Swine Influenza News

Over the last month or so, I've written numerous posts about Daniel Hauser. Danny, as you recall, is the 13-year-old Minnesota boy who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma back in February, underwent one round of chemotherapy for it, and then decided that he wanted to pursue qua... (more)

CDC has another snapshot of what the flu surveillance system is seeing up through week 23 (ending June 13). It shows still circulating in many communities at a time when most seasonal flu is normally at a very low level. Indeed of the 2765 specimens tested in CDC's network of 150... (more)

In light of the recent assassination, by a member of a right wing Christian anti-abortion cabal, of a physician who specialized in late term abortions, it may be worth having a look this medical phenomenon. Well, my blog colleague Monado contacted me a week ago or so and we discus... (more)

Author David Ewing Duncan now officially has the most annotated genome of any human being; but given that the vast majority of those annotations are wrong and the remainder only weakly predictive, he's also a powerful illustration of how far we still have to go before the era of ... (more)

It was the second-most-blogged article on the NYT when I got up this morning; now, it is the first-most-blogged.  It is the article that reports on a survey that shows 72% support for a government-run health insurance program.  The program would be similar to Medicare, but would ... (more)

If you don't want to smell, the FDA has a recommendation: use an over-the-counter cold remedy that contains an intranasal zinc solution. You won't smell. Possibly ever again: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... ... (more)

RePORTER!! This is so much better. h/t: writedit Read the comments on this post... ... (more)

This is slightly unusual subject matter for this blog, but I found this presentation by 2001 Nobel Prize winner Paul Nurse absolutely fascinating. It's an account of his slow unravelling of his family background, told to an audience at the World Science Festival in New York last ... (more)

There are a couple of fantastic boy bloggers here at ScienceBlogs who write about the marketing of unvalidated alternative therapies to patients (a practice they call "woo"). I agree with them that is completely unethical to market a therapy (or, non-therapy) using claims that ha... (more)

No idea what this website is (Routes?), but they have some fun science themed (loosely science based) Flash games, like SNEEZE! They also have 'DNA Hero'-- Guitar Hero with ACTG sequences, and 'Ginger Dawn'-- increase the frequency of that recessive gene, baby! LOL! And it looks... (more)

Homeopathy Awareness Week is almost over, alas. I hope I've done a good job at making my readers even more "aware" of just how silly the principles of homeopathy are. To finish up, I thought I'd repost a bit of "classic insolence" from three years ago, because it's dedicated to o... (more)

Two elite flu reporters, Helen Branswell (Canadian Press) and Declan Butler (Nature), both noted yesterday the dearth of clinic information on the serious and fatal swine flu cases. First Butler: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... ... (more)

One of the major reasons for concern from presenters and conference organisers about the notion of conference bloggers is that having unpublished work discussed online may violate the embargo policies of journals and damage their chances of publication. We now have clarification ... (more)

Misha Angrist points me to the launch of TruGenetics, which basically looks like just another genome scan company with a unique gimmick: they're giving 10,000 scans away free. What's the business model here? The registration page provides some hints: Your questionnaire responses an... (more)

I've been a bit remiss in my coverage of the Simon Singh case, reviewed in detail by Phil Plait, among others. As many of my readers already know, respected science writer Simon Singh is being sued for libel in England by the British Chiroquacktic Association (BCA) because he des... (more)

This is an edited repost of something I wrote nearly three years ago. You can see the original post and comments here. Over at Dr. Isis's blog, there's a post answering a reader's question about whether to tell her postdoc advisor about her troubles with clinical depression. I a... (more)

With Homeopathy Awareness Week rapidly approaching its end, I wondered just what I could do to bring further "awareness" of just how bogus and full of woo the concepts of homeopathy are. True, discussing homeopathic plutonium as a remedy and how homeopaths did "provings" of it th... (more)

Swine flu infection of health care workers (or as CDC refers to them, health care personnel or HCP) was of interest early in the pre-pandemic phase for at last two reasons. One was the obvious goal of estimating the risk to front line workers and devising best practices for their... (more)

You may have been following with some interest the statements made by an apparent biomedical science blogger, Dr. J., regarding the unacceptability of the use of cats in biomedical research. The post and subsequent comments from Dr. J follow a familiar track- the arbitrary person... (more)

Zincs connected to the common cold isnt as wooie as you all might be thinking after this weeks Zicamscepade (cough, sniffle). Though Zicam was marketed as a 'homeopathic' remedy, zinc-->common cold connection wasnt established by some naked sweaty white guy pretending he is a Nat... (more)