Month: August 2021

She immediately sent an email to Bicket, telling the doctor that she was going to stop that medication and just use the others. Maybe it was this medicine that was causing the photophobia, the eye dryness and now the burning. “I’m fine with any short-term IOP-drop experiment you’d like to run,” Bicket wrote back. But the symptoms the patient was having didn’t match the usual side-effect profile of any of the medications she was using. There was another possibility, Bicket added: Maybe it’s not any single drop, but all of them. They all contain a preservative called benzalkonium chloride (BAK). “If that is what you don’t tolerate,” Bicket wrote, “stopping one agent vs. another won’t help.” The patient decided to stop them all, she wrote to Bicket. It was a risky action, because the drop...

More than 615,000 Americans have died during this life-changing pandemic. In recent weeks, the delta variant of the coronavirus has led to a dramatic increase in infections, hospitalizations and deaths. Even with the widespread availability of vaccines, we have not been smart enough, determined enough or strong enough to finally defeat this public emergency. If we could successfully put a man on the moon 50 years ago, surely we can figure out how to eradicate this virus. But we have not.  The first vaccine was rolled out last December. Two more were available soon thereafter. Yet just 50% of all Americans are fully vaccinated as of now. This fact is both alarming and tragic. It is alarming because Americans do not seem to understand the importance of immunization in defeating the coronavi...

Emergency services strained in Pinellas County Dan Matics reports ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - At least one hospital in Pinellas County has made an emergency request for ventilators as hospitals are overrun by COVID-19 patients.  Pinellas County leaders say emergency systems are stretched very thin due to the spike in COVID-19 cases caused by the rapid spread of the delta variant.  Hospitals are also seeing a shortage of ICU beds, officials said Tuesday.  Pinellas County EMS medical director Dr. Angus Jameson says this week brings the highest level of hospitalizations they’ve seen during the last year and a half.    As of Tuesday morning,16% of people who take a COVID-19 test in Pinellas County are testing positive for the virus. Me...

In a leaked report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made a surprising claim about the delta variant of the coronavirus: It "is as transmissible as: - Chicken Pox," the agency wrote in a slideshow presentation leaked to the Washington Post on July 26. Chickenpox is one of the most contagious viruses known. Each individual can spread the virus to as many as "90% of the people close to that person," the CDC reports. Is the delta variant that contagious as well? The short answer is, "No," says evolutionary biologist and biostatician Tom Wenseleers at the University of Leuven "Yeah, I didn't find the CDC's statement entirely accurate," says Wenseleers, who was one of the first scientists to formally calculate the transmission advantage of the ...