COVID-19 US Politics I avoid talking about 🇺🇸US politics too much; I try to focus on what is relevant for BC. But as this article (2025-03-25) reports, the Trump administration has cancelled USD$11.4 billion (with a B) in US CDC funds for COVID-19 testing, vaccination, community health workers, initiatives to address Covid health disparities among… Continue reading 2025-03-28 General
Category: General
General 2025-03-21
COVID-19 Long COVID 🪧 This article (2025-03-15) says that there was a Long COVID protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery on 15 March. I’m bummed that I didn’t know about it ahead of time. 🐕🦺🤧 This older paper (2025-06-15) reports that dogs could be trained to detect Long COVID with high accuracy! They could distinguish… Continue reading General 2025-03-21
2025-03-15 General
COVID-19 📆 There have been a huge number of “it’s been five years since the start of the pandemic” articles. (For example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.) What have we learned? How… Continue reading 2025-03-15 General
2025-03-07 General
COVID-19 Long COVID 🙁🛌 This preprint using data from USA and UK (2025-03-01) reports that people with hypermobility are at increased risk of Long COVID. People with generalized joint hypermobility have a 29% higher risk of Long COVID than controls; people with extreme hypermobility have a 112% higher risk than controls. This higher risk is… Continue reading 2025-03-07 General
2025-03-01 General
Recommended Reading 🐎🤮 Did you know there was a horse flu epidemic in 1872 (also see this Wikipedia section) which crippled the US (and probably Canada)? I didn’t. 🤯 COVID-19 Long COVID 🎉 This older paper (2023-02-07) reports that maraviroc and pravastatin — two HIV treatments — significantly reduced symptoms in Long COVID patients. (Both… Continue reading 2025-03-01 General
2025-02-21 General
Vaccines You might have heard that the USA is having an egg shortage. You might know that 80% of flu vaccines are made with eggs. You might get concerned that egg-based vaccine production would be impacted. Fear not! This article (2025-02-19) reports that chickens who lay vaccine eggs are raised in a “controlled environment”, so… Continue reading 2025-02-21 General
2025-02-15 General
I have been avoiding saying much about the chaos in the US government health sector, but it’s been difficult. COVID-19 Long COVID AGAIN 🧪This paper from Australia (2025-01-13) reports that people with Long COVID and ME/CFS both have bigger left hippocampal subfields than healthy controls. Furthermore, the size of the left hippocampal subfield correlated with… Continue reading 2025-02-15 General
2025-01-07 General
COVID-19 Long COVID AGAIN 😞 This article (2025-02-04) refers to this paper from the USA (paywalled, 2025-02-03), which reports that 1.4% of children surveyed had had Long COVID, and 0.4% currently have Long COVID. 80% of the kids with active Long COVID have an ability limitation that they didn’t have before catching COVID-19. They also… Continue reading 2025-01-07 General
2025-01-31 General
It is still a little harder finding good articles / papers than a few weeks ago. In addition to all the chaff from Trump in the health sites I monitor, there are now a ton of news articles saying, “Today is the five year anniversary of the first COVID case appearing in <jurisdiction>, what have… Continue reading 2025-01-31 General
2025-01-25 General
Health news was harder to find this week. A lot of my sources were overrun with articles about what trouble the new US president is fomenting, leaving little room for articles about COVID, mpox, or H5N1. ☹️ You might have noticed that I sometimes mark snippets with “AGAIN”. Why do I bother showing studies that… Continue reading 2025-01-25 General