Tag: medicine

Dementia Village

Today, the isolated village of Hogewey lies on the outskirts of Amsterdam in the small town of Wheesp. Hogewey is a cutting-edge elderly-care facility where residents are given the chance to live seemingly normal lives. With only 152 inhabitants, it’s run like a more benevolent version of The Truman Show, if The Truman Show were about dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. Like most small villages, it has its own town square, theater, garden, and post office. Unlike typical villages, however, this one has cameras monitoring residents every hour of every day, caretakers posing in street clothes, and only 1 door in and out of town, all part of a security system designed to keep the community safe. Friends and family are encouraged to visit. Some come every day. Residents at Hogewey require fewer medications, eat better, live longer, and appear more joyful than those in standard elderly-care facilities.

Creating healthy cravings

a new form of gentrification! just kidding, this could be awesome if it works. color me skeptical though, it looks more like a design school “concept” than a real thing.

A start-up will contribute an interesting answer to the million-dollar food-policy question: If healthy food was as easy as junk food, would we eat more of it? The salads are made from high-end ingredients like blueberries, kale, fennel, and pineapple. Each one comes out in a plastic mason jar, its elements all glistening in neat layers, the way fossils might look if the Earth had been created by meticulous vegans. They cost $1. The salad machine goal is to offer workers a fast, healthy lunch option in areas where there’s a dearth of restaurants. Instead of popping into McDonalds out of desperation, they can simply grab salads from their buildings’ lobbies and eat them back at their desks.

Malaria Eradication

Based on the progress I’m seeing in the lab and on the ground, I believe we’re now in a position to eradicate malaria within a generation. This is one of the greatest opportunities the global health world has ever had. Melinda and I are so optimistic about it that we recently decided to increase our foundation’s malaria budget by 30%.

Tricorder

I’m not one for future shock, but this place triggers it increasingly more frequently. we’re somewhere between SL2 and SL3, depending on domain.

Sometimes moonshots come in small packages — small enough to float in the bloodstream and send out alerts when danger is afoot. That was Andrew Conrad’s vision when he came to Google X after a storied medical research career. Now he is revealing details of that vision — and reporting that experiments are well under way in realizing it.

Ebola

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rushed to complete a computer program it had been developing to track outbreaks; the program needed to be translated into French so it could be used in Guinea. The C.D.C. also dispatched a team, which grew to more than 12 and was led by Rollin, who arrived in Guinea on March 30. Some 3000 biohazard suits were flown in. Experts and volunteers poured in from the World Health Organization and the Red Cross.

The international health community doesn’t seem to have strong internet technologies, and wastes too much time forwarding shit to each other. In the US, there are too many dumb laws like HIPPA to make rational systems possible, but surely that’s not the case around the world?

Without additional interventions or changes in community behavior, CDC estimates that by January 20, 2015, there will be a total of ~1.4M Ebola cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone

It’s not looking good, between the rock (hard to get around, poor communications, not enough trained workers) and the hard place (religious practices that require touching the dead).
2015-05-11: That sounds like movie-plot science but is apparently real.

When he was released from Emory University Hospital in October after a long, brutal fight with Ebola that nearly ended his life, Dr. Ian Crozier’s medical team thought he was cured. But less than 2 months later, he was back at the hospital with fading sight, intense pain and soaring pressure in his left eye. Test results were chilling: The inside of Dr. Crozier’s eye was teeming with Ebola.

2015-08-13: There’s now a Ebola vaccine, which is great news. Let’s hope there’s never an outbreak in southern California with all the anti vaxxers there.

The outbreak of Ebola fever in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which has killed more than 11K people, has dropped out of the news as it has been brought under control. Although new cases are now measured in 10s, rather than 100s, a week, the disease has not been stamped out—and a new epidemic could flare up somewhere else at any time. A vaccine against the virus responsible would be of enormous value. And a paper in the Lancet suggests one is now available.

See also

Ebola is no longer an incurable horror disease. The new vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, was used in the last outbreak in the Republic of Congo. It protected over 90K. Health responders deployed it in social rings: firstly those in contact with known cases, then their contacts. It’s the same strategy used against smallpox 40 years ago. And that was wiped out.

2019-08-12:

Amid unrelenting chaos and violence, scientists and doctors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been running a clinical trial of new drugs to try to combat a year-long Ebola outbreak. On Monday, the trial’s cosponsors at the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health announced that 2 of the experimental treatments appear to dramatically boost survival rates.