Michael Graves takes on hospital design

For many years I have been a huge fan of the work of Michael Graves, the American designer and architect. Several years ago he became paraplegic, and through his own medical care began to realize how poorly hospitals are designed. In this TED talk he shares his views on this problem as well as potential solutions. He even talks about infection prevention!

Meetings Make You Stupid

There's a funny post by Tim Dowling at the Guardian Blogs.  He discusses a recent study in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B that found the IQs were significantly lower after meetings. The decline was greatest in women.

In the Telegraph, Lead author Kenneth Kishida, a research scientist at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute was quoted as saying: "Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning... (and) given the potentially harmful effects of social-status assignments and the correlation with specific neural signals, future research should be devoted to what, exactly, society is selecting for in competitive learning and workplace environments."

Tim Dowling's suggestions for surviving meetings include:

• When something needs to be decided by several people in a department, call a meeting without telling anyone. The next day send emails to colleagues with the subject heading: "For all of you who missed the meeting, here is what we decided." Put down whatever you've decided.

 • Walk into a pre-scheduled meeting, sit down and have a bite of whatever nibbles might be on offer – egg sandwiches, for example – then jump up and say: "Oh my God! I completely forgot I was allergic to eggs!" Run out of the room, leaving your phone on the table to record proceedings. Listening back later, you may be surprised to hear how stupid everyone sounds.

• When you cannot get out of an office meeting, attend with a marmoset on your head, covered by a capacious but tight-fitting hat. Give the marmoset a couple of cans of Red Bull right before you go in. This should ensure that stress-inducing social cues associated with perceived rank in a work environment are among the very least of your worries.

 Sources:
(1) Tim Dowling, the Guardian Blogs 28 February 2012
(2) Rebecca Smith, the Telegraph, 27 February 2012
(3) Kishida KT et al. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 5 March 2012

Good riddance...

...to the Research Works Act, a bill which would have prohibited the federal government from requiring open access to research funded by the federal government. You read that correctly: you, dear taxpayer, get to pay for the research; then, when you want to read the results, you'll have to pay again!

A Slate commentary on this, here. As we've documented over the past month or so on this blog, the winds of open access seem to be picking up....

Tomorrow! #H5N1 Publication Discussion from the ASM Biodefense Meeting

Live Stream Details 
Date: Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Time: 7:15 a.m. - 8:15 a.m. EST
Link: www.asmbiodefense.org/h5n1

Another Reason to Fear Bats: Influenza

CDC scientists have discovered a novel influenza A virus in little yellow-shouldered bats in two areas of Guatemala. They report in the new PNAS that the novel hemagglutinin (HA) is called H17 and is thought to have diverged when other HAs did while the neuraminidase (NA) appears unrelated to known NAs. They were unable to grow the fruit bat virus in cell cultures or chicken embryos but suggest that it "is compatible for genetic exchange with human influenza viruses in human cells." Great, a new pandemic threat.

UPDATE: Very informative post on the subject by @aetiology

Sources:
1) Tong S. et al. PNAS 27 Feb 2012
2) Gewin V. Nature News 27 Feb 2012

Learned Helplessness and Hand Hygiene

MSKCC's Kent Sepkowitz has a recent commentary in Lancet ID on hand hygiene.  He thinks that modern hospitals are too clean to benefit from hand-hygiene improvement efforts (I guess he hasn't read this paper). He concludes:

"The time has come for the infection control community to move on; please, no more cheerleading louder and harder to get thousands of people to improve their hygiene. We have to accept that our age-old dream of solving a complex problem cheaply and simply has failed. Instead, we must reacquaint ourselves with that lonely feeling familiar to clinicians when they realize a case is much more difficult than it appeared at first glance. In other words, we should embrace the intellectual audacity of our beloved Semmelweis but let go of his how-to manual. As he might tell us (loudly): an ineffective remedy is much worse than no remedy at all."

Is he right?  I don't think so.  There have been only 4 hand-hygiene intervention studies in the past few decades of high enough quality to warrant inclusion in the 2011 Cochrane Review. I say before we throw in the towel, bury our collective heads in the sand and go all Eeyore, we should probably do a few more than 4 good studies.  I also suspect that if we could really figure out why MRSA has declined in recent years, it would come down to hand hygiene improvements and not some expensive PCR.

Attending Super Bowl after refusing super-effective vaccine is super-stupid

Not much new to say about this that we haven’t already covered. If vaccine refusal becomes increasingly prevalent, imagine the consequences when highly communicable viruses meet hundreds of thousands of congregating susceptible hosts.

I’ll outsource my outrage to Charles Pierce.

h/t to our regular reader Noel Eldridge for linking us to the Slate piece on this.