What Adam is Reading - Week of 6-20-22

Week of June 20, 2022

 

We are in the middle of a pandemic-postponed family vacation to France, staying in a house and taking day trips.  I do not speak French.  Despite honing my skills at hand gestures, Google Translate, and French-to-English cognates, there have been moments when these tools fail.  For instance, at a small-town market, we encountered a chatty, enthusiastic French-speaking woman passing out (what appeared to be) homemade herbal lozenges and encouraging us (I believe) to pet her live goat.  I was unsure how these things were related, and she was not bothered by our apparent lack of comprehension.  Did I eat goat food?  Were the lozenges a side hustle to support the goats?  Maybe, I was an unwitting participant in a religious ceremony?   The intrigue and debate are the magic of foreign travel, oui?

 

BTW - I am not a fan of DIY herbal cough drops.

https://thenerdyfarmwife.com/diy-herbal-cough-drops/

 

FYI - I will be in transit next week, so no email till July 5.

 

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Case rates have plateaued with rising hospitalizations (still) and death rates.  However, the reported data is highly variable in quality (under-reporting of cases), depending on the state.  Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 are increasingly common in Europe.  Expect these variants to be frequent in the U.S. in the coming weeks.

(see https://twitter.com/Dr_D_Robertson/status/1537757065292259329 and https://twitter.com/BogochIsaac/status/1538477247669084160)

 

N.Y. Times Tracker

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

 

Country Comparison from FT.com

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=gbr&areas=hkg&areas=chn&areas=jpn&areas=aus&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usla&areasRegional=usnv&areasRegional=usar&areasRegional=usks&areasRegional=usmo&cumulative=0&logScale=1&per100K=0&startDate=2021-06-01&values=cases  

 

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The CDC and FDA authorized the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for children under five.   There are some differences in administering the two vaccines in this age group.   The New York Times offers a succinct compare and contrast

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/us/covid-vaccine-timeline-children-under-5.html

Florida's state government has made it more burdensome for physicians to obtain the new pediatric doses

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article262589972.html

 

If you want a solid, science-based round-up of COVID information, check out theThis Week in Virology podcast.  The host, Dr. Daniel Griffiths, is an infectious disease physician from New York and offers a comprehensive, evidence-based review of the latest data, including the data behind the FDA guidance on vaccinating children under five.

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-910/

 

Eric Topol captures the frustration of many healthcare workers regarding the continued infection and death rates combined with a lack of enthusiasm for either nasal or more evolved vaccines.   Two enlightening threads:

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1538200660843171842

and

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1538202668451041280

 

 

Random Medical Realities and Technology

 

Before I was in medical school (in the late 1990s), the ability to augment medical diagnosis with artificial intelligence was an increasingly real possibility.   Today, dermatologists and radiologists use AI routinely.  As such,  I offer contrasting stories about AI this week.  While not directly related, the " Google AI is Sentient" article got me thinking about what happens if medical diagnostic AI is passive-aggressive - like a pouty and petulant Skynet - "that doesn't look like a melanoma to me.  Good luck, human." 

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326460

and

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10907853/Google-engineer-claims-new-AI-robot-FEELINGS-Blake-Lemoine-says-LaMDA-device-sentient.html

 

Infographics!

Allergies and allergy medications

https://i0.wp.com/www.compoundchem.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Hayfever-Antihistamines-2016.png

 

 

Things I learned this week, édition française

 

Wet rooms are (apparently) common in European homes.  I found an article discussing the advantages.  Having used (and cleaned) a wet room for a week now, I suggest the word "trade-off" is more apt, and I suspect a floor squeegee manufacturer conspiracy is driving this trend.

https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/wet-rooms-have-advantages-over-traditional-bathrooms-252456

and

https://bestreviews.com/home/cleaning/best-floor-squeegees

 

I accidentally discovered Petrarch, the 14th-century Italian scholar (by wandering into a small museum on the site of his home).   He coined the phrase "dark ages."  He was surprisingly modern (by 21st century standards) in his thinking and influential for other medieval writers.  Of course, it also sounds like he was a bit pretentious.  (He was very judgy about the six centuries of human history that preceded him).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

and

the museum-house (requiring chrome's translate features)

https://www.vaucluse.fr/culture-et-patrimoine/les-musees-departementaux/le-musee-bibliotheque-francois-petrarque-a-fontaine-de-vaucluse-866.html

 

Clean hands and sharp minds, team

 

Adam

 

P.S. (again – the next update will be the week of July 5)