May 24th, 2022
Podcast 291: Unionized nursing homes had lower mortality during Covid-19
In the early waves of the Covid-19 pandemic why did patients in unionized nursing homes, have a roughly 10% lower rate of mortality than those in non-unionized ones? A report in Health Affairs tries to sort out the possible reasons. Listen to our 13-minute interview, which raises the question: Should you send your patients to non-unionized facilities? […]
February 22nd, 2022
Podcast 283: More data — this time from the U.K. — about post-Covid vaccination
You want more evidence that post-recovery vaccination against Covid-19 reinfection helps? Here is a careful study from the U.K. that followed some 35,000 health care workers — initially without symptoms — in over 100 institutions there. Starting in June 2020 the SIREN study tested these people regularly, with blood sampling every month and nasal swabs […]
February 17th, 2022
Podcast 282: Vaccination after Covid-19 recovery prolongs natural immunity to reinfection
Governments’ directives about how and when to vaccinate people who’ve recovered from Covid-19 vary widely. But, according to this episode’s guest, Dr. Ronen Arbel, they all say they don’t have enough evidence to set firm policy. So, Arbel and his colleagues set out to collect evidence from some 150,000 patients’ records in Israel who’d recovered […]
January 14th, 2022
Podcast 280: MIS-C after Covid-19 in adolescents — can vaccination prevent it?
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (or MIS-C) is a serious complication of Covid-19 infection, usually showing up about a month after infection. CDC worked with several hospitals around the U.S. to discern whether vaccination in adolescents would lessen the likelihood of this outcome. A vaccine hadn’t yet been approved, as it now is, for kids between […]
August 29th, 2020
Podcast 273: The journals and the pandemic — NEJM
Eric Rubin is editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. I asked him how COVID-19 has affected that journal, which has been around since the War of 1812 and seen its share of pandemics. Listen in — it’s the first in a planned series of interviews with the editors of the principal clinical journals. Running time: 19 minutes […]
August 7th, 2020
Podcast 272: And now for something completely different… almost
Dr. Paul Sax writes the closest thing that the NEJM Group has to humor. He’s serious, of course, since his blog “HIV and ID Observations” concerns all things infectious . But he sprinkles in the odd cartoon or links to … dog videos, fer cryin’ out loud. He scours the ID literature (and we must include […]
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