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 […]
May 1st, 2020
Podcast 265: COVID-19 in skilled nursing facilities
We (Dr. Danielle Bowen Scheurer and Joe Elia) talk with Dr. John Jernigan of the CDC COVID-19 Investigation Team, which recently published its findings on the spread of COVID-19 in a Seattle-area skilled nursing facility. Most intriguingly, over half the patients who tested positive were asymptomatic at the time of their first testing, and a few […]
April 4th, 2018
Podcast 220: Mumps outbreaks — blame waning protection, not new viruses or bad vaccines
Mumps outbreaks keep happening, even among vaccinated groups. Why? Our guest, Joseph Lewnard, and his coauthor, Yonstan Grad, probed studies of mumps vaccine efficacy carried out over five decades. They show that the fault, dear clinician, is not in our vaccines or new viral strains, but in ourselves. Our bodies slowly lose their immune response after […]
August 7th, 2015
Podcast 181: Oral Contraceptives’ Role in Reducing Endometrial Cancers
(Running time: 15 minutes) A study in the Lancet Oncology gathered information from dozens of epidemiological studies to estimate that over 200,000 cases of endometrial cancer have been prevented in the past 10 years as a result of oral contraceptive use. A commentary in the journal offers a remarkable look at weighing the benefits and harms of OCs. […]
July 18th, 2015
Podcast 180: A sketch of community-acquired pneumonia
The CDC’s Seema Jain is our guest, talking about a study she did with her team to characterize the causes of community-acquired pneumonia in U.S. adults. (They don’t mention finding Webster’s Micrococcus lanceolatus.) Medicine has come a long way since 1925, but Dr. Jain says that clinicians still need better diagnostic tools to pinpoint the causes […]
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