The right amount of sugar

What Are Ideal Blood Sugar Levels for Preventing Repeat Strokes, Heart Attacks? asks the American Academy of Neurology. It’s a poorly worded headline. The answer — “right in the 6.8% to 7.0% range” — is more accurately the highest A1C most patients should have. (That’s per a study out of Korea’s Seoul National University.)

The study found that people admitted to the hospital with A1C levels above the 6.8% to 7.0% range had an increased risk of having a vascular event like a heart attack, as well as having another stroke.

SSDD

Some states, particularly in the West, introduced laws prohibiting vaccine mandates. Others narrowly passed mandates after intense debate.

The reasons for resistance were myriad: Some Americans opposed mandates on the grounds of personal liberty; some because they believed lawmakers were in cahoots with vaccine makers; and some because of safety concerns.

[…]

News articles and health board reports describe crowds of parents marching to schoolhouses to demand that their unvaccinated children be allowed in.

That’s from the turn of the century. The 20th century. They were protesting smallpox vaccine mandates.

Hundreds of doctors and registered nurses stood ready to begin the stupendous task of inoculating the millions of children throughout the country.

Some hitches developed, however. In Maryland’s Montgomery County, 4,000 parents flatly refused to let their youngsters receive the vaccine. Two counties in Indiana objected that the plan smacked of socialized medicine.

That’s from 1955. The protest was against the polio vaccine.

Want even more? Check out the Wall Street Journal’s “The Long History of Vaccine Mandates in America.”

Antidepressants: Stop or go?

People who wean themselves off antidepressants can still relapse into depression. Then again, found University College London researchers, so can people who continue to take them (but not as often).

The numbers — for patients taking antidepressants for at least two years:

• 56% of people who gradually stopped taking them relapsed within a year.
• 39% of those who continued to take them after two years relapsed.

Interesting: Of that 56% who were weaned off, half chose to stay off them — and most of those (59%) succeeded.

That sounds bad

Researchers at Tokyo Medical University Hospital have a new study published in BMC Infectious Diseases — they’ve found another potential symptom of Covid-19 — it’s a disturbing variant of restless leg syndrome. Luckily, clonazepam was used to treat it.

The problem is the fillers

You may have heard that some people have had an allergic reaction to a Covid vaccine. It turns out (per Stanford researchers) that in most cases the reaction is to the filler — polyethylene glycol — not the mRNA vaccine itself.

Even so…

Estimated rates of severe vaccine-related anaphylaxis — allergic reactions bad enough to require hospitalization — are 4.7 and 2.5 cases per million doses for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Getting to know you

There’s a problem with drugs used to treat hemophilia A and Pompe disease: The immune system attacks the proteins and enzymes that make up the treatment. So University at Buffalo pharmaceutical researchers came up with a novel solution — a “reverse vaccine” that gets the body’s immune system to recognize the medications and learn to tolerate them.

“Instead of attempting to reverse the anti-drug antibodies, which is highly challenging, clinical treatments that prevent antibody development may be a more effective strategy.”

The next next Covid treatment

Today’s Covid cure comes from … Norway! That’s right, the latest drug combination that researchers say will work against the virus is a combination of nafamostat and peginterferon (aka Pegasys

Nafamostat is already in use as a monotherapy against COVID-19 and is undergoing extensive testing in Japan, among other places. Pegasys (IFNα) is currently used mainly to treat hepatitis C. Combining the two appears to have a positive effect. “Both drugs attack a factor in our cells called TMPRSS2, which plays a critical role in viral replication.”

Not to be all Debbie Downer, but it seems like waiting for a Covid cure is like waiting for the castaways to be rescued from Gilligan’s Island.

The country mouse is in trouble

Rural mortality rates from Covid-19 are now double that of urban areas. “Part of the problem is that Covid incidence rates in September were roughly 54% higher in rural areas than elsewhere.”

“We’ve turned many rural communities into kill boxes. And there’s no movement towards addressing what we’re seeing in many of these communities, either among the public or among governing officials.” —Alan Morgan, head of the National Rural Health Association.

The Long(ish) Read: That Other Epidemic edition

“Is a Successful HIV Vaccine Finally on the Horizon?”

“You know the panic that goes on when a new coronavirus variant surfaces? With HIV, that kind of variation [happens] pretty much every day in everybody who’s infected. It’s just orders of magnitude more variable a virus.”