In his weekly clinical update, Dr. Griffin discusses how vaccination and vaccine hesitancy affects public health and disease spread in terms of mpox, the first human death from H5N1 in US, why one should not feed their pets raw pet food and the metapneumonia outbreak in China before reviewing the recent statistics on RSV, influenza and SARS-CoV-2 infections, the WasterwaterScan dashboard, where to find PEMGARDA, how nirmatrelvir-ritonavir/Paxlovid reduces adverse outcomes of COVID in patients with kidney disease, provides information for Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s long COVID treatment center, SARS-CoV-2 infection affects skin conditions including shingles and if long antiviral treatment affects long COVID.
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Links for this episode
- Mpox vaccination hesitancy, previous immunisation coverage, and vaccination readiness in the African region (eClincial Medicine)
- Global prevalence and correlates of mpox vaccine acceptance and uptake (Communications Medicine)
- First case of new mpox variant in France (Reuters)
- First “Bird flu” death in US (NY Times)
- Emerging threat of H5N1 to human health (NEJM)
- Don’t feed your pets raw food (County of Los Angeles Public Health)
- Oregon, nationwide raw pet food recall (CIRAP)
- Raw cat food avian flu, is this like raw milk? (CIDRAP)
- Human metapneumovirus surging in China (The Guardian)
- Viral video of viral chaos: human metapneumovirus in Chinese hospital (The Economic Times)
- Human metapneumovirus in China (NY Times)
- Acute respiratory infections including human metapneumovirus in northern hemisphere (WHO)
- Waste water scan for 11 pathogens (WastewaterSCan)
- US respiratory virus activity (CDC Respiratory Illnesses)
- Weekly surveillance report: clift notes (CDC FluView)
- RSV: Waste water scan for 11 pathogens (WastewaterSCan)
- RSV-Network (CDC Respiratory Syncytial virus Infection)
- US respiratory virus activity (CDC Respiratory Illnesses)
- Waste water scan for 11 pathogens (WastewaterSCan)
- COVID-19 deaths (CDC)
- COVID-19 national and regional trends (CDC)
- COVID-19 variant tracker (CDC)
- SARS-CoV-2 genomes galore (Nextstrain)
- Where to get pemgarda (Pemgarda)
- EUA for the pre-exposure prophylaxis of COVID-19 (INVIYD)
- Fusion center near you….if in NY (Prime Fusions)
- CDC Quarantine guidelines (CDC)
- NIH COVID-19 treatment guidelines (NIH)
- Infectious Disease Society guidelines for treatment and management (ID Society)
- Drug interaction checker (University of Liverpool)
- The effect of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir on short- and long-term adverse outcomes from COVID-19 among patients with kidney disease (OFID)
- Paxlovid tied to lower risk of hospital stay, heart problems, death in adults with kidney disease and COVID (CIDRAP)
- Molnupiravir safety and efficacy (JMV)
- Convalescent plasma recommendation for immunocompromised (ID Society)
- What to do when sick with a respiratory virus (CDC)
- When your healthcare provider is infected/exposed with SARS-CoV-2 (CDC)
- Managing healthcare staffing shortages (CDC)
- Steroids, dexamethasone at the right time (OFID)
- Anticoagulation guidelines (hematology.org)
- Daniel Griffin’s evidence based medical practices for long COVID (OFID)
- Long COVID hotline (Columbia : Columbia University Irving Medical Center)
- Chronic urticaria, vitiligo, alopecia areata, and herpes zoster following COVID-19 infection (Journal of Dermatology)
- Impact of extended-course oral nirmatrelvir/ritonavir in established Long COVID:
- (Communications Medicine)
- Letters read on TWiV 1182
- Dr. Griffin’s COVID treatment summary (pdf)
- Timestamps by Jolene. Thanks!
Intro music is by Ronald Jenkees
Send your questions for Dr. Griffin to daniel@microbe.tv
The post TWiV 1182: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin first appeared on This Week in Virology.
Dear TWiV Team,
hereby I want to inform you of a little flaw in your knowledge about Ötzi the iceman.
This summer I visited the museum where Ötzi is stored in a cooling chamber and saw him with my own eyes through a 25×25 square centimeter big window. This museum is in Bolzano, the capitol of South Tyrol, Italy. He is there because he was found in Italy exactly 92.56 meters away from the Austrian border (they resurveyed the border between those to countries to clarify Ötzi’s “nationality”).
So Switzerland was never in the game of being Ötzi’s site of the find .
Here is the link to the museum’s website: http://www.iceman.it/en/node/241
Kind regards and please go onwith your awesome show,
Johannes Schimming
(I remember Kawaoka on TWiV saying he didn’t understand why people still
were
opposed after he had exlained why the research was useful. I didn’t
understand that.)
45:50
As I understand it, the GOF-argument is, that those methods may also be
used by
evildoers to create more dangerous flu-viruses. While those people (Kawaoka
and earlier
also Wimmer’s de-optimization) are doing this for vaccine production, it is
clear that
these methods can also be used to create worse viruses. Evildoers may learn
from it
“mechanistically”, as Vincent would say.
Could they do the research while keeping the results secret ?
Apparently not, the system is not designed for that research.
Maybe the military could do that. You must control and lock up these
researchers
And let me say, that the TWiV team is traditionally biased here.
It’s a controversial discussion and most non-flu scientists are against it
and that’s
why we have the moratorium. So, how likely is it that all TWiVers are soo
clearly
on one and the same side here ? I’m not sure how it started, maybe the
“nasty”
Osterholm discussion, maybe because Palese benefits from GOF-research,
maybe because they are too concerned about the science,research,teaching
community and their funding and too less concerned about the general
public.
It goes more and more into riduculing than debating.
I call it agenda-driven science as opposed to curiosity-driven
science.
You would pick only the evidence that supports you agenda while
ignoring
the contras. You won’t acknowledge and accept any argument of the
other
side and do some weighting of pros and cons.
In my opinion the lab escapes from official lab is not the main argument,
but the danger that others will secretly do the research in less safe
labs
illegally or in countries with laxer regulation.
How do you know that these methods can be used to create ‘worse’ viruses? Worse for whom? Where is the evidence? There is none – it is all threatening, apocalyptic scenarios created by the anti-GOF crowd which can only think of fear.
thanks for replying here. I think open internet discussion
is more productive than the typical debating in conferences
or writing papers or articles. You can rethink,edit,
correct,add links and there is direct feedback and discussion.
I’m missing this in the important GOF-debate, the
main “players” (Osterholm-term) won’t do this.
profvrr wrote:
> How do you know that these methods can be used to
> create ‘worse’ viruses?
> Worse for whom? Where is the evidence? There is none –
> it is all threatening, apocalyptic scenarios created
> by the anti-GOF crowd which can only think of fear.
——————————————————————————–
## I “know” — it seems likely from what we know. (There is
much evidence, I’d bet, that most experts would agree )
## “Worse” — more virulent, more transmissable in humans.
Greater pandemic risk,
## Worse for — mankind, global health, global economy.
## evidence —
We know, that these pandemic flu viruses are out there
in the giant search space of 13000^4 combinations and
are found by nature every ~40 years with an evolutionary
algorithm of point mutation and reassortment,
purely step by step, one at a time.
We know, there are better algorithms for such “problems”
and computers are more powerful than nature for that.
We also know that (many) viruses can be assembled from
just knowing the sequences.
This is becoming ever cheaper and easier.
And we know, that lab-reassortment and passaging can
often create more transmissable better host adapted
and sometime more virulent viruses in the lab,
starting from some other (artificial) virus.
Luckily probably we didn’t yet get pandemic-capable
viruses from that. (so far)
Worse viruses have been created by these methods,
viruses that are being generally (including you, afair)
considered more dangerous than the original,
unmanipulated ones and require higher safety levels.
There is evidence that they are more dangerous,
although they didn’t yet create a pandemic.
There are legal hurdles to fully create these,
so we don’t really know what is currently possible.
There could also be some fundamental problems,
which however I don’t see and which have not
been outlined yet. There is “no evidence” for
fundamental problems using your language.
——————————
## apocalyptic scenarios creaed by the anti-GOF crowd —
I remember how the apocalyptic scenarios were
“created” in 2005f by the “H5N1 crowd”
(WHO,UNO,CDC,Webster,Osterhaus,etc.)
The “GOF-crowd” then just applied it to lab-viruses.
I think that without the H5N1 crowd there may not have
bee an anti-GOF crowd. (too small for a crowd)
======================================
But for a reasonable risk estimate it doesn’t matter
so much which crowd thinks what and how they spread it,
what media and headlines they use.
I’m not happy with the GOF-crowd either, FVR etc.
Both sides in the controversy are party agenda-driven,
they have professional interests un the decision.
How safe current American labs are, what happened
in 1977 or whether GOF-research is useful, that’s
not the main point, IMO.
The main point is estimating the risk created by
current technological non-GOF advances.
———————
## GOF-crowd —
By calling them “crowd”, you presumably want to
compare them with the (uninformed) “anti-vaccine
crowd” (another term used by TWiV) or the
“climate-change-denier-crowd” or such.
But it doesn’t work. There are many reknowned and
accepted scientists, nobel-laureates and such,
in the crowd and indeed most non-flu experts are
reportedly against those GOF-experiments.
Was there a poll collected of researches in related fields? Where are you pulling “most” from. All I’ve seen from the peripheries is a few very vocal folks within the scientific community who’s voices are being amplified by the “IFL Science” and “Raw Story” audiences.
sort of a poll. “Large majority out of 200”. Well, that’s what they say but
apparently the opponents
couldn’t come up with better – or just other – estimates
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2013/03/scientists-seek-ethics-review-h5n1-gain-function-research