Daily Archives: January 30, 2016

Viva!

Chinese authorities order Beijing-based women’s legal aid center to shut down

legalaidcentre.jpg

Chinese authorities have ordered a leading women’s legal aid center in Beijing to close down, shocking the country’s legal rights advocates.

innovation, Rock on-Peace Out, Viva!

Kenny Sailors, a Pioneer of the Jump Shot, Dies at 95 – The New York Times

If anyone can be said to have immortalized Sailors, it was the Life magazine photographer Eric Schaal. He was courtside at Madison Square Garden in January 1946, when, in a game between Wyoming and Long Island University, his camera caught Sailors airborne.

In the picture, Sailors, in black high-tops, is suspended a full yard above the hardwood and at least that much over the outstretched hand of his hapless defender. The ball is cradled above his head, elbow at 90 degrees, his right hand poised to fling the shot with a snap of the wrist that will have it backspinning to the rim along a high arc.

The photograph, appearing in one of America’s widest-circulating magazines, made an impact coast to coast.“A shot whose origins could be traced to isolated pockets across the country — from the North Woods to Ozarks, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific — was suddenly by virtue of one picture as widespread as the game itself,” the journalist John Christgau wrote in his book “The Origins of the Jump Shot.” “Everywhere young players on basketball courts began jumping to shoot.”

Source: Kenny Sailors, a Pioneer of the Jump Shot, Dies at 95 – The New York Times

Feminism, human rights, terrorism

It’s Time to Reverse Rape Culture. | Rebelle Society

It’s easy to say to a victim that their experience was not that bad, that it could have been worse, and they should be grateful they still have their lives. I’ve been told that a countless number of times, and I can honestly say it has never made me feel better.What helped was knowing I am not alone.Reclaiming a survivor’s body after abuse is one of the hardest things they will ever endure in their lifetime. Just because the abuse may be invisible does not mean the scars are not there. We cannot let rape culture win.It’s now or never.

***Elizabeth Tsung-Ribar is a Taiwanese American living in NYC. She is currently getting her Masters in Teaching from Fordham University.

Source: It’s Time to Reverse Rape Culture. | Rebelle Society

Viva!

Microcephaly in Brazil: is it occurring in greater numbers than normal or not?

A paper came out yesterday (AEST) from Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) with the heading…

Possible Association Between Zika Virus Infection and Microcephaly — Brazil, 2015


Reads as though some great data may finally show us a hint of an association between Zika virus (ZIKV) infection and microcephaly disease. Right? 

Nope. There are none. At least none that could approach satisfying that title which highlights that it is not just the popular media who can generate misleading titles (headlines in their case).

In fact there are no Zika virus testing results in this study of 35 infants with microcephaly (defined using a useful protocol described detailed within). At all.

The closest we get to identifying a role for ZIKV in this disease are the statements…

  1. “Therefore a mother’s report of a rash illness during pregnancy was used as a proxy indicator of potential Zika virus infection.“
    ZIKV is not the only agent capable of causing a rash-we’ve seen evidence for concurrent circulation of other rash-causing arboviruses in print from Brazil including dengue virus and chikungunya virus.[2] There is also malaria, filiaris, leishmaniasis and yellow fever to consider in this region.[3]
  2. [cerebrospinal fluid] “CSF samples from all infants enrolled in the cohort were sent to a reference laboratory in Brazil for Zika virus testing; the results are not yet available.“
    Why publish these data ahead of these CSF results I wonder? It does not take long to perform RT-PCR for ZIKV. Certainly not long enough to hold up a paper for more than a day or two at most
Oh and there’s this..

“because Zika virus infection was not laboratory confirmed in infants or their mothers, the history of a nonspecific rash illness during pregnancy is subject to recall bias and might have resulted in misclassification of potential Zika virus exposure” 

Recall bias being that thing you get when you don’t really remember what happened a while ago; the details get a little hazy. I imagine that might be a factor in at least some instances here. But clearly not all.

The authors also note that the case definition they describe is unlikely to have been used prior to November 2015. For example, head measurement was not being routinely recorded thus milder cases may not have been reported prior to the ZIKV epidemic/pandemic/global epidemic/multi-country outbreak (or whatever it is being called-my choice underlined). Again, this doesn’t negate the rise nor the issue, but it may reduce the total a little. This idea was given more oxygen earlier in the week in an article by Declan Butler in Nature.[4] Although not all agree, some even suggesting the numbers are underestimates.[5]

A little over a week ago I wondered why the United States had a higher averaged number of microcephaly cases than Brazil…
Q: The US averages 20-120 microcephaly births per 100,000 per year. Brazil about 5 pre-#Zika.
Why higher in US?
ping: @who @DrJudyStone
1/2

— Ian M Mackay, PhD (@MackayIM) January 22, 2016

Crof_Zika%2526Microcephaly_Quote_30JAN20

Flu-blog-eyah’s ProfCrof has just penned a very nice analysis of this issue.[6]

He looks more deeply than I did and folks, this is why we should demand and ensure public health infectious disease data are accessible to the public-not all useful ideas come from, or are communicated by, a paid position. 

The wash-up of Crof’s analysis is that perhaps the rise in microcephaly cases is not a rise at all, but simply a more successful effort to collect data, and that the total number of microcephalic babies may not be too far from the norm (also considering those issues above).[6]

The MMWR study did look for, and found no evidence of the following infections of diseases…
  • syphilis
  • toxoplasmosis
  • rubella
  • cytomegalovirus
  • herpes simplex virus
But no mention was made of seeking signs of those other agents listed in above. And what about toxicology?

So the MMWR paper is essentially providing a useful definition of microcephaly and informing us that a cohort has been started/is still recruiting (?) For me, its title would have been better written as 

“Case definition of microcephaly epidemic in Brazil“or perhaps, 

“>insert name< : a birth cohort study into ZIKV infection and congenital disease“…or something.
Zika-PubMED_30JAN2016.pngThe search for a cause for Brazil’s reported spike in microcephaly cases will go on. If it is a true spike then it must, but even that is not clear right now. As is much at all about ZIKV. This event in the Americas really serves a s reminder that we must keep our eyes open to all possibilities – we can do, and think, about more than one thing at a time. If it is not a true spike, then an awful lot of resources are currently moving towards defeating ZIKV that probably, sadly, would not be moving if microcephaly was not a front page story. Right now it seems we’re not very clear on even the most basic facts.

It is great to see some more papers coming out because there have not been many to date (see graph above). Bravo. It would be greater still if they had more relevant data and came out faster. 

As always, don’t just believe the headline. Read further. And maybe do your own analysis, like the Crof did.

References…

  1. Possible Association Between Zika Virus Infection and Microcephaly — Brazil, 2015
    http://1.usa.gov/200iZXv
  2. Dengue, chikungunya and Zika co-infection in a patient from Colombia
    http://bitly.com/1RT34eb
  3. http://bitly.com/200iXyQ
  4. http://bitly.com/1RT365I
  5. http://on.wsj.com/200iZXx
  6. http://bitly.com/1RT365J
© 2013-2015 Ian M. Mackay. PhD.
This content was originally published at http://bitly.com/1Kas2vY
9920132014201599
avian influenza, Chikungunya, Dengue, environment, malaria, MERS-cov, pandemic, planetkillers, Yellow fever

How Scared Should You Be About Zika? – The New York Times

The point is, we should have anticipated that the large increase in mosquitoes would create a major health crisis. Just as we should have anticipated that a deadly hemorrhagic disease caused by the Ebola virus would emerge one day from the remote forests and threaten the vast slums of the rapidly growing megacities of Africa. We should now anticipate that the MERS virus will result in more deadly outbreaks outside of the Arabian Peninsula, as it did in Seoul, South Korea. We should anticipate that viruses such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis may spread from their jungle homes and be even more deadly than Zika.

Even more than these viruses, we should be afraid of a planet-wide catastrophe caused by influenza. The best way to avert a pandemic is to develop a game-changing universal influenza vaccine. All these crises are largely predictable and we can do much in advance to lessen the effects and diminish the spread. And believe me, the cost of acting now will be infinitely less than the cost of not acting in the long run.

Source: How Scared Should You Be About Zika? – The New York Times