Placebo (side) effects

Sure, some people have side effects after getting a Covid vaccine, but researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found that more than 35 percent of people getting a placebo vaccine reported side effects after a single shot, and overall two-thirds of people had placebo-based reactions, “with headache and fatigue most common.”

How can you have any pudding if you won’t eat your meat?

More kids are becoming fussy eaters — i.e., suffering from parosmia — thanks to Covid. First it takes away their sense of taste, and then it distorts it.

Instead of smelling a lemon, for example, someone suffering from parosmia may smell rotting cabbage, or chocolate may smell like gasoline.

And thus the kids don’t want to eat, frustrating parents and even leading to nutritional problems. Which, to be fair, is probably better than what would happen if the gasoline smelled like chocolate.

Free virtual CPE on cervical cancer

January 20 is Cervical Cancer Awareness Day, so why not attend a 90-minute virtual conference on the subject, featuring Ashley Hannings (associate director of the UGA College of Pharmacy), Jeffrey Hines (medical director for health equity at Wellstar Gynecologic Oncology), and others.

The conference is from noon-1:30pm, and it gives 1.5 hours of that sweet, sweet CE credit.

Questions? Read more here (2-page PDF) or email Jana Mastrogiovanni at jana@cancerpathways.org.

Making islet transplants possible

A potential treatment for diabetes is giving patients an islet transplant — replacing pancreatic islets that have been destroyed by the immune system.

Problem: Rejection, just as with any organ transplant, and immunosuppressive drugs don’t work well. But now researchers at Northwestern have found a possible way around that. And yes, they used nanotechnology, like all the cool kids.

In short (overly short, to be fair), they embedded rapamycin in nanoparticles, allowing them to target the immunosuppressant right where it needed to be, avoiding side effects while still being effective.

Using these rapamycin-loaded nanocarriers, the researchers generated a new form of immunosuppression capable of targeting specific cells related to the transplant without suppressing wider immune responses.

Need some PPE and such?

Through the end of this month, the Georgia DPH is still giving away some PPE-ish equipment. It’s out of sharps containers, but there’s plenty of other stuff — masks, gowns, coveralls — available as it “right-sizes” its inventory.

So what’s available? Click here for the order form. And keep this in mind, per the DPH:

1. Only order what you can store. We are not on allocation for these items.
2. These orders are first-come, first-serve. Once an item is down to stockpile levels, it will be removed from the order sheet.
3. Orders will not be shipped to a residential address or PO Box.
4. Be prepared to answer questions about your receiving capabilities, e.g., docks, forklifts, pallet jacks, etc. This question is required, and you will not be able to submit it without a response.

Barking up the long Covid tree

Dogs can detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus in long-Covid patients a year and a half after their infection. That’s what French researchers found when they had trained dogs sniff sweat samples of people who claimed to have long-term symptoms vs. a group of controls.

The dogs barked “Yes!” for 51.1% of the long-Covid patients, and none of the control group.

The takeaways:

• “Long Covid” is appropriate — the virus hangs around at least 18 months in some people.
• The people who claimed to have symptoms weren’t faking — well, at least 51.1% of them certainly weren’t.

Lung cancer vaccine trial starts

The first of about 86 people in a clinical trial has received a dose of a potential vaccine for non-small cell lung cancer.

“If successful, this cutting-edge immunotherapy could provide an effective, much-needed new treatment to help more people survive their lung cancer.”

Your genome will be ready shortly

We older folks remember when the sequencing of the human genome was a Very Big Deal. The Human Genome Project took 13 years to be “complete” (and another 18 to be ‘really really complete’).

Now a patient can get a personal genome sequencing to look for genetic disease in a matter of weeks.

But who wants to wait weeks?

Stanford geneticists have just set the Guinness World Record — no joke! — for the fastest DNA sequencing technique “which was used to sequence a human genome in just 5 hours and 2 minutes.”

Although this was a one-off in an effort to set a record, the techniques and hardware they used proved the concept of their “mega-sequencing approach” and should soon be scaled and available outside the lab.

The number of the counting shall be three (for now)

A fourth shot of an mRNA Covid-19 vaccine doesn’t do much to prevent Omicron infection. At least, that’s according to preliminary results out of Israel*.

“Despite increased antibody levels, the fourth vaccine only offers a partial defense against the virus. The vaccines, which were more effective against previous variants, offer less protection versus omicron.”

Of course, as with everything else Covid-related, this could change — and a fourth shot and does offer some additional antibodies.

* To be fair, Israel and South Africa have been the go-to sources for both variant and vaccine information.

An apple a day, and so on

Patients with diabetes? A physician from Atlanta’s Morehouse School of Medicine explains why they shouldn’t cut fruit from their diets, even if it does have a lot of sugar.