Athena Aktipis and I wrote a piece about this in TheConversation.com: Here is an excerpt: Viruses walk a fine line between severity and transmissibility. If they are too virulent, they kill or incapacitate their hosts; this limits their ability to infect new hosts. Conversely, viruses that cause little harm may […]
I often feel that I am writing this blog for myself, but I have a platform here. The evolution medicine blog and podcast has a modest number of subscribers. With the recent murder of George Floyd, I am moved to speak. I have been inspired by the peaceful protests that […]
Researchers and opinion leaders cannot seem to make up their minds about what kills us in a variety of serious viral illnesses. Do we die because of too much, or too little, immune activation? Consider this about Ebola virus from an 2014 NPR feature: “But when you look at the […]
The billionaire hedge fund manager Ricky Sandler says we should disregard public health professionals and encourage people to get infected with COVID-19 so that the population can have “so called” herd immunity. He and others argue we should throw caution – and our face masks – to the wind and […]
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many have written about the immune system turning against us. Ali Daneshkhah, a researcher who published a recent article about Vitamin D and COVID stated: “what seems to kill a majority of COVID-19 patients (is) not the destruction of the lungs by the virus itself. It […]
Hypertension, obesity, and diabetes have been identified as risk factors for severe COVID-19. Intriguingly, these are diseases that are linked with the microbiome. The microbiota is the collection of microbes that inhabit our bodies. The microbiome is the collection of all of the genes of the microbiota. The vast majority […]
So called ‘murder hornets’ have been in the news lately, after being discovered in Washington State. These Asian giant hornets are native to Asia, as one might expect. Besides their ability to deliver a painful, sometimes lethal sting to humans, they also pose a risk to honeybees. Murder hornets can […]
Athena Aktipis interviewed David Quammen, the author of Spillover, for a recent episode on zoonotic epidemic events for her podcast “Zombified.” This was recorded before the pandemic, but is absolutely relevant to our current situation. Did you know, “eight percent of the human genome is DNA that was inserted by […]
UNM School of Medicine students and others will be exploring themes of evolutionary medicine as it applies to the current pandemic over the next few weeks. The main theme of the 2020 Ev Med course: Using the pandemic as a lens to understand the theory and practical applications of evolutionary […]
The two pharma companies, Sanofi and Regeneron, proposed that a drug called Kevzara might help patients with COVID-19 pneumonia. The rationale was that patients with COVID-19 have an exaggerated immune response, a phenomenon called a cytokine storm, that is responsible for the lung and organ pathology in COVID-19. The logic […]
