As infuriating as the World Health Organization can be, the reality is that the U.S. cannot "go it alone" on issues like global disease surveillance. Staying in the WHO is aligned with America's long-term security, economic, and geopolitical interests.
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The foundation of medical research, which is considered the gold standard, is the Randomized Controlled Trial when individuals are matched with others, and then randomized to one treatment or another. While the beauty of an RCT lies in its process of deliberate randomness, very little attention has been paid to the integrity of its building blocks: categories. It's time to take a more in-depth look.
A new study paints a counter-intuitive picture of COVID-19’s viral load. Or does it?
Did you honestly believe that the CDC announcement six months ago – of a 4.1% decline in drug overdoses in 2018 – was a sign of progress in the so-called war on drugs? Of course, it was nothing of the sort. Just an exercise in tweaking numbers. ACSH advisor Dr. Jeff Singer tells us the real story.
Incompetence, waffling, moving the goalposts, disregarding unintended consequences, and being political have hurt Americans' confidence in their public health institutions.
Dr. Katherine Seley-Radtke is featured in a Sun article that describes her efforts to combat the coronavirus. Our advisor is an expert in chemistry, biochemistry, and antiviral drug development. The article, which examines a promising COVID drug she discovered, is a follow-up to a recent Op-Ed that the professor co-authored with ACSH's Dr. Josh Bloom.
"I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!"
That, of course, is President Trump's summary of the CDC guidelines for opening schools. It ignited a predictable political back and forth fueled more by politics than facts. Let's take a minute to see what they recommended. You decide how tough they are.
The effect of "Factory" farms on farmers and animals, catching up with John Ioannidis and the controversy over evidence-based care, the intimate connections of mind and body, and a look at gene drives - CRISPR on steroids?
Bari Weiss, a New York Times opinion writer, quit her job following relentless defamatory, bigoted, anti-Semitic, workplace bullying from her super-woke colleagues. And workplace bullying is a lot more common than one might think.
The risk to students of reopening schools is quite small. For instance, more young adults aged 15-24 will drown than die from coronavirus. The challenge for re-opening schools is the risk posed to teachers, staff, and students' families.
As we continue to try and “open up,” much is made of herd immunity. Herd immunity was the putative, underlying rationale for some countries to forgo quarantine and lockdowns. But what exactly do we mean when we talk about herd immunity?
As Spock and the other Vulcans say, Live long and prosper. But what actually can we do, according to our best current science, to achieve that healthy lifespan?
The company dedicated to discovering vaccines for herpes is back in the news. Rational Vaccines gained notoriety when its founder, the late Dr. Bill Halford, bypassed FDA protocol for vaccine development and set up a small trial on the island of St. Kitts, in the Caribbean, using live attenuated virus on volunteers who were suffering from herpes simplex. Now, three years after Dr. Halford's death, Rational is developing five vaccines for herpes and two for COVID. But his time, by the book.
Are you a corporate shill if you point out that environmental activists have a financial incentive to present only one side of a story? According to one scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity -- which has about 50 lawyers on its staff -- the answer is yes. Our irony-meters exploded.
The flight of birds involves both the flapping of wings and soaring on currents of air. But the act of moving their wings is equivalent -- energetically speaking -- to humans sprinting. So what’s a bird, especially a large bird, like the condor, supposed to do?
My inner engineer tells me that air sampling for biologics, especially COVID-19, may be an important way to help measure and contain the pandemic and opening up.
Right now pretty much everything sucks. It can get mighty depressing, reading about COVID-19 deaths or civil unrest. So let's have some fun! A few minutes of mindless idiocy at the expense of California. Why now? Because their officials decided that my patio umbrella stand is gonna give me cancer. There's even a label to prove it. And if you act now, you'll get some really bad "artwork!"
There are so many risks to consider
How did drinking a large glass of expensive celery juice every morning become the latest health fad? It beats us.
The FDA’s re-analysis showed essentially what we already knew. There's a huge antibiotic effect in the treatment of bacterial pneumonia. The effect is the greatest when looking at the early response to antibiotic therapy, but is still large even when looking at later cure.
A very disturbing paper published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases proposes that vaccines can have unexpected side effects. Some are good, such as protecting against unrelated diseases, while some are bad, such as increasing all-cause mortality. This is highly useful and potentially life-saving information that must not be hijacked by anti-vaxxers.
There are at least 24 different concepts of what constitutes a species. Unfortunately, politics plays a substantial role in the process.
Police-involved shootings, the cultural impact upon the "hard" sciences, urban planning gone awry, and stealthy enemies.
One of the great knocks on our healthcare system is that it emphasizes treatment over prevention. Frailty opens a window on alternate views of that distinction, and how we measure up.
If your sole goal in life is getting your hands on a can of Lysol spray, be prepared to be bitterly disappointed. The EPA gave its approval for Reckitt Benckiser (which sells the stuff) to make anti-COVID claims for two Lysol products. What's in there that can kill the virus? Time for "The Dreaded Chemistry Lesson From Hell"? I think so.
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