AFD - Miscellaneous Notes & Other Fun Stuff

[sharon sanders]

Brief Hiatus For AFD




# 2048

http://afludiary.blogspot.com/2008/06/brief-hiatus-for-afd.html

In an hour or so I'll be leaving for Orlando to help set up the Readymom's Alliance display at the American College Health Association meeting. I'm looking forward to meeting Dr. Susan Chu, and helping her in this project.

I expect to be largely out of touch until sometime Friday afternoon or evening, so I doubt I'll be able to update this website until then.

For the best breaking news coverage of all things bird flu, Crof at Crofsblog is hard to beat. I can assure you that if I get the chance, that's where I'll be checking for the latest information.

If any of you are going to be attending this event, stop by the Readymom's booth or Thursday or Friday and say `hi'.

We'd love to meet you.

posted by FLA_MEDIC @ 11:34 AM

[sharon sanders]

Re: AFD - Preparedness - Brief Hiatus For AFD

Today FluTrackers members Fla Medic, Snicklefritz, Ghostrider, and I are going to meet for dinner at the hotel that is hosting the convention. We will also be meeting with Susan Chu M.D. who is the President of Readymom's Alliance.

Mike - You said you are buying! Right??

[sharon sanders]

Re: AFD - Preparedness - Brief Hiatus For AFD

We all met for dinner last night. It was great to meet SusanC and Ghostrider. Snicklefritz could not make it.

We talked about several "bird flu" issues and decided that the operational needs of the servers for the flu forums would exceed the capacity that we each have. We also discussed that this need would have to be anticipated and acted upon before the pandemic. Ghostrider described how "mirror" sites work.

At this point Mike volunteered to fund FT and Readymoms if he wins the Fla lotto this weekend!!

I talked to SusanC about what steps FT took to become a 501 (c) (3) non-profit charity and we are going to exchange more information via emails.

We had a very good time and I look forward to seeing everyone again!

[sharon sanders]

Re: AFD - Miscellaneous Notes & Other Fun Stuff

A Happy Return



# 2072


For those who have fallen out of the habit of checking on SophiaZoe's blog, A Journey Through The World of Pandemic Influenza due to the lack of activity there these past few months, I'm pleased to announce that SZ is back blogging, and is as good as ever.

The past few months have seen an overload of responsibilities in her `day job', leaving her with little time to blog. That, thankfully, has changed.

Her latest blog is We All Make Choices, and it is the fourth in the past week.

Welcome back, SZ.

You've been missed.

posted by FLA_MEDIC @ 5:51 PM

[sharon sanders]

Re: AFD - Miscellaneous Notes & Other Fun Stuff

Two Came Back



# 2161



For bloggers, occasionally life gets in the way, and blog entries can temporarily cease - or at least slow to a dribble. When that happens, regular readers may stop checking their sites, and miss noticing that they have returned.


I'm happy to report that two of our best bloggers - Maryn McKenna and SophiaZoe - have returned with gusto after brief absences.



Maryn's blog Superbug functions as a `virtual whiteboard' as she works on her next book which will deal with MRSA. While this blog deals mostly with the problems of drug resistant bacteria, Maryn is no stranger to pandemic flu issues.

Maryn McKenna and CIDRAP News received an Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism on Mar 29 for her seven-part series, "The Pandemic Vaccine Puzzle." If you haven't read it, this award was well deserved.

Here are links to all 7 parts.
The pandemic vaccine puzzle
Part 1: Flu research: a legacy of neglectPart 2: Vaccine production capacity falls far short
Part 3: H5N1 poses major immunologic challenges
Part 4: The promise and problems of adjuvantsPart 5: What role for prepandemic vaccination?Part 6: Looking to novel vaccine technologies
Part 7: Time for a vaccine 'Manhattan Project'?Bibliography






SophiaZoe, my cyber-twin and good buddy, has returned after several months of being buried at work. She has been blogging up a storm at A Journey Through The World of Pandemic Influenza the past couple of weeks.

A few of her (very) recent entries include:

House of Lords report
Anecdotal vs Empirical evidence
A humanitarian crisis: Ethiopia
Britain?s House of Lords Report: Take II
Hinterland disease and national security
Fear: Real and ego driven



If you've fallen out of the habit of visiting their blogs, now is a good time to resume.

posted by FLA_MEDIC @ 8:17 AM

[sharon sanders]

Re: AFD - Miscellaneous Notes & Other Fun Stuff

HealthMap Redux




# 2166



Yesterday I did a quickie blog on the HealthMap project.

This morning I discovered that one of my favorite writers, Maryn McKenna, wrote an excellent backgrounder on HealthMap - and other projects that are using the Internet as an early disease warning system - for CIDRAP News.


I'll just post a snippet. Follow the link to read the entire article.

More efforts look outside the box for outbreak signals


Maryn McKenna Contributing Writer
Jul 21, 2008 (CIDRAP News) ? In the history of infectious diseases, coincidence plays an extraordinary role. In 1706, Cotton Mather purchased a slave named Onesimus who happened to come from a tribe that practiced variolation, and so smallpox prevention was introduced to North America. In 1928, Alexander Fleming happened to leave a window open in his laboratory, and the contaminants that drifted into a dish of Staphylococcus aureus provided the raw material for the discovery of penicillin.

And in February 2003, a never-identified man in southern China emailed a query to an American teacher he knew from an Internet chat room, who happened to have been the neighbor of a US Navy epidemiologist. The epidemiologist, Dr. Stephen Cunnion, placed the relayed note on the electronic mailing list ProMED?and so the first notice of the international SARS epidemic was brought to the world, weeks before the Chinese government admitted the disease's existence.

Five years on, the example of that relayed note has inspired a broad-based effort to take the coincidence out of outbreak notification. It seeks to do by design what the never-named writer accomplished by happenstance: tap nontraditional sources of information, find and verify the earliest possible news of disease outbreaks, publicize the outbreaks, and possibly help contain them.

Dr. Larry Brilliant, one of the chiefs of the World Health Organization's (WHO's) smallpox-eradication effort and now executive director of the philanthropy Google.org, has dubbed the effort "two steps to the left"?meaning two steps backward on an epidemic curve, when an outbreak is much harder to detect but easier to control or contain.

(Continue reading . . . )

If you are unfamiliar with Dr. Larry Brilliant, I would urge you to watch the following video from 2006.

It runs 26 minutes, and it is both fascinating and inspiring.


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• Larry Brilliant wants to stop pandemics
• 26:02 Posted: Jul 2006

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Dr. Brilliant, among his many accomplishments, is the winner 2006 TED award.

posted by FLA_MEDIC @ 10:18 AM

[sharon sanders]

Re: AFD - Miscellaneous Notes &amp; Other Fun Stuff

Sept. 27, 2008

And Now For Something Completely Different . . .



# 2337




While I have a deep and abiding interest in public health and pandemic preparedness matters, there is more to life than death and disease, even for an old paramedic like myself.


Or at least . . there should be.


For many years one of my hobbies has been collecting, and enjoying OTR. Old Time Radio shows. These shows were broadcast between the late 1920's and the early 1960's, and until television came around, were the main source of in-home entertainment.


While most of these shows are lost forever, we are blessed with thousands of shows that were preserved. Nearly all of them (before 1962) are in the public domain. A few copyrights have been renewed over the years, but not many.


My personal collection now exceeds 12,000 shows. And it is growing.

The Internet and today's computer technology has proven to be a boon to collectors, providing us with better and cheaper ways to copy and share our collections. Along the way many collectors work to clean up, repair, and document these shows for future generations.

Once only available on expensive reel-to-reel tapes, or released on a few phonograph records, now thousands of shows have been converted into MP3 format, and are available online.


Similarly, hundreds of hours of early television from the 1950's has made its way onto the net, and are available for downloading. My collection of early television and public domain movies is somewhat smaller than my radio show collection . . . but it too is growing.


For those of us who are part of the Baby Boom generation, there is a good deal of nostalgia involved when we can look back on the TV or radio shows we grew up with.

Ramar of the Jungle, Rocky Jones Space Ranger, Jack Benny, Sid Caesar's Show of Shows , and the Colgate Comedy Hour are just a few examples.


Today I've begun a new blog that will guide its readers to places where these shows can be freely (and legally) downloaded. Along the way, I provide a bit of the history of the shows and the performers.


Call it an affectionate look at the golden age of broadcasting.


I hope to update this new blog 2 or 3 times a week, highlighting new treasures each time. Today I present 8 episodes of Your Hit Paradefor your viewing pleasure.


Whether you wish to relive fondly remembered shows of your past, or would like an introduction to a world of entertainment that came along perhaps, before you did - I hope you'll join me.


The link now appears on my sidebar. The site is called:


Master Of My Public Domain


I hope you enjoy it, and that you will share these treasures with other people who would appreciate them.


Now back to our regularly scheduled pandemic.