Public Health

Here is Dr Tedros demonstrating how to wash your hands for COVID-19 protection in the "Safe Hands" challenge (click to watch on Youtube) He is challenging others to do the same and upload videos of themselves doing it. It may seem daunting at first - but humans are really good at learning sequences of events - do it a few times and it soon becomes automatic and you just do it as a habitual pattern not a remembered sequence. Make sure you include all the steps - there are videos on YouTube that leave out some of them. Might as well learn it properly. It has 11 steps to thoroughly wash every…

With coronavirus all over media and politicians looking for ways to leverage concern into votes for their political party this November, a number of parents will want to take their children to a doctor at the first sign of a cough "just to be sure" and doctors say that's a bad idea. It burdens a health system that could be overtaxed if aggressive projections about the impact of COVID-19 come true. Those parents are not being rational, doctors will note, most kids will not be harmed by it any more than they would a bad cold or flu, and yet the American medical system is overrun by "defensive…

Please share this widely, to put pressure on UK to go back to the contain phase for COVIDー19, and potentially save thousands of lives: Many in the UK have been scared and appalled by Boris Johnson’s statement that “many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.” Distinguished experts are also shocked and outraged by the UK's decision to stop containing COVID-19, stop detecting mild cases, and just use social distancing to delay it as it spreads through our population. If you live in the UK and follow the mainstream media here, you may not be aware that the WHO's advice…

After the outbreak in China of the COVID-19 virus, Italy has fallen in the middle of the most acute sanitary emergency we ever experienced in a long while. And what's worse, other countries are sadly joining it. As I write this piece, over 15,000 Italians have tested positive to the virus, and over 1000 have already died. Based on very convincing analysis of data from China, we know that the real number of cases is higher by at least a factor 20, if not 100. In these conditions, individuals have to protect themselves and help reduce the spread of the virus with all possible means - most…

If you are experiencing symptoms such as fatigue, nausea, dizziness, decreased energy, feeling faint and heartbeat alterations after starting the fad keto diet, you may not have coronavirus or influenza, it may just be the diet. These are low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets which result in elevated levels of ketones in the blood. A Frontiers in Nutrition study reports that symptoms peak in the first 7 days but dwindle after four weeks. Severity is a wide range because the data are anecdotal, much like the claims of health benefits. Benefits of the keto diet are only found for intractable…

The WHO have said many times that governments can stop this disease by containing the virus swiftly and aggressively. Their most recent statement was the most blunt yet. They declared a pandemic, but one that we can stop. They said the question is not whether we can, but whether we will. Many governments have demonstrated this by doing it, including China, South Korea and Singapore. As Dr Tedros, Director General of the WHO put it: The challenge for many countries who are now dealing with large clusters or community transmission is not whether they can do the same – it’s whether they will.…

Summary: This declaration of a pandemic does not mean that we should say the fight is over - that would lead to unnecessary suffering and death. With every press conference, the WHO have called on countries to take urgent and aggressive action and this hasn’t changed. More than 90% of the cases are in just four countries (Iran, Italy, SK and China). Two of those four countries have significantly declining cases (South Korea and China) 81 countries have no cases yet, and 57 have 10 or less. All countries can still turn the tide on this virus, even ones with community transmission or large…

A new paper tries to "suggest" that a silent killer may be among us - particulate matter so tiny you need an electron microscope to detect it, left behind on furniture by smokers who sat there at some point in the past. Even movie theater seats. And then vapers may be doing the same thing, with nicotine. This particulate matter, inference goes, jumps from their bodies onto seats, where it waits for you to perch, then leaps onto your body, worms its way through your skin, enters your organs, bioaccumulates, and causes cancer. Of course, it's all epidemiological nonsense with no plausible…

There could be a lot more COVID-19 cases than the 164 instances CDC lists, even up to 9,000 in the U.S., but even that would not be reason for alarm. No, I am not MSNBC's Brian Williams or Mara Gay of the New York Times and unable to do basic arithmetic (or willing to believe crap on Twitter), it could be 9,000, according to the high end of a Cedars-Sinai esimate published in a preprint. And that actually ain't bad. In an average year, 12,000 Americans will die from the flu but in the 2017-2018 flu season that shot up to 60,000, and 45,000,000 were infected.  That was bad. It puts a…

Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) devices are often prescribed for home use to patients with obstructive sleep apnea, a condition where an individual’s airway becomes blocked during sleep causing breathing to intermittently stop and start. CPAP devices use air pressure to keep airways open during sleep. Since 2017, the U.S Food and Drug Administration has received 11 reports of patients experiencing cough, difficult breathing, nasal irritation, headaches, asthma attacks and other breathing complaints when ozone gas-based products were used to clean, sanitize or disinfect CPAP devices…