Michele Bachmann! We thought you were out of the race, but then you went and WON the Tea Party Debate by telling Rick Perry that he was a fascist. Then, you went ahead and joined the Anti-Vax movement!
I’m pretty sure the anti-Vax movement does not overlap much with the Tea Party, so this is a major boost for Minnestoa’s Own Michele Bachmann!
Michele, I truly hope this keeps you in the race and advances you in the polls. Seriously. I want that very very much.
Please read and pass on.
Climate researchers are in need of immediate legal assistance to prevent their private correspondence from being exposed to Chris Horner and the American Tradition Institute who are using Freedom of Information (FOI) to harass researchers. (For context please see: http://wapo.st/pQg0JC and http://wapo.st/oiua7V) The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has recently stated: “the sharing of research data is vastly different from unreasonable, excessive Freedom of Information Act requests for personal information and voluminous data that are then used to harass and intimidate scientists.†The complete AAAS statement is available at http://bit.ly/p04sIq
Please visit the site Scott A. Mandia has set up and donate a few bucks after you read his post.
Dentistry Overthrown!
Continue reading Wisdumb Teeth No Longer Need To Be Extracted!
You will recall that in July a paper came out claiming that clouds, not CO2, caused climate change (I simplify slightly). Later, the Editor in Chief of the journal that published the paper resigned. Well, today, a paper came out that addresses the science side of the original paper. The origional paper appears to have been both poorly done and probably improperly (as in unethically done). The paper that just came out shows that clouds do not cause climate change. Climate science remains intact. Climate change denialism takes another hit.
I’ve written it up here. Deltoid has this covered as well.
In addition, there is some interesting reading here, here, here, and here.
Enjoy.
I just posted a summary of the latest rather startling event in Cloud Gate, the curent scandal in the Climate Change Denialist world:
CloudGate: Denialism Gets Dirty, Reputations Are At Stake
Please go have a look and leave any questions you have. If I can’t help you with the questions, I’ll find someone who can.
Meanwhile, this latest event, which involves the resignation of the Editor-in-Chief of a peer reviewed scientific journal, has created a lot of discussion in a very short period of time. Thus, the link farm to help you keep track:
The Original Paper is here.
Wolfgang Wagner’s resignation … is here (pdf).
Blog posts and press reports about the resignation:
Relying heavily on the excellent resource known as Dr. Jeff Master’s Wunderblog and a few other sources, I’ve compiled a quick list of a few of the highlights of weather events related to global warming in the news these days, in preparation for this weekend’s radio show “The Science of Global Warming: Science V Denialsim” on Atheists Talk #126, with Kevin Zelnio and John Abraham.
Here goes:
Continue reading Climate Change Update
We don’t know where the current Minnesota outbreak is going, but there was an outbreak of measles in 2008 that has been studied in a recent paper called “Health Care-Associated Measles Outbreak in the United States After an Importation: Challenges and Economic Impact” by Sanny Chen et. al.
From the abstract:
On 12 February 2008, an infected Swiss traveler visited hospital A in Tucson, Arizona, and initiated a predominantly health care-associated measles outbreak involving 14 cases. … Of 14 patients with confirmed cases, 7 (50%) were aged ?18 years, 4 (29%) were hospitalized, 7 (50%) acquired measles in health care settings, and all (100%) were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status. Of the 11 patients (79%) who had accessed health care services while infectious, 1 (9%) was masked and isolated promptly after rash onset. HCP (Health care personnel) measles immunity data from 2 hospitals confirmed that 1776 (25%) of 7195 HCP lacked evidence of measles immunity. Among these HCPs, 139 (9%) of 1583 tested seronegative for measles immunoglobulin G, including 1 person who acquired measles. The 2 hospitals spent $799,136 responding to and containing 7 cases in these facilities.
Suspecting measles as a diagnosis, instituting immediate airborne isolation, and ensuring rapidly retrievable measles immunity records for HCPs are paramount in preventing health care-associated spread and in minimizing hospital outbreak-response costs.
Measles infected between 3 and 4 million Americans a year before vaccines stemmed the disease in the early 1960s. Between 2000 and 2008, between 37 and 140 cases were reported annually in the US. The typical pattern is for an imported case of measles to cause a local outbreak among unvaccinated people. Those unvaccinated people are almost always of two kinds: Those who are not vaccinated because of the Anti-vax movement, or those who were too young to be vaccinated (or who are unvaccinated for some other equally valid reason) and are thus victims of the anti-vaxers.
The study points out that because measles is such a nasty disease, those infected often end up in a health care facility. For this reason, health care professionals have a higher risk of acquiring the disease. The other group at higher risk for getting measles is, of course, patients in the health care facility. Take Patient 4 from the Tucson outbreak:
Patient 4 was an unvaccinated 11-month-old boy who had spent 45 min in an ED room across the hall from patient 2 at hospital A on 24 February. Fever (temperature, 38.9°C) developed on 4 March, and a maculopapular rash developed on 10 March.
And some of those at risk are at risk because their parents chose to put their children at risk:
Patients 5 and 6 were siblings aged 3 and 5 years, respectively, who had not been vaccinated because of parental opposition to vaccination. Both children were exposed to patient 2 while visiting their mother at hospital A on 24 and 25 February. Their fever onsets occurred on 5 March (temperature, 39.5°C) and 6 March (38.9°C), respectively.
And, these accidental accomplices can then put others at risk in a kind of vicious cycle. Consider, for example, Patient 8:
Patient 8 was an unvaccinated 1-year-old girl who was exposed to patient 4 in the pediatrician’s office on 10 March while waiting to receive MMR vaccine. Fever (temperature, 38.5°C) developed on 19 March, a generalized maculopapular rash developed on 20 March, and earache developed on 20 March.
It turns out that in Minnesota, the current outbreak is facilitated in part by misinformation being spread among certain fairly recent immigrants. After arrival in the US, they were indoctrinated into the anti-vax ideology by someone. I’m not sure how this happened exactly, but apparently members of the Somali community are concerned that anti-vax misinformation has been circulated and is causing many individuals to avoid vaccinations. This is being addressed.
In the mean time, get your vaccination and get your children vaccinated.
Chen, S., Anderson, S., Kutty, P., Lugo, F., McDonald, M., Rota, P., Ortega-Sanchez, I., Komatsu, K., Armstrong, G., Sunenshine, R., & Seward, J. (2011). Health Care-Associated Measles Outbreak in the United States After an Importation: Challenges and Economic Impact Journal of Infectious Diseases DOI: 10.1093/infdis/jir115
Amazingly enough, we (my family) are going to have to work very hard this year, as we did over the last two years, to get in even one or two good days of cross country skiing. And we live in the middle of Minnesota. This is partly because a good bit of the precip that falls on us these days is actually rain and not snow.
But this is of course a very selfish concern, to the extent that this change is related to human-induced global warming (which I’m betting on). And this reminds me of how often I get the question from students and others, “why worry about global warming … what’s wrong with a little warm weather anyway.”
For one thing I think it is safe to say that the “controversy” is over. No one is seriously questioning that there has been warming, that we are in a warming trend, and that this trend is caused primarily by human release of otherwise trapped (mainly fossil) carbon into the atmosphere. Nice to know that the Yahoos are pretty much silenced by the facts on that one…
Still, the question arises, “why is this important” … even in places where you might not expect it, like this discussion on the geology of the grand canyon: Another Timeline
There are a lot of resources available on this issue, but here is a short version of my two cents:
Continue reading Thinking of Global Warming