Pneumonia vaccines and racial remarks

Havana (they spell it Habana but we can still pronounce it with the "v") scientists have developed a new pneumonia vaccine that is going into clinical trials. It doesn’t say if it is what the Institute calls “the only Group-B meningococcus vaccine,” though that sounds a bit afield from pneumonia. The Biblioteca Virtual en Vacunas, a Latin-American “Virtual (presumably online) Bible of Vaccines," reports that Zimbabwe, one of the countries with lowest life expectancy, has introduced the conjugated pneumococcal vaccine, PCV for small children. The Biblioteca says this “supposes a great advance in the health of the population.” And this may not be pie in the sky, despite the Hispanic tendency toward sweeping statements. That sounds like a pure and simple racist remark, but it is based on my living three years in Spain and Brazil, and spending 40 years talking to Spanish and Portuguese native speakers in their own tongues. US Afro-Americans, on the other hand, seem to major in understatement, or low-key reactions to things. Apparently life, and possibly even recent political events, have taught them to go easy when it comes to wild hope and enthusiasm. Back to pneumonia. We can note that US children began to get PCV vaccine in large numbers in 2001. By 2004 careful reports found that pneumonia hospital admissions among the entire population, not just children, had dropped more than ONE-THIRD (emphasis mine). If that's not a great advance, I don't know what is. Zimbabwe's introduction of PCV comes on top of recent five-year campaigns to vaccinate against polio and sarampion (smallpox? no, dear, measles, rubella. Very close.), and to provide vitamin A to “almost 2 million under age 5.” Rotavirus or RSV vaccine is set to arrive in Zimbabwe in 2013. PCV introduction came by a collaboration among the Zimbabwian (sp?) ministry of health, UNICEF (do we always have to capitalize that whole word?), and GAVI (same question!), the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. Zimbabwe is GAVI’s 18th country to get PCV, among them Haiti, which needs all the shots in the arm it can get. Now which chunk of Africa does Zimbabwe hold? The same as Rhodesia did, and not far from South Africa?

More science writing: A few science headlines. Dog-carrying house dust may protect against asthma. Allergic people may have less brain tumor problem. Indo-European languages started in Anatolia. Hawking may have become so brilliant in part because his disability stops him from doing "distractions," leaving more time to sit and think. A virus makes snakes fold themselves up. There may be a way to "re-work DNA and reduce asthma. Mostly from Medical News or Science News online.

Bloomberg School of Pubic Health

Around May, 2012 Medical News Today reported online that in 2010 a careful survey estimated there were about seven and a half million (they used the number 7.6 M) deaths worldwide among children under 5 years of age. Of those 18% were caused by pneumonia, the single highest cause. Let's back up a step so I can say that this sounds to me like a surprisingly small number. Suppose we have 6.5 billion people. The Brits call a billion a thousand million, and for good reason, since that's what it is. Always a pleasant surprise to catch Britain, that island of fuddy-duddies, doing something right. They can't even talk right. A Brit himself recently described his sceptred isle as the "land of the limp paycheck." Limp here means small, so don't think of any anatomical items being limp, even if you do have a dirty mind, and even if limp in that setting would also mean something was small. Back to the billions of people on Earth. Let's just say we are 6000 million in all. How many are under 5? Say 10%, and I suspect it may be less, or 600 M small children. If 7.6 M died, that's just over 1%. Right? Sure. Almost 99% of all vulnerable babies, toddlers, and 2-3-4 year-olds lived through the year. I wouldn't have guessed the survival rate was that good in Marin County, Calif, much less Botswana. Seems like an amazing success rate. I haven't checked the studies, but l say with blowhard confidence, as I sit here at age 63, that 99% of all us age 63 folk who started the year will not be around to finish it. By no means. This 7.6 million is, by the way, down by 2 million since 2000. Of these, as I said, 18% were caused by pneumonia, while 14% were the result of a complication of preterm birth, researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in The Lancet, per Medical News Today. Diarrhea is the third leading cause of deaths among very young children. Wasn't it the Bloomberg School of Public Health that recently put out a brochure labelling itself as the "School of Pubic Health?" I thought of dropping out that "l" from public health years ago, so advanced I am. The School's PR lady was aghast, but the rest of us thought it was hilarious and wrote in for copies of the original brochure. First the best of all the game, right?

Science: Photogenic atoms and addicted doctors

Howard Markel has written a book, An Anatomy of Addiction, tracing the story of how two famous 19th century physicians, Sigmund Freud and William Halstad, both got themselves addicted to cocaine. This may have initially been done as a noble gesture of willingness to experiment on themselves, in the name of science. But once they became addicted, it did the opposite of furthering science. The properties of cocaine were not well understood in their day, nor was there a general grasp of biological addiction to a substance. In fact, the word "addiction" as we use it came into being in their day, derived from an ancient term for slave or slavery. Source: Science Friday online, accessed August 18, 2012 Science Item #2: Eric Streed and his colleagues in the Kielpinski group in Brisbane have used a photon-absorption technique to take a picture of a single atom, and they tell us this is a first (Nature Communications, July 2012) The atom, ytterbium in ionic form, was suspended by itself in a vacuum. For anyone who might say, "So what?" the researchers write, "The absorption of photons by single atoms is of immediate interest for quantum information processing." So there. We can only say that there may be times when a science reporter doesn't actually grasp the subject being reported well enough to spell out how you can use this breakthrough in your basement at home. (the tip for this also came from Science Friday)