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A team of German researchers swabbed 400 bathroom door handles from 136 airports in 59 countries. More than 5 percent produced strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a result that underscores the importance of proactive global epidemiological surveillance. There is no such thing as local outbreak anymore. 

AI (in this case, ChatGPT) is an amazing tool for science and medical writers. But it's not perfect. It sometimes makes pretty awful mistakes. It not only apologizes profoundly but also claims that it will make that correction. And the damn thing appears to have a sense of humor and a bit of an attitude.

According to an estimate released Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over one million people in America are living with HIV. This towering figure is the highest since the 1980s* and may at first seem like discouraging information. But in fact the CDC report represents both good and bad news about the fight against HIV/AIDS.

As the news cycle brings us more COVID-19 variants and reports of the efficacy of the new vaccines by J&J, Novavax, and AstraZeneca, you have to wonder which vaccine is best and why.

Our first two vaccines have greater than 90% efficacy; Novavax reports 89.3%, Johnson and Johnson’s reports 66%. Should we care? What do those numbers mean to you and me when we worry about the protection the vaccine affords us?

Canada has approved Medicago's plant-based COVID-19 vaccine. The new shot itself is an impressive development, but the technology it's built on suggests that we may be growing more drugs in greenhouses in the coming years.

As the Delta variant becomes THE primary source of COVID-19 infections there’s a growing body of knowledge to explain why this is happening. Let's consider two new studies and a fact we may have forgotten.

We've just gotten a whole bunch of good news – news we really needed – about finally getting the upper hand against COVID-19. Two vaccines, both more than 90% effective at protecting clinical trial participants against the disease, were announced just seven days apart. These numbers are well beyond expectations, but some critically important questions linger. Here they are. The answers will determine how successful the vaccines will be.

All over the U.S. the lines for COVID testing often stretch around the block. You can wait an hour or two just to be tested, before learning that the results are not available when you need them. President Biden is going to send us all two home tests. But what are the science-guided recommendations? The New England Journal of Medicine provides a very reasonable answer, beginning with a simple picture.

Are viruses alive? Dead? Dead-alive? ACSH's Dr. Josh Bloom posed this question last night on the new ACSH-sponsored Facebook page, Infectious Diseases and Vaccines, with the promise of a Snickers bar for the best answer. He got a ton of responses, including one woman who wrote, They don t contain all of the structures and biosynthetic machinery necessary for reproduction. Their genome is mostly DNA or RNA, but not both like most organisms.

All of a sudden we have two (provisionally) FDA-approved COVID antivirals, which will be in pharmacies soon. They are quite different. Which is best for you?

Last week, the FDA and CDC presented their recommendations for the newest round of COVID-19 vaccines. As with everything COVID, there are proponents and detractors, or, putting it another way, both knowledgeable experts and disinformation-spreading attention-seekers. The reality is that a group of experts made a judgment based on actual data.  We discuss the evidence here so you can make your own informed decision.

The battle of medicine vs. bacteria has been going quite poorly for more than two decades, primarily due to antibiotic resistance. The last thing we need is giving these bugs another edge. But in China, a newly-discovered gene can spread to many types of bacteria, and render useless some antibiotics that are our last line of defense against unresponsive infections.

Winter is on the way and the hideous norovirus (stomach virus) always comes along for the ride. Are we still helpless against this little monster? What's going on out there? You may be surprised.

It's only one trial, and we don't even know if the report is correct. But a leaked draft report indicated that remdesivir was ineffective in its first controlled trial. Let's assume that this is true and we see the same from other trials. If so, this will not simply be another experimental drug failing. It will be deeply disturbing. Here's why.

Yet another potential Covid treatment has fallen by the wayside. This time it's fluvoxamine, an antidepressant, which showed some promise in minimizing serious disease in small trials. But in a large, randomized trial, it flopped completely. The lesson? You need an antiviral drug to treat a viral infection – not a repurposed drug. These have all failed.

We at ACSH have written frequently about an unmitigated disaster that has already begun the progressive failure of available antibiotics to tackle previously treatable bacterial infections.
Yesterday the CDC issued a report about this, and it was more of the same.

Leeches used to be used as a medical cure-all, but today are of course almost entirely discredited. It’s worth wondering how many other medical tests — from the prostate-specific antigen to routine mammography — will one day be relegated to the dust bin of history. The latest exam to undergo scrutiny are routine pelvic exams [...]
The post Routine pelvic exams may be harming women appeared first on Health & Science Dispatch.

Yesterday we reported on the alarming rise in the incidence of C. difficile (Clostridium difficile) bacterial infections and deaths due to increases in both its prevalence and its antibiotic resistance. The development and discovery of new antibiotic drugs would help counter the problem, but pharmaceutical companies are largely unmotivated to enter this research arena, mainly because investing in such drugs is not profitable.

Harm reduction has been an effective tool in relieving the plight of drug addicts who are at an increased risk of contracting severe infections especially hepatitis and HIV, but also drug-resistant bacteria such as MRSA as a result of using contaminated shared needles.

Congestive heart failure refers to the inability of the heart to perform its basic function, which is pumping blood throughout the body. It comes in various forms, causing swelling of the legs and shortness of breath. It is a very debilitating condition that few outside medicine are aware of. A new study offers a unique treatment, but more importantly for our discussion, it sheds light on how “science” advances and looks at an infrequently used term, hormesis.

The federal government has proposed a nationwide vaccine mandate. It's a terrible idea.

California just paused its plans for a statewide COVID-19 vaccine mandate. There wasn't an ounce of scientific evidence to support this proposal and enough opposition to halt the legislation, at least until after the upcoming elections. There's an important lesson here for policymakers.

Let’s not forget that the goal in tamping down the COVID-19 pandemic is to vaccinate the world. But it’s an ambitious project impaired by the concepts of “vaccine nationalism,” fostered by “vaccine diplomacy.” We should consider more than how those words make us feel.

Ever heard of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center in Houston? If not, you're better off. Its founder, Dr. Steven Hotze, has plenty to say about COVID, almost all of it completely wrong.