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Javier E

Pulling Teeth to Treat Mental Illness - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...381751

brain science medicine ignorance

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Cotton's experiments were unethical and awful, but they weren't that illogical if you consider the knowledge that was available at the time. This was before surgeons operated with gloves on, before doctors knew that people shouldn't stand in front of X-ray machines for 45 minutes, and before people knew about blood types or heroin addiction or that eugenics is not a thing.
  • "Modern medicine had to start somewhere."
  • it's also a reminder of how little we still know about the brain. Certainly, science has progressed to the point where patients aren't subjected to painful and permanent procedures without their consent, and we obviously now know the basic mechanisms behind mental illness. But we still don't know, say, the very best way to prevent schizophrenia or to treat addiction.
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  • To some extent, the brain remains a bit of a black box, as puzzling to modern-day psychiatrists as it was to turn-of-the-century charlatans. The difference is, most doctors today have the humility to admit what they don't know.
anonymous

Businesses May Benefit From Sharing Covid Testing Resources, Study Suggests - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sting-universities-sabeti.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Why It Pays to Think Outside the Box on Coronavirus Tests
  • Universities and other institutions looking to protect themselves from Covid-19 may benefit from sharing their testing resources with the wider community, a new study suggests.
  • Last year, when the National Football League decided to stage its season in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it went all-in on testing
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Between Aug. 1 and the Super Bowl in early February, the N.F.L. administered almost one million tests to players and staff.
  • Many other organizations have sought safety in mass testing.
  • When the coronavirus closed down the country last spring, many colleges and universities sought her advice on how to safely reopen.
  • Now, a new analysis suggests that schools, businesses and other organizations that want to keep themselves safe should think beyond strictly themselves.
  • By dedicating a substantial proportion of their tests to people in the surrounding community, institutions could reduce the number of Covid-19 cases among their members by as much as 25 percent, researchers report in a new paper, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
  • “It’s natural in an outbreak for people to become self-serving, self-focused,”
  • “If you’ve been in enough outbreaks you just understand that testing in a box doesn’t makes sense. These things are communicable, and they’re coming in from the community.”
  • “really profound implications, especially if others can replicate it,” said David O’Connor
  • “We want to start using more sophisticated modeling and probably economic theory to inform what an optimal testing program would look like.”
  • Dr. Sabeti is an epidemic veteran, part of teams that responded to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and a mumps outbreak in the Boston area a few years later.
  • The University of Illinois is testing its students, faculty and staff twice a week and has conducted more than 1.6 million tests since July.
  • At a time when testing resources were in short supply, many of these institutions were proposing intensive, expensive testing regimens focused entirely on their own members
  • ‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
  • ‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
  • Using real-world data from C.M.U., the researchers created a baseline scenario in which 1 percent of people at the school, and 6 percent of those in the surrounding county, were infected by the coronavirus, and the university was testing 12 percent of its members every day.
  • Under these conditions, the researchers found, if the university used all of its tests on its own members, it would have roughly 200 Covid-19 cases after 40 days
  • The researchers then tweaked the model’s parameters in various ways: What if the virus were more prevalent? What if students and staff did not report all their contacts? What if they were better about mask-wearing and social distancing? What if the university deployed more tests, or fewer?
  • Unsurprisingly, the more testing the university did, and the more information it had about its members’ close contacts, the fewer Covid-19 cases there were
  • But in virtually every scenario, sharing at least some tests with the broader community led to fewer cases than hoarding them.
  • Some universities are beginning to adopt this outlook.
  • “A virus does not respect geographic boundaries,” Dr. Pollock said. “It is ludicrous to think that you can get control of an acute infectious respiratory disease like Covid-19, in a city like Davis that hosts a very large university, without coordinated public health measures that connect both the university and the community.”
  • There are barriers to the more altruistic approach, including internal political pressure to use testing resources in house and concerns about legal liability.
  • the researchers hope that their model convinces at least some institutions to rethink their strategy, not only during this epidemic but also in future ones.
  • “An outbreak is an opportunity to buy a lot of community good will, or to burn a lot of community good will,” Dr. Sabeti said. “We could have spent an entire year building up that relationship between organizations and institutions and their communities. And we would have done all that hard work together, as opposed to everybody turning inward.”
  • anonymous on 26 Mar 21
     
    "'You're in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,'" she recalled. "'And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you'll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it's burning to the ground.'"
caelengrubb

Pandemic caused 'staggering' economic, human impact in developing counties, research sa... - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210205150150.htm

shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year led to a devastating loss of jobs and income across the global south, threatening hundreds of millions of people with hunger and lost savings and raising an array of risks for children,
  • , in the journal Science Advances, found "staggering" income losses after the pandemic emerged last year, with a median 70% of households across nine countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America reporting financial losses.
  • By April last year, roughly 50% or more of those surveyed in several countries were forced to eat smaller meals or skip meals altogether, a number that reached 87% for rural households in the West African country of Sierra Leone.
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  • In the early months of the pandemic, the economic downturn in low- and middle-income countries was almost certainly worse than any other recent global economic crisis that we know of, whether the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the Great Recession that started in 2008, or the more recent Ebola crisis,
  • The pandemic has produced some hopeful innovations, including a partnership between the government of Togo in West Africa and UC Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) on a system to provide relief payments via digital networks.
  • The new study -- the first of its kind globally -- reports that after two decades of growth in many low- and middle-income countries, the economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic threatens profound long-term impact: Reduced childhood nutrition could have health consequences later in life.
  • The study was launched in spring 2020, as China, Europe and the U.S. led global efforts to check spread of the virus through ambitious lockdowns of business, schools and transit. Three independent research teams, including CEGA, joined to conduct surveys in the countries where they already worked.
  • "COVID-19 and its economic shock present a stark threat to residents of low- and middle-income countries -- where most of the world's population resides -- which lack the social safety nets that exist in rich countries,
  • Reports early in the pandemic suggested that developing countries might be less vulnerable because their populations are so much younger than those in Europe and North America.
  • In Colombia, 87% of respondents nationwide reported lost income in the early phase of the pandemic. Such losses were reported by more than 80% of people nationwide in Rwanda and Ghana.
  • In the Philippines, 77% of respondents nationwide said they faced difficulty purchasing food because stores were closed, transport was shut down or food supplies were inadequate. Similar reports came from 68% of Colombians and 64% of respondents in Sierra Leone; rates were similar for some communities within other countries.
  • Food insecurity rose sharply.
  • : In Bangladesh, 69% of landless agricultural households reported that they were forced to eat less, along with 48% of households in rural Kenya
  • Between April and early July 2020, they connected with 30,000 households, including over 100,000 people, in nine countries with a combined population of 500 million: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and Sierra Leone in Africa; Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines in Asia; and Colombia in South America. The surveys were conducted by telephone.
  • The evidence we've collected shows dire economic consequences ... which, if left unchecked, could thrust millions of vulnerable households into poverty."
  • In North America and Europe, nations may be struggling with vaccination plans, but vaccines have barely arrived in most low-income countries, he said
  • If we can spread the wealth in terms of pandemic relief assistance and vaccine distribution, we're all going to get out of this hole faster."
huffem4

Trump's "Chinese Virus" and What's at Stake in the Coronavirus's Name | The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...hats-at-stake-in-a-viruss-name

COVID-19 knowledge racism

shared by huffem4 on 26 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • In another part of the study, the researchers determined that defining vaccination in terms of contamination—“the seasonal flu vaccine involves injecting people with the seasonal flu virus”—increased prejudice in subjects concerned about disease, whereas defining it in terms of protection—“the seasonal flu vaccine protects people from the seasonal flu virus”—had no such effect. Initiatives that minimize disease, the researchers concluded, might also end up minimizing discrimination.
  • It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump enlisted such language to serve his nativist agenda. Although COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has killed more than twenty thousand people and affected countries around the world, Trump’s fixation on its origins in Wuhan, China, has encouraged a rash of anti-Asian bigotry in the United States.
  • This month, Trump has taken to referring to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus,” presenting the label as a corrective to Beijing officials’ claims that the American military was the source of the outbreak.
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  • Much of the old nomenclature has turned out to be not only stigmatizing but inaccurate. The Ebola virus, for instance, gets its name from a river that sits about forty miles from Yambuku, the Congolese village where researchers first investigated the disease, in 1976.
  • Still, it’s hard not to see a similarity between the recent reports of harassment against Asian-Americans and the stigmatization that gay people suffered in the wake of the AIDS outbreak.
  • Evolutionary psychologists refer to a “behavioral immune system” that attunes humans to physical differences or unfamiliar behavior, even when it poses no risk.
  • Last week, an Asian-American journalist reported that a member of the President’s staff called COVID-19 the “kung flu” to her face.
  • This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected
  • no disease better illustrates the perils of disease naming than AIDS, which, in its early days, was sometimes called “gay cancer.”
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