Welcome to the future

Want to deliver drugs to metastatic lung tumors? How about using — and we’re not kidding — cyborg nano-robots?

UC San Diego engineers wrapped doxorubicin in nanoparticles, coated them with the membranes of red blood cells, then attached them to green algae cells that can swim. They injected that the lungs of mice, where the red-blood-cell camouflage helped ensure they weren’t attacked by the immune system.

If that isn’t a 21st century paragraph, I don’t know what is.

Oh, and “Treated mice experienced a median survival time of 37 days, an improvement over the 27-day median survival time observed in untreated mice.”

Bird flu news

Testing? What testing?

So we know the bird flu is spreading, and — let’s be real — it’s probably only a matter of time before it’s a human problem. Good thing we’re able to test for it to get ahead of another pandemic! Oh, wait.

Right now there’s only one authorized test (the CDC’s), and it’s only for people who work with livestock. A single authorized test? Sound familiar? As Donald Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator put it, “We’re making the same mistakes today that we made with Covid.”

This time, though, some people — farmers — may not want to know if they or their livestock are sick because of the economic impact. The lack of testing means someone could have, say, pink eye, a runny nose, or a fever and no one would know if it was the flu.

The usual suspects … and more

If you’re keeping track, besides birds and livestock, H5N1 has been detected in bears, big cats (fishers, mountain lions, bobcats), domestic cats, coyotes, dolphins, foxes, martins, mice, minks, opossums, otters, raccoons, seals, skunks, and squirrels.

Vaccine development

There are two dozen companies (literally 24) working to find a bird flu vaccine for cows, in addition to the USDA. That agency is also looking at the possibility of respiratory spread, which we really, really don’t want to happen.

Don’t hold your breath for a cow vaccine, though. “That could happen tomorrow, or it could take six months, or it could take a year,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Great idea (not)

If you’re thinking, “Why not vaccinate the chickens and turkeys? Isn’t this the bird flu?” the Des Moines Register explains why it’s not that simple:

Because the vaccine can mask symptoms in infected birds, other countries would likely ban U.S. poultry imports, costing producers an estimated $24 billion and axing 215,000 poultry jobs, an export council analysis shows. In addition, vaccinating hundreds of millions of chickens, turkeys and other poultry — potentially more than once — is a costly and practical challenge. Plus, researchers still are trying to determine how effective vaccines would be.

So yeah … no.

Are you kidding?

Pasteurizing milk kills the flu virus, so the milk supply is safe, unless you’re foolish enough to drink raw milk, which obviously people aren’t going to do.

Oh, wait. “Interest in raw milk is soaring, and some states are moving to legalize its sale.”

The latest definition of “long Covid”

The folks at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have come up with what they hope to be the definitive description of long Covid — at least until someone else comes up with one.

They’ve also started capitalizing the “L” and referring to it as “LC” so they’ve definitely gotten serious.

Long COVID (LC) is an infection-associated chronic condition that occurs after SARS-CoV-2 infection and is present for at least three months as a continuous, relapsing and remitting, or progressive disease state that affects one or more organ systems.

There’s a bunch more to it than that, but a big disclaimer: “The definition does not list any symptoms or conditions as being required or any as being exclusionary.” In fact, it’s a pretty broad definition (“LC can follow asymptomatic, mild, or severe SARS-CoV-2 infection”) that boils down to “Still feeling sick after recovering from Covid.”

Compounders: Beware sulfites

Some patients are having allergic reactions to sulfite-containing compounded drugs, and the FDA wants healthcare folks to be aware of them. It’s received reports of a bunch of reactions, from conjunctivitis and swollen eyelids to asthmatic episodes, all of which it thinks might be related to sulfides including sodium bisulfite, sodium metabisulfite, sodium sulfite, potassium bisulfite, potassium metabisulfite.

If you compound, your takeaway is: “Indicate the presence of sulfites on product labels or include a sulfite warning statement.”

Bowel cancer annihilator

A new immunotherapy called pembrolizumab, developed in Britain, destroys bowel-cancer tumors — like totally destroys them. The downside is that it only works for the 15% of people who have a particular genetic makeup. Still, it’s a huge breakthrough (yes, someone called it a “game-changer”).

Results show 59% of patients had no signs of cancer after treatment with pembrolizumab, with any cancer in the remaining 41% of patients removed during surgery. All of the patients in the trial were cancer-free after treatment.

Bonus: None of them required chemo, either.