Here’s a link to see my appearance tonight discussing avian flu on NECN’s NewsNight with Jim Braude: http://www.boston.com/news/necn/Shows/news_night/
Go to Bird flu warnings and the response on 3/16/06. Unfortunately, this only seems to work with Internet Explorer. I failed to see it with Firefox.
Description:
“Stephen Smith reports on health and science for the Boston Globe. Stephen Soldz is a public health researcher and psychoanalyst at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. They sit down and talk to NECN’s Jim Braude about bird flu and the human dangers.”
As usual, hardly got a chance to make the points I had hoped to make before the show.
March 16th, 2006
I just went to Nature to read an editorial [Dreams of flu data] whose description – “the lack of an accessible store of information is undermining the fight against avian flu” — suggests it’s a call for making avian flu genetic sequencing data public. I found, however, that I was unable to access this article because it’s only available to subscribers! This is both ridiculous and unconscionable. If, as I believe, avian flu is a serious enough threat that public access to genetic sequencing should be encouraged, then surely the world’s scientific and medical journals should give free, unrestricted access to all articles on the topic.
Information is a key element of the world’s response to this risk. In addition to scientists, who will largely be able to access these journals, it is critical that the public become as educated as possible. An educated public, actively thinking about the issues, is the only remedy we will have to the panic that will ensue should a human pandemic break out. Surely scientific journals should help inform the public by making this information freely available. It won’t even cost them anything as the people who will read only avian flu articles are not likely to subscribe anyway. Nature, please set an example!
March 16th, 2006