Public Health

There is concern about US states making their own abortion laws in the US, but in Germany most abortion is illegal. It is only allowed for medical or criminal reasons within 12 weeks of conception, and lack of body autonomy may be why most Germans are fine with mandatory COVID-19 vaccines. In a perfect world, people would simply get the vaccine, but there are reasons some will not, even if they have opposed no other vaccines. Thomas Rieger and Carsten Schröder from the German Institute for Economic Research, Berlin, together with Christoph Schmidt-Petri from the Karlsruhe Institute of…

Hot on the heels of COVID-19, Monkeypox is in the news for an alarming spread among people who engage in risky sexual behavior, because it is transmitted primarily through direct contact with infectious sores, scabs, or body fluids. Healthcare professionals, particularly those in general practice, gastroenterology, and colorectal surgery, are going to need to discuss sexual behavior to make patients better informed. A new analysis of survey results finds that applies to young heterosexual women as well. Surgeons Tabitha Gana and Lesley Hunt argue that physicians“have a duty to acknowledge…

WNBA star Brittney Griner is in a Russian jail because the laws of the country you enter no matter what country you live in. A visitor to the US with banned substances is going to jail the same way. Yet to many Americans, what she had is no problem. She was not smuggling drugs, she had cannabis oil used for vaping. In that, she is hardy alone. Much like medical marijuana prescriptions were overwhelmingly obtained by young men while pain prescriptions are overwhelmingly for older women, there is a clear demographic who take up vaping for the cannabis, not to quit smoking or reduce harm by…

Vaping devices, e.g. the unfortunately named e-cigarettes, were a valuable tool for smoking cessation and harm reduction, with better results in ending smoking than nicotine patches and gums. Then suddenly they were everywhere, a market so large that a tobacco company whose primary business was cigarettes spent billions for a small stake in Juul, which had become the leader in vaping products. Now they have written 90 percent of that investment down because it turns out that while nicotine is addictive, vaping never had the 'cool' factor of cigarettes. Cigarettes were boosted in culture by…

There is some produce advice coming from the activist camp yet again, but what they are selling is rotten. A recent paper senior authored by famed organic industry proponent Dr. Michael N. Antoniou raised an alarm about insecticide and herbicide residues found in the fecal microbiome of 65 twins in the United Kingdom. The big problem with it is that it preys on modern science journalists not knowing that dose matters. Any detection of any chemical that can kill a rat at high doses is correlated to pathology in humans, despite that being nothing close to reality. Every credible toxicologist,…

Seeing a doctor can be crucial to managing and preventing chronic disease but there has long been a racial gap in routine visits that can't be explained by racism or income.  Maybe people didn't like like going to the doctor because the COVID-19 pandemic caused use of telemedicine to rise sharply, and as that happened gaps in visits disappeared for black patients at Penn Medicine.  Once “normal” in-office appointments returned, previous inequities stayed erased, indicating that telemedicine wasn’t just a stopgap solution but a potential long-term tool for equity.  COVID-19’s…

Though nearly everyone recognizes that smoking cigarettes is a known carcinogen, many marijuana users think marijuana smoke is safe. They may not realize it is inhaling the smoke, not that the smoke is from one plant or another, that is the worry. Nicotine or THC is as harmless as caffeine, but when combusted in a leaf with paper and inhaled, everything becomes harmful. Including marijuana plants. A new observational paper is concerned that 27 percent of marjuana users think secondhand marijuana smoke is safe, and while there is a popular belief that secondhand smoke is a carcinogen just like…

"Live cold, die old" may soon become folk wisdom if a new study holds up in mice is true for people. Most of us have heard some form of the phrase "live fast, die young" and take it to mean reckless behavior leads to premature death. It certainly does in epidemiology but in science it means that animals with high metabolic rates ("living fast") tend to die sooner than those with slow metabolism. They burn out rather than fade away. Some experiments have used that to increase longevity. Mice weaned on a starvation diet, for example, live longer, but that is a human rights violation in people.…

A small pilot study has concluded that even one night of exposure to moderate room lighting during sleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation. In the experiment, 10 people slept for one night in dim light followed by one night with overhead room lighting while another 10 slept for two nights in dim light. Poor sleep is correlated to risk factors like higher insulin and heart rate. Yet more people are being told they should live in cities and in apartments to conserve resources, which means more light pollution. Tablets and televisions are common. The authors say the presence of…

Though there are examples of fit older men, they are the exception, just as attractive young people are the exception. Yet in youth people just accept that, while in middle age men seem to take it more to heart, lowering their feelings of self-worth. In youth, attractiveness can be dismissed as genetics. Later on it becomes inevitable due to age. Some of the despondency is due to media claims about health. Body Mass Index, BMI, is a good population level look for a health proxy but it has no clinical relevance, yet diet claims and journalists still use it as if it were a scientific…