Words about science and hiking
It’s not unusual to see headlines like this in health journalism: Antibiotic Resistance Is Now as Big a Threat as Climate Change To be fair, the article itself is not nearly so hysterical; in fact it doesn’t even mention climate change. Yet some editor thinks that this nonsense is an appropriate way to summarize the Read More …
One of the ways that science journalism continually fails the public is by ignoring the Valley of Death that lies between discovery and product development. The problem is especially acute in healthcare, where the maddening complexity and unpredictability of clinical responses dooms most “breakthroughs” to failure. The problem is less ignorance on the part of Read More …
Today’s sci journo fail is a bonus entry – it is also a history fail. The title, “COLONIALISTS ARE COMING FOR BLOOD—LITERALLY” pretty well sums up the argument: taking blood samples for therapeutic and diagnostic development purposes is exactly the same as stealing diamonds, gold, timber, arable land and people from poorer countries. Please. Blood Read More …
By now you’ve no doubt read that cancer death rates (age-adjusted) are down 27% since 1991. The better sort of news articles point out that this is a bit of cherry-picking, as cancer death rates peaked in 1991, and current progress has brought us back to the rates that prevailed in the 1940s. This graph Read More …
I tend to be skeptical of claims that AI is going to lead to big breakthroughs in medicine. Drug discovery is the usual arena for such claims, the notion being that algorithms will pick over drug datasets to open a pipeline of new therapeutics. I’m pretty confident that AI plays will not revolutionize drug discovery. Read More …
Maryn McKenna – one of the better science journalists out there – is the culprit this time. One might argue in her defense that she is simply relaying the views of a top expert, in this case Kevin Outterson of CARB-X who said “…every antibiotic we count on now will be destroyed…antibiotics will be crushed.” Read More …
I’ve certainly ragged on sci journos before for superficial and misleading articles (see here and here), so it’s only fair to give a shout out to one who consistently works to get it it right. Liz Szabo’s article in today’s NYT on the overpromising and underdelivering of precision medicine is well worth a read. Here is Read More …
Sepsis is the LaBrea Tar Pit of medicine. Many investigators go in; few come out, and those few are covered in ooze. As one review [1] notes: “More than 100 randomized clinical trials have tested the hypothesis that modulating the septic response to infection can improve survival. With one short-lived exception, none of these has resulted Read More …
Published on Forbes and Apple News The public has been ill-served by journalists reporting on the very real threat that antibiotic resistance poses. Most accounts describe antibiotic-resistant bacteria as “tough”, “hardy”, “strong” etc. The “superbug” trope itself implies that they have special powers that render them invincible. This is almost always untrue. Resistant bugs, especially multiply-resistant bugs, Read More …
Phage therapy has been wandering through the wilderness for many decades. It was intensively studied in the 1920’s but fell out of favor in the 1930’s due to inconsistent results and adverse effects. The introduction of sulfa drugs, and then penicillin, rendered it obsolete. But only for a while. Antibiotics were not the end of Read More …