The FDA used to have a laboratory located at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2014, they moved it to consolidate with other FDA facilities nearby. Because these are reasonably careful and conscientious people, they conducted a formal clean-up before they moved, and during that process they found 327 vials of unclaimed samples of viruses “inside cardboard boxes stored in the back left corner of an FDA laboratory’s cold storage room.” Six of them contained smallpox, one contained Russian spring-summer viral encephalitis (the subject of previous lab accidents), and nine had labels that couldn’t be read.
Category: COVID-19 and Public Health
Wednesday Links
- A congressional bill to codify Roe: abortion rights groups can’t stand it.
- Life expectancy declined in every state in 2020.
- State with the longest life expectancy: Hawaii.
- Sometimes it’s better to forget your health insurance and pay cash.
- Electric shock therapy that seems to work.
- More on the idea that if you grow up poor it pays to have rich friends.
- WSJ editors slam Fauci.
Tuesday Links
- What Noble Laureate gene editors don’t seem to want to talk about: can they change the evolution of the human race?
- Eye hospital travels from place to place – inside an airplane.
- How could Pickleball (a wimpy sport in my view) be sending so many people to the ER?
- Your pharmacist can now prescribe Paxlovid. But does Paxlovid work if you have already been vaccinated? and How did the FDA get the power to decide who can prescribe?
- Monkeypox: Trump secured the right to 13 million vaccine doses and ordered 1.4 million for emergency use in 2020. So why are all those doses being stockpiled in Washington?
Mosquitoes Have a Plethora of Ways to Hunt Humans
An article in The Atlantic delivers some bad news. The damage done by mosquitoes is immense and they’re not easy to stop.
The insects’ infatuation with us is costly: By way of the many, many deadly pathogens they carry, mosquitoes kill more people than any other animal on Earth does (except, well, us).
It turns out that mosquitoes are complex creatures that track us in numerous ways.