There ain’t no Coupe de Ville hidin’ at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box….

Eeeeeeeeeew (but hmm….)

That’s one way to test a whole family at once, but I’d hate to be the one going last.

[S]ome Americans—half-proud, half-embarrassed, and fully desperate to find out whether they’re infected—have tossed the rapid-test instruction manual. To stretch their resources, they’ve started combining samples in their home. When a group test is negative, they conclude that everyone is in the clear.

Some pigs

Even if you expose pigs to a high dose of SARS-CoV-2, they don’t get sick. Why not? Suicidal cells.

When a pig’s epithelial cell was infected, the nuclei shredded itself — a sign of apoptosis. The cells destroyed themselves rather than help spread the infection, veterinary researchers at Iowa State discovered.

Triggering apoptosis early in the infection essentially causes minimal tissue damage and confines viral replication, thus limiting severe illness. Human cells can undergo apoptosis in response to coronavirus infection as well, but the study found human cells do so much less frequently than porcine cells.

Could this be useful in the fight against Covid-19? Probably not, but it’s at least interesting.

Covid’s getting sneaky

They’re calling it “stealth Omicron” — one of three subvariants of the omicron variant that seems to be harder to detect that other variants.

Of those three subvariants — BA.1, BA2, and BA.3 — most people have BA.1. But the creepy BA.2 has been gaining ground. Those shifty Danes say “BA.2 accounted for 20% of all Covid-19-cases in Denmark in week 52 [i.e., December],” and Great Britain, Norway, and Sweden are reporting increases as well.

To make it worse, there’s no data on whether these subvariants are more or less virulent or dangerous — or if there’s a difference in vaccine efficacy.

Mark Cuban opens a pharmacy

Billionaire Mark Cuban has opened an online pharmacy, selling about 100 medications that it buys directly from manufacturers, sans PBM. Its prices for generics are cost plus a 15% margin and a $3 pharmacist fee, and it doesn’t accept insurance.

They might be able to stop the eye shots

Patients with “wet” age-related macular degeneration may not need to stick needles in their eyes for life. Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers found that about 30 percent of people getting anti-VEGF injections produce enough of the right proteins in their eyes that they don’t need ’em any more.

Across the board, the patients who could enter a treatment pause did the best even though they were receiving no anti-VEGF drugs. They had better visual acuity, better gain of vision and less fluid in their retina.”

Get off your butts

The CDC has released a map showing in which states people have the least physical activity. Georgia gets a lovely orange color, meaning 25–30% of people (except non-Hispanic Asian adults) don’t exercise much at all.

Where do people exercise the least? Puerto Rico and Mississippi. And the most? Vermont and D.C.

Need another reason? How about “TV watching linked with potentially fatal blood clots”?

Anti-cancer helmet —a lot more research is needed

Neurosurgeons at Houston Methodist Hospital have developed a magnetic helmet they think can be used to treat glioblastoma. In fact, in a single trial “the device was able to reduce the tumor of a glioblastoma patient by 31%.”

The magnetic helmet creates a powerful oscillating magnetic field. At a set range of frequencies and timings, it disrupts the flow of electrons in the mitochondria of cancer cells. This leads to a release of certain chemicals called ROS (Reactive Oxygen Species). […] levels of ROS get so high that the malignant cells are torn apart.

As the headline says, lots more research is needed. And they also need to redesign the helmet so it doesn’t look like one of those beer hats.