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By Laura H. Kahn
The medical community is devoting a lot of effort to researching bioterrorism agents and diseases that could become human pandemics. But in many cases, they’re overlooking a potentially critical resource: veterinarians.
Zoonoses are diseases of animals that can be transmitted to humans. These diseases include: SARS, West Nile virus, HIV/AIDS, and recently avian influenza (H5N1). Many of the agents of bioterrorism are zoonotic in origin such as anthrax, tularemia, and plague. Veterinarians have long recognized the interconnectedness between human and animal health and gave it the term “One Medicine” to reflect this fact. Historically, human and animal diseases have largely been treated as separate entities since physicians and veterinarians do not commonly communicate or collaborate with each other. In the course of my research on emerging infectious disease outbreaks, I came to the realization of the importance of zoonotic diseases after reading the veterinary medical literature.
by PotomacFeverish
What is on the agenda for science during the last 2 years of this Administration? Many believe that with the change in Congress, now we can relax regarding the abuse of science that we have seen in recent years. The scientific community needs to be aware that much of the actions taken by the Executive Branch cannot be blocked by Congress, at least not in the short term. Every administration has made promises, and they often endeavor to come through on these promises during the last few years (or even the last few months) of their term of office. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if the goals are consistent with good science, public health and the law. Are we going to see a “compromising” Executive Branch, working with Congress, promoting good science, or are we going to see more of what we have seen in the past, issuing of regulations, decisions, and policies that undermine the missions of our health, environment, and science-based agencies?
by Susan F. Wood
Much has been written about the antibiotic drug, telithromycin, otherwise known as Ketek. It seems to combine a host of concerns all in one place (see also Matthews, AW, WSJ, May 19, 2006:B1). Critically, concerns about safety, from visual effects to fatal liver toxicity, are paired with questions about lack of relative efficacy. These very basic concerns are then confounded with problems in particular safety studies that were carried out fraudulently and the faulty data derived from it provided to the FDA. But FDA leadership/management apparently discounted these problems, did not relay this information to the advisory committee which recommended approval, and approved this new drug in 2004. This past summer more concerns were raised about studies on Ketek in children; these are no longer ongoing, but FDA has yet to take specific action on whether these studies are permissible.
In last week’s New England Journal of Medicine, David Graham points out another weakness in the approval of Ketek(NEJM, 355(21), November 23, 2006, 2260-2261). He reports on the fact that given the fraudulent safety study, FDA used adverse event data from Germany and France where Ketek is marketed. Unfortunately, Dr. Graham’s analysis points out that the data was insufficient to detect a signal for a safety problem, but “the FDA interpreted the absence of a signal of acute liver failure in the overseas data as confirmation of telithromycin’s safety when the data could not be used to identify the problem.”
By David Michaels
In a move that recognizes the post-election climate change in Washington, the EPA has told two Democratic Senators that it is revising plans to roll-back the reporting requirements of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). In a post yesterday, I wrote about TRI as an important (and cost-effective) example of “Regulation by Shaming” or “Democracy by Disclosure.”
Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post obtained the letter EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson sent to New Jersey Democratic senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez in which he announced his plans. According to Eilperin, one of the nation’s best environmental reporters, this change
highlights how the political climate has shifted since the Democrats won control of the House and Senate. The administration is not likely to bend on its top environmental priorities, such as climate change, but it may make concessions on other fronts.
By David Michaels
Last week, public scorn forced Rupert Murdock, powerful chief executive of the News Corp, to cancel “If I Did It,” OJ Simpson’s book and Fox TV tie-in. While shaming has fallen out of favor in the field of criminal justice, the heaping of public scorn and anger – dating back to putting criminals in public stocks and labeling adulterers with a scarlet letter — has long been recognized as a deterrent to unacceptable behavior
Shaming works on corporations as well as individuals. As a mechanism for restricting undesirable behavior, or promoting desirable behavior, shaming is far less expensive or bureaucratic than most rules enforced by federal agency. Some of our most effective public health programs work on this principle – think about the impact of potential customers reading graphic descriptions of restaurant health code violations.
Read the rest of this entry »
by Liz Borkowski
Parties to the Basel Convention—the international treaty dealing with the transport and disposal of hazardous wastes—are meeting this week in Nairobi, and e-waste is on their agenda. Each year, consumers generate 20 – 50 million tons of e-waste (waste from electrical and electronic equipment), and it’s full of hazardous substances: heavy metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, and chromium, and flame retardants such as polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) and polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDEs).
Much of the e-waste ends up in developing countries, where its toxic components endanger workers and the environment. In a 2003 Washington Post article, Peter S. Goodman offered a disturbing portrait of its effects:
By David Michaels
Meat factories continue to be among the most dangerous places to work in America. According to a devastating article in the Dallas Morning News, “thousands of illegal immigrants gravitate toward meatpacking plants in places like Cactus, Texas” where each year more than one out of every ten workers gets injured carving meat on fast moving conveyer belts. The line speed requires exhausted workers wielding the sharpest of knives or hooks to make hundred of cuts an hour. OSHA inspectors are rarely seen in these factories.
One worker at the Swift & Co’s Cactus, Texas plant described it:
by Dick Clapp
The publication of my article on mortality among IBM workers was the culmination of a two and a half year process. I obtained the data, which included information on the deaths of nearly 32,000 former workers who had died between 1969 and 2001, when I served as an expert witness in a lawsuit brought against IBM on behalf of employees who had developed cancer after working at the company’s San Jose facility. I found that among the workers, the death rates from several cancers—including cancers of some digestive organs, kidneys, brain and central nervous system, melanoma of the skin, and non-Hodgknin’s lymphoma —were particularly high when compared to the national averages.
IBM won the San Jose jury trial and then settled the lawsuits with the remaining plaintiffs, but I still thought that it was important to publish the study to make others aware of the occupational health risks in these manufacturing activities. IBM’s lawyers derided my work (one said it gave “junk science a bad name”) and asserted that I couldn’t publish the results because the data was confidential under a court order. I had to undergo a lengthy process in order to publish this study, but I am convinced that it was worth it now that I see that it has helped bring greater attention to the occupational health risks related to computer chip manufacturing.
by Liz Borkowski
If you haven’t read Laurie David’s op-ed, “Science a la Joe Camel,” in yesterday’s Washington Post, I recommend clicking over to it. David was a producer of Al Gore’s climate change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” and reports that the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) turned down 50,000 free DVDs of that movie, which the movie company offered for classroom viewing.
Why would an organization of science teachers turn down a movie that brings science to a mainstream audience and tackles what’s arguably the most important environmental issue of the day? Because, David explains, NSTA is funded by ExxonMobil.
by revere
[This is another cross-post from Effect Measure but it fits here because it lays out some of the history of the progressive public health blogosphere and welcomes The Pump Handle as its newest -- and we hope brightest -- member!]
This weekend is Effect Measure’s Second Blogiversary and it coincides with two other events: the new Flu Wiki Forum and the incipient debut of a new progressive public health blog, The Pump Handle, to which The Reveres will be occasional contributors (some original posts, some cross posts). We are semi-thrilled to still be around after two years. Semi-thrilled, because two years is a long-time in the blogosphere, especially if you blogged all 730 days of it. Just a few under 1500 posts all told. We know there are a lot of blogs more prolific than ours and older. Our hats are off to them, because we know it’s hard work. If we had known just how hard, we probably wouldn’t have started it. The Reveres are still bickering about who got us all into this. Assuming of course there is more than one Revere. If there’s only one, then he/she/it is working too hard. One thing we’ll admit to. There’s only one at a time.
