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by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
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:
by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
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:
by revere, cross posted at Effect Measure
As the tomato Salmonella outbreak heads past the 800 case level, it’s time to ask some questions about why we don’t know the source of what is the largest produce associated disease outbreak on record. CDC has its own explanation, namely, that figuring out where tomatoes come from and where they go is much harder than they thought. Said another way, the experts in foodborne disease outbreaks at CDC and FDA didn’t know much about the industry. Since tomatoes have been a frequent cause of Salmonella outbreaks, that seems odd, except that my experience with CDC in recent years is that it is full of inexperienced people who don’t know what they are doing being managed by incompetent managers who spend too much time brown nosing the boss who spends too much of her time sucking up to the Bush administration. Because of bad management the professional expertise at what was once the jewel in the crown of federal public health headed for the exits as soon as their twenty years were up. There are still some terrific, dedicated scientists at CDC, but they are being submerged by mediocrity and bureaucracy. But back to tomatoes:
by revere, cross posted at Effect Measure
Our post on what is behind the Right Wing attack on science drew a lot of attention and numerous comments. I’d like to emphasize some key points that may have gotten lost in the details (for the details, please see the original post). We’ll use climate change skepticism as an example, but the principles hold for other kinds of assaults, for example, on public health concerns regarding bis phenol A.
The cardinal point is that the attacks aren’t about science. Refuting false statements about whether CO2 is or is not a driver of global warming may seem (and be) necessary, but it is not the objective of the attackers. Karl Rove is famous for his doctrine that you attack your adversary at his strongest point. Environmental science’s strongest point is the scientific integrity and credibility of the developing consensus that human activities are driving a significant increase in mean global temperatures. It is not the science of global warming that the Right Wing is concerned about but the policy consequences it entails. It is therefore necessary to destroy its authority and credibility.
The attack on the science has two components. The first is the most obvious: to use what appear to be scientific arguments to cast doubt on what the scientific community deems valid arguments about climate change. But the second may be the most important: to do it in a way that casts aspersions on all kinds of scientific argument. The attackers don’t care if they are accused of political or economic bias in making their own scientific arguments because one of their objectives is to establish a covert narrative that says science is always biased and tainted by political corruption. The aim is to destroy the moral authority of science, not its factual basis. They then erect a new standard based on economic promise and the virtues of “progress” and modernity.
In our view an important element in countering the attack is not only to respond by pointing out what is behind the attack (which we have just done), but who is behind the attack and why. Our original post discussed this in some detail, where we document that, almost without exception Far Right ideologues and wealthy elites are the material force behind the assault on mainstream environmental science. Is this a conspiracy theory? There is nothing theoretical about the demonstration that over 92% of books in English questioning the science supporting climate change, endocrine disruption, air pollution effects and other environmental issues with obvious consequences for policy are directly and explicitly affiliated with Right Wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and their ilk.
That’s not a side issue. That’s the issue.
by revere (cross posted at Effect Measure)
If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment agencies. But that was then. Last weekend the US Senate couldn’t even manage a paltry 60 votes to stop a filibuster of a bipartisan and none too strong global warming bill. This kind of failure isn’t new. The US slow motion fall in environmental leadership has been going on for decades. In the Bush administration it is no longer covert but displayed blatantly and without shame. The lack of commitment is not a result of public disinterest or hostility. Polling throughout this period shows continuing support for environmental protection, and mainstream environmental organizations have even increased their membership. So what’s going on? A recent scholarly paper pulls back the curtain on one reason for the long slide (cf. Jacques, Dunlap and Freeman, “The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism”, Environmental Politics 17:349 - 385, 2008).
by revere (originally posted at Effect Measure)
Does the Obama candidacy signal a return of “the sixties”? It’s possible. What does that mean? Even those us who were there remember the sixties imperfectly. Not because we were permanently stoned. Memory is selective. We remember it as better than it was. We were young, and that makes a difference.Yet, as tristero observes over at Digby’s place, the sixties were not just a time of flowering creativity and the securing of new freedoms, but also a terrible, difficult and dark time for anyone who had any political awareness.
The run-up to the sixties was in fact much like the last few years. Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland fills in the grubby and genuinely horrible details. If you haven’t read it you owe it to yourself to see just how terrible each days news good be. A few words that come to mind suffice: anger, anguish, shame, embrrassment, fear, disgust, outrage, confusion — that’s just for starters. They should sound familiar to anyone paying attention these last few years. Maybe there was no internet or cable TV, but the period had its own versions of swiftboating, some of it as hilarious as it was dismaying. Here’s
Perlstein’s sketch of a 1950 Democratic primary campaign:
Cross-posted by Revere at Effect Measure
You wonder when they will ever learn — or IF they will ever learn. In the wake of yesterday’s announcement that the Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Dr. David Schwartz, will step aside while NIH does an inquiry into allegations of turmoil at the institute and management irregularities, comes a letter sent to NIEHS employees — and as far as we know only NIEHS employees — asking for reporting of any contacts with Congress:
Cross-posted by Revere at Effect Measure
In an email letter sent internally to all National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) personnel, its Director, Dr. David Schwartz, has announced he is temporarily stepping aside while the NIH Director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, conducts an internal review of NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program (NATP), both of which have come under fire from congressional, internal and outside critics (see our posts, here, here and here). Here is the text of Dr. Schwartz’s email, as we received it:
Yesterday the Libyan Supreme Council commuted the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-Bulgarian doctor to life in prison. The Tripoli 6 became a cause célèbre in the scientific and diplomatic communities when Libyan courts, after holding them in prison for eight years, refused to hear solid scientific evidence exonerating them from a charge they deliberately infected over 400 children in the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi. in 1998 (for more background, see here). Poor hospital hygiene is the presumed source of the tragic infections which so far have claimed the lives of over 50 of these children. Life in prison would seem an unhappy kind of victory in this case, but as with all things connected with it, it is not yet the last word. Read the rest of this entry »
by Revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
If you’ve ever been to Duluth, Minnesota in the wintertime, at the top of the state on Lake Superior, you know how cold it can get. And if you go another 50 miles up the shore you’ll come to Silver Bay. Also cold. And dangerous in another way. It is a cancer hot spot for perhaps the deadliest cancer we know, mesothelioma. Read the rest of this entry »
Cross-posted at Effect Measure by Revere
Tonight The Reveres are putting on their party clothes and headed for Jordan Barab’s place, Confined Space. Truthfully, this party is also a wake, because Jordan is closing up shop tonight and has invited everyone over (that means you, too) to celebrate his last post. We’ll be gathering in the Comment Thread. That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news. Read the rest of this entry »
by Revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
The University of California Regents (their Board of Trustees) is facing a thorny issue: should researchers in the University of California system be banned from taking research support from the tobacco industry? Two conflicting imperatives, one, unfettered freedom to pursue research wherever it leads; the other, the need for some constraints. Not anything goes, even in the hallowed halls of higher learning. Let me be clear. I think the chief executives of tobacco companies are aiding and abetting, if not committing, homicide, by promoting an addiction to a fatal product for money. I favor prosecuting them fully if they have committed fraud, or at least suing them for every penny they have and then some. That said, I still don’t favor a ban. Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »
by Revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
We continue our summary of the Institute of Medicine “Letter Report” on non-drug non-vaccine measures to slow or contain the spread of an influenza pandemic of a severity similar or worse than that of 1918 (see previous post on models here). The IOM report examined several analyses of historical data from 1918 to see if it was possible to obtain information on the effectiveness interventions on the pattern of outbreaks in various cities in the US. It is well known that both timing and severity varied a great deal in that pandemic. The goal was to see if differences in morbidity and mortality were related to specific actions taken in response.
by Revere, cross-posted on Effect Measure
On December 11, The Institute of Medicine, one of the four constituent parts of the National Academies of Science, released a “letter report” reviewing the scant information on effects from non-drug measures to slow or contain spread of an influenza pandemic (available as a free download here). The report was produced after a special workshop on October 25 in which the panel participants heard from a variety of experts, with subsequent deliberations that produced the summary letter report and its recommendations.
by Revere and cross-posted at Effect Measure on October 24, 2006
An urgent communication from the World Health Organization (WHO) expresses concisely how far behind we are in being prepared for a global pandemic of influenza. Currently there are a number of vaccines under development, some of which might protect against an H5N1 virus that has become readily transmissible from person to person. But none are in production, and even if some were found adequate (not the case) and large scale production begun (far from the case), we, the world, would still be in a fix:
by Revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
The Bush Administration hates science. Science is reality-based and some truths are politically inconvenient. But there are things that can be done. Like this:
by Revere and cross-posted at Effect Measure
We are asking the scienceblogging community once again to rally on behalf of our colleagues on trial for their lives in Libya. They have been accused of infecting over 400 children with HIV (see previous posts, here, here, here, here, here and here). When last we made an appeal (here) the response was extraordinary and spread quickly to the blogosphere on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The campaign to save the six health workers began with a strongly worded editorial in Nature and spread via the science blogosphere to the wider science and human rights organizations and from there to the New York Times, Washington Post, the Economist and beyond (see Declan Butler’s account and here for the links to over 400 blog and other posts). Nature has kept up the pressure and all this resulted in an appeal by 114 Nobel Laureates, just as the trial ended without hearing the scientific evidence. The verdict and sentencing if guilty (as expected) will be on December 19. [More below the fold]
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.
by revere
[Since my colleague and new blog sibling Dave Ozonoff posted here some advice on NIH grant writing in response to a post of mine over at Effect Measure, I thought I'd cross-post a follow-up I did on NIH funding a few days later. BTW, Dave, I'll have to give you some lessons in snarkiness. Your post was way too benign!]
In the late 1990s congress decided to invest in our future by doubling the NIH budget. If you are a scientist today trying to get an NIH grant, however, you are in tough shape. Success rates are falling like a stone, with less than 20% of grant applications now being funded. It is common to submit a proposal several times before finally getting a grant or giving up and moving on. What happened?
