Apocalypse Watch

The Chinese Mystery Virus has made its way to American shores. (A man had travelled to Wuhan and is now listed in good condition in Washington state.) Meanwhile…

Warfarin: Any time is good

Old advice: Take blood thinners at night.

New study: Nah, time of day probably doesn’t matter.

Antibiotic development is slow

Despite almost 36,000 Americans dying from antibiotic-resistant infection every year*, not enough is being done to develop new treatments — that’s according to the latest Antimicrobial Resistance Benchmark report.

Compared to 2018, the pipeline of new drugs in development to combat bacterial and fungal infections remains small, with only 51 potential treatments in late-stage clinical trials, the 2020 report found.

The problem: “the low profitability of antibiotics means that only a dwindling number of pharmaceutical companies still invest in developing and manufacture them.” (Link above is to the news story; click here for the report itself.)

* For comparison, 79 Americans were killed by terrorism worldwide in 2016, and 58,318 were killed in the entire Vietnam War.

Flu: Lots of cases, but starting to ease

There have been 13 million total cases in the U.S. this year, including three million just in the past week. But that’s actually good news — it seems the rate of flu infection has peaked.

And, because only six percent of deaths during the flu season were caused by the flu, it didn’t hit the “pandemic” mark of 6.9 percent, so we don’t have to hear about the “flu pandemic” every time we check the news.

Old drugs, new cancer-killing tricks

The folks at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard decided to ‘systematically analyze thousands of already developed drug compounds’ to see which also might be able to fight cancer. Turns out they found not one or two (which is what they hoped for), but 49.

Or, as they put it in the paper in Nature, “the PRISM screen recovered 49 non-oncology compounds with selective and predictive biomarker-associated anticancer activity.”

This could open up a whole lot of new avenues for research into treatments, that’s for sure.

The Long Read: Pain

“The unexpected diversity of pain”

It comes in many types that each require specialized treatment. Scientists are starting to learn how to diagnose the different varieties.