Skip to main content

A little view of the climate and the other blog! And yay, Covid drugs!

 

I've been writing a few things about the climate at the other place, https://doctorjanicesblog.org/. Just thought I'd mirror those here. Since I last mentioned the climate in this blog, there have been catastrophic floods in the Northwest and record high temperatures in the east coast. The area of South Sudan where I have spent time teaching ultrasound and helping out a bit in a hospital serving internally displaced people remains flooded. For most of a year now there have been no safe places to sleep in the land near Old Fangak, other than those protected by mud dikes and sandbags. So not safe, actually, at all. Gardens are flooded. Roads are rivers. I see photos and I don't recognize the place. I can only barely imagine what it must be like to be trying to live there. Flooding is normal in the rainy season, but never persisting through the dry season like this. The climate continues to change and the results are unpredictable and often tragic. I have been writing a bit about it.

1. This first one is about a climate bank, part of a bill in Congress, who knows whether it will pan out, but the concept is definitely great.

2. The next one is about Carbon Fee and Dividend, the basis of proposed legislation, in which taxing carbon pollution uses the free market system to encourage switching to renewable energy.

3. This one is about methane, and why we need to limit its release into the atmosphere. Methane sounds innocuous when we call it "natural gas." Kind of like "natural food" except not.

4. Today's offering, about the FOREST act which has a chance of passing in congress since it has bipartisan support. It fights worldwide deforestation.

On the subject of medicine, I'm very excited about the introduction of two antiviral medications for Covid. Molnupiravir (named after the hammer of Thor, initially intended for influenza) inhibits a polymerase enzyme to create destructive mutations in coronavirus. Paxlovid combines a protease inhibitor, ritonavir, originally use in the treatment of HIV and another protease inhibitor more specific for Covid 19. This combination drug helps limit the viruses ability to replicate itself. Having effective drugs, especially ones that may be synergistically effective if combined, gives me hope. The fact that the government has been subsidizing medication related to Covid makes me believe that their newness may not price most people out of the market. New drugs are usually unaffordable, but the need to make these globally available may mean that they do not go through the usual multi-year period in which nobody without gold plated health insurance can afford them. Vaccination helps prevent infection and severe disease but we also need medication to treat infections that break through our immunity.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to make your own ultrasound gel (which is also sterile and edible and environmentally friendly) **UPDATED--NEW RECIPE**

I have been doing lots of bedside ultrasound lately and realized how useful it would be in areas far off the beaten track like Haiti, for instance. With a bedside ultrasound (mine fits in my pocket) I could diagnose heart disease, kidney and gallbladder problems, various cancers as well as lung and intestinal diseases. Then I realized that I would have to take a whole bunch of ultrasound gel with me which would mean that I would have to check luggage, which is a real pain when traveling light to a place where luggage disappears. I heard that you can use water, or spit, in a pinch, or even lotion, though oil based coupling media apparently break down the surface of the transducer. Or, of course, you can just use ultrasound gel. Ultrasound requires an aqueous interface between the transducer and the skin or else all you see is black. Ultrasound gel is a clear goo, looks like hair gel or aloe vera, and is made by several companies out of various combinations of propylene glycol, glyce...

Ivermectin for Covid--Does it work? We don't know.

  Lately there has been quite a heated controversy about whether to use ivermectin for Covid-19.  The FDA , a US federal agency responsible for providing unbiased information to protect people from harmful drugs, foods, even tobacco products, has said that there is not good evidence of ivermectin's safety and effectiveness in treating Covid 19, and that just about sums up what we truly know about ivermectin in the context of Covid. The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, a branch of the department of Health and Human Services, tasked with preventing and treating disease and injury, also recently warned  people not to use ivermectin to treat Covid outside of actual clinical trials. Certain highly qualified physicians, including ones who practice critical care medicine and manage many patients with severe Covid infections in the intensive care unit vocally support the use of ivermectin to treat Covid and have published dosing schedules and reviews of the literature supporting...

Actinic Keratoses and Carac (fluorouracil) cream: why is this so expensive?

First, a disclaimer: I don't know why Carac (0.5% flourouracil cream) is so expensive. I will speculate, though, at the very end of this blog. Sun and the skin: what happens If a person reaches a certain age, has very little pigment in her skin, and has spent lots of time in the sun, bad stuff happens. The ultraviolet radiation of the sun does all kinds of great things: it makes us happy, causes us to synthesize vitamin D which strengthens our bones and it gives us this healthy glow until we get old and wrinkled and leathery. And even that can be charming. The skin cells put up with this remarkably well for a long time, partly aided by melanin pigment which absorbs the radiation, which is why we tan and freckle, if we are fair skinned. Eventually, though, we absorb enough radiation that it injures the skin and produces cells which multiply oddly. It also damages the skin's elasticity which creates wrinkles. The cells which reproduce in odd ways peel, creating dry skin or...