@boghuma
Physician Scientist MDPhD Infectious Diseases Academic Medicine Global Health Science Communicator Posts are my opinions, not my employer's and not medical advice I bet on myself and double down https://substack.com/@bktitanji
"Sixteen US states do not require sex education or HIV/STI instruction to be age-appropriate or medically accurate"
Eliminating sex-Ed does not stop young people from having sex, the just do it less safely🤷♀️
www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
$1 BILLION a day for a war.
That same $1B could instead could in the US:
- Fund ~40% of the U.S. HIV treatment program
- Feed ~5.6 million people for a month through SNAP
- Equal ~¼ of the entire federal homelessness budget
Every. Single. Day.
The FDA was requesting a repeat study with genuine administrations of medication into patients in one group, and a control group in which actual holes are drilled into the skull but no medicine is administered.🫠
Regarding the request for sham controlled study the first study conducted involved genuine administrations of the therapy injected into the patients, and the control group simply underwent general anesthesia while some scalp incisions were made but no medicine is administered.
During his tenure Vinay Prasad
-Tried to block review of mRNA flu vaccine
-Demanded a sham-controlled trial for promising immunotherapy for huntingtons raising ethical concerns for patients.
-Imposed new warnings & study requirements for some biotech drugs and vaccines
apnews.com/article/vina...
Illustration credit: @lucyClaireIllustration on IG.
Happy International Women's Day to amazing Women all around the world.
Continue to inspire.
We are the glue that holds it all together ❤️
That's it for this month folks. Very interesting questions. If you missed the chance to ask a question, I run it back next month, you can also review the thread .The session is now officially closed.
Thank you all.
What we do have are a mix of small immunology studies, some vaccine-response studies, and real-world effectiveness data. Those do not show clear evidence that multiple prior COVID infections broadly “wipe out” vaccine responses.
This is a very good question, and the honest answer is we do not yet have strong, direct data showing how repeated COVID infections affect responses to routine vaccines like flu or MMR at a population level.The literature is much thinner than people assume.
Vaccine development has been challenging for decades, but there is renewed interest with mRNA and therapeutic vaccine approaches now in early trials aimed at preventing infection or reducing recurrence and shedding.
HSV: For herpes simplex virus (HSV-1 and HSV-2), we have effective antivirals (acyclovir, valacyclovir, famciclovir) that suppress outbreaks and reduce transmission risk. But they don’t eliminate the virus because HSV also establishes lifelong latency in nerve cells.
which is why it’s historically called the “kissing disease.” The big research push is figuring out whether preventing infection early in life could reduce downstream diseases like MS.
For now, though, there is no approved EBV vaccine or antiviral that clears latent infection. Current antivirals don’t work well against EBV once it’s latent in B cells. Most prevention still comes down to the basics, EBV spreads mainly through saliva,
A few EBV vaccine candidates (including mRNA approaches) are now in early human trials. The goal is to prevent primary infection or at least infectious mononucleosis which may also reduce long-term sequelae.
EBV: Almost everyone gets Epstein–Barr virus at some point, and once infected it stays latent for life. What’s getting attention now is the growing evidence linking EBV to multiple sclerosis and several cancers, which is why vaccine development has accelerated.
Even if the immune response is slightly reduced, partial protection early in life is far better than leaving infants unprotected during a very high-risk period.
because maternal measles antibodies can interfere with the vaccine earlier. But for diseases that are particularly dangerous in early infancy like pertussis, pneumococcus, and Hib we start vaccinating at 2 months.
These antibodies gradually wane over the first few months of life. Those maternal antibodies can sometimes blunt vaccine responses, which is why certain vaccines are delayed until later in infancy. A classic example is MMR, which isn’t routinely given until about 12 months,
Maternal antibodies do affect vaccines in humans too but the biology is a bit different from many animals. In humans, most maternal antibodies are transferred through the placenta before birth, so babies already have circulating antibodies when they’re born.
Rapid test can detect flu A and B. They are not perfect
In the clinical trials involving tens of thousands of people and now billions of doses globally, there has been no evidence that COVID vaccines cause ADE. In fact, vaccinated people consistently have lower rates of severe disease, which is the opposite of what ADE would produce.
ADE has been seen with infections like dengue, which is why vaccine developers actively look for it when designing new vaccines. For COVID vaccines, ADE was something scientists looked for very carefully from the beginning bcos it had been a concern in some early coronavirus animal studies yrs ago.
Antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) is a real immunologic phenomenon, but it’s very rare and very specific to certain viruses and vaccine designs. It happens when antibodies bind a virus but fail to neutralize it, potentially helping the virus enter cells.
It’s also important to remember that many respiratory viruses cause “flu-like” symptoms, and most aren’t routinely tested for outside hospitals. Common culprits in the U.S. include rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, parainfluenza viruses, human metapneumovirus, and the seasonal coronaviruses
Rapid flu tests used in many urgent care clinics are helpful but not perfect. The quick antigen tests can miss infections, particularly early in illness or if the viral load is low, so false negatives do happen.
Because measles is one of the most contagious viruses we know, the threshold for herd immunity is very high. Epidemiologic models estimate that about 92–95% of the population needs to be immune (through vaccination or prior infection) to prevent sustained transmission.
Change it if it becomes wet, dirty, or hard to breathe through.
Otherwise, for a single long flight, one mask is usually fine, but many people bring 1–2 spares.
For maximum protection on a plane, the best option is a tight-fitting respirator such as an N95. These are designed to seal closely to the face and filter ≥95% of airborne particles, making them more protective than surgical or cloth masks.
It depends. Cases that require hospitalization are often severe or with complications. Length of stay will vary on the host and their presentation so impossible to provide an arbitrary range. The vaccines prevent measles. That's the surest way to not needing hospitalization for it to begin with.