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Check out this article about a unit of the Parsons School of Design, which is developing some kind of mapping tool "that can rapidly search open data sources and then present the information geographically, in real-time." Of course the students are upset. (And say the usual range of stupidities about the liberal and pacifist tradition at the New School -- let's just say that I don't think the German Jewish intellectuals who came after '33 were pacifists, and they definitely weren't "progressives" in the sense that these kids think they were.) But actually, the technology is interesting, and the questions about the nature of this complicity would be interesting to explore.

The recent confirmation of an outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter (Peter Pan and Great Value brands) demonstrates another weakness in U.S. disease surveillance. This CDC announcement details the process by which a food-borne disease outbreak is detected, confirmed, and tracked. "PulseNet (the national subtyping network for foodborne disease surveillance coordinated by CDC) detected a slowly rising increase in cases of Salmonella Tennessee this fall. OutbreakNet (the national network of public health officials coordinated by CDC that investigates enteric disease outbreaks) then worked for several weeks to identify this unusual food vehicle. Public health officials from several states have isolated Salmonella from open jars of peanut butter of both Peter Pan and Great Value brand. For nine jars, the serotype has been confirmed as Tennessee and DNA fingerprinting has shown that the pattern is the outbreak strain." Yet as recently as February 16th, "ConAgra officials said they were unsure why the C.D.C. had identified peanut butter as the source of the problem. A spokesman for the company, Chris Kircher, said that tests of the peanut butter and factory were negative but that it closed the plant to investigate." Typical corporate evasion, but the bigger question is: if CDC was picking up cases of salmonella in the FALL, why did it take so long to identify the source? Check out these posts from the blog Effect Measure for more on how the FDA and the USDA are being criticized for poor food surveillance. Interestingly, the FDA briefly increased spending after 9/11 because of bioterrorism, but spending has not kept paced with rising personell costs and a massive shift towards imported food. 'Responding to fears of a bioterrorist attack on the nation's food supply, the FDA budget was increased after 9/11 and inspections increased. That was then. This is now: "The only difference is now it's worse, because there are more inspections to do -- more facilities -- and more food coming into America, which requires more inspections," said Tommy Thompson, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services pushed to increase the numbers. He's now part of a coalition lobbying to turn around several years of stagnant spending. The Bush administration's budget request for 2008 includes an additional $10.6 million for food safety at the FDA; the lobbying group said 10 times that increase is needed. Even though the FDA increased its overall spending on food between 2003 and 2006, those increases failed to keep pace with rising personnel costs."' An increase of $100 million for FDA? This could be interesting.

The FDA advisory committee endorsed yesterday an experimental human vaccine for a strain of the H5N1 avian influenza virus. The vaccine seems to provide a protection of only 45%. According to the NYT, it requires 12 times the dose of antigen delivered by a typical shot for seasonal influenza and it has to be given in two shots several weeks apart... Panel Endorses First Vaccine for Avian Flu By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Published: February 28, 2007 The first vaccine against avian flu for the United States was endorsed by a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel yesterday, but merely as a stopgap measure until better vaccines are developed. The experimental vaccine, made by Sanofi-Pasteur, protected only 45 percent of the 91 people on whom it was tested in a hasty clinical trial. Reaching even that level of protection required 12 times the dose of antigen delivered by a typical flu shot, and it had to be given in two shots several weeks apart. It is also based on a virus strain that was circulating in Vietnam three years ago. Dr. Robert Couch, an advisory panel member from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said members knew of better vaccines still in development, “but this is the only vaccine we had in front of us.” The panel voted unanimously that the vaccine was effective enough to be used. The F.D.A. usually accepts the recommendations from its expert panels. A spokesman for Sanofi, a unit of Sanofi-Aventis, described the move as “a positive first step.” Because it would be unethical to infect trial subjects deliberately with a flu that can kill, it is not possible to say accurately how many people the vaccine can save from death or hospitalization, so “45 percent protection” is a bit of a misnomer, the spokesman, Len Lavenda, said. The closest scientists can get is to draw blood from subjects a month after vaccination and see how many have developed as many antibodies to the target virus as are provoked by a seasonal flu shot to its targets. The government already has plans to stockpile enough avian flu vaccine to protect 20 million doctors, nurses, paramedics, laboratory technicians and other emergency workers against the H5N1 strain if a pandemic breaks out. Sanofi does not plan to sell this vaccine to the public; it is developing newer ones, including one based on a later strain from Indonesia, Mr. Lavenda said. The World Health Organization said recently that 16 companies from 10 countries were developing prototype vaccines, and more than 40 clinical trials had been finished or were under way. So far, all have been found to be safe. The difficulty, experts said, is finding one that works at low doses and can be made quickly. Most now must be grown in eggs; the weakened virus must be injected and the eggs cracked by hand to remove the liquid for purifying. At present, it would take months to create enough for the whole country. Some vaccines being tested now can be grown in a broth of cells; others have additives that boost the immune system, helping lower doses work. Dr. Robert G. Webster, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, has suggested that the current seasonal flu vaccine, which has an H1N1 strain in it, may provide some protection against an H5N1 pandemic because there could be overlap in immune response to the N1 component of both viruses.

 

The New York Times reports: "In 2005 M.I.A., the Sri Lanka-born, London-raised rapper, released her acclaimed debut, “Arular,” a wildly inventive mash-up of punk, hip-hop, dancehall and electro. Now she’s added South Asian sounds to the mix. Her electrifying new single, “Bird Flu,” was partly recorded in South India, where she also filmed the video posted on her MySpace page (myspace.com/mia). The track is pure, surreal rhythm: thunderous dhol drums, poultry squawks and chanting children. (It may be included on her as-yet-untitled album, due in June on Interscope.) Last year a “bird flu dance” craze swept the Ivory Coast and Jamaica. It involves imitating a dying chicken, and naturally you can find plenty of examples on YouTube. In a highlight of M.I.A.’s video, a tiny boy leads a group of dancing villagers, flapping his arms like wings."

I'm posting this here as well as at the bio-nano blog, since it is a nice point of overlap... Dupont, the chemical giant, has put its peanut butter in the chocolate belong to Environmental Defense, the environmental action NGO. Or did ED's chocolate end up in DuPont's peanut butter? In any case they have teamed up to produce a "NanoRisk Framework" that combines techniques risk analysis and product development to help companies monitor the production of new nanomaterials. It is, at first sight, a surprising partnership, but as it turns out, I guess ED is known for "finding the ways that work" as their website puts it. It is also another example of the desire to bring a public into being, as the framework is publicly distributed, and available for comment until March 30th. It's a nice document too-- the kind of thing that isn't normally freely available on a website...

Stephen Flynn did a series for NPR this week called The Edge of Disaster that would be worth a listen. One of the themes is that reduced attention to population security has also increased vulnerability of vital systems, as this nice diary from DailyKos points out in relation to avian flu.

The New York Times thinks so, in this editorial. That Sinking Feeling How do you know when it’s time to improve the country’s roads and bridges, the water systems and power grids that the United States relies upon? There have been plenty of warning signs: spiking traffic congestion and spectacular blackouts. But at what point does the issue move from the province of anxious engineers to an outright national priority? When sinkholes start swallowing repair trucks, it’s a pretty good bet that it’s time to pay attention. As William Yardley reported recently in The Times, the country’s water and sewer lines, many of them a century old, are in terrible shape, leading to those collapsing roads. And the Army Corps of Engineers reported earlier this month that more than 120 levees around the country could fail in a major flood. New Orleans needs to remain an exception, rather than a sad model for the future. According to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, just fixing the nation’s aging wastewater infrastructure will cost as much as $390 billion. A report to be released next month by the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton notes that a successful business environment also demands more reliable energy, water and transportation systems. The report cites a Transportation Department finding that freight bottlenecks — with planes circling at overcrowded airports and cargo stacked up at overcapacity ports — are costing the United States economy $200 billion annually. That means that America’s ability to compete isn’t just a matter of being inventive and having a good work ethic, but also depends on the ability to deliver products reliably and on time. The first president with a master’s degree in business administration — hint, he’s the current Oval Office occupant — should convene a task force of federal, state and local officials to address the growing problem. If a company kept its factories in the condition that America keeps its infrastructure, you’d expect it to lose business.

17-18 April, 2007 | Lancaster, UK

Deadline: 9 March, 2007 The ability to notice trouble and see scope for remedial action is crucial in many different contexts of work. Doctors, mechanics, help-line operators, firefighters, experimental scientists, the police, teachers, surveyors, computer programmers, and many other professionals do it. . Diagnostic practices are a pervasive and important feature of contemporary life. They matter, not least because it is through diagnosing and diagnoses that different perspectives - e.g. novices and experts, users, developers and designers, patients and healthcare professionals - meet. Diagnostic practices are integral to any move towards change. A deeper and broader understanding of diagnosing practices is highly desirable.

An article in Slate about heat beaming weapons -- which are supposed to be harmless, although they make you feel like you are on fire -- makes an interesting observation about how the military got interested in such technology. It notes that "Twelve years ago, the Department of Defense observed that our armed forces were increasingly being used for peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, and protection of civil society. More of our enemies were blending in with, or disguising themselves as, civilians. Through the media, more eyeballs, hearts, and minds could see the infrastructure we destroyed. The DOD proposed the development of weapons 'to incapacitate personnel or materiel, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage to property and the environment.'"

NewScientistTech has a funny little article on the role of social networking sites -- or something like them -- in communicating information about disaster response among members of the "public." The idea, in part, is that peer-to-peer technology might improve information sharing. There is much of interest here, including the possibility that the "public" in a disaster might have a new kind of agency if it were able to actively, and in real time, disseminate information about what is going on. Also of interest, one supposes, is the application of the web -- built as a communication system that would keep ticking after nuclear attack due to its distributed structure for passing along information -- to disaster response.