Medicine

As we saw during COVID, it's very important that we improve our pharmaceutical manufacturing and medical supply chains here in Canada. I also see this as a reason why an extensive national pharmacare plan is important. Countries that have implemented such programs have been able to negotiate better deals for the drugs by acting as a single unit instead of many smaller provincial and private organizations. Instead of cutting healthcare services, we could stop paying unreasonably high prices on pharmaceuticals.

Finally, maybe it's time that Canada reevaluated some of the IP protections that american pharmaceutical companies get.

Marketing for the new Last of Us season is out of control /s

A fungal superbug called Candida auris is spreading through hospitals and nursing homes at an “alarming rate,” with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently calling it an urgent antimicrobial resistance threat.

Last week, the CDC warned about the increasing threat of Candida auris, also called C. auris, as it not only is highly resistant to multiple antifungal drugs but also can withstand common hospital disinfectants.

“CDC has deemed C. auris as an urgent AR [antimicrobial resistance] threat, because it is often resistant to multiple antifungal drugs, spreads easily in healthcare facilities, and can cause severe infections with high death rates,” the statement read.

This worry extends beyond the U.S.

Since the pathogen was first discovered in Japan in 2009, it has spread worldwide, triggering prolonged and challenging outbreaks in hospitals and long-term care homes, including in Canada.

In January, Public Health Ontario officially labelled the fungal pathogen a “disease of public health significance.” This means it’s now considered a public health risk and needs to be closely monitored, with measures in place to prevent and control its spread.

In his resignation letter, Marks wrote that health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wanted "subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies."

Finasteride — or Propecia, its most popular brand name — was invented by Merck. The pharmaceutical company insists that it's rare for men on the medication to experience side-effects, and has long maintained they vanish once the medication is stopped.

But 25 people interviewed by CBC/Radio Canada during a six-month investigation of finasteride's side-effects tell a different story. They say the drug caused sexual, psychological and physical side-effects for them that have lasted months if not years after they ceased taking the drug.

The men interviewed by CBC/Radio-Canada said their symptoms are debilitating: loss of libido, erectile dysfunction, infertility, cognitive and physical issues, anxiety, insomnia, depression and, in many cases, suicidal ideation.

"It's a complete chemical castration where you have no chemical reaction to anything sexual, anything in life," said Michael, a British Columbia man who says his symptoms have lasted more than 15 years.

"It's important to remember that the majority of patients will not experience permanent symptoms with this type of medication," he said. "The problem is that we don't know which men could develop these symptoms or why."

(emphasis mine)

Since its launch, Propecia's product monograph has mentioned the risk of side-effects such as decreased libido, erectile dysfunction and ejaculation disorder, but states that "the incidence of each of the above side-effects decreased to ≤0.3 per cent by the fifth year of treatment."

In these internal exchanges, however, a Merck scientist calls this safety data "misleading." He points out that to achieve such a low number, his colleagues had excluded all men who had left the studies because of sexual side-effects.

While the company has long claimed that side-effects disappear when users stop the drug, other internal emails suggest some of the clinical trial participants did have persistent adverse effects after cessation.

"Nothing has been reported about these men who developed these persistent side-effects. So we don't know if they ever recovered or not," said Irwig.

'Hospital-associated deconditioning' a preventable catastrophe, research shows

The blue names belong to patients 75 and over who've been identified by triage nurses as at risk of functional decline in the hospital. The longer these patients spend in the ER, the worse their outcomes are likely to be, due to a phenomenon known as hospital-associated deconditioning. It refers to physical and often cognitive decline that happens as a result of being hospitalized.

The geriatric multidisciplinary ER team at St. Mary's targets these patients from the moment they arrive.

I am not a medical professional but I am looking for some professional input on this topic, so I hope it's ok for me to post the following here.

Grist is a magazine that I have followed for some time now and I appreciate a lot its content. In an article published in January 2025 that I started reading, it said the following:

In Fukushima, nobody died of radiation. Nobody will die of radiation. This is the scientific consensus on Fukushima: There’s no discernible increase in cancer or in birth defects or heart attacks or deformities in coming generations. 

Let's just focus on cancer, more specifically on thyroid cancer. Taking into consideration that the Fukushima accident was in 2011, I find this statement about cancer to be bold (even tho the survival stats for thyroid cancer are very high), and perhaps misleading because they linked a 2016 WHO Q&A to back this claim. To my understanding, _after exposure [to ionizing radiation], the minimum latency period before the appearance of thyroid cancers is 5 to 10 years_. So I thought of digging a bit deeper.

I found a UN report from 2020/2021 and it says something quite different (brochure, Report Vol. I, Report Vol. II): that there was an actual increase of thyroid cancer but it was concluded that this was not related to the nuclear accident, but it was due to intensive screening. From the brochure:

Although a substantial number of thyroid cancers have been detected among exposed children, the Committee believes that, on the balance of available evidence, the (relative to expected) large increase in thyroid cancers is the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously recognized, and is not a result of radiation exposure.

According an article published in Februray 2025, and if I got this right, in the actual report (Vol. II) they exclusively used the Fukushima Health Management Survey (FHMS) which only followed up with people that were examined in 2011, and did not use the national and local cancer registries (CRs) to detect new patients in the years that followed. This sounds to me like the screenings were actually not extensive enough -- which is kind of the opposite to the ultrasensitive screening procedures claimed in the UN brochure.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first use of merged data from the CR and FHMS registries to evaluate the detection of thyroid cancer in Fukushima Prefecture. Merging of data from these registries was necessary to more fully capture the thyroid cancer cases after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. The NCR [National Cancer Registry], established in 2016, is more precise in capturing cancer cases compared to the local CRs, and it needs further development to become more precise.

It seems to me that the numbers of thyroid cancer in Fukushima have been downplayed. That said, I do acknowledge that since this is not my field and english is not my first language, I could be totally wrong. This is why I thought of sharing this rabbit hole I fell into here, because you would have a better understanding of this topic. So, please, let me know what you think, and if you have relevant links to share, I will totally appreciate them.

And thank you for taking the time to read this!

We’re a team of biohackers with a variety of backgrounds, and skills, and relationships to insulin and diabetes, from many cities and countries around the world, including Oakland, California; Baltimore, Maryland; Paraiba, Brazil; Paris, France; Dakar, Senegal; Yaounde, Cameroon; and Puerto Rico. We’re working to develop the first practical, small-scale, community-centered model for insulin production to make insulin accessible to all. This model will ensure communities in need have local sources of safe, affordable, high-quality insulin, and that people living with diabetes and their communities own and govern the organizations that produce the medicine they depend on to survive.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30806932

Archived

One of the patients said she was admitted to the hospital for an abortion at seven weeks of pregnancy. She was told she would receive local anesthesia, but the medication failed to take effect. Though she immediately informed the doctor, obstetrics and gynecology specialist Mikhail Kurnosikov — who also serves as the hospital’s chief physician — that she was in “searing, unbearable pain,” he ignored her agony and continued the procedure, she said.

“He told me, ‘That’s what you deserve. Next time, you’ll know better than to get an abortion,’” she recalled. “I was in shock from the pain for a full hour afterward.”

The other woman told Dozhd that she was admitted to the same hospital in 2018 for a gynecological surgery. “Normally, they administer anesthesia and wait for it to take effect. In my case, everything happened very quickly. But when it started, I thought I was going to black out from the pain,” she said. The woman said she only realized she hadn’t been given any local anesthesia after she was later readmitted. “I went through the entire procedure fully conscious, feeling everything,” she said.

When Dozhd reached Kurnosikov for comment, the doctor first asked the reporter where she was calling from. Upon hearing she was in the Netherlands, he refused to discuss the allegations. “We don’t talk to Nazi subjects,” he said.

Speaking to the Russian news outlet Podyom, Kurnosikov denied any wrongdoing. “Everything was done in strict accordance with the law,” he said, dismissing the allegations as harassment. “This is a smear campaign. It’s just foreign agents writing this. It’s a targeted attack from abroad.”

[...]

My first memorable experience with vaccines happened when I was in grammar school. For several summers, my mother worried that I would acquire polio at my swimming lessons. In the 1950s, more than 15 000 individuals developed paralytic polio each year in the US, some died, and a number were left with severe complications.1 Everyone knew someone who had contracted polio. For me, it was my classmate’s brother who had polio-related hypoxia and was left with lifelong disabilities. To support vaccine development, I filled March of Dimes cards and solicited my neighbors to do the same. I recall going to my grade school on Sunday with hundreds of others to receive a sugar cube containing live attenuated oral polio vaccine. Everyone was eager to be vaccinated. At a young age, I realized the power of prevention when the disease disappeared with widespread vaccination. That science could be publicly supported and conquer contagion was an early lesson for me.

El Pais paywall can be removed via reader mode in your browser.

A 70 old diabetic man presented with multiple profuse urination. He describes that every time he finishes his toilet, he has the same desire to urinate with a large amount.
What is the most likely cause?
A. Cystitis
B. Detrusor overactivity
C. Bladder diverticulum
D. Underactive bladder
E. Bladder outlet obstruction
#MRCS @admin @medicine

Most important structure for the cough reflex? @[email protected]

Oropharynx, Larynx, Carina, Bronchi,