Yeah, there’s tons of research but the Alzheimer’s community, well-meaning as it is, is wedded to bureaucratic approaches which have totally stymied any true innovation. Definition of Insanity Applies OK, everyone will say how much research is going on in the field and the setbacks are just temporary, yada yada. But the failures in the Alzheimer’s ...
We now realize that we won’t solve climate change. Is that why mental health globally has just taken a big turn for the worse? Climate Change Again Yeah, I know, climate change causes everything right? So why not problems with mental health to add to the list? But hear me out on this one as I’m not a reflexive climate change promoter. As I’m sure y...
FDA Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Defeat? For those of you have stuck with this blog over the years you will know that I have a particular thing about Alzheimer’s. No, it isn’t because I Have it or anyone close to me has it either. It’s just that it is such a social, economic and psychic tragedy right across the world that causes untold suffer...
Are Trees More Important Than People? Infrastructure has been the topic du jour. We all know that means stuff like bridges and roads, the physical side. Now we have social infrastructure. That’s stuff like free pre-K and paid family leave. All well and good. But there’s so much money involved a lot of definitions are getting stretched in the proces...
I just read an article about innovation in the Harvard Business Review (“What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation”) by Noubar Afeyan and Gary Pisano. Noubar Afeyan is the co-founder of Moderna and a serial entrepreneur in the biotech space. Since he is a luminary in the vaccination area it got me to thinking about, well, vaccinations. He is an ...
Who Cares About Home Care? How things change! A lot of Americans don’t want immigrants, especially the undocumented ones. But now we have a humongous labor shortage. So much for restricting immigration. Nowhere is the problem more acute than in home care. These days the only home care workers, other than spouses and close family are foreign. Thes...
Mexican Burritos Drugged Too? So, the Japan Olympics start soon on July 23. But there’s already a casualty, namely the American runner, Shelby Houlihan, who has been banned from participating due to doping. Her story is that it was a burrito that did it hmmm. Zero tolerance, right? The World Antidoping Agency has, after years of investigative w...
I don’t have to tell you that we now have a vaccine out there for covid-19 There is widespread jubilation and a feeling that we have it beaten. How the **** could that ever be construed as bad news? Too Tough to Croak? Well here’s one for starters. “Measles Deaths Soared Worldwide Last Year, as Vaccine Rates Stalled” People aren’t getting their kid...
There’s a lot of hostility to masks. There are many reasons for that, but the health issue is a priority for most people. They wear them for safety. I wonder if we’re all missing something big. Clothing for Deep Thinkers Only, Please WFH (working from home) is now changing the fashion equation. We dress up (on our upper body) so we can look busines...
#Face masks are being blamed for a lot of things, chiefly about whether or not they work for covid-19. Is it possible they are also causing an increase in violence and social conflict, globally if not already in the US? Conflicts R’Us In the US at least it seems that violent crime such as murders has increased significantly this year. There has b...
A Sputnik Moment Yep, 165 vaccines under development 27 in trials. I wonder if that includes Sputnik V (the esteemed Russian entry). So how could there possibly be too many vaccines? Shouldn’t we add even more? And no, I’m not talking about the temptation to accelerate the approval process so that the entries haven’t been adequately tested, althoug...
Depressioned Out We’re just moving into the Second Great Depression courtesy of our bosom buddy covid-19. But how bad is it going to be? Globally we’ve had prior experiences such as the 1918 pandemic, but we don’t have any formal models to inform us of the likely outcome and how bad it will be. We’re all flying by the seat of our collective pants. ...
Wait up! Is this guy smoking something? Don’t we all know that the cause of covid-19 is the coronavirus? That’s totally a known truth, right? Ok so hear me out for a nanosec. Not a respiratory disease?? We all started off thinking that CV19 was a disease of the lungs. We now know that it’s really a disease of the lining of our blood vessels, the en...
Screw-Ups R’Us I think its time we admit that the US totally bungled the whole coronavirus pandemic. Just about every other country did better than us, at least in the early stages. Less cases, less deaths, better leadership overall. But there’s a flip side. More contagion, more disease means more people exposed, more people with antibodies, more...
Not “just” a lung disease There’s a lot of terrible things about the coronavirus. We now know that it’s not just a pulmonary disease. It is also linked with cardiac problems and strokes. But there’s another potential problem that hasn’t yet attracted much attention. It’s the neurological impacts of the virus. We used to think that the virus led t...
Too Big for our Boots I don’t have to tell you about obesity and its traveling companions such as diabetes. In a blog post I wrote on in February I noted that this is rapidly getting worse (“Can we avoid the Obesularity?” 27 February 2020). Well guess what? The next big progression in our collective BMI is now here! The BMI epidemic is going to get...
Those Pesky Little PM2.5 Critters? So why is the epidemic spreading so quickly in New York? Could it be air pollution? We know, especially from research into the severe air pollution in China that the particles in smog carry pathogenic microbes, including both bacteria and viruses (Inhalable Microorganisms in Beijing’s PM2.5 and PM10 Pollutants dur...
“They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Talleyrand Didn’t we learn anything from SARS, MERS and H1N1 and its variants? “The more things change, the more they remain the same”. Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr “To ignore history is to repeat it” George Santayana You get the idea. Doing Nothing Beats AI So here I was thinking that AI had fina...
Obesity is the new abnormal Did you notice the latest gloomy news on obesity? Namely, that on current predictions half of all adults in the US will be clinically obese by 2030. There’s even worse too; one quarter of all adults will be severely obese. That means they are at least 100 lbs. over their ideal body weight and experiencing conditions such...
One of the benefits of living in a rich country is that you get a lot of high quality, nutritious food. As nations become more highly developed, they eat a lot more meat, which, as we know is nutritious and particularly high in protein. Even though there’s a bit of a trend towards a plant-based diet, the mega-trend is to eat more protein, not just ...
