Tag: infectious diseases
When Experts Fail – The Atlantic
Experts hate to be wrong. When I first started writing about the public’s hostility toward expertise and established knowledge more than a decade ago, I predicted that any number of crises—including a pandemic—might be the moment that snaps the public back to its senses. I was wrong. I didn’t foresee how some citizens and their leaders would respond to the cycle of advances and setbacks in the scientific process and to the inevitable limitations of human experts.
The coronavirus
Humans Can No Longer Ignore the Threat of Fungi
This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.
Back at the turn of the 21st century, valley fever was an obscure fungal disease in the United States, with fewer than 3,000 reported cases a year, mostly in California and Arizona. Two decades later, cases of valley fever have exploded, increasing roughly sevenfold by 2019.
And valley fever isn’t alone. Fungal diseases in general are appearing in places they have never been seen before, and previously harmless or mildly harmful
To Understand Anti-vaxxers, Consider Aristotle
Among the many difficulties imposed upon America by the pandemic, the scourge of anti-vaccine sentiment—and the preventable deaths caused as result—ranks among the most frustrating, especially for infectious-disease doctors like me.
People who are hospitalized with COVID-19 rarely refuse therapy, but acceptance of vaccines to help prevent infection has been considerably more limited. Seventy percent of Americans have received the initial complement of vaccine injections, and many fewer have received the boosters designed to address viral variants and confer additional
Biden’s COVID Is Back. Is Paxlovid to Blame?
Four days after recovering from a COVID-19 infection, President Joe Biden has tested positive again. When he first got sick, Biden—like more than one-third of the Americans who have tested positive for COVID-19 this summer, according to the U.S. government’s public records—was prescribed Paxlovid, an antiviral pill treatment made by Pfizer. Like many Paxlovid takers, he soon tested negative and resumed his normal activities. And then, like many Paxlovid takers, his infection came right back. (Biden does not currently have
How Public Health Failed America
Even though Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, backed off his statement that the United States is “out of the pandemic phase,” elected officials and much of the public seem to think that he had it right the first time. But if the end of the COVID-19 emergency is at hand, the United States is reaching it with lower vaccination and higher per-capita death rates than other wealthy nations. The conventional wisdom is that the American political
The Pandemic Isn’t Over for Immunocompromised People
When the coronavirus pandemic began, Emily Landon thought about her own risk only in rare quiet moments. An infectious-disease doctor at the University of Chicago Medicine, she was cramming months of work into days, preparing her institution for the virus’s arrival in the United States. But Landon had also recently developed rheumatoid arthritis—a disease in which a person’s immune system attacks their own joints—and was taking two drugs that, by suppressing said immune system, made her more vulnerable to pathogens.
The Seven Habits of COVID-Resilient Nations
The tweet has stuck with me for months now: a chart of cumulative COVID-19 deaths per capita in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. The U.S. and U.K. lines rise up like mountains relative to the valley of South Korea below. Even as Omicron-related deaths have increased in South Korea more recently, the picture hasn’t changed much.
South Korea “kept deaths 40 times lower all the way till 75% of population fully vaccinated,” the physician Vincent
Enjoy the COVID Grace Period
In many ways, the pandemic has never felt quite so paradoxical. In the United States, cases and hospitalizations are falling, and millions of people are as vaccinated as they can be. A rash of coastal-state mayors and governors is peeling back mask mandates—a stateside mirror of countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where pandemic restrictions have all but disappeared. Things are definitively better than they were just a few weeks ago. And yet—and yet—they are nowhere near
Europe’s country-by-country travel restrictions explained – POLITICO
This article was updated on December 2, 2021.
The European Union spent decades getting rid of its borders. Coronavirus brought them back.
When the pandemic first washed across the bloc in early 2020, panicky countries restored border controls; people and trucks transporting everything from car parts to cabbages spent days in huge lines waiting to cross frontiers. Most air travel ended. Over the last year, as COVID-19 vaccines have become available, those barriers have been lowered — but they haven’t
COVID Parenting Is Reaching a Breaking Point
Parents know that winter is the season of sickness. Your kid will have approximately infinite colds. You, too, will have approximately infinite colds. Last winter, COVID precautions kept sickness at bay. But this year, school is in session, day-care colds are spreading fast, and the only cohort of people in America not yet eligible for COVID vaccination is our youngest children.
Aside from promises of clinical-trial data by the end of the year, the timeline on which children younger than