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Category: Health

When fact checking goes wrong: Facebook versus the British Medical Journal

When fact checking goes wrong: Facebook versus the British Medical Journal

The BMJ reports: On 3 November Howard Kaplan, a retired dentist from Israel, posted a link to a BMJ investigation article in a private Facebook group. The investigation reported poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia, a contract research company helping to carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial. The article brought in record traffic to bmj.com and was widely shared on Twitter, helping it achieve the second highest “Altmetric” score of all time across all biomedical publications.3…

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The Rorschach features of the pandemic

The Rorschach features of the pandemic

David Wallace-Wells writes: “Omicron is in retreat,” declared the January 19 headline of the New York Times’ Morning Newsletter, by David Leonhardt, which reaches millions of inboxes each weekday. That same Wednesday, according to Our World in Data, 3,830 new deaths were reported in the country — not just the highest figure in the Omicron wave but, putting aside a one-day post-Thanksgiving reporting anomaly, the highest since January 2021. In the week that followed, the deaths continued: A few days…

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In China, Covid-era controls may outlast the virus

In China, Covid-era controls may outlast the virus

The New York Times reports: The police had warned Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer, not to go to Shanghai to visit the mother of a dissident. He went to the airport anyway. His phone’s health code app — a digital pass indicating possible exposure to the coronavirus — was green, which meant he could travel. His home city, Changsha, had no Covid-19 cases, and he had not left in weeks. Then his app turned red, flagging him as high…

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Doctors find ‘antibody signature’ for patients most at risk for long Covid

Doctors find ‘antibody signature’ for patients most at risk for long Covid

The Guardian reports: Doctors have discovered an “antibody signature” that can help identify patients most at risk of developing long Covid, a condition where debilitating symptoms of the disease can persist for many months. Researchers at University hospital Zurich analysed blood from Covid patients and found that low levels of certain antibodies were more common in those who developed long Covid than in patients who swiftly recovered. When combined with the patient’s age, details of their Covid symptoms and whether…

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90% of Americans have a poor diet, and 25% don’t exercise

90% of Americans have a poor diet, and 25% don’t exercise

Ars Technica reports: As the pandemic enters its third year with cases and hospitalizations as high as ever, fresh data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds us that we already had a long track record of failing to manage our health. The latest data from a decades-long health survey finds that—yet again—the vast majority of Americans have a poor diet and many of us are inactive. Specifically, just 10 percent of Americans eat enough vegetables, and only…

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Covid will continue but the end of the pandemic is near

Covid will continue but the end of the pandemic is near

Christopher J L Murray writes: The world is experiencing a huge wave of infection with the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. Estimates based on Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) models suggest that on around Jan 17, 2022 there were 125 million omicron infections a day in the world, which is more than ten times the peak of the delta wave in April, 2021. The omicron wave is inexorably reaching every continent with only a few countries in eastern Europe,…

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Omicron has changed the shape of the pandemic. Will it end it for good?

Omicron has changed the shape of the pandemic. Will it end it for good?

CNN reports: The world feared the worst when a worrying new coronavirus variant emerged in late November and ripped through South Africa at a pace not seen before in the pandemic. But two months later, with Omicron dominant across much of the globe, the narrative has shifted for some. “Levels of concern about Omicron tend to be lower than with previous variants,” Simon Williams, a researcher in public attitudes and behaviors towards Covid-19 at Swansea University, told CNN. For many,…

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Antimicrobial resistance now a leading cause of death worldwide, study finds

Antimicrobial resistance now a leading cause of death worldwide, study finds

The Guardian reports: Antimicrobial resistance poses a significant threat to humanity, health leaders have warned, as a study reveals it has become a leading cause of death worldwide and is killing about 3,500 people every day. More than 1.2 million – and potentially millions more – died in 2019 as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, according to the most comprehensive estimate to date of the global impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The stark analysis covering more than 200…

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How sympathy got displaced by scorn

How sympathy got displaced by scorn

Andrea Stanley writes: After Andreea’s mom died of COVID-19 in April, the harassment started. Noxious messages started coming in after she wrote a Facebook post letting friends and family know about her loss. One person messaged her to say they couldn’t believe her mother hadn’t protected herself. Andreea has since deleted most of the other messages, but she remembers people saying things like “I can’t believe your mom was an anti-vaxxer” and “I can’t believe she didn’t understand that COVID…

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School closures were a catastrophic error

School closures were a catastrophic error

Jonathan Chait writes: Recently, Nate Silver found himself in the unenviable role of main character of the day on Twitter because he proposed that school closures were a “disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision.” The comparison generated overwhelming anger and mockery, and it is not an easy one to defend: A fiasco that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and rearranged the regional power structure is a very high bar to clear. Weighing policy failures in such…

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Do the Omicron numbers mean what we think they mean?

Do the Omicron numbers mean what we think they mean?

Dhruv Khullar writes: More than a hundred and fifty thousand Americans are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus—a higher number than at any other point in the pandemic. But that figure, too, is not quite what it seems. Many hospitalized Covid patients have no respiratory symptoms; they were admitted for other reasons—a heart attack, a broken hip, cancer surgery—and happened to test positive for the virus. There are no nationwide estimates of the proportion of hospitalized patients with “incidental covid,” but…

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Two decades of soldiers’ medical records implicate common virus in multiple sclerosis

Two decades of soldiers’ medical records implicate common virus in multiple sclerosis

Science reports: One hundred and fifty years after a French neurologist first recognized a case of multiple sclerosis (MS) in a young woman with an unusual tremor, the cause of this devastating disease remains elusive. Now, a study that combed data from regular blood tests of 10 million U.S. soldiers has found the strongest evidence yet that infection with a common virus, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), dramatically increases a person’s chances of developing the rare disease. The work leaves many questions,…

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Can weed protect you from Covid?

Can weed protect you from Covid?

Slate reports: Fikadu Tafesse wasn’t expecting to wake up on Wednesday to a text in which his former mentor blamed him for his children’s new interest in weed. Earlier this week, Tafesse, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Oregon Health & Science University, published evidence that some compounds found in cannabis plants could prevent the coronavirus from infecting cells. The internet latched onto the idea that weed might protect them from COVID: Twitter users made memes about the…

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How is the pandemic affecting the brains of a generation of children?

How is the pandemic affecting the brains of a generation of children?

Nature reports: Like many paediatricians, Dani Dumitriu braced herself for the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus when it first surged in her wards. She was relieved when most newborn babies at her hospital who had been exposed to COVID-19 seemed to do just fine. Knowledge of the effects of Zika and other viruses that can cause birth defects meant that doctors were looking out for problems. But hints of a more subtle and insidious trend followed close behind. Dumitriu and…

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The world we want to live in after Covid

The world we want to live in after Covid

Dhruv Khullar writes: In 1909, the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep published a book called “The Rites of Passage.” In it, he explored the rituals that cultures use to transition people from one stage of life to the next. Birth, puberty, graduation, religious initiation, marriage, pregnancy, promotions, the seasons—we’re always on the threshold of one phase or another. How do communities shepherd individuals from the pre- to the post-? Van Gennep argued that certain universal principles underlie rites of passage…

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Evolution ‘landscapes’ predict what’s next for Covid virus

Evolution ‘landscapes’ predict what’s next for Covid virus

Carrie Arnold writes: In the fall of 2019, the world began one of the largest evolutionary biology experiments in modern history. Somewhere near the city of Wuhan in eastern China, a coronavirus acquired the ability to live inside humans rather than the bats and other mammals that had been its hosts. It adapted further to become efficient at spreading from one person to the next, even before the body’s defenses could rise against it. But the evolutionary chess game didn’t…

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