Discussing causes, origins, and implications of disease and other phenomena.
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Latest Posts
New Ebola subtype confirmed
Few things can take me out of blogging hibernation (especially when the next grant deadline is Monday...) However, one of those things that I'll carve out time to write about is an interesting, hot-off-the-presses Ebola paper, and especially one describing a new strain of the virus--and there just happens to be such a paper in the new edition of PLoS Pathogens. Details after the jump...
I know I have many promised posts, and I'll get to them one day. Alas, the family and day job come before blogging, and I've been swamped with ongoing projects, grant applications, and manuscripts. I've been so busy, in fact, that revere over at Effect Measure beat me to the punch on my own upcoming paper, looking at antibodies to Streptococcus suis in Iowa swine workers. The paper is scheduled for the December issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, but the unedited draft is already up in their ahead of print section. As revere already has a good overview of the paper, I'll just point you there rather than re-hash everything. (For a bit of a review of Strep suis, I have an overview post here.)
I'll likely have little time to do any updates here until January, but you can always find out what's going on with emerging diseases here in Iowa by checking out our redesigned center homepage, or signing up for our Facebook group. We take new interns 3 times a year, so if you know students who'd want to gain some experience, drop us a line...
Just in time for the introduction of Autism's False Prophets by Dr. Paul Offit (the current choice for Scienceblogs' book club), Jenny McCarthy comes out with yet another interview decrying vaccines, blaming autism on the greed of pharmaceutical companies, and how her son was "healed" from autism by his diet, vitamins, and "detoxing".
I'll have a review of Dr. Offit's book up later this week. In the meantime, you can read what he says about it over at the Scienceblogs' Book Club page.
Well, you certainly can't fault Obama for aiming high. Via satellite, Obama announced at yesterday's Clinton Global Initiative forum that he would provide support to end malaria deaths in Africa by 2015--a lofty goal, but is it even close to attainable?
Obama provided the basics of his plan here, laying out why he feels this is such an important goal:
Malaria needlessly kills 900,000 people each year. In Africa, a child dies from a mosquito bite every thirty seconds. Beyond this devastating human toll, malaria undermines the economic potential of local economies and overwhelms public health systems - accounting for up to 40% of health spending in many African countries. As global warming and population displacement trends accelerate, an additional 260-320 million people worldwide could be living in malaria-infested areas by 2080.
He then discusses multiple approaches necessary to quickly reduce the mortality from this infection. Is this attainable? More after the jump...
Thanks again to those who blogged, commented or emailed regarding our PLoS Biology manuscript. Nick already has his own response here, highlighting posts such as Larry's, Blake's, Drug Monkey's, Thomas', and Carlo's. Several criticisms ran along the same lines: that, as Nick notes, "that further institutionalizing blogs risks compromising their inherent spontaneous and independent 'blogginess'". I agree with much of what he says in response:
Along with Shelley Batts and Nick Anthis, I have a new paper out today in PLoS Biology on academic blogging: a short commentary on potential ways to integrate blogs into academia. Nick already has a bit of the history and goals of the manuscript over at The Scientific Activist so I won't repeat those here; long story short, we started out with the goal of simply reviewing academic blogs, and the paper ended up morphing into a road map describing potential ways to integrate blogs into academia.
Many, many readers and writers in the blogosphere donated their time to send us messages about what blogging meant to them, how they had benefited, what risks they had taken, and how they saw (or would like to see) blogging evolve, and while only a few stories made it into the final manuscript, their time and input is greatly appreciated. (Nick has collected many of them here, with a hearty thanks to all who helped out).
Of course, publication is only the start of the process, and I'm happy to see one post already up about the paper. I think DrugMonkey has some great points, and I'll discuss them and hopefully some other forthcoming responses I see popping up to the paper in a later post. And of course, comments from y'all are appreciated as well.
The science fair: what's a parent to do (or not to do?)
This started out in the comments to Janet's conundrum about what to do regarding her child's upcoming science fair:
I'm very committed to the idea that a science fair project is the kind of thing a kid should control, from start to finish -- conceiving the project, formulating some clear questions and some promising strategies for answering them, doing the experiments and making the observations, adjusting the strategies as necessary, setting up more experiments, looking at the results, figuring out what they might mean, flagging the questions that remain unanswered, and then figuring out how to communicate it all to kids (and teachers) who weren't right there with you doing all the research.
If a parent does this stuff (or acts as PI to the kid's lab tech), I think the parent may learn a lot, but the kid will not get the same experience.
Having attended many science fairs over the past few years (from elementary to high school level), I absolutely agree. It's all too obvious when the parent has carried out the project, and the kid has taken a backseat (or in the worst cases, just ends up being a spokesperson for the parents' project.) My experience with my own child below...
Scienceblogs Millionth comment party--Iowa City fiesta
As today's Scienceblogs homepage notes, we've now reached over 1,000,000 comments. To celebrate, bloggers are throwing shindigs across the country. Ours is now officially set as well. We'll be screening "Flock of Dodos" on Monday, Sept. 22nd at 7PM in Kollros auditorium (Biology Building East, room 101). After the movie, we'll retreat somewhere (location TBA) for drinks and discussion.
Via Bora comes some of the week's most important journalism: video of a Chicago Tribune reporter trying to put lipstick on a pig. He gets it much too easy with the first one; the squealing and running around when he tries to go for the second one is more familiar to me (after the jump).
Vaccination doesn't cause autism volume what-are-we-up-to-now?
Oh, let's go back to the start... --Coldplay, "The Scientist"
A decade ago, a paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was published in The Lancet, detailing the cases of 12 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Anecdotal reports from parents of several of these children suggested that the onset of their condition followed receipt of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Wakefield concluded following this research that the MMR vaccine was unsafe, and could play a causative role in the development of autism as well as gastrointestinal disease--the first volley in the latest incarnation of anti-vaccination fear-mongering that's as old as vaccination itself. Well, to the surprise of few, a study has been published in today's PLoS One showing yet again no link between vaccination and autism--and, as in the original Wakefield study, the authors here looked at the presence of measles virus RNA in intestinal tissue. More after the jump.
Chris Condayan, ASM's public outreach and media guru (and the guy behind the scenes of MicrobeWorld), has an editorial in the latest issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology. Cleverly titled "Culture media," Condayan encourages microbiologists to get involved sharing their knowledge online (and gives examples of ways they can do so). He notes:
As long as the internet remains free from regulation, every microbiologist has just as much access to online distribution as the BBC and CNN do. And in this day and age, if you don't start sharing knowledge and news online, you may run the risk of becoming irrelevant in the near future.
If you can't get your hands on the whole article, drop me an email and I can send it along.
So, after almost a week of intense media scrutiny and finger-pointing at USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks, the FBI has now released its documents pertaining to the case, and declares that Ivins was indeed their man. However, a lot of unanswered questions remain--about the investigation itself, the whole mess surrounding the anthrax attacks and what they meant to the "war on terror," and the science itself that linked the attack strain to Ivins' lab. A few of the remaining issues are discussed below...
Real life work has once again stepped in, so I won't have the Helicobacter posts up until next week. However, in the meantime, a big story has broken regarding the 2001 anthraxattacks--a potential suspect, and his suicide before he could be arrested. Will we ever actually get to the bottom of this? More discussion below...
An interesting new paper is just out today in PLoS ONE. You recall the announcement a few years back that soft tissue that resembled organic tissue had been isolated from a Tyrannosaurus femur. This started off a huge controversy in the field (and beyond)--researchers disagreeing with each other whether the structures seen were indeed blood cells and vessels; creationists crowing about how this finding represented "proof" that the earth was indeed young and dinosaurs had existed just a few thousand years ago; and of course, talk of cloning and DNA analysis. On the side of "soft tissue = dino blood" were findings that reported identification of the iron-containing protein heme (potentially from the red blood cells) and morphology of cells and vessels similar to that seen in modern-day ostriches and emu. However, the new paper by Kaye et al. provides an alternative explanation: that the structures aren't actual vessels and cells, but are instead iron-rich bacterial biofilms. More on that below.
Few things can take me out of blogging hibernation (especially when the next grant deadline is Monday...) However, one of those things that I'll carve out time to write about is an interesting, hot-off-the-presses Ebola paper, and especially one describing a new strain of the virus--and there just happens to be such a paper in the new edition of 
I know I have many promised posts, and I'll get to them one day. Alas, the family and day job come before blogging, and I've been swamped with ongoing projects, grant applications, and manuscripts. I've been so busy, in fact, that revere over at 
As today's Scienceblogs homepage notes, we've now reached over 1,000,000 comments. To celebrate, bloggers are 
