Month: May 2024

More avian flu news:

I remain on the fence about this, but it makes sense that we should be "doing everything absolutely possible to stop H5N1 from evolving to human-human transmission." My question is: What? What precautions could we be taking among agricultural workers who handle chickens and cows?

So far, the CDC recommends extensive preventive gear (N95 masks, coveralls, boots, face guard), but only for "close exposure" with sick or suspicious animals. Is that insufficient? Should farm workers be routinely vaccinated against H5N1?¹

What else?

¹Vaccine doses are not yet available in quantity but will be shortly.

Alex Tabarrok links today to an old article by Robert Kuttner about a cure for the common cold:

Now unfolding is the next pharma outrage. I’ve written about a miracle cold and cough medication called ambroxol. It is far superior to junk like Mucinex and Robitussin.... Ambroxol, which is highly effective, has been available in Europe (and in most of the world) since the late 1970s as a generic. It costs about $5 a box.

You can’t get ambroxol in the U.S. because of the failure of the Food and Drug Administration to grant reciprocal recognition to generic medications approved by its European counterpart, the European Medicines Agency, when they have long been proven safe and effective.

I hate to step on a righteous rant, but:

• Ambroxol is not a miracle drug. In a recent report, the European authorities concluded that it has "modest but positive results."
• Ambroxol was originally tested in the '60s and '70s, when clinical studies were "considerably less standardised" than today.¹ It is now grandfathered in, but it would not be approved today based on the old studies.
• Reciprocity is probably a good idea, but it's not the FDA holding things up. It's the law. Until and unless Congress authorizes it, there's nothing the FDA can do.

In the meantime, you can always try to order it online from Canada. Except it's not approved there either. Hmmm. Mexico it is, I guess.

¹This is a polite way of saying they were crap:

The clinical studies performed during the development of bromhexine- and ambroxol-containing products between the 1950s and 1980s were considerably less standardised than would be necessary today, and would not completely fulfil contemporary requirements with regard to validated endpoints, statistical confirmation, or Good Clinical Practice (GCP). These constitute the majority of the available evidence.

....Often a large placebo effect is seen in studies investigating respiratory conditions, particularly in non-serious, self-limiting conditions.... It is acknowledged that most of the indications are supported by old studies presenting limitations and deficiencies. Some trials failed to show a significant difference between ambroxol or bromhexine and placebo and others only showed significant difference in some of the studied endpoints.... It is recognised also that the limitations and uncertainties attached to the dataset hinder the ability to draw robust conclusions on the efficacy.

Today is the 300th anniversary of the last time a total eclipse passed over Los Angeles, on May 22, 1724. There won't be another one for at least another thousand years, making a total drought of more than 1,300 years. That's a very long time to go without a total eclipse.

This is the Vienna city hall seen through a bloom of roses from the Volksgarten across the street. It's rose season right now and the Volksgarten is jammed with tiered rose bushes, most of them in memoriam of someone or another. Apparently that's a Viennese tradition.

Today the Washington Post writes:

Having a decades-long marriage in Hollywood is rare, but....

I've heard this a million times, but always in the context of someone who has miraculously broken the mold. So is it even true that "Hollywood marriages" are unusually short? It turns out that it's hard to say. According to researcher Michael Aamodt, here are the professions with the highest and lowest rates of divorce:

Extruding machine operators? How did they end up in the top ten? In any case, actors aren't listed, but I gather from another source that they're close to the top ten. So the stereotype is real, but not all that real.

Math and science-y folks clearly dominate the low end of the list. And why not? They might be nerdy, but they're probably even tempered, reliable, and good providers. You could do worse.

POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that this is 2012 information, and differs a fair amount from the author's earlier study based on 2000 census data. Dancers were the top group both times, but the rest of them move around a surprising amount.

In case you haven't gotten enough of Trump and his inexplicable desire to hold on to classified documents, today brings yet more news:

Buried in the supporting documentation for one of the motions was a document that contained a new public revelation: Once Trump realized that security cameras at Mar-a-Lago could capture his employees moving classified government information that officials were attempting to retrieve, he allegedly ensured that they would avoid the cameras when moving boxes.

Jesus. What is the deal with Trump and classified documents? Why was he so hellbent on keeping them? The answer, as with all things Trump, is most likely "because his brain is broken," but I can't stop wondering if there's anything more to it.

The Guardian reports in a new poll that most Americans think the economy is in recession:

This is insane. Even half of Democrats believe this nonsense. And it's not as if it's a close call, with the economy sort of flattish but technically not in recession. In fact, the economy is running so hot that the Fed is scared to reduce interest rates even a quarter of a point.

For the record, over the past 12 months:

• The unemployment rate has averaged 3.7%, the lowest 12-month period in more than 50 years.
• Inflation has averaged 3.4%. Inflation for groceries has averaged 1.1%.
• GDP has grown 3.0%.
• The stock market has gone up 25%.
• Consumer spending has increased 3.1%.
• Total employment is up 1.8%.
• Wages are up, private investment is up, and labor force participation is up.

All of these numbers are adjusted for inflation, of course.

The New York Times reports today on the algebra wars, which arise from the fact that lots of Black kids are behind white kids in math skills:

To close those gaps, New York City’s previous mayor, Bill de Blasio, adopted a goal embraced by many districts elsewhere. Every middle school would offer algebra, and principals could opt to enroll all of their eighth graders in the class. San Francisco took an opposite approach: If some children could not reach algebra by middle school, no one would be allowed take it.

The central mission in both cities was to help disadvantaged students. But solving the algebra dilemma can be more complex than solving the quadratic formula. New York’s dream of “algebra for all” was never fully realized, and Mayor Eric Adams’s administration changed the goal to improving outcomes for ninth graders taking algebra. In San Francisco, dismantling middle-school algebra did little to end racial inequities among students in advanced math classes. After a huge public outcry, the district decided to reverse course.

This is idiotic beyond any measure. You won't close the racial gap either by making everyone take algebra or by allowing no one to take algebra. Forcing kids into or out of classes is just playing games. That's because the skill gap is real:

By 8th grade, Black kids on average are 32 points behind white kids on the NAEP test. Roughly speaking, this means Black schoolchildren in 8th grade are doing math at about a 5th grade level. They've just barely begun to add and subtract fractions and decimals. Forcing them into an algebra class they aren't prepared for won't teach them algebra any more than dressing them up in lederhosen will teach them German.¹ As for San Francisco's approach of helping Black kids by forcing other kids to wait a year for algebra, the mind reels. What kind of magic is supposed to make this work?

The only way to teach kids algebra is to teach them 5th, 6th, and 7th grade math first. And the only way to do that is to teach them 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade math. Unfortunately, Black kids are already three grades behind by 4th grade.

It's entirely understandable that middle schools want to do something. And there might be answers out there. Most likely, though, the answer is to do a better job of teaching Black kids starting all the way back in preschool. Until we face up to that, we'll never make any progress.

¹OK, that's a weird analogy. But I'm writing this in Vienna, so lederhosen and German are on my mind.

Here's some unexpected news. In late 2022 Twitter added a feature called Community Notes, which allows readers to add short remarks to posts they believe are either wrong or lack important context. If the note gets enough upvotes, it's attached to the tweet permanently.

A team of researchers was curious about how well this worked in the area of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. The results might surprise you:

Ninety-seven percent of notes were entirely accurate, 2% partially accurate, and 0.5% inaccurate.

Not bad! It might be harder to judge the accuracy of notes in other areas, where accuracy is a little more a matter of opinion, but this nonetheless speaks well of both the note writers and the quality of the algorithm that promotes notes.

Interestingly, the number of vaccine notes was fairly steady and low throughout 2023 until November, when the number suddenly shot up. Something must have happened around then, but my memory fails me. I'm not sure what it was.

As you all know, Donald Trump took reams of classified documents with him when he left the White House and then repeatedly refused to turn them over when asked. Eventually the FBI searched his home and carted away boxes of stuff.

But guess what? Even after that, Trump still managed to hold on to several classified documents. This was disclosed last year in a ruling by judge Beryl Howell, but was kept under seal until today:

Throughout the opinion, Howell — who was chief judge of the Washington, D.C. federal district court at the time — described with varying degrees of incredulity how four documents with classification markings could have been discovered in Trump’s private quarters.... “Notably, no excuse is provided as to how the former president could miss the classified-marked documents found in his own bedroom at Mar-a-Lago.”

But if you think that's bad, hold on to your hat:

In a footnote, Howell also noted that another Trump adviser connected to his Save America PAC had acknowledged scanning the contents of the box that contained the classified materials in 2021 and storing them on a personal laptop provided by the PAC.

What. The. Fuck? Trump not only kept classified documents, but turned them over to some PAC flunky to scan into her personal laptop?

This case gets more bizarre every time we hear something about it. And yet somehow Trump's pal, judge Aileen Cannon, keeps finding reasons to pretend that it's tortuously complex and requires endless months of preparation. The reality is that I'm not sure I've ever seen a more open-and-shut case in my life. As near as I can tell, it could be tried tomorrow and be finished by Memorial Day without missing anything important.