Category: Health

DNA Evidence Supports John Locke’s Vacuum Domicilium Argument for Europeans Claiming New World Land Ownership

(p. A21) The population size of “pre-contact” Hispaniola . . . [is] a contested issue until the present day, not least because of its profound emotional and moral resonance in light of the destruction of that world. Modern scholars have generally estimated the population at 250,000 to a million people.

Some of the arguments for large population numbers in the pre-contact Americas have been motivated by an attempt to counter a myth, perpetuated by apologists for colonialism like the philosopher John Locke, that the Americas were a vast “vacuum domicilium,” or empty dwelling, populated by a handful of Indigenous groups whose displacement could be readily justified. In a similar vein, some of the arguments for large population sizes have been motivated by a desire to underscore how disastrous the arrival of Europeans was for Indigenous people.

By any measure, the arrival of Europeans was catastrophic for Indigenous Americans. This is true whether the numbers of people were in the hundreds of thousands or millions — or for that matter, the tens of thousands. It is questionable to pin our judgments of human atrocities to a specific number. To learn from the past, it is crucial to be willing to accept new and compelling data when they become available.

In the case of the pre-contact population of Hispaniola, such data have arrived. By analyzing the DNA of ancient Indigenous Caribbean people, a study published in Nature on Wednesday [Dec. 16, 2020] by one of us (Professor Reich) makes clear that the population of Hispaniola was no more than a few tens of thousands of people. Almost all prior estimates have been at least tenfold too large.

. . .

The finding about the pre-contact population size in Hispaniola was made possible by a new scientific advance: We are now able to detect “DNA cousins” in ancient genomes — taking two people and determining whether they share large segments of DNA inherited from a recent ancestor. This is similar to what personal ancestry companies like 23andMe and Ancestry do with living people.

When the Reich team applied this method to 91 ancient individuals for whom it had sequenced enough of the genome to carry out this analysis, it found 19 pairs of DNA cousins living on different large islands or island groups in the Caribbean: for example, an individual in Hispaniola with a cousin in the Bahamas, and another individual in Hispaniola with a cousin in Puerto Rico. This meant that the entire population had to be very small; you wouldn’t find that random pairs of people had such a high probability of being closely related if the entire population was large.

For the full commentary, see:

David Reich and Orlando Patterson. “DNA Rewrites the Telling of the Caribbean’s Past.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 12, 2020): A21.

(Note: ellipses, bracketed word, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 23, 2020, and has the title “Ancient DNA Is Changing How We Think About the Caribbean.”)

The paper in Nature mentioned above is:

Fernandes, Daniel M., Kendra A. Sirak, Harald Ringbauer, Jakob Sedig, Nadin Rohland, Olivia Cheronet, Matthew Mah, Swapan Mallick, Iñigo Olalde, Brendan J. Culleton, Nicole Adamski, Rebecca Bernardos, Guillermo Bravo, Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht, Kimberly Callan, Francesca Candilio, Lea Demetz, Kellie Sara Duffett Carlson, Laurie Eccles, Suzanne Freilich, Richard J. George, Ann Marie Lawson, Kirsten Mandl, Fabio Marzaioli, Weston C. McCool, Jonas Oppenheimer, Kadir T. Özdogan, Constanze Schattke, Ryan Schmidt, Kristin Stewardson, Filippo Terrasi, Fatma Zalzala, Carlos Arredondo Antúnez, Ercilio Vento Canosa, Roger Colten, Andrea Cucina, Francesco Genchi, Claudia Kraan, Francesco La Pastina, Michaela Lucci, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, Beatriz Marcheco-Teruel, Clenis Tavarez Maria, Christian Martínez, Ingeborg París, Michael Pateman, Tanya M. Simms, Carlos Garcia Sivoli, Miguel Vilar, Douglas J. Kennett, William F. Keegan, Alfredo Coppa, Mark Lipson, Ron Pinhasi, and David Reich. “A Genetic History of the Pre-Contact Caribbean.” Nature 590, no. 7844 (Feb. 4, 2021): 103-10.

Lack of Competition Allows Carlsbad Medical Center to Sue Thousands of Patients

(p. D1) An examination of court records by The New York Times found almost 3,000 lawsuits filed by Carlsbad Medical Center against patients over medical debt since 2015, more than 500 of them through August of this year alone. Few hospitals sue so many patients so often.

. . .

Carlsbad Medical Center is not the only hospital to have filed reams of lawsuits over unpaid bills. In Memphis, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, a nonprofit hospital, filed 8,300 lawsuits from 2014 through 2018, including some against its own em-(p. D6)ployees, according to an investigation by the journalism nonprofit groups ProPublica and MLK50.

. . .

People across the country are coping with soaring medical costs, opaque pricing and surprise bills, but these issues are felt acutely in one-hospital towns like Carlsbad, where residents have few options for care — and must pay whatever prices the hospital sets.

“Hospitals that have little competition can negotiate higher rates, because the insurer wants that hospital in their network,” said Sara Collins of the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund.

. . .

Carlsbad Medical Center is owned by Community Health Systems, a chain of hospitals based in Franklin, Tenn. An investigation in 2014 by the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper found that the three hospitals charging the highest prices in the state were all owned by that chain.

In 2015, the company paid $98 million to the federal government to settle charges that it had inflated revenue by admitting patients unnecessarily. Community Health Systems admitted no wrongdoing.

. . .

There are alternative hospitals near Carlsbad, but the closest is more than 40 minutes away, in the town of Artesia — which residents may find too far to drive to in an emergency.

. . .

Artesia General has no debt-collection suits against patients on record since 2015. Neither does Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque — which, at 450 licensed beds, is almost four times as large as the hospital in Carlsbad.

By contrast, other hospitals owned by Community Health Systems in New Mexico also regularly file suits over unpaid bills. Lea Regional Medical Center in Hobbs has filed almost 2,000 such suits since 2015. Mountain View Regional Medical Center in Las Cruces has filed about 2,000 suits against patients in that time; almost half of them came just this year.

In Carlsbad, these lawsuits flood the docket. District Judge Lisa Riley, who has been on the bench in Eddy County since 2011, estimated that about one-third of all civil cases that come across her desk involve unpaid medical debt.

. . .

She, too, was a target of the hospital before she became a judge. Her husband had been disputing emergency room charges when the hospital sued; the case was resolved and dismissed. (Judge Riley would not comment further, citing ethics restrictions that prohibit judges from making statements about matters that might appear in court.)

Judge Riley’s case and others from Carlsbad appear in an upcoming book called “The Price We Pay,” by Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University who studies the costs of American health care and led the study of hospital suits in Virginia.

Debt collection is common in the health care industry, he said, but lawsuits are a traumatic way to force patients to pay. Normally hospitals simply refer unpaid bills to debt collectors; fewer file lawsuits and then garnish wages or place liens on homes.

In his study of Virginia, 36 percent of hospitals garnished the wages of patients owing money, with 10 percent doing so frequently. (Even his own institution, however, has come under fire for suing the poor.)

When seeking payment for medical bills, “Collections agencies may harass you with phone calls,” Dr. Makary said. “They may send a note to your credit bureau, but they’re not reaching into your paycheck.”

Many of these patients are low-paid workers with little savings. Dr. Makary’s study found that Walmart was the most common employer of those whose wages were garnished over medical bills. “These are hardworking Americans who did nothing wrong,” he said.

The cost of care differs from institution to institution, partly because hospitals have broad discretion in setting prices. Charges for the same services vary widely, even when hospitals have similar patient demographics, and the amounts billed have little relationship to quality.

If you are a hospital executive, “you could charge whatever you want,” said Dr. Makary. “You could charge $1 million for an X-ray.”

For the full story, see:

Laura Beil. “Proficient At Healing, And Suing.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 3, 2019): D1 & D6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 2, 2019, and has the title “As Patients Struggle With Bills, Hospital Sues Thousands.”)

The Makary book mentioned above is:

Makary, Marty. The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care–and How to Fix It. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

Can the Methods of ACT UP Bring Quicker Cures for Other Maladies?

Amar Bhidé has a thought-provoking article in which he asks the public choice question of how to overcome government regulators who slow the development of breakthrough drugs. He holds up, as a main example to ponder, the AIDs ACT UP movement that is often given credit for winning concessions from the FDA that spurred the availability of a drug cocktail that greatly extended and improved the lives of AIDs patients. The passages quoted below are from a review of a book that may be a promising source for learning more about what ACT UP did and how they did it.

(p. C3) In her 2012 book, “The Gentrification of the Mind,” Sarah Schulman delved into the silence still surrounding AIDS in America.

. . .

Schulman has gone from witness to a sort of living archive. She is a former member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the influential direct-action group committed to ending AIDS. Her new book, “Let the Record Show,” is based on 17 years of interviews she conducted with nearly 200 members of the organization.

. . .

The effect is rather like standing in the middle of that large room, where anyone could speak up and share an idea. Everyone is talking; small stories branch off, coalesce pages later. Speakers shade in one another’s stories, offer another angle, disagree passionately. You turn a page, and the same people have their arms linked together at a protest. Shadows start to fall; in squares of gray text, deaths are marked, moments for remembrance. So many people leave the room.

. . .

This is not reverent, definitive history. This is a tactician’s bible.

The organizational brilliance of ACT UP emerged out of necessity. The group was founded in 1987, incited by Larry Kramer’s famous call to action. The members were infected, their lovers were sick and dying. There wasn’t time to obsess over process, to contest every comma in a letter. The anarchistic framework asked only that members be “committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”

. . .

When Schulman herself returns to the individual, it is to think again about the figure of the bystander. Why did these particular people rise to the moment and not others?

What thread connected an H.I.V.-positive stockbroker, a retired chemist from Queens, addicts, art students, lifelong activists, people who just happened to be in the next room at the center and wandered in, What was going on in there? For some it was their first experience of gay community; for others it was where they went when the community began to vanish. All of them became autodidacts in drug research, policy, media relations.

For the full review, see:

Parul Sehgal. “Remembering Those Who Stood Up.” The New York Times (Wednesday, May 5, 2021): C3.

(Note: ellipses added. In the original, the words NOT italicized above, were the only words that WERE italicized.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 4, 2021, and has the title “A New Testament to the Fury and Beauty of Activism During the AIDS Crisis.”)

The book under review is:

Schulman, Sarah. Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

The article mentioned above by Bhidé is:

Bhidé, Amar. “Constraining Knowledge: Traditions and Rules That Limit Medical Innovation.” Critical Review 29, no. 1 (Jan. 2017): 1-33.

Biden’s “Abrupt Shift” on Wuhan Lab Origin of Covid-19

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — President Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies on Wednesday to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, indicating that his administration takes seriously the possibility that the deadly virus was accidentally leaked from a lab, in addition to the prevailing theory that it was transmitted by an animal to humans outside a lab.

. . .

But the president’s carefully worded directive underscored a new surge in interest about the lab, which President Donald J. Trump and some of his top aides repeatedly blamed for the pandemic. Some scientists attributed the renewed focus on the lab to Mr. Trump’s departure from the White House — and being less identified with the theory — while others said it reflected the deep frustrations with the recent W.H.O. report that was co-written by Chinese scientists.

. . .

(p. A8) “For over a year, anyone asking questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been branded as a conspiracy theorist,” Mr. Hawley said. “The world needs to know if this pandemic was the product of negligence at the Wuhan lab, but the C.C.P. has done everything it can to block a credible investigation.”

In the past several days, the White House had played down the need for an investigation led by the United States and insisted that the W.H.O. was the proper place for an international inquiry. Mr. Biden’s statement on Wednesday was an abrupt shift.

. . .

Scientists had been reluctant to discuss the lab leak hypothesis last year because they had been on guard against disinformation, said Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard epidemiologist.

“Nobody wants to succumb to conspiracy theories,” he said.

But the March report by the group of W.H.O.-chosen experts in collaboration with Chinese scientists, dismissing the possibility of a lab leak as “extremely unlikely,” compelled some scientists to speak out.

“When I read that, I was very frustrated,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. Along with Professor Lipsitch, she signed a letter published in the journal Science this month saying that there was not enough evidence to decide whether a natural origin or an accidental laboratory leak caused the coronavirus pandemic.

“I think it’s really an unanswered question that really needs more rigorous investigation,” Dr. Iwasaki added.

From the earliest weeks of the outbreak, the Chinese government has worked to delay, deflect or block independent investigation of the virus’s origins.

Chinese officials said in early 2020 that the outbreak began at a Wuhan market, and they blamed illegal wildlife sales there. They did so despite having evidence that undermined that theory: Early data showed that four of the first five coronavirus patients had no clear links to the market. The government resisted accepting an international scientific mission.

For the full story, see:

Michael D. Shear, Julian E. Barnes, Carl Zimmer, and Benjamin Mueller. “President Orders Report in 90 Days on Virus Origins.” The New York Times (Thursday, May 27, 2021): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated May 27, 2021, and has the title “Biden Orders Intelligence Inquiry Into Origins of Virus.” Where the wording in the online and print versions of the passages quoted above differs, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

Three Wuhan Lab Researchers Sought Hospital Care at Time When Covid-19 Is Thought to Have Emerged

(p. A1) WASHINGTON—Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.

The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet, issued during the final days of the Trump administration, which said that several researchers at the lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.”

The disclosure of the number of researchers, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into Covid-19’s origins.

Current and former officials familiar with the intelligence (p. 8) about the lab researchers expressed differing views about the strength of the supporting evidence for the assessment. One person said that it was provided by an international partner and was potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and additional corroboration.

Another person described the intelligence as stronger. “The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality. It was very precise. What it didn’t tell you was exactly why they got sick,” he said, referring to the researchers.

November 2019 is roughly when many epidemiologists and virologists believe SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic, first began circulating around the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where Beijing says that the first confirmed case was a man who fell ill on Dec. 8, 2019.

The Wuhan Institute hasn’t shared raw data, safety logs and lab records on its extensive work with coronaviruses in bats, which many consider the most likely source of the virus.

. . .

The Biden administration declined to comment on the intelligence but said that all technically credible theories on the origin of the pandemic should be investigated by the WHO and international experts.

“We continue to have serious questions about the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, including its origins within the People’s Republic of China,” said a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

. . .

David Asher, a former U.S. official who led a State Department task force on the origins of the virus for then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told a Hudson Institute seminar in March that he doubted that the lab researchers became sick because of the ordinary flu.

“I’m very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances in a level three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all get sick with influenza that put them in the hospital or in severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything to do with the coronavirus,” he said, adding that the researchers’ illness may represent “the first known cluster” of Covid-19 cases.

For the full story, see:

Michael R. Gordon, Warren P. Strobel, and Drew Hinshaw. “Report on Wuhan Lab Fuels Covid-19 Debate.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, May 24, 2021): A1 & A8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 23, 2021, and has the title “Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate On Covid-19 Origin.”)

Hundreds of Thousands at Risk From Blackouts That Shut Off Air Conditioning

(p. A15) Because both heat waves and blackouts are becoming more frequent, “the probability of a concurrent heat wave and blackout event is very likely rising as well,” Dr. Stone said.

So Dr. Stone, along with a team of eight other researchers — from Georgia Tech, Arizona State, the University of Michigan and the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada — set out to gauge the human health consequences when power failures coincide with heat waves.

. . .

Crucially, the researchers wanted to know how hot the insides of homes would get under those conditions — something that Dr. Stone said had never been tried before.

. . .

The results were alarming. In Atlanta, more than 350,000 people, or about 70 percent of residents, would be exposed to indoor temperatures equal to or greater than 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the level at which the National Weather Service’s heat classification index says heat exhaustion and heat stroke are possible.

In Detroit, more than 450,000, or about 68 percent, would be exposed to that indoor temperature. In Phoenix, where a vast majority of residents rely on air-conditioning, the entire population would be at risk — almost 1.7 million people.

Even without a blackout, some residents in each city lack access to air-conditioning, exposing those residents to dangerous indoor temperatures during a heat wave. Those numbers range from 1,000 people in Phoenix to 50,000 in Detroit, based on the characteristics of their homes, the authors found.

That exposure is most pronounced for the lowest-income households, who are 20 percent less likely to have central air-conditioning than the highest-income households.

For the full story, see:

Christopher Flavelle. “Blackouts Are Growing Threat to U.S. Cities.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 4, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated May 5, 2021, and has the title “A New, Deadly Risk for Cities in Summer: Power Failures During Heat Waves.”)

The research co-authored by Stone and mentioned above was described in:

Stone, Brian, Jr., Evan Mallen, Mayuri Rajput, Carina J. Gronlund, Ashley M. Broadbent, E. Scott Krayenhoff, Godfried Augenbroe, Marie S. O’Neill, and Matei Georgescu. “Compound Climate and Infrastructure Events: How Electrical Grid Failure Alters Heat Wave Risk.” Environmental Science & Technology (published online in advance of print on April 30, 2021).

Deregulation of Hearing Aids Will Lower Cost and Increase Innovation

(p. B5) Hearing aids typically cost thousands of dollars, require multiple visits to specialists and often aren’t covered by health insurance. Untreated hearing loss is associated with cognitive decline, dementia and other harms. Overcoming barriers to hearing treatment may significantly improve Americans’ health.

The federal government is poised to help. Congress in 2017 passed legislation that would let anyone buy hearing aids approved by the Food and Drug Administration without a prescription from an audiologist. The F.D.A. has missed a deadline to release draft guidelines for this new category of over-the-counter hearing aids.

Experts told me that when the F.D.A. moves ahead, it’s likely to lead to new products and ideas to change hearing aids as we know them.

. . .

It is already possible to buy a hearing helper — they can’t legally be called hearing aids — without a prescription. These devices, called personal sound amplification products or PSAPs, vary wildly in quality from excellent to junk.

. . .

Nicholas Reed, director of audiology at the Johns Hopkins Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health, told me that the F.D.A. process should provide a path for the best PSAPs to be approved as official over-the-counter hearing aids. He expects new companies to hit the market, too.

You may doubt that a gadget you buy next to the toilet paper at CVS could be a serious medical device. Dr. Reed’s research, however, has found that some hearing helpers for $350 or less were almost as good as prescription hearing aids for people with mild-to-moderate hearing loss.

Dr. Reed described the best lower-cost devices as the Hyundai of hearing help. (This was a compliment.) They aren’t flashy, but they will get many people safely and effectively where they need to go. He also imagines that the F.D.A. rules will create the conditions for many more people to buy hearing aids — both over the counter and by prescription.

. . .

Health care in the United States can often feel as if it’s stuck, and technology is usually not the solution. But with hearing aids, technology and a change in government policy could bring helpful health innovation.

For the full commentary, see:

Shira Ovide. “ON TECH; Affordable and Accessible Hearing Aids.” The New York Times (Monday, April 19, 2021): B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 12, 2021, and has the title “ON TECH; Hearing Aids for the Masses.”)

Reed’s research mentioned above is documented in:

Reed, Nicholas S., Joshua Betz, Nicole Kendig, Margaret Korczak, and Frank R. Lin. “Personal Sound Amplification Products Vs a Conventional Hearing Aid for Speech Understanding in Noise.” JAMA 318, no. 1 (July 4, 2017): 89-90.

Automation Tools Assist, but Do Not Replace, Surgeons

(p. D4) Using many of the same technologies that underpin self-driving cars, autonomous drones and warehouse robots, researchers are working to automate surgical robots too. These methods are still a long way from everyday use, but progress is accelerating.

. . .

The aim is not to remove surgeons from the operating room but to ease their load and perhaps even raise success rates — where there is room for improvement — by automating particular phases of surgery.

Robots can already exceed human accuracy on some surgical tasks, like placing a pin into a bone (a particularly risky task during knee and hip replacements). The hope is that automated robots can bring greater accuracy to other tasks, like incisions or suturing, and reduce the risks that come with overworked surgeons.

During a recent phone call, Greg Hager, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins, said that surgical automation would progress much like the Autopilot software that was guiding his Tesla down the New Jersey Turnpike as he spoke. The car was driving on its own, he said, but his wife still had her hands on the wheel, should anything go wrong. And she would take over when it was time to exit the highway.

“We can’t automate the whole process, at least not without human oversight,” he said. “But we can start to build automation tools that make the life of a surgeon a little bit easier.”

. . .

. . . the Berkeley researchers have been working to automate their robot, which is based on the da Vinci Surgical System, a two-armed machine that helps surgeons perform more than a million procedures a year. Dr. Fer and his colleagues collect images of the robot moving the plastic rings while under human control. Then their system learns from these images, pinpointing the best ways of grabbing the rings, passing them between claws and moving them to new pegs.

But this process came with its own asterisk. When the system told the robot where to move, the robot often missed the spot by millimeters. Over months and years of use, the many metal cables inside the robot’s twin arms have stretched and bent in small ways, so its movements were not as precise as they needed to be.

Human operators could compensate for this shift, unconsciously. But the automated system could not. This is often the problem with automated technology: It struggles to deal with change and uncertainty. Autonomous vehicles are still far from widespread use because they aren’t yet nimble enough to handle all the chaos of the everyday world.

. . .

Many obstacles lie ahead, scientists note. Moving plastic pegs is one thing; cutting, moving and suturing flesh is another. “What happens when the camera angle changes?” said Ann Majewicz Fey, an associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin. “What happens when smoke gets in the way?”

For the foreseeable future, automation will be something that works alongside surgeons rather than replaces them.

For the full story, see:

Cade Metz. “When the Robot Wields the Scalpel.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 4, 2021): D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 30, 2020, and has the title “The Robot Surgeon Will See You Now.”)

Always-Curious Microbiologist Found Useful Robust New Bacterium in Yellowstone Hot Spring

An enzyme in the bacterium that Brock discovered was used by Kary Mullis to create the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) that is part of Covid-19 tests.

(p. B11) Thomas Brock, a microbiologist, was driving west to a laboratory in Washington State in 1964 when he stopped off at Yellowstone National Park.

. . .

What fascinated him, on what would be the first of many trips to Yellowstone, were the blue-green algae living in a hot spring — proof that some life could tolerate temperatures above the boiling point of water.

It was the beginning of research that led to a revolutionary find in 1966: a species of bacteria that he called Thermus aquaticus, which thrived at 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit) or more.

. . .

The yellow bacteria — discovered by Dr. Brock and Hudson Freeze, his undergraduate assistant at Indiana University — survive because all their enzymes are stable at very high temperatures, including one, Taq polymerase, that replicates its own DNA. It proved essential to the invention of the process behind the gold standard in coronavirus testing.

. . .

When he arrived at Yellowstone, he did not have grandiose ambitions.

“I was just looking for a nice, simple ecosystem where I could study microbial ecology,” he said in an interview for the website of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was a professor of natural sciences in the department of bacteriology from 1971 to 1990. “At higher temperatures, you don’t have the complications of having animals that eat all the microbes.”

Stephen Zinder worked with Dr. Brock as a student from 1974 to 1977, a period that included Dr. Brock’s last summer of work at Yellowstone and his research into the ecology of Wisconsin’s lakes, including Lake Mendota in Madison.

“He had an encyclopedic knowledge of microbiology and science in general,” said Dr. Zinder, now a professor of microbiology at Cornell University. “He was always learning and picking up new things.” He added, “I think his real ability was to see things simply and to figure out simple techniques to find out what the organisms were doing in their environment.”

For the full obituary, see:

Richard Sandomir. “Thomas Brock, 94, Scientist Who Shared a Nobel Prize’.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 1, 2021): B11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated April 26, 2020, and has the title “Thomas Brock, Whose Discovery Paved the Way for PCR Tests, Dies at 94.”)

Why “Efficacy” Is Greater Than “Effectiveness”

Some literature in medicine distinguishes between the “efficacy” of a medicine and the “effectiveness” of a medicine. The efficacy is measured by the medicine’s success in a randomized clinical trial; the “effectiveness” is measured by the medicine’s success in actual clinical practice. Since medicines are usually administered under better conditions, and often to cherry-picked patients, in randomized clinical trails, the “efficacy” of a medicine is almost always higher than the “effectiveness” of the same medicine.

In recent months a study has shown that airline air ventilation technology has very high efficacy in preventing the spread of Covid-19. Yet other studies have shown that in actual practice the “effectiveness” of airline technology has allowed cases of substantial transmission of Covid-19. The article quoted below, plausibly explains that ventilation systems are often turned off, or operate at low levels, when planes are on the ground. Puzzle solved.

(p. A9) The Federal Aviation Administration has few ventilation requirements in cabins, generally deferring to requirements from manufacturers. This has been an issue in the past, when cabins were left without ventilation for long periods with passengers on board. The FAA has issued guidance to airlines recommending passengers be taken off planes if cabin ventilation is shut down for more than 30 minutes, an FAA spokeswoman says.

Leonard Marcus, the director of Harvard’s Aviation Public Health Initiative, says that researchers have found that it’s important to have ventilation running full force on the ground.

“The risk of transmission is increased when people are walking up and down the aisle, when they are putting their luggage in the overhead, when they are breathing on top of one another,” Dr. Marcus says. “So to compensate for that, you have to keep the airflow moving, which is true for all communicable diseases of this nature.”

American says its procedures call for the use of ground air while at the gate and during boarding. Spokeswoman Sarah Jantz says captains have discretion to turn on the APU “if the flow of preconditioned air is not sufficient” or not cooling the aircraft enough. American didn’t change procedures during the pandemic, but did provide additional education to crews “to ensure optimal ventilation,” she says.

. . .

Airline claims about the safety of travel are predicated on functioning ventilation systems. An October [2020] study from Harvard University’s School of Public Health, funded by the airline industry, used mathematical models and found a low risk of coronavirus transmission on airplanes because of a layered approach, including aircraft ventilation and masks.

The study, directed by Dr. Marcus, did recommend extending “in-flight level of ventilation while on the ground.” It didn’t estimate the risk of being in an airplane with even brief periods of little or no ventilation.

For the full commentary, see:

Scott McCartney. “THE MIDDLE SEAT; The Importance of Airflow Before Takeoff.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, April 8, 2021): A9.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 7, 2021, and has the title “THE MIDDLE SEAT; The Key to Safe Airflow for Planes Before Takeoff.”)

Where Hospitals Charge Higher Prices for C-Sections, More C-Sections Are Performed

(p. B6) The more a hospital profits from a cesarean delivery, the more likely a woman is to get one, a new analysis suggests.

For the study, published in JAMA Network Open, researchers analyzed records of 13.2 million deliveries nationwide from 2010 to 2014, using a large database of generally healthy women.

. . .

During that period, profit from C-sections varied, from an average of $4,969 for the one-quarter of hospitals with the lowest charges to $26,129 for the quarter that charge the most.

The researchers found that compared with the one-quarter of hospitals that averaged the lowest profit per cesarean, those that made the most per formed 8 per cent more C-sections.

For the full story, see:

Nicholas Bakalar. “In Brief; Making Profits From C-Sections.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 13, 2021): D6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: after considerable search, I could not find this article in the online version of the NYT as of 4/24/21.)

The JAMA Network Open article discussed in the passages quoted above is:

Sakai-Bizmark, Rie, Michael G. Ross, Dennys Estevez, Lauren E. M. Bedel, Emily H. Marr, and Yusuke Tsugawa. “Evaluation of Hospital Cesarean Delivery–Related Profits and Rates in the United States.” JAMA Network Open 4, no. 3 (2021): e212235-e35.