local MP to get the application of opt-out form
Acidflask: if cannot then you must get the Town Council to spend $10m to sequence your genome and email to me for verification
Acidflask: $1m discount if you do it at Biopolis
Acidflask: and you CANNOT mail in sperm samples or vaginal discharges
Cowboy Caleb: is there a government subsidy for association fees?
Acidflask: only if you receive the full $350 subsidy a month
Acidflask: and got an angpow from the PAP for CNY
Cowboy Caleb: buaahahhahaha
Acidflask: also you must have a signed certificate from the Singapore Flyer saying you completed their six hour sitting marathon
Cowboy Caleb: I…must…resist…urge..to..blog…about.. silly…blogger.. associations
Acidflask: eh i really blog ah
Cowboy Caleb: ok ok

I accept PayPal or cash. No purchase necessary to win. Void where prohibited.

UPDATE 1/22: If you have a Facebook account, join my Association of Tyrannicidal AcidFlask Supporters (Facebook) chapter. The A.T.A.S. (F) link is http://tinyurl.com/fatas

Some of you have been asking why this blog hasn’t been updated recently.

The reason is because I am writing my dissertation. Unlike some people *cough Kevin cough* who still find time to update, I don’t that ability to write two divergent tomes at once.

Next semester will be my last as a graduate student.

If you’re curious as to how things are going, you can follow me on Twitter or peek at my reading list on Shelfari. Otherwise I’m sure you know where to find me.

See you all on the other side.