A press release earlier today from Pfizer – details to be released in study form soon – claims that their Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was “highly effective” in a trial in more than 2,000 adolescents. Which is a major under-statement, I think, since there were no infections in the group of adolescents who received the vaccine […]
Even if you know it’s a placebo. In a very interesting randomized study by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in the US and published in the journal PAIN, nearly three-quarters of people with moderate to severe irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) who got a placebo still reported “clinically meaningful improvements in their IBS symptoms”, […]
This new analysis of data from the UK which was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open will surprise very few people because this has has been widely shared before, but still, this new study’s conclusions bear repeating: Several chronic medical conditions (medicalese refers to these as co-morbidities) such […]
Some days, tens of thousands. So why is BC not vaccinating 24/7 to try to slow down the spread of these variants? Bad planning ? I can’t really think of another reason. Can anyone?
In a real-world setting during which there was a large uptick in COVID-19 cases in the area, researchers who looked at data on health care workers who received over 36,000 first doses and 28,000 second doses in southern California determined that the risk of infection afterwards was very low, although it was not zero. In […]
We no longer refer to diabetics – they are people with diabetes, and asthmatics are of course persons with asthma. And as a celiac, I haven’t seen this anywhere as yet but I presume that I am now a person with celiac disease as opposed to a simple celiac. So I was not surprised just […]
A study from Boston-area researchers which was just published online in the journal, Open Forum Infectious Disease, has concluded that our keep-safe lifestyle practices to avoid coming down with COVID-19 – mainly wearing masks and practicing physical distancing – led to an approximate 80 % decrease in the rates of common respiratory viral infections, such as […]
Israel offers you a sobering 2nd thought. Israel is, of course, the country with by far the largest proportion of its citizens vaccinated against COVID-19. The good news from that fast mass vaccination program is that serious infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19 have dropped dramatically in Israel, especially among seniors and the most vulnerable. […]
To be perfectly blunt, no one really knows yet how many people who pick up a COVID-19 infection actually develop symptoms, although the usual best guesses are somewhere between 40 and 50 %. Well, those best guesses might be very wrong. According to a recent study on roughly 10,000 residents in Wuhan which was published […]
Which they do because they’ve become convinced that hard workouts are the key to better health not to mention to a longer life as well. Well, maybe not. According to a recent study of a 4-week program comparing hard workouts with more relaxed exercising, the researchers concluded that the hard workouts actually led to worse […]