Cyclospora, a COVID Injury Table, and SSRIs - Gistr Blog

We covered a lot of ground this past week, from a detective-themed look at why perimenopause hormone labs so often read “normal” when you feel terrible, to medical stigma , to a rise in poison control calls involving Benadryl among teens, to a Substack addressing the viral COVID vaccine turbo cancer myth. All of it is worth reading up on, so be sure to check out our socials , but we picked three to highlight here: Cyclospora, the COVID vaccine injury table, and SSRIs. Let’s discuss! The Michigan cyclospora outbreak keeps growing, and we have a lead on the source If you follow us on Instagram, you saw our carousel about this outbreak when Michigan was climbing toward 1,000 cases. It’s kept climbing. The outbreak has now grown past 3,300 cases in Michigan alone and over 5,000 across the country . That’s staggering for a state that normally logs about 50 cyclospora cases in a whole year. There have been dozens of hospitalizations and no deaths, and Michigan is updating its numbers regularly if you want to follow along. The 3 Steps to Commitment 00:00 03:23 Cyclospora turns up every summer, and the US typically logs thousands of cases a year, so many states are still within their usual seasonal range. New York is one of them. It has one of the higher case counts in the country, but its health department says that’s close to normal for New York this time of year. The unusual surge is concentrated mainly in Michigan. Ohio and Illinois are also seeing counts state officials call higher than normal. There’s also a lag to factor in. Symptoms can take up to two weeks to appear, about a week on average, so the counts we’re seeing now probably trail the actual number of infections. The big update since our post is that investigators have a lead. More than a thousand patient interviews keep pointing to lettuce or salad greens as the likely source, though no specific variety, grower, or supplier has been named, and other foods aren’t fully ruled out. Traceback is slow with cyclospora, partly because that two-week lag makes it hard for anyone to remember what they ate. A few practical things. The symptom to watch for is watery diarrhea, often explosive, usually about a week after exposure. It’s treatable with a specific antibiotic , but cyclospora doesn’t show up on many routine stool panels, so a clinician has to order testing for it by name. You also can’t catch it from another person, so isolating from a sick family member won’t protect you here. The exposure already happened, through food or drink. HHS is proposing a COVID vaccine injury table Here's what you need to know about the HHS proposal for a COVID-19 vaccine injury table. What's Being Proposed HHS is moving forward with a rule that would create an official list of injuries presumed to be caused by COVID-19 vaccines. The proposal is slated for November, with a public comment period extending into early 2027. Two Different Compensation Programs This is where it gets important to distinguish. COVID-19 vaccines were never part of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) — the no-fault trust fund most people think of for vaccine injuries. Instead, they fall under a separate emergency program called the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) , created under the PREP Act. An injury table works by presuming causation : anything on the list is treated as caused by the vaccine without the claimant having to prove it case by case. The Track Record of CICP The concern here is rooted in history. CICP has been notably stingy with payouts: Only about 60 COVID claims have been paid The median award was around $4,000 Roughly 99% of applications were rejected The Core Tension A properly constructed injury table isn't a bad thing. Myocarditis after mRNA vaccines, for instance, is a real and documented adverse event, particularly in young men (though it's more common and more severe after actually catching COVID). Fair, fast compensation for genuine vaccine injuries is something the public health community has supported for years. The worry is about what kind of table gets built. Secretary Kennedy has publicly called the COVID vaccine "the deadliest vaccine ever made" — a claim that is false. An overly broad, poorly constructed table could function as a government-stamped list that people point to as proof the vaccines are dangerous, eroding public confidence and fueling litigation. As the article puts it: vaccines don't have to be outlawed to disappear. They just have to become too costly and too legally risky to keep making. What to Watch The two things to keep an eye on are: what actually goes on the table , and how the causation piece gets explained to the public . A scientifically sound table that provides fair compensation is one thing. A broad one weaponized to undermine vaccine confidence would be a very different story. Would you like me to dive deeper into the specifics of how the CICP and VICP differ, or look into the myocarditis data that's likely to be central to this table? Immigrant's Dilemma, Identity Crisis 00:00 02:32 Unbiased Scientists in the Wild A little spotlight on our team out doing their own thing. Go read them, go follow them. Dr. Leigh Baxt, our resident translational science and drug development guru, keeps chipping away at the evidence, or lack of it, behind the peptide craze. Her Instagram is full of clear, no-hype breakdowns. A big shoutout to Dr. Sarah Berg, who dreamed up this week’s hormone lab work post . We love the creativity! Sarah is also speaking at a virtual congressional briefing on, you guessed it, menopause. It’s called The Menopause Policy Imperative: Shaping the Future of Women’s Health, hosted by Women’s Health Advocates on Thursday, July 23 at 12PM ET, and you can register here . Achievement vs. The Art of Fulfillment 00:00 08:47 Due to the open-ended and explorative nature of our research questions, we conducted semi-structured interviews (Adams, 2015; Gudkova, 2018) with developers, architects, and management roles directly working on MSA or similar loosely coupled systems. The semistructured format enabled the participants to express their thoughts freely and provided us the opportunity to ask follow-up questions and discuss emerging topics ad-hoc while maintaining the desired dialogue direction. This allowed us to not only learn about applied strategies and encountered challenges individually b 1-s2.0-s0164121224001559-main.pdf Generate Document Document Microservice API Evolution in Practice Strategies and Challenges If you’d like to support this work, please consider a tax-deductible donation to The Center for Unbiased Science and Health (CUSH), our nonprofit that funds educational initiatives like this one. / If you would like to support this work, please consider a tax-deductible donation to the Center of Unbiased Science and Faith, a nonprofit that funds educational initiatives like this one.

Cyclospora, a COVID Injury Table, and SSRIs - Gistr Blog

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Cyclospora, a COVID Injury Table, and SSRIs - Gistr Blog

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