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Dennis OConnor

Africa is Rising And Blockchain is a Central Part of it | by Dr. Alex Cahana | Jul, 202... - 0 views

healthblockchanger.medium.com/entral-part-of-it-81e95d8bbebd

Cahana blockchain Africa

shared by Dennis OConnor on 30 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • For Africa’s digital revolution to yield peace and prosperity, it is not enough for investors to focus on the rapid and often reactive expectation for return on investment, but rather the need to pay attention to the effects their capital investment will have on people’s lives.
  • Dennis OConnor on 30 Aug 21
     
    And although waves of COVID are still occurring, Africa is moving towards a digital, science-centric, inter-dependent post-pandemic reality that requires robust investment in technology, and as I will explain later, specifically in decentralized, distributed, open- and crowd-sourced solutions.
Dennis OConnor

The Prime Cellular Targets for the Novel Coronavirus - NIH Director's Blog - 0 views

directorsblog.nih.gov/...gets-for-the-novel-coronavirus

research covid

shared by Dennis OConnor on 05 May 20 - No Cached
  • Posted on May 5th, 2020 by Dr. Francis Collins
  • it has been remarkable and gratifying to watch researchers from around the world pull together and share their time, expertise, and hard-earned data in the urgent quest to control this devastating virus.
  • a recent study that characterized the specific human cells that SARS-CoV-2 likely singles out for infection [1
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This work was driven by the mostly shuttered labs of Alex K. Shalek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge; and Jose Ordovas-Montanes at Boston Children’s Hospital. In the end, it brought together (if only remotely) dozens of their colleagues in the Human Cell Atlas Lung Biological Network and others across the U.S., Europe, and South Africa.
  • The discovery suggests that SARS-CoV-2 and potentially other coronaviruses that rely on ACE2 may take advantage of the immune system’s natural defenses.
  • t’s clear that these new findings, from data that weren’t originally generated with COVID-19 in mind, contained several potentially important new leads. This is another demonstration of the value of basic science.
  • Dennis OConnor on 05 May 20
     
    "Posted on May 5th, 2020 by Dr. Francis Collins"
Dennis OConnor

A mysterious company's coronavirus papers in top medical journals may be unraveling | S... - 0 views

www.sciencemag.org/...cal-journals-may-be-unraveling

covid research systematic-reviews

shared by Dennis OConnor on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • On its face, it was a major finding: Antimalarial drugs touted by the White House as possible COVID-19 treatments looked to be not just ineffective, but downright deadly. A study published on 22 May in The Lancet used hospital records procured by a little-known data analytics company called Surgisphere to conclude that coronavirus patients taking chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine were more likely to show an irregular heart rhythm—a known side effect thought to be rare—and were more likely to die in the hospital. Within days, some large randomized trials of the drugs—the type that might prove or disprove the retrospective study’s analysis—screeched to a halt. Solidarity, the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) megatrial of potential COVID-19 treatments, paused recruitment into its hydroxychloroquine arm, for example.
  • The study doesn’t properly control for the likelihood that patients getting the experimental drugs were sicker than the controls
  • Other researchers were befuddled by the data themselves. Though 66% of the patients were reportedly treated in North America, the reported doses tended to be higher than the guidelines set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, White notes. The authors claim to have included 4402 patients in Africa, 561 of whom died, but it seems unlikely that African hospitals would have detailed electronic health records for so many patients, White says.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • This was very, very annoying, that The Lancet were just going to let them write this absurd reply … without addressing any of the other concerns,”
  • 200 clinicians and researchers, that calls for the release of Surgisphere’s hospital-level data, an independent validation of the results
  • But the revision had other problems, Chaccour and his colleagues wrote in their blog post. For example, the mortality rate for patients who received mechanical ventilation but no ivermectin was just 21%, which is strikingly low; a recent case series from New York City area found that 88% of COVID-19 patients who needed ventilation died. Also, the data shown in a figure were wildly different from those reported in the text. (Science also attempted to reach Grainger, but received no reply to an email and call.)
  • Surgisphere’s sparse online presence—the website doesn’t list any of its partner hospitals by name or identify its scientific advisory board, for example—have prompted intense skepticism.
  • wondered in a blog post why Surgisphere’s enormous database doesn’t appear to have been used in peer-reviewed research studies until May.
  • how LinkedIn could list only five Surgisphere employees—all but Desai apparently lacking a scientific or medical background—if the company really provides software to hundreds of hospitals to coordinate the collection of sensitive data from electronic health records.
  • Desai’s spokesperson responded to inquiries about the company by saying it has 11 employees and has been developing its database since 2008.
  • The potential of hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 has become a political flashpoint, and the questions around the Lancet paper have provided new fodder to the drug’s supporters. French microbiologist Didier Raoult, whose own widely criticized studies suggested a benefit from the drug, derided the new study in a video posted today, calling the authors “incompetent.” On social media, some speculated that the paper was part of a conspiracy against hydroxychloroquine.
  • Chaccour says both NEJM and The Lancet should have scrutinized the provenance of Surgisphere’s data more closely before publishing the studies. “Here we are in the middle of a pandemic with hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the two most prestigious medical journals have failed us,” he says.
  • Dennis OConnor on 03 Jun 20
     
    Recommended by Mike Kurisu, DO.
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