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 […]

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Let’s take a visit back to May 2006. The DJIA was above 11,000 and would continue to increase for more than a year. The Da Vinci Code was in theaters. Don Rumsfeld would continue to look very polished in his tab-collar shirts, but his kung fu would serve him for only six more months, when […]

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Swine influenza, seasonality, and the northern hemisphere:
This history demonstrates the seasonality of pandemic influenza, and suggesta that spread of A/California/09/2009 in the northern hemisphere is not imminent. Based on this regularity, the epidemic in Mexico should be over no later than the end of May. While it is not ‘impossible to see the current contagion […]

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In my last post, I looked at some of the ethical considerations an individual might make during a flu epidemic. My focus was squarely on the individual’s decisions: whether to stay in bed or seek medical care, whether to seek aid from others, etc. This is the kind of everyday ethics that crops up for […]

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What is yoga without breathing?
Acrobatics. Exercise. Anything but yoga.
The breath is such a crucial component of yoga. Breath, mind, and body together make up a yoga practice. Yet so often in classes, breathing instruction is neglected for asana (I will be offering breathing sessions by phone in the upcoming months. If you’d like to […]

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As senior diplomats and politicians from 17 countries headed towards the US State Department building in Washington DC, this morning, they couldn’t have missed a couple of Greenpeace climbers dangling below a huge banner bearing a picture of our beautiful blue planet and the words “Too big to fail”.     Full Story…

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…asked Joe. Answer: only a few days to sequence, clean up the data, and submit to NCBI. Seven H1N1 swine flu sequences are up (H/T Jonathan Eisen). I’ve not had a chance to crack anything open yet, but I hope to see some analysis from more of the genomics geeks soon…However, one bummer is that […]

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Like a lot of other people, I’m watching the swine flu outbreaks unfold with some interest. As they do, I can’t help but think about the ethical dimensions of our interactions with other humans, since it’s looking like any of us could become a vector of disease.
There are some fairly easy ethical calls here — […]

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It must seem magical.. this little box, a keyboard, a screen, a mouse, and it’s a portal to all the worlds knowledge. It must seem so magical but perhaps I’m so accustomed to it after 25 years living on the Internet that I’ve forgotten that magic. Lately though I’ve been thinking about some […]

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Just a few quick interesting links:

Google Map of H1N1 Swine Flu Cases
(HT: Clinical
Cases and Images - Blog)
Google Flu Trends
We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators
of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data
to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than
traditional flu surveillance systems.

Veratect Swine Flu Twitter […]

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