Swine Influenza News

This air purifier ad from Sharp is a little creepy, in a Spongebob Squarepants way. I love how you can see their fluorescent organelles! Unfortunately I don't see anything here that resembles a virus, but with swine flu all over the news, this serves as a good reminder to wash your hands. Ad by Takho Lau for ad agency M&C Saatchi of Hong Kong. Found via Next Nature Read the comments on this post... ... (more)

Free Influenza Medical Text [The Corpus Callosum]

Just to let everyone know, if they don't already: freebooks4doctors has a downloadable text, Influenza Report 2006. It is a 225-page, 2.7 MB PDF. Being from 2006, it does not specifically cover the current situation. Rather, it focuses a bit on avian influenza. Still, it is a reasonably good source of information. If you want, you can buy a hard copy for 25 Euros, but anyone can download the free copy. Influenza Report ISBN 3-924774-51-X Influenza Report is a medical textbook that provides a comprehensive overview of epidemic and pandemic influenza. Influenza Report has also been p... (more)

Swine flu: the Flu Wiki [Effect Measure]

In June 2005 a reader over at the old site suggested we put up some of our flu related material on Wikipedia. That sounded like a great idea to me. Even better, why not start a special purpose wiki -- a flu wiki -- to harvest the vast knowledge of the hivemind? Many, if not most, of the problems that would plague us in a pandemic weren't medical or even scientific in nature. They were things like, how do you prepare your small business for the possibility that the one person who knows how to unjam the fax machine is out sick for 4 weeks? Two other bloggers were also doing flu stu... (more)

Scientist VERY hard at work: Great interview with CDC's head virologist [Neuron Culture]

Wanted to draw attention to this wonderful interview with CDC virologist Ruben Donis, chief of the molecular virology and vaccines branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from ScienceInsider. It's echoes nicely some of the themes I and others have been trying to hit in this swine flu coverage: the mystery about where this virus came from and where it is going; its weird novelty  — and the temptations and difficulties in trying to explain that novelty; the huge advantage we have in spotting and studying it because of the "false alarms" from SARS and av... (more)

But What If You Can't Afford To Stay Home? [Thus Spake Zuska]

What's a good citizen to do if he or she thinks that cough and sneeze is swine flu? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends: Stay home if you get sick. CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them. This afternoon I've been reading Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich - which is ever so more relevant now, if that were possible, than when it was originally released. Near the end she notes: It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition ... (more)