H5N1
"Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale"—Rudolf Virchow
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Intention to vaccinate children against measles: findings from a national survey in the United States

Via Science Direct, a preview of an article scheduled for the March 2026 issue of The Lancet Regional Health — Americas: Intention to vaccinate children against measles: findings from a national survey in the United States. The summary: Background The United States is currently experiencing the largest surge of measles cases since 2000, with over 2855 cases reported across the country since January 2025. Though the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is recognized as the most effective protection against measles, rates of MMR coverage among children under the age of five have declined in several US states. Across the...
February 13th, 2026

Lessons of the Barbary Plague

Way back in 2006, I reviewed a book for The Tyee that clarified for me the role that racism plays in spreading diseases: In 2003, when avian flu was just emerging in a couple of Korean poultry farms, American writer Marilyn Chase published The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco. Reading it recently, I thought it pointed to the same factors that are at work in the impending H5N1 pandemic. The first of these factors is old-fashioned medical ignorance. When the first cases of plague broke out in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1900, most doctors didn’t even...
February 11th, 2026

Some very early thoughts on pandemics

Back in 2004, one of the first articles I wrote for The Tyee was about a possible flu pandemic as it might affect Vancouver. An excerpt: Oct. 5, 2004: Vancouver reports its first case of New Flu, already labelled a pandemic by the World Health Organization. The virus has moved around the world with frightening speed from Europe, where it was first identified just a few weeks earlier. Oct. 11: Three hundred cases of New Flu have been confirmed in Vancouver. Oct. 20: Vancouver has 3,000 cases of New Flu, 1,000 reported in the past 24 hours. The pandemic has...
February 9th, 2026

A cautious return

Last September Typepad shut down and I lost all the blogs I'd build over 20 years. So it goes. I've thought about reviving my old H5N1 blog, and looked into various platforms. Scribbles seems like one of the better ones—not very expensive, easy to set up. So here's a cautious attempt to track reports on disease outbreaks, public health, and the politics involved in both. I'll try to post excerpts from news reports or other blogs, or from my own articles in The Tyee, along with a little comment and analysis. I hope you find them helpful as you try...
February 9th, 2026