Getting into the Bird Flu market

Want to buy a few shares of Bird Flu? They say it's gonna go big one of these days.
CNN:

Think bird flu will become a worldwide threat this summer? Wanna put some money on that?

In an unusual effort to better predict the advance of a potential flu pandemic, public health experts will be staked about $100 apiece to bet on the spread of bird flu. This type of grim futures market has also been created to predict hurricanes and temporarily, a few years ago, terrorist attacks.

In this case, the goal is to develop a faster way to collect expert opinion about the potential spread of a deadly disease outbreak.

"Farmers have used futures markets for decades to make decisions about what crops to plant. We're just borrowing that concept to help people in public health and health care make decisions about the future," said Dr. Phil Polgreen, a University of Iowa assistant professor of medicine who helped create the project.

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One more thing to thank Dubya for...

Thanks to all the bloodletting in Iraq there is a new strain of virulent drug-resistant microbe being spread around the world.

Nicole Bell of Crooks & Liars

Okay, normally, I tend to discount the hysterics surrounding new pathogens, but this one does scare me quite a bit and just adds more fuel to the fire of my belief that we have screwed up this country enough and need to get out.

Raw Story: (h/t Rasputin)

A drug-resistant bacteria that is infecting wounded US soldiers in Iraq — and has spread to civilian hospitals in parts of Europe — accidentally evolved in US military hospitals in Iraq, Wired Magazine will report in a massive expose on Monday, RAW STORY has learned.

The several thousand word expose is set to bring uncomfortable new light to the bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii that Pentagon officials previously said was likely a product of Iraqi soil.

And TRex at Firedoglake

In many ways, the Bush Administration's "War on Terror" has been able to accomplish things that the terrorists themselves could only dream of. It has divided the American public against each other. It has stretched our military so thin that we would be helpless in the face of a real national emergency. And now, it has bred its own drug-resistant biological weapons, one of which is rapidly making its way through civilian hospitals from California to Canada, on to Germany and Anbar Province. It's called acinetobacter baumannii and the US military not only created the conditions that led to its development, but the Pentagon has played an active role in exporting it to the world and in the suppression of information that could have led to its containment.

[...]like every other problem that has arisen in our nation's prosecution of the Bush Administration's "Great War on Terror", rather than deal with the issue in a frank, open, and effective manner, the government has chosen instead to lie, obfuscate, and cover up, thereby placing more and more lives at risk.

Healing the world's politics. Is that possible?

Chris Floyd at Truthout

...a quiet announcement at London's Hammersmith Hospital at the turning of the new year heralded a breakthrough that has the potential to be one of the most transformative developments ever seen in global affairs: a positive change on a par with - or even surpassing - the world-altering malignancies of war, greed and strife. But this boon could be strangled in its cradle by the vast corporate interests threatened by its radical new approach to both health care and business.

The approach is called "ethical pharmaceuticals," and it was unveiled on January 2 by Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College, and Steve Brocchini of the London School of Pharmacy, the Guardian reports. Their team of scientists in India and the UK, financed by the prestigious Wellcome with technical assistance from the UK government, have developed a method of making small but significant changes to the molecular structure of existing drugs, thereby transforming them into new products, circumventing the long-term patents used by the corporate giants of Big Pharma to keep prices - and profits - high. This will give the world's poorest and most vulnerable people access to life-saving medicines - now priced out of reach - for mere pennies.

But the breakthrough is not merely biochemical. Shaunak's team is proposing a new model for the pharmaceutical business. The patent of the transformed drug they have developed is held by non-profit Imperial University. And because their methods are hundreds of millions dollars cheaper than the mammoth development costs of the big pharmaceutical companies - whose spending on marketing and advertising often dwarfs their funding of scientific research - Shaunak and his colleagues can market their vital medicines for infectious diseases at near-giveaway levels, yet still stay in business. How so? By foregoing the profit motive as the ultimate value of their work.

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