It was the most disasterous cyclone-hit in recent times. Over 140,000 people have been confirmed dead with tens of thousands more missing and millions rendered homeless, mostly in the low lying Irrawaddy delta region on the Burmese coast, where even one year on, survivors are facing deficits of foot, water, shelter and sanitation, and the UN have only recently been granted significant access. The damage was done not by the winds of "Cyclone Nargis" however, but by a tidal surge more than ten feet high that swept across the land. It's tempting to attribute such disasters to bad luck, but in fact this was at least partly preventable, and scientists explained exactly why in 2005 in the research that I'll show you now for my first regular post at worldismycountry.org - Dahdouhguebas et al's "How effective were mangroves as a defence against the recent tsunami?" [1].

Continue reading at WorldIsMyCountry.org.

[bpsdb] You won't hear practitioners say it - it would spoil their underdog, anti-establishment vibe - but alternative medicine is big business, pulling in over US$60billion a year. In many countries, alt med is primary healthcare. Unsurprisingly, those tend not to be the healthiest countries. The thing is, as Tim Minchin astutely observes in his poem 'Storm': "By definition, alternative medicine has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? ... Medicine" So why do such lousy treatments remain so popular? The authors of a recent PLoS paper, "From Traditional Medicine to Witchcraft: Why Medical Treatments Are Not Always Efficacious," have one intriguing idea [1].

It's repeated so often that it has long been regarded as a cliche, but we live in an increasingly information-intensive world, bombarded by facts and figures from an endless queue of media outlets, websites, television shows and Windsor-based science bloggers. This abundance of information often comes with a cost. If my grandfather wanted to learn something about his health - and of course like many men of his generation he didn't - he would have seen a doctor or read a reputable book. These days, we receive much of our information on the fly in bite-sized chunks from websites and media articles. Fast food culture applied to research.

The result is like trying to build an igloo by catching snowflakes. We snatch little snippets of information here and there, but often they lack any real substance, failing to really contribute to the building of a complete understanding of a subject. Stripped of context or reference, in the end these factlets are as intangible as the ether they travel through.

In 1917, at the height of the Great War, William Baer made a chance, startling discovery. The result was his exploration of a novel form of treatment, one that - while somewhat grim to contemplate, is still used today. His experiences and early experiments are described in this paper, "The Treatment of Chronic Osteomyelitis with the Maggot (Larva of the Blow Fly)" [1].