🗞️ Letter to the editor about the need for healthy air in schools 📝 Public comment period for hospital virus reporting requirements 🔊 Using podcast memberships to spread public health messaging 📣
The effect that a chatbot may make search engines into stochastic pseudoscience influencers is egregious.
USA Public Comment Period - A Proposed Rule for covid reporting by hospitals by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
CMS is planning to require covid, flu, and rsv reporting requirements for hospitals. People may submit comments by June 10, 2024 to support public reporting of covid hospitalizations, and to urge CMS to include covid in the Hospital Acquired Infections reporting and incentive structure.
Guide to writing comments by People’s CDC
Pennsylvanians Against Covid Letter to the Editor published in The Philadelphia Inquirer about pandemic barriers to attract people to the teaching profession.
Thanks to Jim Lertola of Pennsylvania for pointing out how rampant spread of infectious disease is a barrier to becoming a teacher in Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.
The Philadelphia Inquirer - Letters to the Editor | June 2, 2024 - Healthy Schools
The average teacher is taking on risk in so many ways, and the already high risk category disabled person who wants to be a teacher is effectively barred from the profession by the threat of infectious disease because of lack of health & safety provisions persisting in many schools, despite available pandemic related funds that have too often been diverted.
🗞️ In the news
Fierce Healthcare - House Energy and Commerce Committee presents own 2-year telehealth extension, with more rural health wins By Emma Beavins May 15, 2024 4:20pm Telehealth lobbyists told Fierce Healthcare on the sidelines of the American Telemedicine Association annual conference in Phoenix this week that they are happy with the extension, though they prefer telehealth permanency. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will likely follow suit in the next week, a source said, further entrenching the battle between the two committees to get a telehealth extension through the House.
FDA Panel to Consider Which COVID Strain to Target in an Updated Vaccine — The KP.2 subvariant is now dominant in the U.S., FDA staff says in a briefing document by Joyce Frieden, Washington Editor, MedPage Today June 3, 2024 As of May 11 -- the latest date for which figures were available -- 22.5% of adults reported receiving an updated COVID vaccine since mid-September 2023, and 14.4% of children ages 6 months to 17 years were reportedly up to date on their COVID shots, according to the CDCopens in a new tab or window.
As COVID precautions vanish, people with disabilities struggle with safety and isolation - PBS NewsHour - Jun 1, 2024 (VIDEO) With precautions like mandatory masking no longer in place, it can seem as if worries about the virus are gone as well. But for many people with disabilities, the threat is still very real. We hear from people in the disability community about their concerns.
This is NOT fine
Running nursing homes like a business is a safety hazard.
I’ve been hearing about “nursing home flipping” for over a decade - a type of real estate house flipping. This type of management of nursing homes has led to obvious problems. And now, if they can’t even manage to keep the power on at a nursing home in my city, what are they doing about infection control and other safety issues?
Scranton nursing facility lacked power, residents relocated By Sarah Scinto | WVIA News Published June 3, 2024 at 9:51 AM EDT Chris Hughes, communications director for the City of Scranton, said the Department of Health alerted the city of the safety issues at the facility, then managed the emergency closure once code enforcement made its declaration. The Department of Health said the facility had been on a provisional license prior to the emergency closure. In the letter dated May 31, the department also expressed concern over the facility’s financial status. “The current temporary manager has on several occasions made the department aware of pending Sheriff Sales at the facility,” the letter states. “Further, the temporary manager has provided the department with information related to the nonpayment of numerous vendors, tax obligations and services required for the operation of the facility.”
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Synthetic media spills are a public health threat, and also a threat to human connection.
It’s bad enough that people find pseudoscience and garbage marketing of healthcare information, and much of it is pushed by influencers on social media and dubious actors who join social support groups with the intention of sales. The effect that a chatbot may make search engines into stochastic pseudoscience influencers is egregious. It’s now “searchers beware” when it comes to AI assisted search engine results.
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter May 28, 2024 Information is Relational Google's AI Overviews Fails Helpfully Highlight a Source of Danger By Emily I've been writing for a while, in academic papers and also blog posts and op-eds, about why LLMs are a bad replacement for search engines, and how synthetic media spills are polluting our information ecosystem. One of the key points is that, even if the answers provided could be magically made to be always “correct” (an impossible goal, for many reasons, but bear with me), chatbot-mediated information access systems interrupt a key sense-making process. An example I like to use is as follows: Say you put in a medical query into a traditional search engine (think one that would return “10 blue links”), and the links you get point to a variety of sites. Perhaps you're offered links to the Mayo Clinic, WebMD, Dr. Oz's site and a forum where people navigating similar medical questions are discussing their own experiences. As a denizen of the Internet in 2024, you have had the opportunity to form opinions about these different sites and how to situate the information provided by each. You might know the Mayo Clinic as a renowned cancer treatment center, WebMD as commercial web property but one that does work with MDs to vet information, and Dr. Oz as a charlatan. The forum is particularly interesting, because any given answer lifted from such a site might be the kind of thing you'd want to confirm before acting on, but the potential to connect with other people living through similar medical journeys, share stories and pool information, can be invaluable. If instead of the 10 blue links, you get an answer from a chatbot that reproduces information from some or all of these four options (let's assume it even does so reliably), you've lost the ability to situate the information in its context. And, in this example, you've lost the opportunity to serendipitously discover the existence of the community in the forum.
The assertion that infectious diseases are created in labs is confused circular reasoning for those born yesterday.
An example of those who are asserting that all diseases are concocted “in a lab” — this from Michael Flynn, the extreme conservative political organizer and pundit. Do people who believe this somehow think that history began with the time period of modern medical science? Have these people heard of the Black Death? Do they think the Hanseatic League had advanced medical research laboratories cooking that stuff up in the 1300s? Certainly would’ve made an interesting addition to the video game I used to play called Patrician III. It may seem reasonable to have questions or concerns about lab leaks, but these people are saying all infectious diseases come out of laboratories, and that is NOT reasonable. What makes it more bizarre and incoherent is that he said that the reason these infectious diseases are all made in labs is because the labs are developing vaccines and treatments… Why would… Um. It’s a circular reasoning to nowhere. I think most people wouldn’t believe this stuff if they just paused and thought about this for a moment. Living on autopilot is a serious danger in our current information landscape.
Thanks to those using podcast paid membership shoutouts to spread public health messaging.
Adam Conover’s podcast Factually for a certain level per month membership he thanks people at the end of his podcast, and on a recent episode about climate change, someone listed their name as “Mask when you can protect your community.” I don’t know who that is, but thanks.
During the interview, Dr. Hannah Ritchie mentions how people are not masking despite a continued threat from the pandemic virus, and remarks how this is demonstrative of how bad something has to be for people to take action.
But I think more people would take action if people in leadership positions told people it was worth it instead of spending all the time and energy to say there’s no need just because business interests don’t want people reminded of danger.
QUOTE:
“Children, although they do suffer from less COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. There are numerous examples of lifelong morbidities associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in children including higher rates of new onset type one diabetes. And numerous case studies showing significant cardiac issues including necessitating pacemakers being placed in previously healthy children, all post SARS-CoV-2 infection. And as long as this vaccine is deemed safe, I do not understand why it would be withheld from that population. When it could have a significant impact on lifelong morbidity and allow a child to live a healthy life. We also tend to forget that children do not live in a bubble. They're often part of multi-generational households. They see teachers daily and protecting children from significant bouts of infection and reducing duration of infection also protects people writ large.”
— Dr. Melanie Matthews at the CDC ACIP meeting September 12, 2023