Alan Dove

Greetings,

I read your publication on Nature and was very impressed! Assay Biotechnology would like to extend an exclusive antibody promotion for your lab. You can try any 5 (20ug each) of our 5000 antibodies (with the LARGEST selection of phospho-specific antibodies in the world) for only $99 USD till the end of this year, 2010. Your special promotion code is NATURESAMPLE. Shipping is not included though, sorry about that. Enjoy your weekend!

Greetings to you, too! Had you addressed me by name, I might reply to your email personally rather than post it on my blog, but your generic greeting tells me you haven’t the faintest idea who the hell I am! The remainder of your message confirms that, as all of my actual acquaintances know that I’m a FULL-TIME science journalist who no longer does bench research!

If anyone else can benefit from this “exclusive” antibody deal, though, they should feel free to use the special promotion code NATURESAMPLE when ordering from Assay Biotech! Enjoy your weekend!

This just in from the “things that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in New York” department:

A Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority spokesman says a Boston-area train was temporarily stopped Thursday after riders reported a man aboard had a snake around his neck. The man had already left when police arrived at the Green Line’s Brookline Village station at about 12:30 p.m. to investigate. MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo tells The Boston Globe police held the train for about nine minutes to investigate, briefly backing up service.

Of course, here’s the obligatory Samuel L. Jackson link.

Here’s your next script idea:

The remains of a prehistoric child were removed from an underwater cave in Mexico four years after divers stumbled upon the well-preserved corpse … The skeletal remains of the boy, dubbed the Young Hol Chan, are more than 10,000 years old and are among the oldest human bones found in the Americas.

In other news, members of a team of cave divers have begun to die, one by one, under mysterious circumstances.

According to new research from Germany, clean hands are good corporate policy:

Nils-Olaf Hübner and a team from Germany analyzed absenteeism and symptom data from 129 participants. He said, “Our study found that hand disinfection reduced the number of episodes of illness for the majority of the investigated symptoms.” In the study, the participants were divided into two groups. The control group were told to maintain normal hand washing behaviour, whilst the intervention group were supplied with hand disinfectant and instructed to attempt to use it at least five times during a working day. Disinfectant use was encouraged, especially after activities which were likely to facilitate bacterial or viral transfer, such as toilet use and nose blowing.

Whilst the effect of hand disinfectants in medical facilities and non-clinical settings such as child day -care centres had already been documented, its effectiveness in improving employee health in open community work places had not been assessed. The study also found a reduction in symptoms of illness during times when participants were not absent from work, suggesting that hand disinfectant use can reduce on-the-job-productivity-losses, increase workplace health levels, and therefore improve overall productivity.

Hand sanitizer. Image courtesy Heather Kennedy.

It’s charming to see that someone still uses “whilst.” Whilst this work is certainly interesting, I would have liked to see another control group that was told to use ordinary soap and water to wash their hands. Alcohol-based sanitizers are useful when there is no water available, but they tend to irritate skin after prolonged use. Soap and water might be more sustainable, and they’re generally available at the office. In any case, it’s another reminder that simple measures can pay big dividends in public health.

A much-anticipated paper on the potential role of retroviruses in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) just came out in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Before it was published, many people had speculated that this work would “confirm” the XMRV-CFS link. It does not. However, it does provide more evidence that people with CFS may be more likely than the general population to harbor murine-like retroviruses.

As a Science news article covering the new work explains:

Part of the problem, skeptics say, is that the researchers didn’t exactly replicate the Science paper. XMRV is a so-called xenotropic murine virus, which means it can no longer enter mouse cells but can infect cells of other species. (Murine means “from mice.”) The researchers in the PNAS paper say the viral sequences they find are more diverse than that and resemble more closely the so-called polytropic viruses, which is why they adopted the term MLV-related virus, for murine leukemia virus. “Let’s be clear: This is another virus. They did not confirm [Mikovits's] results,” says retrovirologist Myra McClure of ICL, a co-author of one of the four negative studies.

Still, “in the grand scheme of things,” the viral sequence found in the PNAS paper closely resembles those of XMRV, says Celia Witten, the director of FDA’s Office of Cellular, Tissue and Gene Therapies, who was not an author of the paper herself but spoke on Lo’s behalf. Witten adds that the data “support” the Science paper. Mikovits — who is “delighted” by the new paper — says the difference is not important. In as-yet-unpublished results, her group finds more genetic diversity in the virus as well, she says.

So now we have two studies suggesting a correlation between CFS and murine-like retroviral infection, four studies finding no evidence of these murine-like viruses in any humans, and the newest results suggesting that we’re not dealing with a single virus at all, but perhaps a whole family of them. Interestingly, the two studies that did detect murine-like viruses in CFS found them in both CFS patients and healthy controls – they’re just much more frequent in the CFS patients. Similarly clear-as-mud data sets have now accumulated for prostate cancer, both claiming and denying a link between that disease and murine-like viruses.

This raises a whole passel of new questions. Are we simply awash in murine retroviruses, which can start opportunistic infections in humans who are already sick with other diseases? Do any of these viruses actually cause any disease? And if 3-6% of the healthy population really is walking around with these viruses in them, is there any point in restricting blood donations from CFS patients?

Vincent, Dickson, and Rich continue Virology 101 with a discussion of how viruses with DNA genomes replicate their genetic information.

Please answer the following “Yes” or “No” questions:

1. Is your primary residence anywhere outside of the County of New York (also known as the “Borough of Manhattan”)?

2. Does your constituency/audience hail primarily from a “red state”?

3. Have you ever made a disparaging rhetorical reference to “New York elites”?

4. Have you ever vehemently proclaimed that states’ rights and local control are superior to Federal policymaking or other outside meddling?

If you answered “Yes” to any of the above, neither you nor your constituency/audience are entitled to any opinion whatsoever on the local zoning decisions of Lower Manhattan’s democratically elected leaders. Please find some actual problem to talk about instead.

Today’s issue of MMWR includes an interesting analysis of the prevalence of smoking among characters in top-grossing American movies. The statistics span 1991-2009, during which time the authors noticed an apparent trend:

This report summarizes the results of that study, which found that the number of tobacco incidents depicted in the movies during this period peaked in 2005 and then progressively declined. Top-grossing movies released in 2009 contained 49% of the number of onscreen smoking incidents as observed in 2005 (1,935 incidents in 2009 versus 3,967 incidents in 2005). Further reduction of tobacco use depicted in popular movies could lead to less initiation of smoking among adolescents. Effective methods to reduce the potential harmful influence of onscreen tobacco use should be implemented.

The data are pretty noisy, though. For example, while the past four years appear to show a decline, the number of smoking “incidents” in 2009 is still higher than the 1998 level, and there’s tremendous year-to-year variation.

If there really has been a decline in smoking in movies, though, what might have caused it? Is it just coincidence that a fairly successful film satirized exactly this type of product placement in 2005, precisely when the decline began?

As everyone has already heard, there’s been a bit of a problem with the US egg supply. Today, the New York Times and other sources report that it’s getting even worse. Buried in the reporting is a pretty typical food poisoning timeline:

The salmonella outbreak began in May, when several states began seeing an increase in the number of cases of a common type of bacterial illness known as Salmonella enteritidis, said Dr. Christopher R. Braden, acting director of food-borne diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The numbers continued to grow, and in June and July, a database used to track disease nationwide found that the number of cases had risen from a historical average of about 50 a week to about 200.

Public health officials in California, Minnesota and Colorado determined that many of the people who had gotten sick had eaten food containing eggs. Further investigation traced many tainted eggs to Wright County Egg.

Incredible (edible?) eggs. Image courtesy woodleywonderworks.

So officials started to suspect a problem in May, were probably pretty sure of it by June or July, and we’re just getting around to recalling these products in late August. Why does it take so long to stop a pathogen that only has a 24 to 72-hour incubation period?

There are a few reasons. Public health departments have accelerated their data-sharing dramatically in recent years, but there’s still room for improvement. It also takes time just to figure out which ingredient is causing a foodborne outbreak, and more time to trace it to its source. The biggest delay, though, may come from the big food processors themselves, who have an enormous motivation to stall such an investigation. As the Times explains:

The company announced on Friday that it was recalling 228 million eggs that it had sold since mid-May. On Wednesday, it added another 152 million eggs to the recall. Many of the affected eggs have long since been cooked and eaten, but millions could still be stored in refrigerators.

You don’t have to refund someone’s money for an egg that’s already been sold, cooked, and eaten. Wait another week, and there won’t be anything left to recall at all.

Boatbuilders come and go, so it’s no surprise that virtually all of the vessels in my earliest sailing memories are now out of production. Most of them, though, survive in boatyards and have fan clubs online, so information about them is never more than a Google search away. Not so the Wesort.

Before I was even big enough to hold a tiller, I remember my father teaching older kids how to sail at Indian Landing Boat Club on the upper reaches of the Severn River. The club had a sizable fleet of a type of boat called a Wesort. As I recall, it was about 12 feet long, had a daggerboard and a cat rig, and seemed well suited to the light, variable winds and shallow waters of the upper Chesapeake. Looking back, I now think it was probably some variation on a sharpie.

Web searches on this boat are completely uninformative, though, at least with respect to the boat. I did learn a bit of the fascinating (and apparently disputed) history of the Piscataway Indian tribe, also known as the We-Sorts. So did the We-Sorts build Wesorts, or was Wesort a corruption of Westport, a neighborhood in Baltimore? Or was Elmer Fudd somehow involved in the design?

These are the kinds of things I ponder in my spare time.