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Total 106 results found since Jan 2013.
Parents Still Poached of Baby Formula While Egg Supply Is Turning Sunny Side Up
Scott Lincicome,Gabriella Beaumont-Smith, and Alfredo Carrillo ObregonReports last Friday broke that the Department of Justice (DOJ) hasopened an investigation into potential criminal conduct at the Michigan factory at the center of the “nationwide infant formula shortage” that lasted for most of 2022. Whether laws were broken at the Abbott Laboratories plant is a matter for the DOJ, but we’re confident that the investigators won’t discover the real source of last year’s problems: federal policy.As we explain in new Catobriefing paper, the Michigan plant closure surely put a major dent in U.S. infant formula p...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - January 25, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Scott Lincicome, Gabriella Beaumont-Smith, Alfredo Carrillo Obregon Source Type: blogs
Some thoughts on where we are with Covid-19
I hesitated to show you this graphic because it might lead to unwarranted complacency, but I ' ll show it to get it over with and then discuss. (Source:Worldometer) Basically, the death rate has held pretty steady since last April, at around 400 a day. That ' s obviously well below the previous peaks, but I don ' t think people would tolerate it from any other readily preventable cause. However, deaths are a lagging indicator and the CDC is reporting a widespread increase in cases around the country. Again, not a major spike like last March but we don ' t know where it ' s going yet. New strains are h...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 19, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Going Viral
Helen Bramwell of StatNews is an excellent writer about public health. Here she interviews a bunch of scientists to ask what surprised them about Covid19. It ' s a long read, and I won ' t try to summarize it all, but a couple of points stand out.The first is that most experts originally thought, based on experience with other coronaviruses, that this one would be stable -- that it would not be able to mutate so as to avoid immunity from previous infections or vaccination. Therefore they believed that the pandemic would peak after a few months and we ' d enter an endemic phase. (You might remember those models from t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 30, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
A Change Of Heart: " For The Children "
Last night, I archived everything on the blog except " Why Pediatrics " . More and more, it ' s become a question rather than a statement of purpose. In the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic, where the entire US system shifted on its axis to shut down community Pediatrics services and " feed " children ' s hospitals (to free up resources for sick adults), the situation for those of us practicing inpatient Pediatrics (as " Pediatric Hospitalists " ) really went to hell. You could not find/beg a job in the community setting during the pandemic. Actually, jumping through the ABP ' s hoops to do a...
Source: Dr.J's HouseCalls - December 24, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Clinical Research 101: Lecture 3
Now that we ' ve cleared away a bit of the underbrush, let ' s say you think that Eye of Newt Toe of Frog (Eontof) is potentially therapeutically useful against Creeping Crud (CC), and you want to test it. You face a whole lot of considerations. One is that you ' re going to need funding, which means you need to persuade somebody -- either the National Institutes of Health or a pharmaceutical company, most likely -- to invest in your idea. They ' re going to want to know that there ' s a reasonable chance of success with Eontof, and in the case of the pharmaceutical company that they can make money off of it, which brings ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 17, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Clinical Research 101: Lecture 2
Editor ' s note: Only about 15 million people so far have gotten the new bivalent Covid booster that ' s specifically formulated against the Omega variants that are currently circulating. I got it a few days ago, Walgreen ' s was offering appointments the same day! I got the flu shot at the same time, both absolutely free. Do it!So, picking up where we left off, to determine whether an intervention is beneficial, harmful or basically useless you ordinarily need a comparison group. There are actually exceptions. You don ' t need a randomized controlled trial for parachutes when jumping out of airplanes because you alr...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 15, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
FDA Wisely Permits Pharmacists to Prescribe Paxlovid
Jeffrey A. SingerWhen the Food and Drug Administration granted Emergency Use Authorization to the antiviral drugs Paxlovid and monupiravir in the beginning of this year, I co ‐authored anoped in the New York Daily News, along with Josh Bloom of the American Council on Science and Health, complaining about, among other things, the FDA ’s requirement that a patient who tests positive for COVID must get a prescription from a doctor, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant to obtain the drug. For the drugs to be effective they must be started within five days of the start of COVID symptoms. Not ev...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 7, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
Flu Is Making Comeback. Here ’s What We Can Do About It
Jeffrey A. SingerAfter being nearly absent in 2020 and 2021, influenza cases are making a comeback. In fact, cases are up ‐tickingunusually late in the year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)reported on April 15 that the majority of cases are H3N2, “antigenically different from the vaccine reference viruses.” This explains why the latest flu vaccine is only16 percent effective in reducing the chances of a moderate to severe infection. As of April 15, the CDC reported at least 4.3 million flu illnesses, 42,000 hospitalizations, and 2,500 deaths from the flu.Public health experts attribu...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 18, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
No, it isn ' t over
The country as a whole, including apparently the CDC, has decided that the Covid-19 thing is over and done with. The Republicans in congress even insisted on stripping funding for Covid-19 testing and relief from the recent appropriation bill, and the Democrats went along with little protest. While it is true that most of the country right now is experiencing a lull, there has been a bump up in hospitalizations in Europe. Look at the far right of the chart: As you can see the uptick so far is small, but it ' s just beginning. It ' s because of the new Omicron BA.2 variant, which is more transmissible ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 28, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
More on why we Stay Alive
A couple of days ago I referred to the doubling of human life expectancy in 100 years, and the importance of pasteurization of milk in making that happen. Our next installment is about water. There ' s nothing more basic than good old H2O, but it used to kill city dwellers about as often as milk. People actually figured this out even before Pasteur and Koch came up with the germ theory of disease.Cholera is an intestinal infection caused by a bacterium called Vibrio cholera, which is spread through contaminated water or food. The disease causes severe diarrhea that can last for several days. Depending on the strain of bact...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 21, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Whither Covid?
I recommend this Twitter thread by John Burn-Murdoch, as most Americans and their political leaders have apparently decided that the pandemic is over. It isn ' t, although here in the U.S. we are in a better place than we were a year ago. In a nutshell, new cases and hospitalizations are rising in much of the world, including much of Europe. This isn ' t so much because of loosened mitigation measures, but because of the emergence of a new variant, Omicron B.A2 which is evidently even more contagious than the original Omicron and perhaps a bit better at getting around existing immunity. It ' s just starting to show up...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 18, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
‘Just Follow the Science’ Shows Some Improvement
Peter Van DorenDuring summer 2020 I wrote anessay about what science can and cannot do and the role it can play in public policy decisions including those pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic. I concluded that science explains relationships between cause and effect: no more and no less. No normative conclusions about individual or collective decisions follow directly from science. Instead, costs, benefits, and other values properly enter both individual and collective decisions.I have writtenthreetimessince then about gradual recognition of this argument among medical professionals as well as journalists. I a...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 16, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Peter Van Doren Source Type: blogs
The next plague
Here ' s a discussion by Kelly Piper of the ominous implications of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. Most people are thinking that in the long run, it ' s good news that we have this highly contagious, but less virulent strain of the virus. Once we get past the surge and the problems of overwhelmed hospitals and too many people out sick, we ' ll have a degree of herd immunity and it will be comparable to flu and other respiratory viruses that we already live with.That may be true, although it ' s too soon to tell. Another more dangerous variant may yet emerge. But it also points to a danger -- this highly contagious virus ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 28, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
A brief note on epidemiology
Mark Sumner at DK has aroundup of news from overwhelmed health care systems around the country. This seems to be getting very little attention from national media, for some reason -- this is a list of local stories, which don ' t seem to have gotten the attention of editors at CNN or the New York Times.This is definitely bad news in the present, but it ' s better news in the long run. The Covid-19 variant that ' s causing this is extremely contagious -- as contagious a measles, apparently. That means you can become infected just by briefly being in the vicinity of an infectious person. One thing that ' s really unpleasant ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 8, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Innovation, mRNA, and Public Policy
Chris EdwardsThe main weapons against COVID-19 are the vaccines developed by Moderna and BioNTech after a decade of their research into mRNA technologies. That research was supported by more than $3 billion of private angel investment and venture capital.Democrats and Republicans both support medical research funding, and Republicans tout the Trump administration ’s Operation Warp Speed. But governments were not the key to mRNA development. Instead, we can thank the leaders and scientists at Moderna and BioNTech and the suppliers of private capital to them, as I discusshere andhere.TheWall Street Journal ’s A...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 6, 2021 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs
