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Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Friday, March 12, 2010
I saw a kid with chickenpox...
I saw a kid with chickenpox. This isn't that unusual, as I'm a pediatrician and an infectious diseases specialist. Pediatricians have been coming home and saying "I saw a kid with chickenpox," to their spouses for a long, long time. It's less common now, because we have a safe, effective vaccine that prevents infection with varicella, the virus that causes chickenpox. Children get two shots -- the first at 12 months and the second at least three months later. In exchange for this, they get lifelong immunity against a disease that used to affect essentially all kids.
There are a reasonable number of people, some pediatricians included, who think that the varicella vaccine is superfluous. Why give a shot to prevent something that we all had as kids? After all, it didn't kill us, right? Well, before the vaccine was licensed in the United States, there were about 11,000 hospitalizations and 100 deaths per year due to chickenpox. These are relatively small numbers when compared to the size of any year's birth cohort, though that calculus changes pretty drastically if your kid is one of the 100. The vaccine has drastically decreased these numbers, though there are still cases, including severe ones. These may occur among immune compromised people, children who are too young to have received the vaccine, or those whose parents or pediatrician decided to forgo this protection.
Which brings us to the kid I saw. She was a beautiful two year-old with the classic dots of chicken pox studding her pale skin. They had passed the "dew drop on a rose petal" phase and were crusted over already, indicating that her immune system had the virus pretty well under control. What was less under control was the Streptococcus bacteria that had taken advantage of her damaged skin barrier to invade first the soft tissues of her neck and later her bloodstream. That's why we met in the intensive care unit, where a ventilator did her breathing, where Sharpie lines on her skin demarcated the spread of her infection since her arrival, and where her father told me that she was up to date on her vaccines. It was just that her pediatrician didn't give her the chickenpox shot at the 1 year-old visit.
When you sign up to be a pediatrician, you agree to sometimes argue with parents, to push and cajole and manipulate so that parents trust that, yes, even though the grandmother says to put the newborn baby on her stomach to sleep that it really truly is safer on the back. We ask questions about car seats and smoke alarms and guns in the house, all in the name of preventing tragedy. There are so many things that we can't vaccinate our patients against. If I had a child abuse vaccine, a car crash vaccine, a heartbreak vaccine -- I would use them all. It turns out that we only have a handful. So why, then, was I picking up the pieces of this family whose daughter was fighting bravely against one of the few things that we actually know how to prevent?
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
PLoS ONE Prokaryotic Genome Collection
PLoS ONE unveiled their new Prokaryotic Genome Collection today, along with an editorial by Section Editor Niyaz Ahmed. Well done, Niyaz! Everyone else: send us your best genome papers!
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Tara Smith on Swine Flu
Tara Smith (Aetiology) has a great post on the unfolding swine flu outbreak in Mexico, California, New York... [Link].
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Our new PLoS ONE paper is out!
Our new paper about detection and inhibition of vaginolysin, the human-specific toxin from Gardnerella vaginalis, came out on line today! [Link] Please check it out and rate/comment if you can!
Friday, April 3, 2009
Kristof on pneumonia
Nicholas Kristof has an excellent blog post about the overwhelming importance of pneumonia as a cause of childhood mortality worldwide. Preventable, treatable, often overlooked.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Papers
I know that this has been widely publicized by Olivia Judson already, but Papers from mekentosj.com has changed my life. It is the most intuitive program I've encountered for organizing pdfs, searching PubMed and autoimporting, and letting me purge paper copies from my office. I've been importing manual and interlibrary loan scans of older papers as well. Amazing. It's $42 after the free trial and worth every penny.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Top picks in infectious diseases at PLoS ONE
As a followup to the interview with Bora, I got to pick some of my favorite infectious diseases articles from PLoS ONE. http://www.plos.org/cms/node/444
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
PLoS ONE interview
An interview that I did with Bora at PLoS ONE is now available at the PLoS site. We talked about infectious diseases, open access, and social justice. I also got to use the term "tyranny of the Impact Factor," which was fun...
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
A primer on funding labs and the consequences for creativity...
Stephen Quake gets it right as a guest blogger at NYT today.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Using your kids as experimental subjects...
MIT scientist attaches camera to his newborn's head, and the NY Times is there. (Link). This seems less surprising than they make it out to be, though the picture is quite cute. The article is mainly about people doing speech and vision studies, but there is mention of Salk giving his child the experimental polio vaccine. It isn't mentioned in the article, but Maurice Hilleman made the mumps vaccine using virus isolated from his daughter's throat (the Jeryl Lynn strain).
Full disclosure: I have a couple of my daughter's group A streptococcus strains from episodes of strep throat sitting in the -80C freezer in the lab.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Tree of Life Post on Thanksgiving
A nice post over at Tree of Life on what scientists should be thankful for:
http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-scientists-should-be-thankful-for.html
Have a great Thanksgiving.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
NIH Open Access Mandate Under Attack
Here is a message from PLoS that was posted today. Legislation has been introduced that would effectively end the mandatory deposition of manuscripts reporting NIH-funded research into the freely available PubMed Central archive. Please contact your representatives and urge them to oppose this legislation and to preserve access to taxpayer-funded research. Thank you.
______________
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Sarah Palin and Botryotinia fuckeliana
Enormous hat-tip to Jonathan Eisen for uncovering the evolutionary connection between Sarah Palin (or, more correctly, the peptide SARAHPALIN) and a hypothetical protein from -- wait for it -- B. fuckeliana. You could almost say that it looks intelligently designed... Link to Jonathan's blog post at Tree of Life here.
Friday, August 15, 2008
For profit, closed-access publishing
An excellent post on for-profit publishers over at The Questionable Authority.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Ithaca, NY
The Sciencenter (link) in Ithaca is the best children's science museum I've ever seen. The exhibits are attention-grabbing and (more impressively) attention-holding, even for an 8 year old. I've been twice in the past two days. We also did the Carl Sagan Planet Walk through Ithaca, which was a really cool way to think about relative sizes and distances in the solar system.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
George Carlin
Today is a sad, sad day. George Carlin, one of my favorite comedians, has died. I used to listen to his albums as I fell asleep as a junior high school student, and only much later realized how spot on he was about the absurdity of life and the hypocrisy of government. He has left at a time when we need his insights and his laughs more than ever.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Sour cream fudge cake.
Joy of Cooking. Page 931. The sour cream fudge cake is the best cake recipe I've ever made. We've put it to the test twice now. Outstanding.
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