What to expect for long-haul flights CLINICAL MATTERS On April 7, 2022, I took a long-delayed trip to Vancouver, Canada as my first international trip in two years. The trip had originally been scheduled in 2020 when I received a senior fellowship at TED. Most people are familiar with TED Talks but...
Understanding XD, XE and XF CLINICAL MATTERS There has been a recent flurry of news articles on the latest twist in the Covid-19 saga—recombinant SARS-CoV-2 viruses. XD and XF, both recombinants of Omicron and Delta, have been unceremoniously dubbed “Deltacron” by the media. XE, a recombinant...
Are yearly shots in the works? CLINICAL MATTERS Do you need a fourth shot? When should you get one? What about a fifth shot? Is this going to be a yearly thing? The resurgence of Covid-19 as a result of breakthrough infections by the variants of concern has tempered expectations on the ability of...
Are we endemic yet? CLINICAL MATTERS Six hundred thousand new Covid-19 cases in one day in South Korea! Nearly 300,000 in Germany! Almost 200,000 in Vietnam! These numbers almost sound made up. Unimaginable. While many people were apoplectic at the nearly 39,000 cases we had in January 2022, the...
Variant Alphabet Soup: Deltacron redux, AY.4/BA.1, BA.2.2 nightmare in Hong Kong, and the truth about BA.2.3 CLINICAL MATTER Deltacron! As if Delta or Omicron wasn’t bad enough on its own, this hodge-podge of a virus is now a thing. Or is it? The initial report of a “Deltacron” virus came...
A fourth dose, boosters for younger kids, masks, and keeping the virus at bay CLINICAL MATTERS It is remarkable how fast people forget and move on to other things when there is a perception that the danger has passed. It was barely two months ago when people were bunkered in their homes as the...
Think about it, chances are high you’d know someone who succumbed to some form of cancer or is a cancer survivor. Whether it be a loved one, family member, friend, co-office worker, or acquaintance, there’ll be someone in your social network who’s had the dreaded big C. That’s just one of...
It’s finally Alert Level 1, and we have vaccines to thank CLINICAL MATTERS The transition to Alert Level 1 has been a long time coming. After one year of the nationwide rollout of vaccines, Covid-19 has been tamed. But we would not have gotten to this point so quickly if not for the...
SPEAKING OUT Ignacio R. Bunye Until recently, my knowledge of Ukraine (Crimea in particular) was limited to what I picked up in high school. My English teacher, who also happened to be my mother, Sofia Rivera Bunye, asked her class to memorize “Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Lord...
Can we now throw away the masks? CLINICAL MATTERS Lockdowns have been a major feature of the pandemic since the first city-wide lockdown in Wuhan. Faced with a novel coronavirus for which there was no pre-existing immunity and no known treatment, the world had little choice but to drastically limit...
Here are the latest medications against COVID-19 CLINICAL MATTERS Try this, it might work! Early in the pandemic, doctors desperate to improve the chances of their patients surviving COVID-19 were willing to use whatever treatment showed some promise. The number of drugs tried as potential...
‘Stealth’ Omicron, a decline in cases, and preventing the next variant CLINICAL MATTERS Whenever new scientific information is released on COVID-19, misinformation isn’t far behind. There are many factors that contribute to this. Scientists being unable to properly communicate their findings...
