A study led by Prof. Miguel Nicolelis from Duke University has suggested that exposure to the mosquito-transmitted illness, dengue, may provide some level of immunity from COVID-19. The report, still in preprint, found a link between the spread of the virus and past outbreaks of dengue fever.
These maps by the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB) show the comparison between the geographic distribution of COVID-19 cases and dengue fever cases, summarizing all data from 2019 until May 2020. The findings suggest a possible immunological cross-reactivity between the two illnesses as areas with lower COVID-19 infection rates and slower case growth were places that had suffered recent intense dengue outbreaks.
There have been 15,871 confirmed COVID-19 deaths in New York City. Until yesterday, the data was not connected to geographical location. Check out the newest map using the latest from the NYC Department of Health.
Interestingly, this map shows a population virtually the opposite by income and status of a previous map of those New Yorkers who were able to flee the city during the pandemic! But the message remains the same: wealth and privilege provide more spatial mobility and choice of locale in whatever circumstances!
COVID VISITS NEW YORK: While New Yorkers shelter at home, a most obnoxious tourist visits the city! Everyone wants him to leave as soon as possible. This map shows where he has left his coronavirus by Zip Code. (Including new cases as of last week).
Epidemiology allows us to better understand the conditions that lead to sickness and to health so we can better solve public health problems.
To do this, we use surveillance, or the collecting or gathering of information. In public health, this means we’re monitoring data to help inform our work to protect the health of a population.
At the Health Department, for example, we monitor health behaviors, social determinants of health, as well as instances of disease. This includes data related to: Physical activity Chronic diseases Flu-like illness Lead exposure New diagnoses of HIV The number of heat-related deaths Housing conditions And much more!
FromScience Magazine SPECIAL COLLECTION of ARTICLES: the Ebola Virus
Given the current outbreak, unprecedented in terms of number of people killed and rapid geographic spread, ScienceandScience Translational Medicine have made this collection of research and news articles on the viral disease freely available to researchers and the general public.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Region of the Americas recently reported that Brazil’s ongoing yellow fever virus battle shows unfortunate results.
In Brazil, between July 2021 and week# 18 of 2022, there were 547 suspected cases of yellow fever in humans were reported, of which four were laboratory-confirmed and fatal.
The fatal cases were men between 20 and 29 years of age with no history of yellow fever vaccination.
The PAHO says the COVID-19 pandemic cause a significant disruption in yellow fever vaccination in Brazil.
For the first time during his hospital stay, his pain became real to me, and I realized I had wronged my patient by not taking his complaints more seriously. We gave him an opioid for his pain, and, slowly, the pain in his finger improved.
We’re taught in medical school not to undertreat pain, yet we do it too often in our zeal to not promote addiction. But many people who misuse opioids started out seeking pain treatment. We’re not doing enough, but what more can we do?
Don’t get me wrong. We absolutely need to continue to ask questions. We need to be more responsible when we prescribe these powerful drugs. And, yes, we need to remain vigilant for any signs of drug-seeking behavior.
That said, we have to be a little more trusting of our patients when it comes to their pain. Getting better control of their pain may help them recover faster and stay healthier longer.
With the opioid overdose epidemic, there is a palpable resurgence of very conservative pain management. We need to recognize that some people need opioids for pain management. Ultimately, substance use disorders and overdose are largely driven by disconnection, trauma, and stigma surrounding drug use, not the drugs themselves. Let’s evaulate and change the environments within which people are using drugs (i.e. address the social determinants of health, including employment, education, housing, and income). Limiting the conversation to restricting people’s access to medications obstructs a larger conversation on how our environments shape health behaviours.
“There’s some truth” to claims that people of color are suspicious of clinical studies, this epidemiologist, who is Latino, said, “because there’s discordance in who gets studied and who’s doing the studying.”
This has enormous implications for the applicability of health research.
I just wanted to say what a fantastic idea this is and what a fantastic job you’re doing carrying it out. I work in public health (in training to become an epidemiologist), and was spurred to do so by learning about the AIDS epidemic and the failure to act by both the Canadian and American (and global, but I don’t work there) governments. I felt the need to do something, to dedicate my life to preventing something like this from ever happening again. Thank you so much for putting together such a wonderful resource and educational tool. It is truly inspiring to see this kind of dedication and work, and is sure to inspire more people the way Larry’s work inspired me.
Love,
Olivia
Thanks, Olivia, this means a lot.
In working on this Tumblr, I (shana) was reminded again how the entire idea of wanting to be an epidemiologist or to study immunology was pretty rare/obscure as a career path pre-AIDS, and how many friends (gay men especially) I had who have pursued those fields since. And how much better prepared (if still underfunded) public health is now as a result.
It’s a cautionary tale of the time I was a conference’s Patient Zero for con crud.
Once upon a time, way back in 2014, I lived in Nebraska. I flew to California to attend two concerts – one in San Jose and one in Los Angeles the following night.
Now, the lead singer was on vocal rest during the pre-show VIP events because he’d been sick for a while with a bad cold that was screwing with his voice. I attended those VIP events at both concerts, and they included photos with the band. Which meant standing right next to the lead singer. Who was on vocal rest. For a bad cold.
I joked with my friend, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we got his cold? We could totally brag that we got Jared Leto’s cold. lol”
And it was funny… right up until a couple of days later when my throat started getting scratchy and I started coughing.
Yep. I got his cold. Dammit.
But the story doesn’t end here! You see, I had a conference to attend, and my bug and I flew from Los Angeles to Atlanta to attend that con, along with around 400 other people.
When friends went to hug me, I’d say, “Whoa, I have a cold. Probably best not.” But then to lighten the moment, I’d joke, “Then again, it IS Jared Leto’s cold.” And they’d say “WELL IN THAT CASE” and they’d hug me anyway.
And it was funny… right up until a couple of days later when they started getting scratchy and coughing.
It turned out to be one of the worst con cruds any of us had seen in a long time. No one was seriously ill, but a lot of people were pretty miserable (and they haven’t let me forget it, either).
But it didn’t end in Atlanta.
Because then I flew back to Nebraska.
And they flew back to their homes in Europe, Australia, Canada, and other parts of the US.
And the globe-trotting microbe continued its world tour.
I’m one (1) person, but I carried that virus into the crowd at one (possibly two) concerts, multiple airports (including LAX and Atlanta), and at least four flights before passing it on to a conference on the other side of the continent attended by around 400 people, who then drove or flew back to their own homes in various parts of the world.
All because I stood next to someone with a cold.
Fortunately, for as unpleasant as it was, it was relatively mild.
Now let’s make it a virus that we’re not quite sure how to treat, kills more people than the flu, and is more easily and widely transmitted. Let’s make it a virus that is easily transmitted by asymptomatic carriers. Let’s make it a virus that survives on surfaces for days. Let’s make it a virus that we still don’t quite have a grasp on, whose effects are serious and have the potential to leave its survivors with lifelong health problems.
Imagine the Spanish Flu with twenty-first century travel and population density. Epidemiologists have been warning for years that a modern day pandemic could be an unprecedented disaster purely because of the sheer amount of traveling people do, and now that pandemic is here.
THAT is why you should stay home.
THAT is why you should wear a goddamned mask.
THAT is why business as usual is too dangerous right now.
I don’t care about your conspiracy theories: DON’T BE RECKLESS WITH PUBLIC HEALTH.
A baaaaaaad bug, Pseudomonas aeruginosa…the number one cause of death in patients with cystic fibrosis, so make sure you know how to properly treat it!
News reliability in the internet age has been under the scrutiny with the increasing spread of data access especially through social platforms. User-created content is part of this phenomenon where source integrity has become questionable, distinctively in the wake of the weaponization of information through channels.
Lately the contradicting data over the COVID-19 outbreak has forged many questions over numbers, locations, and precautions. We had news China knew ahead of this threat but didn’t act properly, yet the fear of a global pandemic is quickly spreading through the media.
Wether it’s politics, economy, or the latest health news over the Corona virus, I’m finding difficult understanding the structure of the information. The news scenarios can at this point be in these conditions:
facts are being misrepresented by Chinese authorities;
western media is using information to gain leverage on China;
reality has countries unable to make sense of the situation of the pandemic.
All these scenarios might not just happen singularly and that would be worrisome; however, the product of the information in this age is the depth of confusion we are in that won’t allow us to see through anything. At this point what to believe: the Corona virus is manageable or data is faulty?
I’m getting newsfeed form expat aquaintances living in China how the western media is blowing numbers, and perhaps we know the story that selling newspapers copies and clickbaits is profitable for the media. Now we have little to no clues how warped the situation is because we are supposed ot believe the WHO’s data, but also the information coming from national sources across Europe.
Now I can ask myself if technology can come to the rescue and help us track the spread of the virus over the last two months. So far we know SARS in 2003 had a higher contagion effect and that at a certain point it was contained. Opposite is the scenario we have with the current health crisis from Asia where the issue of censorship in China might have played a key role. The spread of the Corona virus went under the radar until its reach went quasi global, landing as far as Italy and Egypt.
Northern Italy is in now on alert with major public events like the famous carnival of Venice cancelled. Schools, universities, and certain public places are shut down until further notice. Efforts to stop the spread of this virus are underway as Italy managed to isolate the disease and a vaccine is being developed across nations.
Information is so crucial that if China really did censor the news of the spread we might look at our second major alarm bell; the first being how this nation has officially become a playground for technology in developing a Big Brother state. So if information was withheld it’s certain Beijing understood the full value of manifacturing and distribuiting technology for the rest of the world.
I’m a little skeptic over the quantity and quality of data that could have easily gotten filtered through the Internet Of Things, and refined via artificial intelligence to better track the spread of the virus. We have all the available tools in 2020 to put to the test our technology and track better information of useful human behavior, helping us prevent worst scenario for the near future.
This translated in being able to harness what you want to tell and not to tell through the very own decives your country has been manufacturing to the rest of the world. But this tells me that China might actually have all the truth over this disease, feeding fake news to specific targets in order to manipulate the information flow and therefore be in full control of the situation.
Okay guys, I know I haven’t been online and most of y’all are here for teh spoopernatural. But right now I really want to talk to people about nutritional studies and a bunch of stuff I learned from researching the ketogenic diet I’ve been on for the past like two months or so. You see, I have a horrible gluten and grain sensitivity that I never knew about up until a few weeks ago, as well as Hashimotos Thyroditis (or, chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis) which is an autoimmune disease where my body sees my thyroid and thinks it’s an invader and kicks the piss out of it, which causes my hypothyroidism. All of that together makes for a very not happy and not healthy me. I’ve been struggling with this stuff for years, several years of which I had no idea I was struggling with this stuff. Luckily, I had a friend who told me what to get checked at the doctor’s and she was right, and I at least knew what was wrong. The sucky thing about that is that Hashimotos and Thyroid issues tend to be treated with just a pill and being sent on your merry way. After two years of no improvement (and it getting even worse) my friend stepped in again and told me about ketogenic diets. For her, her favorite benefit was the fact that it helped her lose the thyroid weight. Thus far for me, my favorite benefit is that I’m not constantly in pain and running for a bathroom. In my first week on a ketogenic diet, I’ve read a lot of things about it, because I’m a fuckin nerd who wants to know what to hell I am doing to my bodacious temple of awesomeness. I’m not genuinely interested in losing very much weight (you should’ve seen the look on my mother’s face when I told her that I didn’t want to go under 200 pounds, which was the weight that I felt and looked best at), but I’m more interested in relieving my IBS and maybe helping with my Hashimoto’s, which effects you more than people think.
The sad thing is, the more I read about ketogenics and the studies done for this diet, the more I realize something very very important that I think all people should realize: nutritional science isn’t just bad and underfunded, it’s really damn bad and hella underfunded.
I took a course in Epidemiology, which is basically a fancy word for the study of health issues and how they develop and spread. The biggest thing I learned from this course (other than if I was put in a one on one educational setting where i was free to learn at my own pace, I probably would’ve been pretty good at math and science, which I’m a little slow in) is the difference between causation and correlation.
See, in the early 1900s, it was discovered that people with atherosclerosis (layman’s terms: heart disease) also had high blood cholesterol levels. They assumed high cholesterol caused heart disease and reducing cholesterol would help heart disease, and so they told everyone to cut their saturated fat from their diets. That sounds perfectly logical, but heart disease was and is still just as prevalent. A few decades down the line, doctors found out that there isn’t just one but three kinds of cholesterol, they all do different things, and your body makes them in different ways. The original cholesterol test measured the total blood cholesterol, not what kind. And so while nutritionists and doctors insisted that their patients cut fat from their diets, people did, and they replaced them with carbs, which when consumed in high amounts (as most people do to replace the full feeling you get from fatty foods) turn into vLDL and LDL (bad cholesterol).
The point is: nutritional science is based predominantly on what most people call “arm chair science”. Most nutritional studies (studies are how scientists find out what effects a thing has on another thing) are flawed because they usually last very short term (between 6 months and a year as a median), have very small focus groups, and rely heavily on the honesty of those participating (because you can’t look people up in a laboratory and control what they eat for years, that’d be very unethical and expensive). Nutritional studies are also very expensive to conduct, and money for studies usually comes from outside biased sources (companies and organizations who have a stake in the study). The reason why all that matters when it comes to the ketogenic diet (or any diet) is that when it comes right down to it- “scientific” nutritional literature is often funded by biased sources, not given a long enough study time, and reliant on the honesty and ethics of the subjects in the study (and humans are such fickle creatures). HOWEVER. What I have come to find from researching pro-keto and anti-keto papers and studies is that no matter how you slice it, in the short term, it works. Anti-keto proponents claim that the weight loss comes from being in a calorie deficit, just like any other diet, and that the high fat content makes it easier for people to stick to it because it makes them feel satisfied and fuller longer. Pro-Keto proponents claim that the weight loss comes from Ketosis, or the bodily state in which the body produces ketones, which breaks down fat into glucose to replace the shortage of carbs to be turned into glucose. Both of them acknowledge that ketosis is a real bodily state that can be monitored and maintained, they just disagree one whether or not it is the cause of the weight loss. But what they do agree on is this: Ketogenic diets cause weight loss, provide significant relief for people with gluten and grain sensitivities/allergies, and can help control and improve epilepsy. So, while there isn’t a whole lot of reliable science on how it works (like how we still have no idea how a lot of things in our bodies work), what has been proven is that it does work. TL;DR: Ketogenic diets work, be careful when reading nutritional studies, face the fact that science is not always right, be skeptical, and read stuff
ALT
