Search results

Oppenheimer and the “Gita”
Releasing the nukes
Where have all the Dinosaurs gone?
The return of the paper bag

An allergy to the sugar galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose “alpha-gal” – which causes an allergy to red meat and is spread by a tick – has “climbed 41%” over four years. To add to our fears, the media reported, “42% of health care providers didn’t know about the syndrome, and another 35% weren’t too confident about how to diagnose and treat it.” Is the meat apocalypse upon us? Have the cows found a way to make us eat less of them and more vegetables?

COVID-19, a respiratory virus, often begins in viruses trapped in our nose and upper respiratory tracts. While universal precautions in healthcare settings require frequent handwashing, enforcing that requirement is lax, and compliance is often low. A new study reports on rhinotillexis, the act of “extracting nasal mucus with one’s finger,” and subsequent mucophagy, the ingestion of said mucus, among healthcare workers in the Netherlands.   

"The United States needs resilient, diverse, and secure supply chains to ensure our economic prosperity and national security.” – Executive Order #14017
“The pandemic and recent supply chain disruptions have revealed the perils of a national food system that depends on capacity concentrated in a few geographic areas and requires many steps to get from farm to fork. In order to be more resilient, the food system of the future needs to be more distributed and local.” – the USDA response.

It is seemingly such an easy question: if I need an ambulance, what will it cost me? Unfortunately, there's only a complex answer, summarized as “it depends.”

Shionogi just purchased Qpex. When I inquired about this, the Qpex folks told me that Shionogi is a company truly committed to the antibiotics space. What I found was truly inspiring! This is a real feel-good story! How often does that happen for antibiotics?

Johnson’s Baby Powder once conjured cooing babies, satiny-smooth skin, and wholesome purity. But claims the talc was contaminated with asbestos invoked the fear of cancer, leading to thousands of personal injury suits and millions of dollars in damages, which relied on expert testimony for support. Denying any causal connection, J&J’s spin-off declared bankruptcy but now is fighting back – suing doctors whose “research” shored up the awards. While J&J has a right to protect its product brand, don’t doctors have the right to free speech?

It is virtually impossible to walk a single block in New York City without seeing stores selling CBD oil. The Drug Gods haven't frowned upon CBD yet because it won't get you high. But CBD frequently contains delta-9-THC, the primary psychotropic component of marijuana, and that will get you high. Can CBD oil get you in trouble? Maybe.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in health care. This could lower costs and streamline patient interactions—but the technology has a dark side, too. Critics of "ultra-processed" food often claim that certain snacks aren't even food. Let's debunk this myth, with a special focus on Pop-Tarts.

Earlier this month, the headline “New Study Finds PFAS 'Forever Chemicals' in Drinking Water from 45% of Faucets Across US” led many news reports. That's after 32 individual PFAS were tested and found in both private and public water supplies, presenting potential hazards to our nation’s health. What did the study really say?

A Fish Tale
The Ancients on Public Life
Hester Prynne, cancel culture’s first victim?
Should I get a COVID booster?

One of the judgments made by scientists is how to aggregate or segregate data – especially when it comes to changing a continuous variable like age – into separate bins (10 to 18, 19 to 34, etc.). Race/ethnicity as a category has come in for some well-deserved criticism. Leave aside the argument that it is a social construct, race/ethnicity contains too many confounding features. A study in Nature points to a new way to break the category into meaningful segments.

Roughly 99.5% of people born before 1980 are infected with herpes zoster, yet only 33% will develop its clinical manifestation: shingles. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates that 98% of people in the U.S. have been infected with COVID, but roughly 30% of our population has been symptomatic to the extent that they are registered as “cases.” It's time to discuss the infection enigma - “the puzzling observation that only a small minority of infected people die from infection or even develop clinical disease.”

A study confined to COVID deaths in Florida and Ohio suggests that the Grim Reaper’s “excess” deaths, when stratified by political party, came for Republicans more often than Democrats.

The harder the enforcement, the harder the drug – the iron law of prohibition – is alive and well in the U.S., unlike those who consume increasingly dangerous circulating drugs like xylazine (aka "tranq") and more powerful fentanyl analogs. Drs. Jeff Singer and Josh Bloom explain in an op-ed in The Daily Beast.

There's a codeine analog with a strange name: "Thebacon." How does one pronounce this? Is it useful? And are there other obscure chemicals with meat-containing names? And A Dreaded Chemistry Lesson From Hell (TM) for no extra charge.

With respect to COVID, children experience less severe disease but remain transmitters of the infection, especially within their immediate and extended households. Should we vaccinate or not? A new study looks at the demographics of NY City school children receiving the complete (2 shot) initial vaccination.

If you haven't taken Paxlovid you cannot possibly fathom the vile sensory experience called "Paxlovid tongue." What to do? Write a song. The Blues, of course.

Minnesota has become the leader in restoring the rights of patients to receive necessary pain medications as well as the doctors who prescribe them. It's a huge step. One down, 49 to go. Drs. Bloom and Singer in Newsweek.

A Modern History of Bail
Streetlights illuminating the Street, and some unwarranted (?) surveillance
Calling people names stifles understanding.
Presentism - wokeness reinterprets history

How good is the evidence implicating climate change as a cause of heart attacks? Not very. Let's take a critical look at some of this research.

The EPA’s model for assessing the rise of carcinogenesis from chemicals and their dose-response models remains controversial. Is the EPA “following the science” or making assumptions?

Hermann J Muller revolutionized radiation genetics, received the Nobel Prize for producing gene mutations, and helped to create the linear non-threshold (LNT), the EPA’s default model for cancer risk assessment. Could mistakes he made haunt today’s most dominant global regulatory strategy?

World War II ended with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those bombings and the late effects of radiation on the development of cancers in those “survivors” spurred scientific inquiry into the mechanisms underlying human carcinogenesis – the development of cancer. Today’s regulatory science of chemical carcinogens is based upon assumptions and beliefs that are now 75 years old. Our understanding of carcinogenesis has evolved; should our regulatory models shift?

Did COVID lockdowns save lives? At what cost and to whom? The answer to both is that it depends. Let’s consider some of the issues that make up “it depends.”