“A synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t mean there was malicious intent. In fact, the location of BsaI/BsmBI site appear almost chimeric: some are shared with close relatives and others are shared with distant relatives, making us hypothesize that perhaps researchers just wanted to make chimeric viruses within this clade of relatively unstudied CoVs. Again, this is a common research project, much like that conducted at Boston University recently, and it is often done with noble intentions of learning about genotype-to-phenotype relationships and even preemptively designing vaccines against viruses that are most-likely to cause a pandemic. That would be tragically ironic if proven true.”

They find, first, that unionization throughout one’s career is associated with a $1.3 million mean increase in lifetime earnings, larger than the average gains from completing college. Second, the lifetime earnings gains are channeled entirely through higher hourly wages and occur despite earlier-than-average retirement for persistently unionized men. Third, the union wage premium is not constant throughout a worker’s career; instead it increases with more years of union membership.

When the government fails to track a deadly epidemic, simply turn to Amazon product reviews.

“Healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.”

The peer-reviewed U.S. study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open on June 9, looked at 7,772 infants delivered during the pandemic between March and September 2020 at six hospitals in Massachusetts, 222 of whom had prenatal exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Results showed that the latter group of infants were more likely to receive a neurodevelopmental diagnosis in the first year after birth.

Separately, a small Spanish study compared 21 cases where the parent tested positive during pregnancy and 21 babies who had no exposure during pregnancy at the Marqués de Valdecilla University Hospital in Santander, Spain. Analysis showed that infants who were exposed in utero demonstrated more motor skill difficulties six weeks after birth, findings that were presented at the 30th European Congress of Psychiatry in early June.

In this study, a total of 164 pregnant individuals were studied, consisting of 24 uninfected healthy patients as a control group and 140 individuals who contracted COVID-19. Both groups delivered at about the same time, 37 to 38 weeks. Preterm birth occurred at almost 3 times the rate with the patients with COVID-19 when compared with those without. About 75% of the patients with COVID-19 were either asymptomatic or had mild symptoms, according to the study.

“We found no evidence to support the use of ivermectin for treating COVID‐19 or preventing SARS‐CoV‐2 infection. The evidence base improved slightly in this update, but is still limited.“

The world is trying to kill me prematurely.

Weight stigma impacts negatively healthcare quality and hinders public health goals. The aim of this review was to identify strategies for minimizing weight bias among healthcare professionals and explore future research directions. An electronic search was performed in PubMed, PsycINFO and Scopus (until June 2020). Studies on weight stigma reduction in healthcare students, trainees and professionals were assessed based on specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. A narrative synthesis was undertaken to analyze emerging themes. We identified five stigma reduction strategies in healthcare: (i) increased education, (ii) causal information and controllability, (iii) empathy evoking, (iv) weight-inclusive approach, and (v) mixed methodology. Weight stigma needs to be addressed early on and continuously throughout healthcare education and practice, by teaching the genetic and socioenvironmental determinants of weight, and explicitly discussing the sources, impact and implications of stigma. There is a need to move away from a solely weight-centric approach to healthcare to a health-focused weight-inclusive one. Assessing the effects of weight stigma in epidemiological research is equally important. The ethical argument and evidence base for the need to reduce weight stigma in healthcare and beyond is strong. Although evidence on long-term stigma reduction is emerging, precautionary action is needed.

It gets harder to multitask as you age

The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.

I’ll often say something like the way Zoloft works, is, it increases the level of serotonin in your brain (or synapses, neurons) and, presumably, the reason you’re depressed or anxious is that you have some sort of a deficiency. And I say that [chuckles] not because I really believe it, because I know the evidence really isn’t there for us to understand the mechanism—I think I say that because patients want to know something. And they want to know that we as physicians have some basic understanding of what we’re doing when we’re prescribing medications. They certainly don’t want to know that a psychiatrist essentially has no idea how these medications work