Bigfoot sightings in Michigan
These are some pretty important results. Data from The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) – www.bfro.net – “an organization dedicated to investigating the bigfoot / sasquatch mystery.”
I was interviewed by WCBN on Covid-19
Among other things. Check out the full interview here:
Covid19 report cards for businesses: it is time.
The risks of covid19 are well known at this point. While we all need to be sympathetic to the need for people to earn a livelihood, a living should not come at the expense of public health and worker safety. This should be a given.
I have seen some businesses who are doing quite well right now. While my sample size is certainly small and my observations subject to my own biases, it is easy to tell apart the businesses who make an effort and the ones who do not.
We should support businesses who 1) require masks without fail, 2) offer masks and gloves to both workers and customers, 3) limit the number of customers in the store at any given time and 4) build plexiglass shields to separate customers and workers.
We should not support businesses who take a lax approach to masks, do not offer masks to customers who don’t have them, allow large numbers of people in the store proportional to size and do not have plexiglass shields in front of the register.
All of these modifications are easy and cheap to implement. There are few occasions where there is any valid excuse for not doing all of them in normal retail and food service industries.
Which bring me to the the point of this post. How can customers know how seriously businesses are taking covid19? Certainly, online review sites like Yelp or Google are going to be helpful, but these do not provide any indication of progress that businesses might make (“evolution”) or provide standards so that we can easily compare one business with another.
Many municipalities provide public record of compliance with health regulations. The New York City Health Department performs unannounced inspections of all restaurants in the five boroughs at least once an year and makes the data public. The public can search for any food provider in the city for any type of violation and even has a grading system. The Washtenaw County Health Department and the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development conduct regular inspections of food service establishments within their jurisdictions and publish the results online. The worst offenders often make the papers.
We need such a system for all businesses to make sure that they comply with efforts to contain the spread of covid19. Consumers have a right to know whether a business is compliant or not BEFORE they make the decision to visit that business. While the logistics of such a system are complicated and likely expensive, they are necessary.
Will this be on our legislature’s agenda? Do local health departments already have the authority to implement such a system? Would businesses push back against cheap masks and plexi? Certainly, there are challenges to implementation, but it isn’t impossible.
My intro malaria/tropical medicine course at Colby College… is done!
A friend of mine hooked me up with a short gig teaching a course in malaria and tropical medicine for Colby College’s JanPlan. Every January, students have the opportunity to study a subject in depth, often with teaching faculty not based at Colby College.
I have long wanted to design an undergrad level course in tropical medicine so took it as an opportunity to do so. We focused mostly on malaria, covering the basics of malaria epidemiology, pathogen and vector biology, prevention and treatment, diagnostics, vector control, health care delivery, international funding for malaria programs, drug and insecticide resistance and elimination/eradication. We even had lectures on basic concepts of epidemiology and infectious disease and talked at length about public health, public health practice and medical ethics. It has been a fairly intense month.
At first, I was a bit concerned that the subject matter would be too broad, particularly for science people, but quickly learned that much of the class were non-science majors, and most were freshmen. This gave me a great opportunity to bring in a wide range of topics that could appeal to just about everyone in the class.
Leeches for sale: The economy of bloodletting in France, 1827-1836
I found this great post on drug shortages that appeared in BMJ today. Among all of the other great gems in it, was this incredibly interesting article on the creation of a mechanical bloodletting device. Jean-Baptiste Sarlandière, a French anatomist and inventor, created the “mechanical leech”, a device intended to extract a controlled amount of blood from the body. Sarlandiere intended the device to replace leeches, which were subject to increasing demand, were becoming expensive, were difficult to cultivate, and were subject to shortages in the Netherlands, who was a large producer of leeches at the time.
A paper was written on the device back in 2009, and within there is a dataset of leech imports and exports to France, which includes data on the monetary value of leeches and public consumption. Of course, I couldn’t resist pulling this data out and doing something with it (despite having better things to do.)
Here is the data, pulled from yet another paper (Alexandre E Baudrimont, Adolphe J Blanqui, et al., Dictionnaire de l’industrie manufacturie`re, commerciale et agricole, Paris, J-B Baillière, 1833–1841, pp. 25–30.):
| Year | Number of leeches imported | Value in Francs | National consumption | Exports | Import export ratio | Value per leech |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1827 | 33653694 | 1009611 | 33456744 | 196950 | 170.87 | 0.03 |
| 1828 | 26981900 | 809457 | 26689100 | 292800 | 92.15 | 0.03 |
| 1829 | 44573754 | 1337212 | 44069848 | 503906 | 88.46 | 0.03 |
| 1830 | 35485000 | 1064550 | 34745848 | 739250 | 48 | 0.03 |
| 1831 | 36487975 | 1094639 | 35245875 | 1242100 | 29.38 | 0.03 |
| 1832 | 57487000 | 1724610 | 55591700 | 1895300 | 30.33 | 0.03 |
| 1833 | 41654300 | 1249629 | 40785650 | 868650 | 47.95 | 0.03 |
| 1834 | 21885965 | 656579 | 21006865 | 879100 | 24.90 | 0.03 |
| 1835 | 22560440 | 676813 | 21323910 | 1236530 | 18.24 | 0.03 |
| 1836 | 19736800 | 592104 | 18721555 | 1015245 | 19.44 | 0.03 |
Of course, I am fascinated with this. The number of leeches exported from France rose during this period as did the market price of each leech. Though the entire industry would eventually collapse because other medical advances of the nineteenth century would supercede it, it is clear that increased demand and expense led to innovation to create devices to replace it. I don’t know whether the “mechanical leech” led to the development of other medical devices, but would like to think that even batshit ideas like how swamp worms draw out blood to cure any and all medical conditions would lead to the creation of methods which do improve health.
Is blogging even meaningful anymore?
I started this blog way back in 2007, when I was a Masters student at the University of Michigan. At the time, it felt like a good way to get writing out there, and communicate ideas in a public forum. When I was at my peak on this blog (and my life, it seems) I was writing daily, sometimes posting the data analyses equivalent to many (low quality) published scientific papers, writing travel logs, doing interviews, broadcasting psychological traumas, posting photos… it was a good time.
At some point, I lost focus, got busy with other things, got on the wrong track, the right track, it really isn’t clear to me what happened, but I posted less and wrote less. The result was that my writing suffered, because the daily posts provided a great opportunity to keep my writing in shape, and explore interesting scientific topics in depth without worrying about the bureaucratic demands of peer review or research collaborators. While peer review and research collaborations are important, every science needs a forum with which to explore ideas.
Now, though, as I move back into my academic career, I am wondering…. is blogging worth it anymore? I just read Rachel Strohm’s final post . Rachel started blogging about the same time I did, and has since moved on to a fruitful career in development and academia and now lives in Kenya. She has recently stopped blogging, noting that “The development blogging ecosystem is basically dead. ” (I do wonder if her move to Kenya might have killed her motivation for blogging, the same way it killed mine.) I have also noticed that the authors of several blogs I used to read have also moved on.
Strohm offers that direct newsletter updates and Twitter might be a better platform for dissemination blog-like information for people. I think Twitter is a pretty terrible platform for anything at all outside of haranguing right wingers or sending cat videos, so I am not sure that it would do what blogging would have done for me. While I do not have a large Twitter presence, it seems to be a major time suck, with little reward and multiple costs (like blood pressure.)
Newsletters are interesting. Even as a musician, I find that directly engaging people who might be interested in my music is far better than any of the social media platforms, which do their best to make sure that no one ever sees what you do, unless you have a thousand dollar PR budget.
I liked the blogging format. I still do. I think it could still work, but wonder…. do people even read long form writing anymore? Does it have any impact? Is blogging going the way journalism is? What is a good platform anymore? Does writing mean anything at all anymore?
Detroit Communities Reducing Energy and Water (use): Jefferson-Chalmers edition
Once again, I tagged along on a trip to Detroit with the D-CREW, a community based participatory research project aimed at developing strategies to improve housing and thereby reduce wasteful water and energy use in Detroit communities.
This weeks data collection efforts focused on the Jefferson-Chalmers area of Detroit, just adjacent to Gross Pointe.
Data collection went as smoothly as before, but with a more affluent and sophisticated group of people the vast majority of whom own their own homes.
The informational session became quickly energized, with participants asking pointed questions like “how is this research going to benefit us?” “are you going to sell our data?” “is my cousin going to be able to see my data?”
Doing research in the communities of Detroit is every bit as exciting and engaging as doing work in Kenya, where researchers are rightly met with skepticism, the goals of the research are obscure, and the direct benefits likely non-existent.
Pollen allergies and asthma study begins!
Get your immunotherapy shots here
Currently, I am a part of a project looking at climate change impacts on the distribution of tree and grass pollens in the US and associations with allergy and asthma related emergency room visits
As part of that, we are collecting baseline data on symptomatic profiles of patients who are sensitive to tree and grass pollens and are currently undergoing immunotherapy in local clinics.
Our survey is two fold, the first a baseline survey of types of demographics, types of allergies, seasonal sensitivities, general symptoms and lifestyle impacts, the second a three week survey of sleep quality and allergy and asthma related events.
University of Michigan School of Public Health Masters student Erica Bennion explains the goals of the study to a potential participant.
We hope to gather data to see how the ragweed season might impact general health and well being using a coarse raster of predicted pollen distribution.
The survey is being conducted at the University of Michigan Allergy Specialty Clinic and Food Allergy Clinic at Domino’s Farms and will include approximately 50 people.
Reducing energy and water use in low income communities in Detroit and improving health
At least that’s what we hope happens. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to join the Detroit Communities Reducing Energy and Water (use) project, focusing on Parkside, a subsidized housing community in Detroit, MI.
The project aims to help residents make changes to the electrical and plumbing infrastructure of their homes to reduce the energy costs. Residents in poor communities often live in housing that has old, inefficient and sometimes faulty electrical wiring, kitchen appliances and aging or damaged pipes, showers and toilets.
The University of Michigan School of Public Health has a community based participatory research project with the residents of Parkside, the Friends of Parkside, a local advocacy group.
We administered a survey on energy, housing conditions and health to about twenty residents who came to the event. Following the consumption of copious amounts of pizza, the goals of the study were explained to everyone in a group meeting and consent was obtained.
They then moved to another room and took the survey. Many of the residents were elderly, mostly women. All had interesting stories to tell about broken air conditioners, unresponsive maintenance crews, family, friends, kids…. everything you find in these kinds of surveys.
After they were done, they all got some ca$h and were provided with a temperature monitor so that we can better understand what they are experiencing in their homes during these hot summer months. We will then conduct a follow up survey to assess the impact of a home based educational program on energy use and health.
It had been a long time since I was involved in community and I was grateful to be a part of. Some people don’t like this kind of work, I really don’t understand what’s not to like about hanging out with survey respondents who feel invested in the project and their communities.
New chapter from myself in a Springer volume: “Access to Health Care in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges in a Changing Health Landscape in a Context of Development”
I wrote a chapter for “Health in Ecological Perspectives in the Anthropocene” edited by Watanabe Toru and Watanabe Chiho. I have no idea if they are related. Either way, my chapter “Access to Health Care in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges in a Changing Health Landscape in a Context of Development” occupies pages 95-106 in the volume.
Check it out, you can buy the book through Amazon for a cool $109, or just my chapter through the Springer site for $29 or you can simply write me and I’ll give you a synopsis.
Success!
Here’s the abstract for the book:
This book focuses on the emerging health issues due to climate change, particularly emphasizing the situation in developing countries. Thanks to recent development in the areas of remote sensing, GIS technology, and downscale modeling of climate, it has now become possible to depict and predict the relationship between environmental factors and health-related event data with a meaningful spatial and temporal scale. The chapters address new aspects of environment-health relationship relevant to this smaller scale analyses, including how considering people’s mobility changes the exposure profile to certain environmental factors, how considering behavioral characteristics is important in predicting diarrhea risks after urban flood, and how small-scale land use patterns will affect the risk of infection by certain parasites, and subtle topography of the land profile. Through the combination of reviews and case studies, the reader would be able to learn how the issues of health and climate/social changes can be addressed using available technology and datasets.
The post-2015 UN agenda has just put forward, and tremendous efforts have been started to develop and establish appropriate indicators to achieve the SDG goals. This book will also serve as a useful guide for creating such an indicator associated with health and planning, in line with the Ecohealth concept, the major tone of this book. With the increasing and pressing needs for adaptation to climate change, as well as societal change, this would be a very timely publication in this trans-disciplinary field.
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