Effect Measure

Dying for a home

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:58:00 -0500

A tragedy in Massachusetts is highlighting the terrible strain the housing crisis is taking on millions of former homeowners who are losing their homes:

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Why should the military get a scarce pandemic flu vaccine before almost everyone else?

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:44:39 -0500

The headline said, "Vaccination plan puts health care workers first," but you had to read the article to find out who goes next: the military. This according to the Guidance on allocating and targeting pandemic influenza vaccine released yesterday by the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The guidance is premised on the assumption that in the early phases of a pandemic, any vaccine will be in short supply and will need to be rationed. The document gives "strong advice" on how DHHS thinks this rationing should take place, although much is left unexplained. Since the allocation to states will come from a national stockpile, the strong advice will have some weight. Moreover, some of the vaccine will be taken "off the top" for federal government use and this will not be subject to any decisions downstream. And some of the federal allocations appear to us to be highly questionable:

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The Katrina aid that wasn't

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:45:38 -0500

Hurricane season is upon us (Hello, Dolly), so it's time to drag out the still heaving corpse of Hurricane Katrina. There was always this weird mismatch between Bush administration tales of how much aid was going to the victims and the pictures of forlorn, unaided and then outraged victims. Given the huge amount of federal aid, some may have thought that ungrateful. But what was "given" can be taken away by just moving a few decimal points:

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The Iraq-Pakistan border is not a problem

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:33:19 -0500

This is the first, and I hope the last, time I come anywhere near defending Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, but I want to make a more general point so I'll swallow hard and do it. This is about his supposed gaffe wherein he seems to think Iraq and Pakistan share a border:

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Salmonella outbreak developments

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:26:47 -0500

The tomatoes-peppers-cilantro-? Salmonella story is starting to break, although which way is hard to say at this moment. Beginning about 3 pm yesterday afternoon newswire stories began to report that the FDA had found a single jalapeno pepper in a small distribution center in McAllen, Texas, contaminated with the same uncommon Salmonella serovar (S. stpaul) implicated in a large outbreak that has infected over 1200 people in 43 states. This is the first time any food item has turned up positive for this Salmonella strain in the 14 weeks federal and state authorities have been trying to nail down the source of the infection. So this is significant progress, although it is tempered by the fact that the comparison is no progress. At this point, however, we don't know exactly what it means:

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HIV/AIDS grossly underestimated in US?

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:58:57 -0500

Lots 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:

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Spoiling the tomato barrel

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:28:46 -0500

The 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, although the evidence still suggests a single common source that was widely distributed in the food chain. Meanwhile the tomato industry has suffered serious economic losses and consumers are still wary. If Mrs. R. is any gauge, many people have changed their grocery buying habits -- even though she never believed tomatoes were the cause of the outbreak (the fact that she is married to an epidemiologist may have colored her opinion a bit). "It just made them unappetizing," she told me. We have a tomato plant that is producing lots of tomatoes, so we haven't had to depend on the store. Poll results, in fact, show she is typical, and it's not just tomatoes:

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Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Prime Movers

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 07:41:36 -0500

I ran across this on a linguistics blog. Their interest was in the origin of the phrases, "Blackjack. No tagbacks" in the last panel. The consensus was it refers to school yard games where you can't turn around and just tag the tagger in a game of tag. It makes sense in this context. And it's the only thing in the three panels that does make sense. Because if you think through what's being said here, it is the "first mover" argument, so beloved of creationists, flipped on its head and applied to an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic God:

I put it to you: if there were no people, then where did the first God come from?! QED.

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"One donut, decaf, no glaze, no powdered sugar"

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:50:05 -0500

About a year and half ago, in a post entitled "One donut, black", I noted the claim of a food company that it would soon be able to sell donuts spiked with caffeine. I wasn't sure I would ever see such a thing, but I was too skeptical. Not only is that company still on track with its product, but another company has now announced its intention to put caffeine into bakery goods. All for our benefit, of course:

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The US is one of the better off developing nations

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:06:18 -0500

If you make a ranked list among developed nations on how well the US is doing in health care, we are towards the top of the list. If you hold the list upside down:

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"Braised enterovirus" and "Fuck the spring chicken"

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 07:30:25 -0500

Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD, not to be confused with a disease of cattle, Foot and Mouth Disease) is the result of an infection by one of several intestinal viruses, the most common being Coxsackie A and Enterovirus 71 (Ev71). HFMD is a fairly common contagious infection of infants and children that often appears in outbreak form in schools and daycare centers. Children with HFMD have fever, sore throat and characteristic lesions around the mouth and in the throat. Recently some very sizable outbreaks caused by Ev71 have been reported in China, Singapore and Mongolia, with thousands of cases and scores of deaths. It made news headlines around the world and within China. Given the way news of disease outbreaks is handled in China, this isn't a given, unfortunately, but in this case the Chinese were quite aware of the outbreak and its cause (for more on the outbreak in East Asia, see the great eye witness account by Tara Smith over at Aetiology). That seems to be the explanation for the "braised enterovirus" on the menu of this Chinese restaurant (h/t reader gh):

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Swimming and the "one hour rule"

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:18:40 -0500

A recent news article by Helen Branswell of Canadian Press ("Wait an hour to swim after eating? Says who?") contained two pieces of information, one that surprised me and one that didn't. Branswell was writing about the well worn safety advice to wait at least an hour after eating before going in swimming. This was a rule I remember as far back as I remember anything about what I was told about water safety. She points out that no one seems to know the basis of the alleged fact that to do otherwise courts the risk of developing muscle cramps that could lead to drowning. The theory, as I remember it, was that blood needed by your muscles was being diverted to your intestines for digestion. Not enough blood in the muscles led to cramps. Cramps while in water over your head might make it impossible to stay with your head above water. Etc.

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KBR and DoD expose workers and soldiers to a carcinogen but it's not a big deal

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:28:54 -0500

What's a little sodium dichromate, anyway? So it's a known human carcinogen and can do a lot of other nasty things. No big deal. Not for Iraq war contractor, KBR, anyway. At the time KBR was a subsidiary of ~~Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's~~ Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton. So when they were given a lucrative contract to clean up and safeguard Iraqi oilfields after the Bush Mission was Accomplished in 2003, they told the soldiers and workers that the chemical, used as an antirust agent and then strewn all over the oil facilities, was a "mild irritant." Later they admitted this wasn't exactly accurate, so the Army tested blood and urine of over a hundred of the workers for chromium. No problem:

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Bush's CDC is a freak accident waiting to happen

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:05:43 -0500

CDC has discovered a new way a bird can cause bird flu: its own incompetence:

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The shame of clusterbombs

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:30:41 -0500

Cluster bombs are designed to do just one thing: kill people. It doesn't matter if the people are soldiers or not. In fact cluster bombs kill more civilians than they kill combatants. These diabolical weapons (I can't think of a better word) are not just one bomb but hundreds of little bomblets, each a small grenade, that scatter over a wide area and then explode. Or not. And that's the problem. Unexploded ordinance that later explode when disturbed by a farmer's plow, a child playing in the field or a family's valuable livestock. The civilized world wants to ban cluster bombs. The United States is not a part of the civilized world and opposes any ban on cluster bombs, as does Israel who used them two years ago in their invasion of Lebanon and reaped the justifiable condemnation of the civilized world. Which apparently doesn't include israel, either. The UN estimates there are 100,000 unexploded bomblets scattered around populated areas of south Levanon. In fact there are a fair number of rogue cluster bomb making nations besides Israel and the US, including Russia, Pakistan, China and India, none of whom can claim to represent civilized nations, either.

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