Pox News

First: A human woman was infected with cowpox she got from her cat. That is not something (thankfully) you read every day.

Today, cowpox is rare in cattle, and the main reservoir is rodents, according to the Merck Veterinary Manual. Cats can become infected when they kill rodents carrying cowpox, but transmission from cats to people is rare,

WARNING: Article contains photo.

Second: Wales is reporting its second case of a human with monkeypox. How rare is that? Rare enough that my spell-checker doesn’t recognize (or even recognise) “monkeybox.”

WARNING: Article also contains photo.

J&J vaccine ups and downs

The good news: The Johnson & Johnson vaccine* can keep safe and effective for six weeks longer than originally thought. That means millions of doses won’t need to be destroyed, and can be shipped around the country (or the world) instead of being destroyed.

The bad news: The company will have to destroy several more batches from its Emergent BioSolutions Baltimore plant because the FDA determined they were “not suitable for use.” Kind of like what’s printed on the food cartons in high school cafeterias.

* Funny how I don’t need to specify which vaccine we’re talking about.

ICYMI

Three, count ’em, three members of the FDA’s 11-member advisory committee have now resigned over the agency’s rather surprising* approval of the Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm.

“This might be the worst approval decision that the F.D.A. has made that I can remember,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who submitted his resignation Thursday after six years on the committee.

Diet now, disorder later

I guess it’s not a total surprise: A new study out of Fargo, Minneapolis, and other cold places found that girls who take pills for weight control today — diet pills and laxatives — had about a 60% greater chance of being diagnosed with an eating disorder within five years than those who didn’t use them.

Good news: We’re talking about 4.0% vs. 2.6%, so it’s not like an epidemic … at least until “60 Minutes” gets hold of it.

Elsewhere/ICYMI: A few fries short of a Happy Meal

Meet Sherri Tenpenny, a doctor (of osteopathy) who was invited to testify in front of the Ohio legislature about coronavirus vaccines. She claimed that Covid vaccines made people “magnetic,” among other totally crazy ideas.

She was thanked (!) by legislators who oppose vaccination efforts for being “enlightening in terms of thinking.”

“There’s been people who have long suspected that there’s been some sort of an interface, ‘yet to be defined’ interface, between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.” —Sherry Tenpenny

Where health insurance dollars go

A new report from America’s Health Insurance Plans found that prescription-drug spending makes up the single largest item from every premium dollar paid. (The plurality, if you will.) It edged out both in- and out-patient hospital costs.

What’s interesting is that this cuts through all the discounts and programs and whatnot, at least in theory. It’s based on what insurers actually paid, not list prices, although it is “estimated.”

That link above was to the news story. Here’s the report itself, a lovely five-page PDF.

I bet it does!

“Electric shock device boosts focus and energy in sleep deprived soldiers”.

But seriously, folks, once you get past the headline, it’s actually interesting. It’s a hand-held device that sends electrical current to the vagus nerve through the skin of the neck.

[T]hose who received vagus nerve stimulation performed better at tasks testing focus and multi-tasking abilities. They also reported less fatigue and higher energy than those who received placebo stimulation. These effects peaked at 12 hours after stimulation, with improvements in alertness lasting for up to 19 hours.

Yes, the obvious question: What is “placebo stimulation”?

Pulitzer winners tackled the pandemic

Congrats to two Pulitzer Prize winners whose work related to healthcare.

Ed Yong of the Atlantic for “a series of lucid, definitive pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic that anticipated the course of the disease, synthesized the complex challenges the country faced, illuminated the U.S. government’s failures, and provided clear and accessible context for the scientific and human challenges it posed.”

The New York Times for “courageous, prescient, and sweeping coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that exposed racial and economic inequities, government failures in the U.S. and beyond, and filled a data vacuum that helped local governments, healthcare providers, businesses, and individuals to be better prepared and protected.”