BTW, article from July 2017, giving an update on Nathan Myhrvold's laser mosquito zapper, that he touted back in 2010:
https://nymag.com/intelligence...
Here's to hoping that some Chinese bootleg manufacturer will start cranking them out for sale on Alibaba.
Her immune system is weakened yet she has no symptoms!
I few years back encountered a kidney transplant on anti-rejection medications, who caught the flu. Mild persistent fever, but otherwise not really any symptoms, patient said he'd been walking around with a fever for weeks, but otherwise felt pretty normal. Anyway, the guy's influenza antigen testing was also positive for quite a few weeks after the start of his flu -- we didn't prove actual shedding of viable virus (using viral culture techniques), but I wouldn't be surprised if he'd been doing so the entire time.
Most of the flu symptoms you feel are not due to direct cytopathic effect, they're due to cytokine release by your immune system. Suppress the immune system, and you'll actually feel better, even if your actual ability to fight the virus is worsened. On the other hand, if you enhance cytokine levels (for example, the now-obsolete Interferon treatment for Hepatitis C), you will improve immune response but feel very poorly the entire time.
Funny thing is, that even in America, SCOTUS ruled that the constitution is NOT a suicide pact, and yet, idiots continue to push for spreading the disease.
Most people are blissfully unaware that the US has century-old control efforts for diseases like TB still grinding along unrecognized today. They rely on long-standing recognition that the government has special powers when it comes to communicable diseases -- and the exercise of these powers was once quite common and accepted, back when outbreaks of such diseases were a regular occurrence.
It may be decades before the next great pandemic, but historically there have been a lot worse things than our current SARS-CoV-2. If the Supreme Court overturns these powers, our descendants may someday curse us for it.
Family doctor (and former laboratory bench-monkey for pharma) here.
Maybe previous poster is exaggerating when they say "the best", but Cuba punches well above its weight in the medical field. Their schools have an excellent reputation in Latin America and other underdeveloped areas, and they export physicians around the world (under what looks a lot like an indentured-labor system).
As another example, Cuba developed and manufactures their own Hepatitis B vaccine. This might not seem like a big deal if you don't work in the field, but it is an example of a product that requires somewhat advanced genetic engineering capabilities to pull off (what landed Cuba a spot on Bush Jr.'s bio-terrorism watch list).
Huh? I want a Quantex! Anyone remember Quantex? Come on, I bought two computers from them! Never heard, huh?
Yeah, I remember their "Do you speak Quantex?" advertisements.
The main one you left off that I was considering was a longer period of low-symptom contagiousness.
Another place we got extremely lucky, is the relatively lower mortality among infants and children.
Increased morbidity and mortality among the very young is actually quite a common trait for respiratory virus epidemics. The number of life-years lost to COVID could easily have been much higher, had it not been for this atypical characteristic.
In this case, it makes a lot of sense. COVID-19 has a lot of aspects of a vascular disease
FYI, Dr. Anthony Fauci also happens to be one of the world's leading experts on vasculitis. The rheumatology research he did back in the 70's was considered a breakthrough that dramatically improved the survival rates of patients with vasculitic diseases such as polyarteritis nodosa, granulomatosis with polyangiitis (Wegener's disease), and lymphomatoid granulomatosis.
As far as portents go, comet showed up a few months late. Could have bothered to show up on time, like the locusts.
These antibodies won't survive long and the donors are limited. Do they just want to make bank with some risky prophylactic for a handful of rich geriatrics while pretending to do something for the common good?
This is the big issue, as long as the material is harvested from humans, the volume doesn't scale up. Even if replaced by recombinant antibodies, cost and limited manufacturing capacity will prevent widespread usage. This is already a problem with the current therapeutic usage of convalescent serum, which is targeted at a much population of sick individuals (and which will have to compete with a new prophylactic injection for limited manufacturing capacity).
Taiwan just got screwed.
Not only do they lose the indirect revenue from the jobs and supporting activities associated with this fab, they just lost a major pillar of their "silicon shield", the political and military protection they get by being a irreplaceable part of the global electronics supply chain.
I wonder what kind of arm twisting went on behind the scenes, to get TSMC to agree to this.
The performance flaws in Intel's current 10nm process is what is behind the big push for TSMC to locate a fab in the US, they've become a poker chip in the balance-of-power game between China and the US, with the future of Taiwan's "Silicon Shield" in the balance.
Then again, if TSMC can just delay the issue a few years, it's quite possible that Intel's upcoming 7nm process will turn out to be competitive, and maybe the problem won't be so urgent anymore.
Having has a life-threatening autoimmune lung inflammation years ago, heavy steroid use saved me. I think doctors have been hesitant to blast these very sick patients with steroids (e.g., solu-medrol) because steroids can suppress the immune system, but that is changing.
Corticosteroids were actually one of the first things resorted to, during the early phase of the outbreak, and I believe Iran especially used them quite heavily. That approach fell out of favor rather quickly, although as far as I know the shift was mostly driven by expert opinion -- but that parallel expert opinions all shifted in the same direction, in multiple countries.
I think we may revisit steroid use at some point, but most likely only in combination with a sufficiently potent direct-acting antiviral.
Also, I don't believe it's anti-inflammatory properties that make the difference, but interference of the virus replication. This was shown in vitro but hasn't really transferred out of the lab to human studies well.
In-vitro anti-viral activity of HCQ requires fairly high concentrations though, high enough to be physiologically problematic in-vivo.
Most plausible theoretical explanations for why it could have activity center around either cell-based anti-viral actions (as opposed to direct-acting antiviral activity), or immuno-modulation that dampens down excessive immune activity. Neither route has historically been all that promising compared to direct-acting antivirals, as far as drug development is concerned.
If I were any company working on anything Covid related, I would simply ignore whatever the FDA had to say about anything and start saving lives instead.
Maybe not that many lives. The proportion of COVID-19 patients that make it off vent (or worse, ECMO) is turning out to be rather dismal. That being said, the families and loved ones of those patients expect us to try.
It is more than that, the Gilead Hepatitis C cure actually costs $84,000 dollars.
It hasn't cost that much in some time. Gilead had a remarkable amount of lead-time over their competitors with sofosbuvir and its combinations, but at this point it has around 3 or so competitors in the market (applicability varies with HCV genotype).
The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- B. Franklin
