One Seattle morning, Carolina Reid sat in a room with nine other volunteers, each waiting to take part in a clinical trial for a new, experimental malaria vaccine.

Reid's turn came. She put her arm over a cardboard box filled with 200 mosquitoes and covered with a mesh that keeps them in but still lets them bite. "Literally a Chinese food takeout container" is how she remembers it. A scientist then covered her arm with a black cloth, because mosquitoes like to bite at night.

Then the feeding frenzy began.

"My whole forearm swelled and blistered," says Reid. "My family was laughing, asking like, 'why are you subjecting yourself to this?'" And she didn't just do it once. She did it five times.

"We use the mosquitoes like they're 1,000 small flying syringes," explains University of Washington, Seattle physician and scientist Dr. Sean Murphy, lead author on a paper in Science Translational Medicine released on August 24 detailing the vaccine trials.

The insects deliver live malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites that have been genetically modified to not get people sick. The body still makes antibodies against the weakened parasite so it's prepared to fight the real thing. //

He and his colleagues went this route because it is costly and time consuming to develop a formulation of a parasite that can be delivered with a needle. The parasites mature inside mosquitoes so at this proof of concept stage – as early stage trials are called — it makes sense to use them for delivery.

"They went old school with this one," says Dr. Kirsten Lyke, a physician and vaccine researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. "All things old become new again.

Many low-resource areas of the world are short on medical technology, including incubators. So why not turn parents into pseudo-incubators? When a baby is born prematurely, a good way to help the baby survive and thrive is simply to hold it close to a parent's naked chest. No technology needed!

That's the essence of kangaroo care.

It's a method of holding the baby, clad only in a diaper, right up against a parent's bare chest for skin-to-skin contact. In 1978, physician researchers Edgar Rey Sanabria and Héctor Martínez-Gómez introduced the technique at the maternity ward of the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Bogota, Colombia. //

"It was what we had to do and it saved my child's life" //

"It creates a link to my child and brings me closer with my wife" //

"I started taking part ... to give the love of a father to my children"

To be sure, well-being evaluations conducted to date do suggest that up to a third of LIS patients report being severely unhappy. For them, loss of mobility and speech make life truly miserable—and family members and caregivers, as well as the broader public, tend to identify with this perspective. And yet, the majority of LIS patients, the data suggest, are much more like Lopes: They report being relatively happy and that they want very much to live. Indeed, in surveys of well-being, most people with LIS score as high as those without it, suggesting that many people underestimate locked-in patients’ quality of life while overestimating their rates of depression. And this mismatch has implications for clinical care, say brain scientists who study wellbeing in LIS patients. //

It's important to not project our thoughts and feelings” onto others, said Steven Laureys, a neurologist and research director of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. While non-disabled individuals might say, "'this is not a life worth living,'" he added, the evidence doesn’t necessarily bear this out.

This striking change is familiar yet also baffling. Only the skin on our fingers and toes wrinkle when immersed in water, while other body parts such as our forearms, torso, legs and face remain no more crinkled than before they were submerged.

This water-induced wrinkling of skin on our fingertips and toes has occupied the thoughts and work of scientists for decades. Most have puzzled over what causes this puckering in the first place, but more recently the question of why, and what purpose it may serve, has attracted the attention of researchers. Perhaps more intriguing still, however, is what our shriveled fingers can reveal about our own health.

It takes around 3.5 minutes in warm water – 40C (104F) is considered the optimal temperature – for your fingertips to begin wrinkling, while in cooler temperatures of about 20C (68F) it can take up to 10 minutes. Most studies have found it takes around 30 minutes of soaking time to reach maximum wrinklage, however.

Fingertip wrinkling was commonly thought to be a passive response where the upper layers of the skin swelled as water flooded into the cells via a process known as osmosis – where water molecules move across a membrane to equalise the concentration of the solutions on either side. But as long ago as 1935, scientists have suspected there is more to the process than this.

Doctors studying patients with injuries that had severed the median nerve – one of the main nerves that run down the arm to the hand – found that their fingers did not wrinkle. Among its many roles, the median nerve helps to control so-called sympathetic activities such as sweating and the constriction of blood vessels. Their discovery suggested that the water-induced wrinkling of fingertips was in fact controlled by the nervous system.

Later studies by doctors in the 1970s provided further evidence of this, and they proposed using the immersion of the hands in water as a simple bedside test to assess nerve damage that might affect the regulation of unconscious processes such as blood flow.

Then in 2003, neurologists Einar Wilder-Smith and Adeline Chow, who were working at the National University Hospital in Singapore at the time, took measurements of blood circulation in the hands of volunteers as they soaked them in water. They found that as the skin on the volunteers' fingertips began to wrinkle, there was a significant drop in blood flow in the fingers. //

With the help of 500 volunteers who visited the Science Museum in London during 2020, Davis measured how much force they needed to use to grip a plastic object. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those with dry, unwrinkled hands needed to use less force than people whose hands were wet – so their grip on the object was better. But when they submerged their hands in a water bath for a few minutes to turn their hands wrinkly, the grip force fell between the two even though their hands were still wet.

"The results were amazingly clear," says Davis. "The wrinkling increased the amount of friction between the fingers and the object. What is particularly interesting is that our fingers are sensitive to this change in the surface friction and we use this information to apply less force to grip an object securely." //

Unsymmetrical wrinkling of the fingers – where one hand wrinkles less than the other despite the same immersion time – has even been suggested as an early sign of Parkinson's disease as it indicates the sympathetic nervous system is not functioning correctly on one side of the body.

So, while the question of why our fingers and toes began wrinkling in water in the first place remains open, our pruney digits are proving useful to doctors in other surprising ways.

With so much fear being spread about Monkeypox, I’m amazed that seemingly no one is stopping to ask whether it’s even all that deadly. Per the ABC News article that the above excerpt came from, there have been about 14,000 cases worldwide since the outbreak began. Of those, only five people have died, and all of those five lived in poorer parts of the African continent, meaning they likely lacked proper medical care.

Further, no one in the mainstream media wants to talk about how Monkeypox is spreading because that would mean having to denounce the gay orgy scene. No, I’m not trying to be snarky. The chief vector of Monkeypox spread is sex between two men (you can take it from there as far as details go), with some 95 percent of cases being attributed to it. //

So how did the WHO arrive at its decision? Apparently, Tedros overrode the panel vote on the matter, choosing to declare the emergency of his own volition.

Officials in Florida are again battling a highly invasive, extraordinarily destructive giant snail species that also happens to be capable of spreading parasitic worms that invade human brains.

The giant African land snail (GALS)—aka Lissachatina fulica—can grow up to 20 centimeters (8 inches) long and is considered "one of the most invasive pests on the planet," according to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. It ravenously feasts on over 500 plant species—including many valuable fruits, vegetables, and ornamentals—while prolifically spawning, pushing out several thousand eggs in its multiyear life span. //

While the snails are a grave threat to agriculture and natural vegetation in the state, the invasive mollusks also pose a health risk. They're known to transmit rat lungworm parasites, which can invade the human central nervous system and cause a type of meningitis. For this reason, officials warn people not to handle the mammoth snails without gloves.

Brain invasion
You may recall that rat lungworm made headlines a few years ago when Hawaii's health department tallied more than a dozen cases in 2018 and 2019. In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also published data on several unconnected cases from eight continental states between 2011 and 2017, suggesting a widespread presence.

The rat lungworm—aka Angiostrongylus cantonensis—gets its name by primarily infecting the lungs of rats and other rodents. In the lungs, adult worms mate and females lay eggs, which develop into larvae. The rats then cough up those young parasites and end up swallowing them, then pooping them out. //

From those laden logs, the larvae infect snails and slugs (intermediate hosts), via burrowing into their soft bodies or in the event that the mollusks feast on infected feces. In the last steps of this gut-turning life cycle, rats nosh on the infected snails and slugs, delivering late-stage larvae that migrate from the rodent's stomachs to their brains, where the worms develop into young adults. Those mature worms then migrate back to the rats' lungs for breezy breeding time.

Humans are accidental hosts in this cycle. People pick up an infection by eating undercooked snails or slugs; eating fruits and vegetables contaminated by infected snails or slugs; or eating undercooked animals that may have eaten snails and slugs, such as frogs or crabs. Just like in rats, when the worms are ingested by humans, they make their way to the central nervous system.

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his seminal classic, The Great Gatsby. “They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

Thus, to many of us, it can be perplexing that some people might contemplate going under the knife so that they might endure the drive from Manhattan to their Hamptons home without being inconvenienced by the need for bathroom stops. //

To combat “Hamptons bladder,” New Yorkers who summer in the exclusive Long Island enclave are seeking a pair of specialized medical procedures: prostate artery embolization, which reduces the size of the prostate in men, and “bladder Botox,” which decreases urinary frequency for women.

“A lot of people have problems with this issue. They come out to the Hamptons and have to stop four or five times on the way, but can’t find a restroom,” said Dr. David Shusterman, a New York City urologist who’s been advertising the procedures with the tagline “Race to the Hamptons, not to the bathroom.” //

Clearly, the old Gatorade bottle isn’t going to be an option for such fine folk. “They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves,” wrote Fitzgerald. “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us” — for example, when they really, really have to go and there’s nowhere convenient or acceptable — “they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.” //

Hyperion
19 hours ago edited
Don't drink alcohol all day, especially close to bed.

Also, about 80% of Americans don't get enough potassium and eat too much salt throwing off the balance. It should be 4 to 1 potassium to sodium, and most people have it the reverse in the USA. Which causes your bladder to not empy well enough in the day and then when your put your feet up after going to bed...

So here's the bargain version of that treatment:

Stop drinking alcohol so much, instead get a job so you're too busy to drink all day.

Stop eating so much salt.

Eat more brocolli and salads and other green stuff.

Also, let me tell you, I know quite a few wealthy people and almost every one of them with few exceptions will opt for surgery for things you can fix with diet and exercise. It seems insane to me.

Medieval villages in northern Kyrgyzstan may have been very close to ground zero.

In 1338 and 1339, people were dying in droves in the villages around Lake Issyk-Kul in what’s now northern Kyrgyzstan. Many of the tombstones from those years blame the deaths on a generic “pestilence.” According to a recent study of ancient bacterial DNA from the victims’ teeth, the pestilence that swept through the Kyrgyz villages was Yersinia pestis—the same pathogen that would cause the devastating Black Death in Europe just a few years later. //

In just five years, bubonic plague killed at least 75 million people in the Middle East, northern Africa, and Europe. Known as the Black Death, the cataclysm of 1346-1352 is still the most deadly pandemic in human history. But the Black Death was only the first devastating wave of what historians call the second plague pandemic: a centuries-long period in which waves of Y. pestis periodically burned through communities or whole regions. When English diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about the Great Plague of London in 1666, he was describing a later wave of the same pandemic that began in the mid-1300s with the Black Death. Centuries of life with the reality of the plague actually shaped the genetic diversity of modern European populations.

It may seem reassuring, but it still means a whole lot of people with long-term symptoms. //

"Far more people were infected first with omicron than with delta," Kevin McConway, an emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, said in a statement. "So even if the percentage of infected people who got long COVID during the two waves is on the scale that these researchers report—and it may well be—the actual numbers of people reporting long COVID after first being infected during omicron is still far larger than during delta."

Chloe had a similar experience. “Because my body didn’t match beauty ideals, I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. I thought I wasn’t pretty enough to be a girl, so I’d be better off as a boy. Deep inside, I wanted to be pretty all along, but that’s something I kept suppressed.”

She agrees with Dr. Anderson that more psychological evaluation is needed to determine whether underlying mental health issues might be influencing the desire to transition.

“More attention needs to be paid to psychotherapy,” Chloe said. “We’re immediately jumping into irreversible medical treatments when we could be focusing on empowering these children to not hate their bodies.” //

Medical professionals typically follow the affirmative-care model, which is supported by the American Psychological Association, validating a patient’s expressed gender identity regardless of their age. As a result, detransitioners frequently report that getting prescriptions is a breeze. A total of 55% said their medical evaluations felt inadequate, according to Dr. Littman’s survey.

In Helena’s case, all it took to get a testosterone prescription was one trip to Planned Parenthood when she was 18. She said she was given four times the typical starting dose by a nurse practitioner in less than an hour, without ever seeing a doctor.

Chloe said she was fast-tracked through her entire transition — from blockers to a mastectomy — in just two years, with parental consent. The only pushback she said she encountered came from the first endocrinologist she saw, who agreed to prescribe her puberty blockers but not testosterone when she was 13. But she said she went to another doctor who gave her the prescription with no trouble. //

“Because all the therapists and specialists followed the affirmative care model, there wasn’t a lot of gate-keeping throughout the whole transition process,” she recalled. “The professionals all seemed to push medical transition, so I thought it was the only path for me to be happy.”

What scientists know about "infantile amnesia." //

Despite the fact that people can’t remember much before the age of 2 or 3, research suggests that infants can form memories—just not the kinds of memories you tell about yourself. Within the first few days of life, infants can recall their own mother’s face and distinguish it from the face of a stranger. A few months later, infants can demonstrate that they remember lots of familiar faces by smiling most at the ones they see most often.

In fact, there are lots of different kinds of memories besides those that are autobiographical. There are semantic memories, or memories of facts, like the names for different varieties of apples, or the capital of your home state. There are also procedural memories, or memories for how to perform an action, like opening your front door or driving a car.

Research from psychologist Carolyn Rovee-Collier’s lab in the 1980s and 1990s famously showed that infants can form some of these other kinds of memories from an early age. Of course, infants can’t exactly tell you what they remember. So the key to Rovee-Collier’s research was devising a task that was sensitive to babies’ rapidly changing bodies and abilities in order to assess their memories over a long period.

When faced with these conditions, our bodies call upon a well-known mechanism to keep us from overheating: sweating. As perspiration evaporates from the skin, it cools the body’s temperature. But if the air is not only hot but also already filled with moisture, less sweat can evaporate, and this safety feature fails. In India, high temperatures and humidity are increasingly combining to pose a deadly threat—one the country isn’t prepared for.
This danger to human life is measured using “wet-bulb temperature”—the lowest temperature that air can be cooled to via evaporation. It’s determined by wrapping the bulb of a thermometer in a wet cloth and seeing what temperature is recorded. Essentially the bulb is you—or me, or Lakshmanan—the wet cloth is our sweating skin, and the temperature recorded is the coolest we can hope to get by sweating.

When heat and humidity combine to push wet-bulb temperatures past 32° Celsius, physical exertion becomes dangerous. Consistent exposure to high wet-bulb temperatures—35° Celsius and above—can be fatal. At this point the sweating mechanism shuts down, leading to death in six hours. //

At night the body should recover from the daytime assault of heat, but because nights are getting hotter, that recovery is hampered, says Dutta. Whenever people talk about the effects of heat, they usually refer to its direct effects—such as heat exhaustion and stroke, which can be fatal or debilitating—but these are only the tip of the iceberg, he says. “If heat stays high in the night, it affects the body’s homeostasis, its ability to regulate and maintain its internal body temperature.” Upset this and your cellular and metabolic activities become disrupted, which can be a driver of disease, and can even be fatal itself.

How long after getting COVID can you be reinfected?
This is another complicated question — especially for sufferers of long COVID, who appear to harbor low, even undetectable levels of the virus for weeks and months. For mild to moderate cases, people who test positive for COVID can expect their infection to clear within five to 10 days after their symptoms arose, or since their confirmed test result.

Nascent research suggests that the average immune system can fend off COVID reinfection for three to five months after the previous bout. That’s why, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who had a confirmed infection within the previous 90 days are not expected to quarantine after coming in contact with another infected individual.

But all bets are off about six months later, when antibodies are known to start waning — regardless of vaccination

recently released a study, which found that Splenda is, well, not so splendid for the gut microbiota. The study found that in mice, the artificial sweetener Splenda negatively impacts the intestinal microbiota. And promotes Crohn’s-type disease in genetically susceptible hosts. The findings of this study suggest that consuming Splenda may be a serious risk factor for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Over a six-week period, Splenda was found to worsen gut inflammation in mice with Crohn’s-like disease. But had no substantive effect on those without the condition. Crohn’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disease of the digestive tract. Which often causes abdominal pain, severe diarrhea, bloody stools, weight loss, and fatigue. About 10-15% of humans who suffer from Crohn’s disease report that sweeteners make their symptoms worse.

My colleagues and I found that the numbers of Proteobacteria, a large phylum group of microbes, increased in the intestines of mice drinking water with Splenda. The artificial sweetener was found to stimulate the intestinal overgrowth of E. Coli (a member of the Proteobacteria group) and increased bacterial penetration into the gut wall. This was only found in mice with Crohn's disease.

“When you have a disease like this, everyone says they have the cure — your mom clips something out of Reader’s Digest to send to you,” he said. Still, when his physician, Dr. Qingping Yao at Stony Brook University, asked if he wanted to join the beta trial of an intriguing new probiotic pill, he figured it couldn’t hurt. “‘Everything is worth a try,'” he added, of his thought process at the time.

Within weeks of starting it, he said he could increase the time he spent working out by 10%. Now, a year into his regimen, Gallagher’s workouts are 40% longer and significantly more intense. He is also down 7 pounds, even though his weight has rarely fluctuated in the past. “I’m a believer,” he said.

What he’s come to believe in, specifically, isn’t just any old gut health vitamin. Gallagher was part of a trial for a pill, which is being marketed under the name Nella, that contains bacteria harvested from the poop of high-performing athletes. //

Over the last decade or so, it’s become increasingly accepted that the microbiome — the bacteria in your gut — directly impacts our overall health, both mental and physical. Per the American Psychological Association, 95% of the body’s serotonin is produced by gut bacteria, and 70% of our immune system is found in the intestines, too. The idea behind Fitbiomics is to hijack an average Joe’s GI system and bio-hack it with bacteria until it resembles that of a pro-athlete. //

In the meantime, Gallagher and others are enjoying results they attribute to Nella. Nick Vendikos, a 52-year-old fundraiser from Brooklyn, had long struggled with chronic pain as the result of an accident, along with IBS and difficulty maintaining an ideal weight.

He decided to try Nella and has been surprised by how much better he feels.

“I’m a skeptic, but my stomach started feeling better. All my issues have gone away, and I lost about 20 pounds,” he said. “I don’t know if it is or it isn’t Nella, but something’s working.”

Doctors noted that the problems began with a raised, itchy rash and mild diarrhea. The red, wavy skin lesions originated in his perianal region, then began to migrate under his skin, reaching all over his trunk and limbs. Doctors outlined individual red squiggles on his skin with pen and noted that 24 hours later, the squiggles had moved.

The shifting rash—and the identification of Strongyloides stercoralis larvae in a stool exam—clenched the diagnosis. Doctors prescribed the man the anti-parasitic ivermectin, and the rash and diarrhea improved.

Even as Democrats attempt to revive their stalled reconciliation legislation to impose prescription drug price controls, another group within the health care sector has come forward with a better solution. Their proposal, which would use competition to bring down prices, has the potential to benefit consumers — with fewer side effects than blunt government force.

A consortium of hospitals recently announced plans to build a factory that can manufacture insulin within two years. Once their plant gets up and running, the non-profit consortium said it would sell the insulin at a cost of $30 a vial — a fraction of what pharmaceutical companies currently charge. //

The Biden administration has its “solution” to the problem of high drug prices: Government-imposed price controls. Its proposal, incorporated as part of the $5 trillion spending spree being considered by Congress, would allow the federal government to “negotiate” (i.e., dictate) the prices of certain drugs. Companies who refuse to “negotiate” would be penalized with a 95 percent tax — a penalty so onerous that some companies could stop selling their drugs in the United States entirely. //

Price controls also would create other harmful effects on innovation. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that one version of Democrats’ price control legislation would result in approximately 60 fewer drugs during the first three decades following its enactment. Other estimates have suggested as many as 100 fewer drugs within the course of the first decade alone. In either case, these price controls would mean diseases not treated, and potentially lives not saved.

Despite high rates of incorrect results, medical professionals push prenatal testing that can lead to healthy babies being aborted. //

In a groundbreaking report published last month, The New York Times revealed that at detecting various rare and serious genetic issues, prenatal genetic screening tests provide incorrect results as often as 83 percent to 91 percent of the time.

Despite this alarming record, prenatal genetic testing is increasingly billed as a routine part of pregnancy care. The absurdly high number of false-positive screening results for various rare genetic disorders not only causes deep emotional harm to new parents, but even more tragically, in some cases motivates doctors and genetic counselors to incorrectly use these erroneous results to encourage women to abort their perfectly healthy children.

It is essential for women to understand that these genetic screening tests are exactly just that: a screen. They do not have the capability to definitively diagnose any genetic condition with 100 percent confidence or accuracy. As noted by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an organization that researches and publishes data regarding abortion-related issues, “too little emphasis is placed on the fact that these tests are merely screening and not diagnostic tests. While the manufacturers recommend that a positive indication on the test should be confirmed with an invasive test such as an amniocentesis, some parents are choosing to abort their unborn children based entirely on these screenings.” //

Although it is difficult to find reliable published data regarding exactly how many prenatal tests are done, one company, Natera, reports that it performed 400,000 tests for a single genetic condition in 2020, according to The New York Times. One study found that four out of every one thousand tested pregnancies ends in abortion because of a “detected fetal anomaly.” Even if the tests were correct, this would be a tragedy.

Selectively cherry-picking ‘The Science’ to suit a political narrative is not ‘Following the Science.’ It is malpractice and fraud.

According to a recent headline from The New York Times, “the CDC isn’t publishing large portions of the COVID data it collects.” That headline downplays what the article in fact reveals:

Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said. //

The article says when the Centers for Disease Control “published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65…it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots.”

“The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public,” according to the Times, “because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.” //

Every time these federal employees uttered the phrase “follow the science,” they actually meant, “Do what we say and don’t question it, or we’ll punish you.” True scientists don’t release partial data or hide their data. Yet after severe damage is done to government credibility and the country’s social fabric, now even The New York Times can’t deny that the CDC hid the truth about booster efficacy from Americans because it would contradict this administration’s political goals.