Words about science and hiking
High contagion in a world of low trust The death of Dr. Li Wenliang was not just a human tragedy. The man was a genuine hero, a doctor felled by a disease contracted from a patient. The practice of medicine can be overly transactional, more focused on the acquisition of wealth than the relief of suffering. Read More …
Phage therapy isn’t ever going to be the cure-all envisioned by overly-enthusiastic science writers. But it doesn’t have to be. Curing some patients of some indications is a noble and worthy goal in and of itself. And maybe when we learn to use phage therapy in limited applications, we can start thinking about tackling sepsis Read More …
To anyone trained in medicine or biology, this question seems laughably naive. One’s impulse is to brush it off with a quick and curt answer. But it is a very good and important question because it distinguishes modern from ancient disease concepts. The notion that specific agents cause specific diseases—something that now seems blindingly obvious— Read More …
Let’s step back a bit on this question. We care about antibiotics and antibiotic resistance because they impact our ability to avoid suffering and death due to bacterial infections. Antibiotics are just a means to an end. Antibiotic resistance blocks one path to that end, but it is just one path; there are others. I’ll Read More …
I often despair when I read some of the papers that pass for phage therapy science, so it’s nice to see a couple of very solid contributions published this month. Neither are attention-grabbing reports of cures of patients who had failed antibiotic therapy and were at death’s door. You won’t see a word about them Read More …
Jon Otter tweeted out this graph today, and it just blows me away: “Trust apportioned” is apparently the term in UK English for what we in the US call hospitals. So the dotted lines are hospitals and the solid lines include community cases. Huge drops in C diff diarrhea and MRSA BSIs. This is the English Read More …
This one comes to us from the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC and is particularly heartbreaking: a 2-year old with congenital heart disease suffering a post-surgical Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. Pseudomonas infections are particularly liable to become resistant over the course of antibiotic treatment, and in this case treatment options were limited by allergic reactions to Read More …
I love genetics. Among the many disciplines of biology, it is perhaps the most elegant – that is, it explains much with just a few simple principles. The genetics class I took at UCSC so entranced me that I gave up all ambition to study psychology or be a writer, and became a molecular biologist Read More …
Our healthcare system is oriented toward cures, not prevention. Outlays for public health measures have never been more than 2-3% of total healthcare spending, and this small amount is falling – even though we know that every dollar spent returns several dollars in benefits. We could blame greedy doctors or pharmas or hospitals, or more Read More …
The FDA today cleared a new drug for treating influenza, the first in 20 years. Xofluza (baloxovir) appears to have about the same efficacy as oseltamivir in reducing symptoms of patients with uncomplicated influenza infections. Maybe a little better: From Baloxavir Marboxil for Uncomplicated Influenza in Adults and Adolescents Baloxavir attacks a different target (RNA replication) Read More …