Aetiology

French doctors on Wednesday claimed a world-first partial face transplant, saying a nose, lips and chin were grafted onto a 38-year-old woman disfigured by a dog bite.

The woman was in "excellent" condition and that the transplanted organs look "normal," the statement said. She wants to remain anonymous, it said.

Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, one of the surgeons who collaborated on the transplant, told The Associated Press when reached Wednesday that the transplant was the world's first of its kind.

Scientists elsewhere have performed scalp and ear transplants in the past. However, the claim is the first for a mouth and nose transplant. Experts say the mouth and nose the most difficult parts of the face to transplant.

The woman was disfigured by a dog bite in May that made it difficult for the woman to speak and chew, the statement said. Such injuries are "extremely difficult, if not impossible" to repair using normal surgical techniques, it added.

The organs were taken from a donor who was brain dead, with the family's consent, the hospitals said.

One of my favorite subjects is disease. I was happy to get so many submissions about sickness and plague and pestilence. It may be that I'm not a well woman, but it seems I am in extremely good company.

Link to CNN story.

Stan Berenstain, who with his wife created the popular children's books about the Berenstain Bears, has died.

In more than 200 books, the Berenstain Bears, written and illustrated by Stan and Jan Berenstain, helped children for 40 years cope with trips to the dentist, eating junk food and cleaning their messy rooms.

The first Berenstain Bears book, "The Great Honey Hunt," was published in 1962. The couple developed the series with children's author Theodor Geisel -- better known as Dr. Seuss, then head of children's publishing at Random House -- with the goal of teaching children to read while entertaining them.

Best of the medical blogosphere is up and runnin' at "Over my med body" (great title!) with a Thanksgiving theme. Ones that drew my attention: antimicrobial chewing gum on the Biotech Weblog; a discussion on the issues related to VBAC (vaginal birth after Cesarean) at Red State Moron; Polite Dissent discusses a pet peeve of mine as well: ridiculous headlines; Catallarchy has more on the autopsy of HIV-denier Christine Maggiore's daughter, Eliza; and Orac lays the smack-down on chelation therapy for autism.

Additionally, it was noted that applications are being accepted for the 2005 Medical Weblog Awards. Nominate your favorite blogs in the following categories and spread some love around:

-- Best Medical Weblog

-- Best New Medical Weblog (established in 2005)

-- Best Literary Medical Weblog

-- Best Clinical Sciences Weblog

-- Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog

-- Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog

Fatter rear ends are causing many drug injections to miss their mark, requiring longer needles to reach buttock muscle, researchers said on Monday.

Standard-sized needles failed to reach the buttock muscle in 23 out of 25 women whose rears were examined after what was supposed to be an intramuscular injection of a drug.

Two-thirds of the 50 patients in the study did not receive the full dosage of the drug, which instead lodged in the fat tissue of their buttocks, researchers from The Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin said in a presentation to the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Besides patients receiving less than the correct drug dosage, medications that remain lodged in fat can cause infection or irritation, researchers Victoria Chan said.

Have you ever wondered how Kevin Bacon and the lights of fireflies related to malaria and power grids? I know it’s something that’s kept me up many a sleepless night. One word: interconnections.

Many of you have probably heard of the “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon”game. This is based on the work of Stanley Milgram beginning in the 1960s, and brought up again more recently in a 1998 Nature paper, "Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” by mathematicians Watts and Strogatz. Milgram conducted a number of studies using his “lost letter technique,” in which letters were sent out and then needed to be forwarded onto reach their destination. In one instance, Milgram sent out 160 letters to individuals in the midwest, with instructions to pass them along to acquaintances who would be most likely to reach his stockbroker friend back east. Almost all of the letters that reached the stockbroker did so via one of 3 friends, and most did it within 6 steps--hence the “six degrees of separation” idea. Similarly, Duncan Watts first became interested in the “small world problem”—the idea that all of us are more closely connected than we realize—after watching fireflies flash in synchrony, and wondering how they accomplished that. What Watts, Strogatz, Milgram, and others were investigating boiled down to a series of links in a network—hubs and connectors. As Watts and Strogatz showed in their 1998 paper, all it took to make a "small world" from a regular network was the addition of a few "short cuts" (see figure from their paper, above). This elegant and seemingly simple structure of networks explains not only connections between movie stars and scientists but also cellular metabolism, ecology webs and the World Wide Web itself.

Another “small world” phenomenon is disease transmission. Social architecture affects, and explains, factors that impact the spread of disease—the people we are in contact with, and in the cases of sexually transmitted diseases, the people we sleep with. At the base of this phenomenon in infectious diseases is an idea called the "tipping point." This is something epidemiologists have discussed much in recent months regarding the potential of an avian influenza pandemic—tiny influences can have startling effects. A simple mutation may make a virus more easily transmitted between humans. Given the right environment, this may allow the virus to sweep through a population, causing a world-wide outbreak. Under different conditions, it may cause a few infections and fade away; a few factors may make all the difference. Mathematical modelers can examine these factors in computer simulations in order to determine if a disease will burn out, remain endemic in a population, or become an epidemic. A critical determining factor affecting these outcomes is the basic reproductive rate of a disease (R0). If R0 is less than 1 (each case infects less than one additional individual), a self-sustaining epidemic is not possible. If it is equal to 1, the disease will become endemic in a population. If R0 exceeds one, the disease may become epidemic; the larger the number, the more likely this outcome is. But, while this number is useful, one must keep in mind that R is an average over the population—it may be much higher or lower in subsets of the group.

Early work in this area did not take this difference into account, and assumed that individuals in a population had an equal chance of transmitting the disease. However, reality does not bear this out, leading to the proposal of the "20/80 rule," which suggests that approximately 20% of the most infectious individuals are responsible for 80% of the disease transmission. This was most recently demonstrated by an analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak (see figure, from MMWR 52(18);405-411), but has also been seen with AIDS and other STDs. With AIDS, we recognize that "core groups" of infected individuals are often responsible for large outbreaks of disease. What we see when we examine this graphically is a "small world" network: a series of hubs and connectors, with the largest hubs—-termed "superspreaders" (the numbered dots in the picture above)--responsible for a disproportionately large number of secondary cases. This may be due to the fact that the superspreaders simply have a higher number of contacts; they may have a co-infection that leads to increased pathogen shedding, meaning the contacts they have are more efficiently exposed; they may have an undiagnosed illness, leading to an extended period of transmission; or they may have a combination of the above. For example, imagine a sex worker with both HIV and a secondary STD, such as gonorrhea. By virtue of her occupation, she will be in contact with a large number of individuals. HIV may lead to an increase in bacterial load, exposing her clients to a larger dose of N. gonorrhea than the "average" infected person; and her lack of health care means she has been treated for neither STD—potentially spreading both for years, until she is too sick to continue working. In this case, there are multiple explanations for why she would be a superspreader.

It takes careful epidemiological analysis to identify these superspreaders, however. One limitation of epidemiological analysis is that populations are generally divided into homogeneous subgroups--people of the same age, or race, or occupation, etc. This makes it possible to carry out studies comparing groups of individuals, but at the same time, it creates false divisions; life is always messier. A new paper published in Nature seeks to investigate some of this "mess," addressing the heterogeneity of transmission number among individuals and its effect on spread of disease. This new study by Lloyd-Smith et al., instead of using R0, investigates ν, the individual reproductive number. To examine this, they looked at previously published accounts of disease transmission where contacts had been traced, and determined ν for a number of different diseases and patients (see figure, below).

To sum up their findings, they suggest that disease with a high variation in ν show infrequent, but explosive, epidemics after introduction of a single case, a statement again borne out by an examination of the epidemiology of SARS, a disease which showed a high variation in ν. Indeed, many cities were exposed to SARS, but very few had explosive outbreaks. Is this universal? It will take more careful studies to determine that, but it suggests a new avenue of investigation.

Indeed, knowledge of the architecture of these outbreaks has immediate real-world applications. If the superspreaders could be identified early in an outbreak, interventions (vaccination, isolation/quarantine, treatment) could be targeted to this group. For example, another recent report highlights this same conclusion for malaria: identifying and targeting the superspreaders could reduce the disease burden enormously. Additionally, this work suggests, again, that we need better surveillance in order to detect these events while they are in progress. We can’t control superspreaders that we aren’t aware of, or only identify retrospectively, weeks, months, or years down the line.

Finally, this work—and indeed, much of the work done in the field of network theory--also points out, again, how things that appear to be “designed” can be the product of chance and circumstance. Each of these “small worlds” reveals a very similar architectural design. Each is dominated by hubs—a few extremely well-connected individuals, or web sites, etc. Additionally, this is not merely a qualitative difference: instead, they have a specific mathematical signature, which is nearly identical from one network to the next. I won’t go into the details, but Mark Buchanan has written a very layman-friendly book on the subject. (To be complete, Watts and Strogatz have also written books on the subject, but I've not read them yet). In Nexus, Buchanan notes:

What we see then is a kind of natural order that for mysterious reasons seems to well up in networks of all kinds and that does so despite the complexities of their individual histories….In biology, Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection offers an extremely powerful organizing framework within which historical accidents take place. In the context of networks, there must also be some deeper principle at work.

Dr. Masato Tashiro, a Japanese WHO consultant, believes that China has had 300 human deaths from avian influenza and is hiding the true extent of the disease from the rest of the world. Dr. Masato Tashiro, Director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Influenza at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Tokyo, and head of the Department of Virology of the National Institute of Infectious Disease (Japan), astonished colleagues with this information during a speech at a recent retirement dinner for a fellow virologist, Hans-Dieter Klenk.

Having just returned from the Hunan province of China on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO), [Dr. Masato Tashiro] claimed that a reliable source had provided him with details of the true nature of the H5N1 virus in China. "We are systematically deceived," he is reported to have said.

Tashiro visited China on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Hunan province. His laboratory, at the National Institute for Infection Research in Tokyo, as one of the Asian points of contact for the United Nations, had been particularly entrusted with investigations into avian influenza in Asia and China. Dr. Masato gave his lecture in the University of Marburg Clinic before some the most outstanding virologists in the world and shocked the meeting with his unauthorized data [report] from inside China.

The Japanese virologist [said he] firmly believes in the reliability of the source and its data. The secrecy of the Peking government is still causing concern as it was at the beginning of the SARS epidemic disease, complained Tashiro. At least 5 medical co-workers who should be reporting on the situation in the provinces were arrested, and [other] publication-willing researchers were threatened with punishments [he said].

I mentioned a real "microbial machine" in this post last month. Now, they're appearing as living photographs:

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Texas announced in the journal Nature that they had created photographs of themselves by programming the bacteria — — best known for outbreaks of food poisoning — to make pictures in much the same way Kodak film produces images.

***

Voigt and colleagues took from algae light-sensitive genes that emit black compounds and spliced them into a batch of E. coli bacteria. The organisms were then spread on a petri dish that resembles a cookie sheet and placed in an incubator. A high-powered projector cast photographic images of the researchers through a hole on top of the incubator, exposing some of the bacteria to light.

The result: Ghostly images like traditional black-and-white photographs of the researchers responsible for the invention, at a resolution Voigt said was about 100 megapixels, or 10 times sharper than high-end printers.

Synthetic biology: Engineering Escherichia coli to see light

Anselm Levskaya1, Aaron A. Chevalier, Jeffrey J. Tabor, Zachary Booth Simpson, Laura A. Lavery, Matthew Levy, Eric A. Davidson, Alexander Scouras, Andrew D. Ellington, Edward M. Marcotte and Christopher A. Voigt

Abstract:We have designed a bacterial system that is switched between different states by red light. The system consists of a synthetic sensor kinase that allows a lawn of bacteria to function as a biological film, such that the projection of a pattern of light on to the bacteria produces a high-definition (about 100 megapixels per square inch), two-dimensional chemical image. This spatial control of bacterial gene expression could be used to 'print' complex biological materials, for example, and to investigate signalling pathways through precise spatial and temporal control of their phosphorylation steps.

Maybe.

Living in the harsh desert of northern Chile's Pacific coast more than 7,000 years ago, the Chinchorro fishing tribe mysteriously began mummifying dead babies — removing internal organs, cleaning bones, stuffing and sewing up the skin, putting wigs and clay masks on them.

The Chinchorro mummies are the oldest-known artificially preserved dead, dating thousands of years before Egyptian mummies, and the life quest of the archaeologists who study them is to discover why this early society developed such a complex death ritual.

"I was reading a Chilean newspaper that talked about pollution and it had a map of arsenic and lead pollution, and it said arsenic caused abortions. I jumped in my seat and said, 'That's it,'" Arriaza said.

Arriaza says high levels of arsenic in the water in the region, which persist to this day, meant more premature births, stillbirths, spontaneous abortions and higher infant mortality among the Chinchorro.

"We've always known that the Camarones (the area where the mummies are found) had a lot of arsenic, and the first mummies were children," he said.

He posits the Chinchorro began preserving dead babies to express personal and community grief and later began mummifying adults as well, and the practice became more elaborate.

“If I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses — because that goes straight to the bottom line — then I hope I can help the country in some way,” Brown told the Rocky Mountain News for its Thursday editions.

Brown said officials need to “take inventory” of what’s going on in a disaster to be able to answer questions to avoid appearing unaware of how serious a situation is.

I discussed here new research on venom evolution that topples some old conventional wisdom. It seems this and another study are already making large waves in that field.

Genealogy of Scaly Reptiles Rewritten by New Research

The most comprehensive analysis ever performed of the genetic relationships among all the major groups of snakes, lizards, and other scaly reptiles has resulted in a radical reorganization of the family tree of these animals, requiring new names for many of the tree's new branches. The research, reported in the current issue of the journal C. R. Biologies, was performed by two biologists working at Penn State University: S. Blair Hedges, professor of biology, and Nicolas Vidal, a postdoctoral fellow in Hedges' research group at the time of the research who now is a curator at the National Museum in Paris.

Vidal and Hedges collected and analyzed the largest genetic data set ever assembled for the scaly reptiles known as squamates. The resulting family tree has revealed a number of surprising relationships. For example, "The overwhelming molecular-genetic evidence shows that the primitive-looking iguanian lizards are close relatives of two of the most advanced lineages, the snakes on the one hand and the monitor lizards and their relatives on the other," Vidal says.

"We gave this group the new name, 'Toxicofera' because of another discovery, reported in a related paper, that some lizard species thought to be harmless actually produce toxic venom, as do some snakes--including some large monitor lizards in the same family as the giant Komodo Dragon and some large species of iguanians." Vidal, Hedges, and other researchers report this and other discoveries about the early evolution of the venom system in lizards and snakes in a paper led by Bryan G. Fry, of the University of Melbourne in Australia, published in the current issue of the journal Nature. "It's a really startling thing that so many supposedly harmless lizards actually are venomous," Vidal comments, "but their sharing of this characteristic makes sense now that our genetic studies have shown how closely they are related."

"Because the current tree has been widely accepted for nearly a century, I think there is going to be a delay of maybe a few years before the general scientific community gets used to the new tree," Vidal says. "If other research groups working in this area find the same pattern with additional genes, then I believe the scientific community may accept these results more quickly."

Using multivariable proportional odds modeling, all 3 exposed study groups demonstrated markedly elevated titers against the H1N1 and H1N2 swine influenza virus isolates, compared with control subjects. Farmers had the strongest indication of exposure to swine H1N1 virus infection (odds ratio [OR], 35.3; 95% confidence interval [CI], 7.7–161.8), followed by veterinarians (OR, 17.8; 95% CI, 3.8–82.7), and meat processing workers (OR, 6.5; 95% CI, 1.4–29.5). Similarly, farmers had the highest odds for exposure to swine H1N2 virus (OR, 13.8; 95% CI, 5.4–35.4), followed by veterinarians (OR, 9.5; 95% CI, 3.6–24.6) and meat processing workers (OR, 2.7; 95% CI, 1.1–6.7).

Carl Zimmer has a post today about the work of Dr. Bryan Grieg Fry on the evolution of snake venom. If that name sounds familiar to those of you who aren't reptile specialists, you may have run across Dr. Fry's homepage, or you may have seen his research profiled previously on Panda's Thumb here, or you may have read comments by the good doc in this thread. Zimmer, as always, has an excellent overview of Fry et al's new paper in Nature (link ), but he didn't emphasize the one sneak peek I received from Bryan.

This tasty bit of information involved monitor lizards, such as the Komodo dragon. The conventional wisdom has been that these lizards kill by infecting their prey with bactera during a bite, featured on many sites such as this one:

[The komodo dragon] can run as fast as a dog for short stretches and prey they merely injure are brought down shortly by the deadly bacteria in their mouths.

[The komodo dragon's] saliva is not venomous, but the mouth of a Komodo dragon is so full of bacteria that a bite from one almost always leads to infection. If untreated, the infection is usually fatal.

1. A previously completely healthy girl developed PVB19 infection leading to both encephalitis and aplastic anemia (possible, but highly unlikely, and, even if PVB19 were found, it would be far more likely that it was able to cause anemia because of immunosuppression due to AIDS).

2. This same girl also developed an acute allergic reaction to amoxicillin that led to cardiovascular collapse and--oh, by the way--also caused steatosis of the liver within a day after starting the drug, the steatosis being something even Dr. Al-Bayati's own references do not seem to support as being likely.

3. This same otherwise healthy girl had sufficient quantity of P. carinii in her lungs to show up on Gomori methenamine silver staining at her autopsy.

4. The medical examiner and neuropathologist either botched the staining for the p24 protein (or that it was a false positive) and an experienced neuropathologist didn't know the pitfalls of the diagnosis of HIV encephalitis using brain tissue sections.

The global HIV epidemic continues to expand, with more than 40 million people now estimated to have the AIDS virus, but in some countries prevention efforts are finally starting to pay off, the United Nations says.

AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized in 1981, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in history. An estimated 3.1 million people died from the virus last year and another 4.9 million people became infected, according to a U.N. update published Monday.

However, for the first time there is solid evidence that increased efforts to combat the disease over the last five years have led to fewer new infections in some places, said UNAIDS chief Peter Piot.

Previously improvements had been seen in places such as Senegal, Uganda and Thailand, but those were rare exceptions.

"Now we have Kenya, several of the Caribbean countries and Zimbabwe with a decline," Piot said, adding that Zimbabwe is the first place in Southern Africa, the hardest-hit area, to show improvement.

These are all countries that have invested heavily in safe-sex campaigns and other prevention programs, with the result that prevalence of HIV among the young has declined.

"People are starting later with their first sexual intercourse, they are having fewer partners, there's more condom use," Piot said.

The epidemics continue to intensify in southern Africa. Growing epidemics are under way in Eastern Europe and in Central and East Asia. Five years ago, one in 10 new infections were in Asia. Today the number is one in four or five.

China, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam are facing significant increases. There are also alarming signs that Pakistan and Indonesia could be on the verge of serious epidemics, the report said.

Intravenous drug use and commercial sex are fueling the epidemic in Asia, where few countries are doing enough to inform people about the danger of such behavior, the report warned.

Worldwide, less than one in five people at risk of becoming infected with HIV has access to basic prevention services. Of people living with HIV only one in 10 has been tested and knows that he or she is infected.

"It's part of science to consider what blinders you might be wearing," Skiff said. "Materialists put conditions on science that things can only exist if they satisfy materialism. I think that is a mistake."

He said scientists need to be open to the possibility of God and the idea that the world could be "bigger than their imagination."

"They say that can't be true because it doesn't fit into their conception of the world," he said. "That's not science' that's metaphysics. It's not looking at the world around you. It's closing your eyes and saying that 'Nothing can exist except for things that can fit into my theory.'"

Skiff said he believed the statement is intimidating to he and his colleagues who are open to intelligent design because it institutes the philosophy of materialism as the definition of science.
"They are saying that anyone who doesn't have our point of view isn't a legitimate scientist," he said. "That's coming on pretty strong."

He [Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute] criticized the ISU statement signed by professors opposing intelligent design as a slap at Gonzalez’ academic freedom.

‘‘This is a wonderful development,’’ he said. ‘‘It shows that people opposed to intelligent design are no longer acting like McCarthyites.’’

Gonzalez said Avalos and a few other intelligent design critics have created a hostile environment for him at ISU by circulating the statement and speaking out in the media. But Gonzalez said he thinks many ISU faculty silently support teaching intelligent design as science.

‘‘It would be nice if someone took a poll to find out what the real opinions are,’’ he said.

Gonzalez said intelligent design is still too controversial to teach in high school, except as part of what he regards as the controversy over evolution. He also wouldn’t mandate that anyone teach it either. Partly, he said, because few teachers really understand it.

Officials at the Iowa Department of Education know of no school districts in the state teaching about intelligent design, department spokeswoman Kathi Slaughter said.

Malaria is one of the world's leading infectious killers. World-wide, almost 40% of the world's population is at risk of acquiring this disease--many of them in poor countries with limited resources to control the disease. Each year, malaria causes 300-500 million infections, and up to 3 million deaths--about 5000 Africans die of the disease every day; one child succumbs every 30 seconds. Mosquito-borne, simple devices (such as mosquito nets over beds) have been shown to drastically decrease the incidence of disease. Though these only cost a few dollars each, many in developing countries lack the resources to purchase them. Additionally, evolution, as we often see, has caused both the parasites that cause the disease (one of four species of Plasmodium) and the mosquitoes that transmit it (Anopheles species) to become resistant to our efforts to stop them. The parasites have developed high levels of resistance to many of the anti-malarial drugs, and many insecticides are of little use in controlling the mosquito population due to a similar phenomenon.

Malaria is an ancient disease. Descriptions of malarial symptoms exist in Chinese literature dating back almost 5000 years. The name itself comes from 16th century Italy, meaning "bad air" (the assumed cause at that time). The disease used to be rampant in the United States. During the U.S. Civil war, troops on both sides stationed in the south suffered more than a million cases of the disease. Indeed, malaria was endemic in the southern United States until the 1940s, and continues to be a problem in the U.S. due to "imported" cases. Despite this huge burden of disease, to date, there has been no successful malaria vaccine. This is largely due to problems that arise in trying to target an organism with an extremely complex life cycle (see image, left). 1. Sporozoites in salivary gland. 2. Oöcysts in stomach wall. 3. Male and female gametocytes. 4. Liver phase. 5. Release of merozoites from liver. These enter red cells where both sexual and asexual cycles continue. As you can see, it's a bit of a mess, with different protozoal antigens being expressed at different times throughout the life cycle. What do you target? Which are the most important for immunity?

A new study may have cracked that question. Led by Pierre Druilhe of the Pasteur Institute (link to journal article), investigators focused on a malaria protein--merozoite surface protein 3 (MSP-3)--that prior research had identified as the focus of the immune systems of adults who had proven resistant to the disease.

The team injected an MSP-3-based vaccine into 30 European volunteers who had never had malaria, readministering it after one month and again after four months. Blood samples were taken one month after each injection. These blood samples were then compared to French blood samples from individuals with no immunity to malaria and African blood samples from people with immunity.

Nearly every vaccinated sample produced an immune response to malaria when it was introduced in vitro and 77 percent produced anti-MSP-3 antibodies. Plus, these antibodies proved to be as good at killing the parasite as those from immune adults and, in some cases, better, destroying up to twice as much. "This type of immune response, characteristic of immune adults living in malaria-endemic regions, requires under natural conditions 10 to 15 years of daily exposure to billions of infected red blood cells," Druilhe notes.

Vaccines are designed to protect people by boosting the immune system to kill parasites but, unless a malaria vaccine leads to the death of every single parasite, the ones that survive are likely to be the nastiest.

Initially, the Edinburgh researchers directly injected two groups of mice with infectious parasites - "immunised" mice, which had been exposed to Plasmodium and then treated with the anti-malarial drug, mefloquine, and "naive" mice, which had not. They then transferred parasites via a syringe from host to host 20 times. The parasites thus evolved in the immune or non-immune environments. The parasites that evolved in the immunised mice were more virulent than parasites evolved in the naive mice. Infection was not as severe after transmission through mosquitoes, but the effect was still there. In other words, immunity accelerates the evolution of virulence in malaria, even after mosquito transmission, making them more dangerous to their non-immunised hosts.

Dr. Mackinnon said: "How does immune selection create more virulent pathogens? One possibility is that many parasites die in immunised hosts but those that win "the race to the syringe" - or the mosquito - are probably genetically equipped to stay ahead of the advancing immune system. Since the virulent strains showed no problems transmitting infection to new hosts, it's likely that such strains would spread throughout an immunised population.

Is the mainstream media scare-mongering? Or is it providing a public service? If there is an eventual backlash in public support for pandemic preparedness that results in hundreds or millions of bird flu deaths, who is to blame?

...do developed nations have the right to stockpile antiviral medications for treating their populations at large in the event of avian flu, when the drugs are best indicated for the control of new avian flu outbreaks - outbreaks that are far more likely to occur in developing nations?

China reported its first three confirmed human cases of bird flu Wednesday as the government raced to vaccinate billions of chickens, ducks and other poultry in a massive effort to stop the spread of the virus.

The World Health Organization said two of those cases were fatal.

The Health Ministry confirmed two human cases in the central province of Hunan and one in the eastern province of Anhui, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Both areas reported outbreaks in poultry in the past month.

The fatalities were a 12-year-old girl in Hunan and a 24-year-old female poultry worker in Anhui, said Roy Wadia, a WHO spokesman in Beijing.

Women without bacterial vaginosis had 1 to 6 vaginal bacterial species (phylotypes) in each sample (mean, 3.3), as detected by broad-range PCR of 16S rDNA, and lactobacillus species were the predominant bacteria noted (83 to 100 percent of clones). Women with bacterial vaginosis had greater bacterial diversity (P<0.001),>with 9 to 17 phylotypes (mean, 12.6) detected per sample and newly recognized species present in 32 to 89 percent of clones per sample library (mean, 58 percent). Thirty-five unique bacterial species were detected in the women with bacterial vaginosis, including several species with no close cultivated relatives. Bacterium-specific PCR assays showed that several bacteria that had not been previously described were highly prevalent in subjects with bacterial vaginosis but rare in healthy controls. FISH confirmed that newly recognized bacteria detected by PCR corresponded to specific bacterial morphotypes visible in vaginal fluid.

I grew up in the middle of vast swaths of northwestern Ohio farmland. My dad, the youngest of 13 kids, was raised on a farm, most of my uncles still farm to some extent, and collecting eggs and shearing sheep was something I got to do regularly as a kid on visits to Grandma's house. But I'd honestly never heard of "cow tipping" until I went to Swanky East Coast College (TM) and got asked if that was a pasttime I and my rural friends engaged in. (Obviously, it wasn't). Well, now researchers at the University of British Columbia have data to show that it's likely that all these tipping stories are simply myths.

Ms Boechler, now a trainee forensics analyst for the Royal Canadian Mounted Corps, concluded in her initial report that a cow standing with its legs straight would require five people to exert the required force to bowl it over.

A cow of 1.45 metres in height pushed at an angle of 23.4 degrees relative to the ground would require 2,910 Newtons of force, equivalent to 4.43 people, she wrote.

Dr Lillie, Ms Boechler’s supervisor, revised the calculations so that two people could exert the required amount of force to tip a static cow, but only if it did not react.

“The static physics of the issue say . . . two people might be able to tip a cow,” she said. “But the cow would have to be tipped quickly — the cow’s centre of mass would have to be pushed over its hoof before the cow could react.”

***

Another problem is that cows, unlike horses, do not sleep on their feet — they doze. Ms Boechler said that cows are easily disturbed. “I have personally heard of people trying but failing because they are either using too few people or being too loud.

“Most of these ‘athletes’ are intoxicated.”

Harriet the tortoise, quite possibly the oldest living animal on Earth, celebrated her 175th birthday on Tuesday -- with a pink hibiscus flower cake at her retirement home in northern Australia.

Australia Zoo, where Harriet has spent the past 17 years, claims the Giant Galapagos Land Tortoise was collected by British scientist Charles Darwin in 1835.

More pictures of Harriet eating.

Professor Gonzalez will be speaking on the subject of Intelligent Design, how it makes the earth a privileged planet, and why Darwinian science from the steam engine era is no longer able to keep up in the information age.

AMES, Iowa -- With a magician's flourish, Thomas Ingebritsen pulled six mousetraps from a shopping bag and handed them out to students in his "God and Science" seminar. At his instruction, they removed one component -- either the spring, hammer or holding bar -- from each mousetrap. They then tested the traps, which all failed to snap.

"Is the mousetrap irreducibly complex?" the Iowa State University molecular biologist asked the class.

"Yes, definitely," said Jason Mueller, a junior biochemistry major wearing a cross around his neck.

That's the answer Mr. Ingebritsen was looking for. He was using the mousetrap to support the antievolution doctrine known as intelligent design. Like a mousetrap, the associate professor suggested, living cells are "irreducibly complex" -- they can't fulfill their functions without all of their parts. Hence, they could not have evolved bit by bit through natural selection but must have been devised by a creator.

"This is the closest to a science class on campus where anybody's going to talk about intelligent design," the fatherly looking associate professor told his class. "At least for now."

Overshadowed by attacks on evolution in high-school science curricula, intelligent design is gaining a precarious and hotly contested foothold in American higher education. Intelligent-design courses have cropped up at the state universities of Minnesota, Georgia and New Mexico, as well as Iowa State, and at private institutions such as Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon. Most of the courses, like Mr. Ingebritsen's, are small seminars that don't count for science credit. Many colleges have also hosted lectures by advocates of the doctrine

*groan*

At the end of the article, they present one of Ingebritsen's tactics:

On a brisk Thursday in October, following the mousetrap gambit, Mr. Ingebritsen displayed diagrams on an overhead projector of "irreducibly complex" structures such as bacterial flagellum, the motor that helps bacteria move about. The flagellum, he said, constitutes strong evidence for intelligent design.

One student, Mary West, disputed this conclusion. "These systems could have arisen through natural selection," the senior said, citing the pro-evolution textbook.

"That doesn't explain this system," Mr. Ingebritsen answered. "You're a scientist. How did the flagellum evolve? Do you have a compelling argument for how it came into being?"

Ms. West looked down, avoiding his eye. "Nope," she muttered. The textbook, "Finding Darwin's God," by Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, asserts that a flagellum isn't irreducibly complex because it can function to some degree even without all of its parts. This suggests to evolutionists that the flagellum could have developed over time, adding parts that made it work better.

During a class break, Ms. West says that Mr. Ingebritsen often puts her on the spot. "He knows I'm not religious," she says. "In the beginning, we talked about our religious philosophy. Everyone else in the class is some sort of a Christian. I'm not." The course helps her understand "the arguments on the other side," she adds, but she would like to see Mr. Ingebritsen co-teach it with a proponent of evolution.

Ms. West and other honors students will have a chance to hear the opposing viewpoint next semester. Counter-programming against Mr. Ingebritsen, three faculty members are preparing a seminar titled: "The Nature of Science: Why the Overwhelming Consensus of Science is that Intelligent Design is not Good Science."

I think that's a *course,* not a one-time, hour-long seminar, if I'm not mistaken. Or at least, a similar one was/is in the works there. Additionally, for those of you who are in Iowa, there also will be a seminar on Feb. 2nd at ISU:

Why Intelligent Design Is Not Science - Robert M. Hazen

02 Feb 2006, 8:00 PM @ Sun Room, Memorial Union - Robert M. Hazen is the Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University, and a scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory. He received his M.S. in geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from HarvardUniversity. Dr. Hazen is the author of over 240 articles and 16 books, including the most recent Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin; Why Aren't Black Holes Black? and the best-selling Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy, which he co-authored with James Trefil. Dr. Hazen has recorded the acclaimed lecture series, The Joy of Science, with the Teaching Company (www.Teach12.com), which provides a fresh and definitive overview of all the physical and biological sciences.

Finally, again for those of you in the Hawkeye State, the Iowa Citizens for Science group now has a website: http://www.iowascience.org. It's still a bit rough, but I'll be updating it with events like these as I find out about them, so keep an eye on it--and drop me an email (iowascience AT gmail DOT com) if you'd like me to add you to the email list for even quicker updates.