monkey's uncle

I am happy to report that our paper describing the measurement of casual contacts within an American high school is finally out in the early edition of PNAS. Stanford’s great social science reporter, Adam Gorlick, has written a very nice overview of our paper for the Stanford Report (also here in the LA Times and [...]

[Read more →]

As we enter flu season, I think that the importance of hand-washing can not be overstated for maintaining health. Here is a (somewhat ugly) flyer published by CDC: You’d think CDC could hire some graphic designers! Two things that I think many people don’t appreciate: (1) washing hands with hot soapy water is better than [...]

[Read more →]

It’s been a while since I last posted about swine flu.  Alas, it is still with us. The most recent data from CDC show that swine flu is still with us and that we should steel ourselves for a heckuva flu season this autumn and winter.  The curve peaks around the middle of June, but [...]

[Read more →]

A very interesting epidemiological analysis of the first cases of novel A(H1N1) flu in China was posted on ProMED-mail this morning by Dr. Ji-Ming Chen, Head of the Laboratory of Animal Epidemiological Surveillance, China Animal Health and Epidemiology Center, Qingdao. Dr. Chen notes that all 12 of the cases in China were imported via air travel.  He writes, [...]

[Read more →]

The bad news is that cases of novel 2009 influenza A(H1N1) continue to increase. Data from WHO Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR), Influenza A(H1N1) - update 43 — 23 May 2009: The good news is that the spread appears to be sub-exponential at this point.  Exponential growth will appear linear on semi-logarithmic axes.  Here I plot the natural logarithms [...]

[Read more →]

Data from WHO Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR), Influenza A(H1N1) - update 34 — 20 May 2009: 

[Read more →]

Data from WHO Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR), Influenza A(H1N1) – update 33 — 19 May 2009: 

[Read more →]

There is a nice video piece at the New York Times website done by science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr.  In it, he makes a number of important points that I have been trying to emphasize in my latest posts on the topic. McNeil is to be congratulated.  This is the kind of reporting we need [...]

[Read more →]

As the potential pandemic fades into the obscurity of a couple weeks’ worth of the 24-hour news cycle, cases continue to mount.  New York City reported its first swine-flu death, an assistant principal in a NYC public school. As with most of the other deaths so far, this particular victim had medical complications that contributed [...]

[Read more →]

The coming Aporkalypse appears to have faded into last week’s obscurity. With WHO raising the pandemic alert from 3 to 5 in the span of about 24 hours, it seemed that Oinkmageddon was upon us.  But now it’s hard to find a news piece on swine flu, let alone an inflammatory one. This is something [...]

[Read more →]