This story was the web-bomb for 7/18--came out in Nature Medicine.  My AI abstract sniffer didn't identify it as clinically relevant, I'm afraid.  Hundreds of news outlets had coverage.

Machine learning notwithstanding, I think it's highly exciting that in a few years, we might be able to slap on a patch instead of getting a needle injection for vaccines.

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2-17-10-1.mp3

I have been interested for many years on the question of whether adding antibiotics to chicken feed leads to more "superbug" resistant organisms in the hospital. There is science on both sides of the question.

Last week, we had a paper reporting that bacteria given sub-lethal doses of antibiotics don't die, but they mutate their DNA due to oxygen free radicals liberated by the antibiotics.

Here's the latest update from CDC, indicating that swine flu has almost run its course.

A publication in Environmental Health Perspectives this month challenges a long-held assumption about tobacco and infections.

People assumed that the reason smokers get a lot of respiratory infections was because the smoke was suppressing their immune systems.

Cats, too

Our skin is home to 100 billion bacteria. This mind-boggling fact and many others are summarized in a nice LA Times writeup today. The journal article was published in Science this week and reflects the work of the human microbiome project. The concept is profound: the NIH spent $115 million cataloging the bacteria that grow on our skin collecting samples from the nether regions of volunteers and sequencing the DNA. Such a simple idea but this had never been done before.

Wired has a nice feature with good links NYT story today Drudgereport.com also has a bunch of links on there today. So far the theory that the disease is more severe in Mexico where 103 people have died than here in the USA where nobody has died. There must be epidemiological reasons for this difference.

Public health "emergency": http://news.e-healthsource.com/index.php?p=news1&id=626464 Worse in Mexico than US: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5isJD5Q4PP0jfBREmcu5au3... NY school closes after outbreak sickens 75 students: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090426/ap_on_re_us/us_swine_flu_states

A study published in last week's New England Journal of Medicine looked at Stage II cervical cancer as the outcome and found that testing for HPV DNA was about twice as accurate as Pap smears. Pap smears will "soon be of mainly historical interest" says a Professor of Gynecology at Stanford Dr. Paul D. Blumenthal. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/health/07virus.html?partner=rss&emc=rs... Don't tell that to laypeople just yet. There are plenty of stories of fortuitous finds on Pap smears.