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 […]
I recently became aware of Cameron Kyle-Sidell, an emergency physician and intensivist in NYC because of his videos describing his experience with COVID-19 patients. Sidell has argued that COVID-19 appears less like traditional ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome) and features more in common with high altitude illness. He argues that […]
In a recent report, healthcare workers accounted for 11% (1,689 of 15,194) of reported cases. It is clear that being a healthcare worker is a risk factor for symptomatic COVID-19 disease. It is less clear if health care workers get sicker than the general population when infected. Severe disease in […]
One of the first outbreaks of COVID-19 in the United States occurred in King County Washington in a long-term care facility. It resulted in infection among 81 residents, 34 staff members, and 14 visitors. In total, 23 persons died. As of April 14th, 3800 residents of nursing homes had died […]
The Washington Post today ran a piece entitled Young and middle aged people, barely sick with COVID-19, are dying from strokes. “Doctors sound alarm about patients in their 30s and 40s left debilitated or dead. Some didn’t even know they were infected.” From the article: Sherry H-Y Chou, an intensive […]
“Despite the evidence that fever can serve a protective function, old habits die hard, ” so wrote Blumenthal in 1997. Old habits about fever are indeed hard to shake, and this may be particularly so in a pandemic, where history’s lessons and hard-earned knowledge from epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and good […]
I don’t usually teach evolutionary medicine in the Spring. In fact, I was originally scheduled to be in Kauai, hiking the Kalalau trail with a group of wilderness medicine students this April. Alas, that trip, and this year’s whole wilderness medicine elective, were not to be. Many students who would […]
