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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.

The Manhattan Project to develop the bombs was one of the greatest scientific, technological, and logistical achievements in history. The bombs ended the war and saved millions of lives of combatants and civilians.

The eight cases of locally transmitted malaria recently reported in the U.S. – the first in 20 years – have elicited loony conspiracy theories about the cause. They're bunk.

Masking to prevent COVID infections has diminished drastically, even in healthcare settings, and there are already examples of its negative effects. Across-the-board abandonment of masking is premature: It is effective, inexpensive, not terribly inconvenient, and applicable to preventing airborne and droplet-spread infections in addition to COVID. Most important, it is in the best interest of staff, patients, and public health.

The drug, Leqembi, does not reverse symptoms. In patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, it slowed cognitive and functional decline somewhat compared with placebo. The FDA’s approval of Leqembi is not the end of the Alzheimer’s journey, but it could be a way station. 

Discussions of “climate change” or “global warming” tend to focus on increasing temperatures in summer, especially the current run of severe heat waves.  The 85-page summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report mentions “winter” only once, the surname of one of the authors, but the adverse health effects of cold winters have long been recognized. Can the health benefits of warmer winters compensate for the damaging effects of hotter summers? 

The FDA is allowing women over-the-counter access to one brand of one form of birth control pill. But the agency should follow the advice of medical experts and let women exercise their right to self-medicate with all hormonal contraceptives.

Mosquito magnet
Undercover journalism
Daily Ice cream reduces heart disease
How Madison Avenue taught us to consume healthcare

While academics explore the bounty and pitfalls that Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers, and Big Tech continues to hype the possible over the actual, the feds seek to make regulations. Corporate healthcare, in all its forms, is fighting back. Should we be techno-optimists, Luddites, or somewhere in between?

Tori Bowie, a 2016 US Olympian, died from complications of childbirth; Serena Williams experienced a pulmonary embolism after delivery that was initially ignored. According to the World in Data, US maternal mortality per 100,000 live births lies “comfortably” less than in Grenada but more than in Latvia or Puerto Rico. Let’s get behind the headlines, and delve deeper into a “preventable” problem.