With time running out in the 2022 congressional session, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers and infectious disease specialists is scrambling to pass a bill aimed at spurring the development of antibiotics to combat the deadly spread of drug-resistant pathogens. The PASTEUR Act, as amended, would provide $6 billion in federal funding over several years to give drugmakers incentive to develop and...
Q&A — Visual neuroscientist Jenny Bosten The way we see and describe hues varies widely for many reasons: from our individual eye structure, to how our brain processes images, to what language we speak, or even if we live near a body of water What color is a tree, or the sky, or a sunset? At first glance, the answers seem obvious. But it turns out there is plenty of variation in how people...
Let’s play a game…I am going to list the diagnoses on the Assessment section of a specialist’s consult note in the order he listed them, and you try to guess the provider’s medical specialty: Paroxysmal atrial fibrillation Coronary artery disease Hypertension GERD Gastric polyps GI bleed Chronic kidney disease Hyperlipidemia Diabetes Hypogonadism Iron deficiency anemia We’re going to pause our...
Recently, The Atlantic published an article by Dr. Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University, titled “Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty.” In the piece, Oster argues that, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we were plagued by a lack of true knowledge about the best way to react to the virus. Consequently, “almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was...
ST. LOUIS — It was not shocking that people listening to musicians covering Grateful Dead and Phish songs in October at a dive bar here would be interested in trying a new drink containing delta-9 THC, the primary psychoactive ingredient in weed. What was unusual was seeing a bar owner — in this case, Pop’s Blue Moon’s Joshua Grigaitis — grab cans of the drink and give them to customers without...
A recent study by Bretthauer, et al, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on October 9, 2022. This study, known as the NordlCC trial, was a randomized control trial from centers in Poland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The 10-year study evaluated the efficacy and safety of colonoscopy, a screening procedure for colon cancer that is considered a gold standard of care...
