Once more, with feeling

The WHO is preparing another task force to try to find the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Monkeys? Lab leak? Pangolins? Hollow-Earth lizard people? The previous task force left after being stonewalled by Chinese authorities; this one, however, will come armed with strongly worded letters and Very Serious expressions.

Latest Covid news

Vaccinations up, cases down, deaths starting to go down in most places. (About 81 Georgians a day are dying from it.)

DPH PPE for Y.O.U.

Trigger warning: The following story contains the phrase “right-size.”

Need PPE? The Georgia DPH has some extra on hand, and you can order it (while supplies last) through the end of the year.

The Georgia Department of Public Health’s warehouse is beginning to right-size our PPE and vaccine ancillary inventory. To assist with consolidation, we will allow facilities and agencies to order items for current or future responses between now and December 31, 2021. We have only listed the things that we have in excess over the 60-day stockpile.

They’ve got N95s, KN95s, surgical masks and gowns, coveralls, Air Armour Decon Pro Fogger Solution (fogger required), Lure Lock, and sharps containers.

All the stuff is by the pallet.

Check out the details and order what you need (and can store).

A new food scale

It’s old news that the official food pyramid was created with a lot of food-industry input — meaning it’s really not the best source for what’s nutritious and what’s not.

Harvard has its version, and now the latest alternative comes from Tufts: The Tufts Food Compass. It’s less a fancy consumer chart and more of a “nutrition profiling system,” which they hope to expand so every food you eat is rated from 1 (“should be minimized”) to 100 (“encouraged”).

To create a score, 54 attributes are scored across 9 health-relevant domains: nutrient ratios, vitamins, minerals, food ingredients, additives, processing, specific lipids, fiber & protein, and phytochemicals.

Unexpected correlation

Here’s an odd finding, courtesy of the University of Buffalo: People who take proton-pump inhibitors for heartburn are likely to have better dental health — specifically, “smaller probing depths in the gums (the gap between teeth and gums).”

How’s that possible? Their guess: PPIs may change either bone metabolism or gut bacteria, leading to fewer harmful bacteria in the mouth. As usual, “Additional studies are under development.”

When zinc goes bad

Sunscreen with zinc may seem like your friend, but don’t let your guard down. After two hours, that changes.

You see, the ingredients in sunscreens are all evaluated for safety separately. Oregon State University researchers were curious if their safety profile changes when they’re make into compounds — sunscreens.

Without zinc oxide, the sunscreens were stable under UV light. Yay.

But “scientists saw big differences in photostability and phototoxicity when zinc oxide particles were added.”

After two hours, the zinc oxide…

…degraded the organic mixture and caused a greater than 80% loss in organic filter protection against ultraviolet-A rays, which make up 95% of the UV radiation that reaches the Earth.

But it also caused the compounds to degrade into chemicals that “caused significant increases in defects to the zebrafish we used to test toxicity.”

So UV-filter chemicals are good. And zinc oxide might be good. But when they’re put together … not so much.

Shampoo, makeup, and plastic containers kill 90,000 people a year

Well, technically the phthalates in those things do, according to researchers at NYU and the University of Iowa. Those chemicals disrupt the functioning of certain enzymes, which leads to an increase in deaths. A lot of them.

“Extrapolating to 55–64 year olds,” they said, “we identified >90,000 attributable [American] deaths/year.”

[They] analyzed data from more than 5,000 adults between the ages of 55 and 64. They found that those with the highest level of phthalates in their urine were more likely to die earlier than expected, especially of heart-related causes.

More importantly, that’s more than $40 billion in lost economic productivity! “Regulatory action,” they say, “is urgently needed.”

Well that backfired

Johnson & Johnson wanted to get into the booster game (and its sweet, sweet profits). It may have backfired, though. The FDA was iffy about J&J’s data, and now the NIH says yeah, a booster may be a good idea … but a Moderna or Pfizer booster.

Toppling cancer’s Tower of Babel

Cancer researchers, it seems, don’t have a common naming system for cancers. Some use the type of tumor, some use the location in the body.

That means there’s no easy way to see how one genomic study might relate to another. A ‘soft-tissue study’ might be looking at the same kind of tumor as a ‘breast cancer study.’

So researchers at the Salk Institute decided to change that.

First, they painstakingly went through cancer studies “and reclassified each cancer according to a consistent naming system.” Then they looked at the prevalence of genetic mutations in this new, more accurate database.

The result, they say, is huge: a comprehensive list of the most commonly mutated genes in all cancers.

When they analyzed the data, they found that some widespread beliefs were incorrect. For example, KRAS is an important cancer-promoting gene that was believed to be mutated in 25% of all cancers; rather, it was found to be involved in only about 11% of all cancers.

With researchers now able to be on the same page, and knowing which mutations are most common in the entire cancer patient population, it could streamline a host of research avenues.