Smoking cigarettes is stupid, involving financial and, more importantly, significant health costs. While there are several “drivers” to the smoking habit, including sociability and status (especially during those rebellious teen years), could we agree that nicotine is, by far and away, the most significant component of chemical dependency?
Harm Reduction
Phase III trials put the efficacy of the two earliest COVID-19 vaccines in the mid-’90s, certainly more than we had hoped. The word on the media “street” has been that vaccinations result in fewer hospitalizations and no deaths. The CDC is now reporting on “breakthrough infections” since the beginning of the year.
Despite increasing evidence that vaping is safer than smoking, uncertainty surrounds the long-term effects of electronic cigarette use. Many in the tobacco control field have used the lack of data to speculate about these unknown risks. Here's a better way to deal with the uncertainty.
There seems to be a reproducibility “crisis” in the sciences, where the results obtained by one group of researchers cannot be reproduced by another, putting the validity of the original work in doubt. What is the fate of those papers? Do they languish in some academic backwater hell lining birdcages?
According to at least one source [1], it takes an average of 17 years for a proven intervention to be fully implemented. By that metric, we would have no treatments for COVID-19 besides those identified anecdotally. How did the boots on the ground of our healthcare systems actually respond?
When it rains, when a low-pressure system passes by, and when water soaks the soil, it's not a great day to sample for radon. Those conditions force radon out of pore spaces and into basements.
There have been three major accidents at commercial nuclear reactors – Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011). Let’s take a look at each of these accidents to see what happened.
Shipping regulations passed in December 2020 and poised to take effect in the near future will greatly restrict access to electronic cigarettes. Since the law was enacted, additional research has shown that smokers who switch to vaping have a good shot at giving up cigarettes, and maybe even nicotine, forever. Congress is hindering this important public health victory.
Long before COVID-19, overwhelming infection, sepsis, often bacterial rather than viral, has been a leading cause of death in US hospitals. Sepsis has attracted the concern of Medicare, which requires hospitals to report on their adherence to a bundle of treatment measures. How is that working out?
The recent excellent article by Josh Bloom, “NYC Pol Uses Phony Cancer Scare & ‘Children’ to Ban Glyphosate in Parks,” talks about the scare tactics used by a council member in New York to ban glyphosate (Roundup) from city parks. I’m taking a deeper dive looking at how the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and our EPA determine whether or not glyphosate causes cancer. A flawed process leads to flawed science, which like radioactivity – stays around forever!
Fish + bacteria = 25% mortality.
Fish + bacteria + rocks = 5% mortality.
What magic lies within the rocks? What can farm-raised fish teach us?
Where does the Earth’s magnetic field come from, why do we think it’s going to reverse itself (and what in the world does that mean, anyway?), and what’s any of that got to do with me or cosmic radiation?