#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 ...
The Plaque Obsession I’ve been really concerned about the lack of progress on Alzheimer’s. So in early 2018 I posted on the topic (“We urgently need a Manhattan Project for Alzheimer's!” 13 January, 2018). In my post I pointed out the research into the disease wasn’t working out because it was concerned only with amyloid plaque, that none of the dr...
I just watched a Netflix documentary called "The Game Changers". Its about how meat damages your body. As if we needed another bad health story. I don’t have to tell you that vaping is in the news. Now we know that it does major damage to your lungs in the longer-term, albeit not as bad as tobacco. How about this meat thing though? You know, all t...
Yep, I know, this topic is way too out there to even consider. Whatever. There’s so much news now about black holes, gravitational waves and the like that you just can’t help thinking of weird stuff, right? After all, newspapers (the few left, that is) still publish horoscopes and millions of apparently sane people believe implicitly in them. Aren’...
So, measles is getting out of control again. Ebola is already out of control. All those diseases of childhood are making a return in some shape or form, like measles and chicken pox, even polio. Antibiotic resistant bugs are getting nastier. The cognoscenti is already parsing the meaning of the post-antibiotic era. Meanwhile the latest drugs for Al...
Stem cells are hot! They are being touted for being able to cure just about everything. Even off-the-shelf cures for cancer! There’s a lot of quack remedies out there. On the other hand, stem cells are real and so is their potential to do good things for humans. Is there some thing we can do to help these good guys along? Well, first a couple of fa...
You can’t read anything these days without finding articles on how you gotta exercise. And it’s true. Exercise has enormous benefits, physical, mental, cognitive and so on. If you exercise you get all these massive benefits for free. So what’s not to like? Well clearly many people no like. The CDC estimates that only 20% of the population meet its ...
Just saw an article that claims that e-cigarettes help people quit smoking. They were, it was reported, twice as effective as gum or patches. Beautiful right? But what about the fact that these people didn’t quit imbibing nicotine? They just switched to another method which is less likely to give them lung cancer. This study by the way was publishe...
I posted on Alzheimer’s early last year (“We urgently need a Manhattan Project for Alzheimer's!”). My thesis was that we needed more out-of-the-box thinking. So far there’s no public hints of that happening either in the scientific community or the NIH. (OK, flash release: interesting research linking gum disease with Alzheimer’s, but still way too...
You might have associated UK Prime Minister Teresa May with BREXIT. But she has another distinction. She appointed the first Minister for Loneliness ever in the UK early in 2018. At the time I thought it was a weird idea. That shows you how little I know. The current fashionable buzz is about living alone and loneliness. The concern is that living ...
