Category: General Interest

Categories : COVID General InterestTags :

Pandemic Steals the Enjoyment of Terminally Ill Patients’ Last Years

On By ModernMedia

Welsh grandmother Maggie Shaftoe has a terminal brain tumour and doctors have told her she has less than two years to live.

Life with a terminal illness during the coronavirus pandemic and being in lockdown has caused difficulties for one couple making final memories.

Macmillan Cancer Support calls it an “acutely challenging time” for people living with a terminal diagnosis.

In 2017, the 63-year-old great-grandmother was diagnosed with an Anaplastic Pleomorphic Xanthoastrocytoma (APXA) brain tumour, which is very rare and most commonly occurs in children and young people with an average age for diagnosis at 12 years old. Her cancer was discovered by chance through a regular epilepsy check up and an MRI scan.

Mrs Shaftoe said that she has not seen her 11 grandchildren and great-granddaughter and she’s “just waiting for things to get back to normal”.

Together for more than 50 years, Mrs Shaftoe and her husband Chris first met as teenagers in a church choir in London. Mr Shaftoe said at this stage they “should be making the most of the time she has left and making memories with our family”.

“I think we’d like to go somewhere like Disneyland, or Lapland to see the northern lights or she’d love to go to the Cheddar Gorge,” said Mr Shaftoe, 65.

“But the pandemic has buried us in a great big hole and I don’t expect the situation to change.

“We’re noticing that Maggie’s memory is fading quite quickly now and she is getting worse day by day, and we understand what is coming,” he said.

In 2017 Mrs Shaftoe had an operation to remove the tumour and the following year had radiotherapy.

But Mr Shaftoe said this has only “delayed the inevitable” and his wife’s life expectancy “hangs on the effectiveness” of two anti-cancer drugs.

Since the operation, she has suffered difficulty with her memory, impaired speech, balance problems and is partially blind.

Doctors have told the couple that typically life expectancy for a patient with APXA would be five years.

Cancer Research UK said that the pandemic has had a “devastating impact on the lives of cancer patients”.

“Dealing with a cancer diagnosis and treatment is extremely difficult at any time, but the pandemic has added the stress of uncertainty, delays and shielding for some cancer patients,” said Martin Ledwick,  head information nurse at the charity.

Mrs Shaftoe remains positive despite the situation, saying it helps to laugh.

“If you can make a joke of something, make a joke of it,” she said, speaking during Brain Tumour Awareness month.

“You go out to make a cup of tea and you end up peeling potatoes, and come back in and wonder why I haven’t got a cup of tea – you have to laugh at silly little things.”

However managing during lockdown has been “very difficult” and mundane tasks could be a “major headache”, according to her husband, who has medical conditions of his own.

Mr Shaftoe says they now have a carer who comes for an hour each morning.

But he said: “We need more care. We have spent most of the pandemic without a carer and it has been absolutely nightmarish trying to get Maggie one.”

Macmillan Cancer Support in Wales said it has heard from many people in isolation, which makes “a challenging situation even more difficult”.

“We know this is an acutely challenging time for people with cancer, the NHS and cancer care, and particularly for people who are living with a terminal diagnosis,” said Richard Pugh, Macmillan’s head of partnerships.

Source: BBC News

Categories : COVID General InterestTags :

A Dozen Accounts Responsible for Majority of COVID Misinformation

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Connor Danylenko from Pexels

According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the majority of COVID and vaccine misinformation posts emanate from a dozen accounts.

Out of 812 000 anti-vaccine messages shared or posted on social media platforms between Feb 1 and March 16, 2021, 65% were attributed to just a handful of individuals, whom the report authors have dubbed the “Disinformation Dozen”, 13 users spread across 12 accounts (one of the accounts refers to a couple, Ty and Charlene Bollinger, who are alternative medicine activists).

Some of the individuals named include entrepreneur Joseph Mercola, author Robert F Kennedy Jr and chiropractor Ben Tapper, with the report including examples of the COVID misinformation that they shared on various social media platforms.

Mercola for example has shared his views on unproven COVID cures in various anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook, including one article saying “hydrogen peroxide treatment can successfully treat most viral respiratory illnesses, including coronavirus” getting 4600 shares.

The report notes that Robert Kennedy Jr often shares misinformation linked COVID vaccines to deaths, and his organisation, Children’s Health Defense, released a film in March that targeted American black and Latino communities with anti-vaccine messages. 

“According to our recent report, anti-vaccine activists on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter reach more than 59 million followers, making these the largest and most important social media platforms for anti-vaxxers,” said CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed.

“Despite repeatedly violating Facebook, Instagram and Twitter’s terms of service agreements, nine of the Disinformation Dozen remain on all three platforms, while just three have been comprehensively removed from just one platform,” the report added.

To combat the disinformation problem, the CCDH urged social media companies to deplatform the Disinformation Dozen, along with key organisations associated with the 12 individuals.

In a statement to Engadet, Facebook took issue with the report, claiming that “it taken action against some of the group”. However, the report contends that Facebook’s algorithm struggle to identify COVID misinformation.

Source: The Star

Categories : General InterestTags :

Heart Doctors’ Twitter Popularity Is Unrelated to Their Publications

On By ModernMedia
Phone with popular social media apps including Facebook and Twitter. Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels.

Having large numbers of widely cited publications has no bearing on the Twitter popularity of academics in the interventional cardiology community, a new study has found. 

The study, by Davide Capodanno, MD, PhD, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Policlinico “G Rodolico-San Marco” in Catania, Italy, and colleagues, found that academic impact through papers and citations, as calculated by the Hirsch index (or h-index) was found to be unrelated to whether or not academics were in the top quartile of Twitter followers (> 736 followers).

“Indeed, accounts generating a stream of valuable content are more likely to be followed. In addition, some accounts may take advantage of celebrity to amplify their success, in a kind of incremental cycle,” wrote the authors.
Rather, Twitter followers were defined by factors mostly related to time and effort spent on the platform.

Having abundant tweets (> 505 tweets, adjusted OR 16.39), along with individual charisma (‘Kardashian index’ >5, adjusted OR 8.66), were the most significant predictors. Large number of accounts user follows (> 309 following), tweet rate (> 2.6 tweets per week), a large cooperation network and being affiliated to the US were also predictive of the heart doctors’ Twitter popularity.

“Indeed, accounts generating a stream of valuable content are more likely to be followed. In addition, some accounts may take advantage of celebrity to amplify their success, in a kind of incremental cycle,” according to the authors.

Individual charisma per the ‘Kardashian index‘, which measures discrepancy between social media reputation and publication record, was not a significant factor in the rate at which someone amassed followers.

“In aggregate, our results suggest that a prediction rule for durable popularity on Twitter is to be active and generate valuable contents rather than relying on individual academic or social reputation,” Capodanno’s team concluded.

An earlier study had shown that the reverse was true; the more Twitter followers, the greater their academic standing.
Limitations include not being able to account for anonymous or pseudonym accounts, and the results may not be generalisable to the interventional cardiology community as a whole.

Source: MedPage Today

Journal information: D’Arrigo P, et al “Determinants of popularity and natural history of social media accounts in interventional cardiology” JACC Cardiovasc Interv 2021; DOI: 10.1016/j.jcin.2021.01.021.

Categories : COVID General InterestTags :

Have COVID Restrictions Eroded The Right to Dissent?

On By ModernMedia
Image by Niek Verlaan from Pixabay

An article in The Guardian explores how the COVID pandemic and its restrictions have also may have caused an erosion in the institutions of democracy around the world.

On Saturday, a vigil at Clapham Common in the UK for Sarah Everard, a woman believed to have been murdered by a police officer, was broken up by police in a heavy-handed manner which drew widespread criticism.
Defending the Metropolitan police’s handling of the situation, assistant commissioner Helen Ball argued the force had to act “because of the overriding need to protect people’s safety” from COVID. In 2020, Black Lives Matter protestors were criticised for their actions in the first waves of the pandemic, but their actions did not cause a spike in infections. Indeed, the protests may have helped deter the spread of COVID due to their deterring people from going to restaurants and other forms of social gatherings.

While the Clapham Common event was not on the same scale, it is possible that even very large and boisterous protests are not ‘super-spreader’ events. And, according to the human rights organisation Liberty, they can be performed safely. For example a socially distanced rally was held in Tel Aviv in April last year against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, where thousands of people,   each in their own space, separated by two metres, were able to shout and wave banners.

“Protest is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy, and it’s critical that we can all stand up to those in power, and make our voices heard,” said Lana Adamou, a lawyer at Liberty. “Safe, socially distanced demonstrations are perfectly possible, and it is the duty of the police to facilitate them, not block them. The current restrictions should be interpreted compatibly with our rights enshrined in the Human Rights Act.”

However a report published by Carnegie Europe in January observed that human rights are being eroded in the name of public health, with many governments using the pandemic as a pretext to crack down on dissent.

“While governments have claimed that they were imposing measures to tackle the pandemic, these measures often have been contradictory and have excessively restricted the right to peaceful assembly,” the report said, saying that while economic activities were enabled, large protests were still prohibited. In Sweden large groups were allowed to congregate in restaurants and at sporting events, but public gatherings and protests involving more than eight people were banned. It also noted that police used tactics such as kettling, a controversial tactic where police corral protestors into tight groups before arresting them, which can increase the spread of infection.

These restrictions have forced some campaigners to become creative in their protests. In the Netherlands, climate activists filled a square in front of the Dutch parliament in the Hague with 1000 shoes from all over the country. In Croatia, a civil society movement staged balcony protests against the governance of the mayor of Zagreb.

What campaigners in some countries will be asking is whether or not the pandemic has eroded the right to dissent, and to what extent will mass public protests be allowed to return once the COVID threat has passed.

Source: The Guardian

Categories : General Interest TransplantsTags :

Teen Embraces Chance to ‘Live Well’ With Kidney Disease

On By ModernMedia

Thanks to a young organ donor, Bronwen Fredericks has a new kidney that she and her mother Bridget are deeply thankful for.
The 15-year-old was one of two patients at Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital who received their new kidneys last month. With a new chance at their childhoods, they have a chance to embrace the spirit of “Living Well with Kidney Disease”, the 2021 theme for World Kidney Day tomorrow. 

Bronwen said: “I’m really grateful to my donor and excited for my new life. I’m really looking forward to being able to dance again.”

According to her mother, a blood pressure test had alerted them to the problem.

“I would like to encourage everyone, especially parents, to do a regular general check-up with their children at a clinic or GP. A simple blood pressure test could show us that there was a serious problem and we were able to take action that saved my daughter,” she said.

“Irrespective of age, being diagnosed with kidney disease can pose a huge challenge for the patient and their family. It remains draining on those involved, be it emotional, financial, physical or a combination of these – but imagine the impact on a young child,” the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital said in a statement on Wednesday.  The hospital conducts around 10 to 12 kidney transplants a year.

The Red Cross Hospital said it is aiming to reduce stress factors through education, empowerment and by building a partnership with patients and their families.

“The diagnosis and management, particularly in the advanced stages of kidney disease, impacts severely upon the lives of our young patients by reducing their ability to participate in everyday activities like attending school, participating in extra-curricular activities and socialising, whilst the whole family’s ability to travel and parents ability to work is also affected,” said Dr Deveshni Reddy, ‎paediatric nephrologist at the hospital.

Current management includes dialysis to take the strain off of kidneys, and in more extreme cases, donor transplants.
Professor Mignon McCulloch, the hospital’s head of paediatric nephrology and solid organ transplantation, said: “While we always try our best to treat chronic kidney disease and other kidney disorders through medical intervention, sometimes a surgical intervention, or dialysis and resultant kidney transplant, is the only option.

“The Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital conducts around 10-12 kidney transplants per year, making it one of the most active paediatric transplant services in South Africa, which is only possible due to the close collaboration with the multi-disciplinary role-players from Groote Schuur Hospital and Red Cross.”

Source: IOL News

Categories : Ethics and Law General InterestTags :

Op-ed: Facebook Medical ‘Fact Checking’ Has No Room for Debate

On By ModernMedia

Fact-checking is increasingly important in an era of disinformation on social media, especially with the current COVID pandemic, but an article for MedPage Today calls into question the process for Facebook’s medical fact-checking.

After an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Marty Makary, MD, MPH, Johns Hopkins professor and editor-in-chief at MedPage Today, was labelled “misleading” by Facebook fact checkers, another op-ed in MedPage Today asks how the social media giant is choosing its medical fact-checkers. 

Mystified by why this would be labelled “misleading” by Facebook, and setting aside the ‘veracity’ of the article, Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH, a haematologist-oncologist and associate professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, investigated the website HealthFeedback.org that Facebook uses to fact-check some of its medical articles. 

The process involves two to four reviewers chosen to examine an article. Prior to the COVID pandemic, medical fact checking appears to have been done by academics, but the flood of disinformation has resulted in the change of this process, Dr Prasad noted.  

In one instance, a reviewer for the article was selected because he had already written an article critical of Dr Markary’s op-ed: in other words, he was selected because he had already announced his bias.

The website’s picking and choosing of reviewers “felt like a high school clique”, Dr Prasad wrote. One that allowed them to confirm their previously held ideas about COVID and extinguish differing viewpoints. Labelling the alternative views as misleading “instantly usurps the reader of their ability to make up their own mind. It is antithetical to the spirit of the academy.”

He found that the fact-checkers typically had large Twitter followings, while the typical medical professor seems to have them in the hundreds. This makes sense, Dr Prasad wrote, as leading academics and authorities are likely too busy to be courting large numbers of followers on Twitter.
Other than a “vague explanation” of the feedback process, Dr Prasad could not find any information on how Facebook chooses its reviewers, which of the billions of posts and articles on Facebook to fact-check, whether anyone is paid and how appeals are made.

Source: MedPage Today

Categories : Cancer General InterestTags :

Impact of French Nuclear Testing Underestimated

On By ModernMedia

A new report has found that the extent of radiation exposure to people involved in nuclear testing in French Polynesia has been significantly underestimated.

Over 1966 to 1996 at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in French Polynesia, France conducted An unofficial report has gone through thousands of recently declassified documents, focusing on the impact of three key nuclear tests: Aldébaran, Encelade and Centaure in 1966, 1971 and 1974.
The report suggests that the French government has underestimated fallout by as much as 40%, opening the door for tens of thousands more to claim compensation.

One millisievert (mSv) per annum is the maximum allowable public exposure. There is clear evidence for radiation effects at doses over 100mSv, while doses less than 10mSv are undetectable even in very large epidemiological studies and such low dose effects on human health are controversial. According to the linear-no dose-threshold (LNT) theory, all radiation exposure carries some level of harm.

Last February, a report was sent from Paris to French Polynesia on a cluster of cancers uncovered there, believed to be linked to radiation exposure . Email evidence suggests that at least 2000 of the 6000 military personnel involved in the tests had contracted at least one form of cancer.
It was only in 2010 that France established a compensation claims board for people with one of 23 cancers associated with radiation and who lived in French Polynesia at the time of the tests. However, many claimants do not have the means to access these claims, such as those who live on remote islands.

Faulty and imprecise monitoring equipment impacted the results, which were used to calculate the original dose calculations. The researchers recalculated the estimated doses absorbed by the population based on samples taken by the military at the time, and also using new methods involving meteorological data to plot the spread of radioactive fallout. Some recalculations did not show much change, but a 1966 test produced a level three times higher than the official estimate. Some 11 000 people exposed to the nuclear testing received a dose higher than 5mSv, the researchers found.

Source: The Guardian

Categories : COVID General Interest UncategorizedTags :

Nurse Recounts His Year on the Frontlines

On By ModernMedia
Stethoscope. Photo by Robert Ruggiero on Unsplash

One year into the first case of COVID being detected in South Africa, one nurse recounts the hardships he and other healthcare workers have faced as they battled against the pandemic.

Lebohang Nkoana, a nurse on the frontline at Thelle Mogoerane Hospital in Vosloorus, Ekurhuleni, spoke to IOL of his experiences.

“When Covid-19 came, no one knew what to expect,” said Nkoana, who has been a nurse for eight years and is also a branch secretary for the Democratic Nurses Organisation of SA.

“It was devastating because we were already short-staffed. At first, we were resistant. We did not want to work with Covid-19 patients

“We were just using normal non-sterile gloves. Then we stopped working for two days as we did not want to risk our lives and also because we were not fully informed about the disease.”

Like many in the first days of the pandemic, he was forced to work without adequate PPE. Lack of regulation and price gouging had also worsened the PPE situation during the early days of the pandemic.

“There was no PPE, no increment, nothing. I had to use what I had at my disposal to protect myself and render a service.

“I went into a Covid ward to save lives, but in the process, exposed myself.”

Mr Koana contracted COVID during the course of his duty, and lost 19 of his colleagues to the disease, with little in the way of support for his trauma. He is also stigmatised in his community, as people assume that he has COVID. He also fears for his wife and two children.

“I am not scared for myself, because as a nurse, I took an oath. I am scared for my children. If I bring the virus home and it kills my wife, who will take care of our children?”

Source: IOL

Categories : COVID General Interest VaccinesTags :

After Receiving Vaccine, Queen Elizabeth Encourages Others

On By ModernMedia

After receiving her COVID vaccine, Queen Elizabeth encouraged those who were wary to think of others and do the same.

She and Prince Philip received their vaccine in the initial wave of vaccinations for the elderly in the UK. Prince Philip, 99,  is currently in hospital for a non-COVID related illness. There are concerns about the health of her husband Prince Philip, but the palace says that he is responding to treatment, but likely to remain in hospital for a few more days.

“Once you’ve had a vaccine you have a feeling of you know, you’re protected which I think is very important and as far as I could make out it was quite harmless,” the 94-year old monarch queen said in a video call with health officials supervising inoculations across the UK.

“It was very quick, and I’ve had lots of letters from people who have been very surprised by how easy it was to get the vaccine. And the jab – it didn’t hurt at all,” she added, likening the virus to a plague.

Earlier this week, the UK’s vaccine minister said that 11% to 15% of people were hesitant about receiving a vaccine, especially among minority groups.

“It is obviously difficult for people if they’ve never had a vaccine because they ought to think about other people other than themselves,” said the queen.

She praised the “remarkable” Britain’s rollout of the vaccination, one of the world’s fastest. Other members of the royal family including Prince Charles and his son Prince William, have been visiting vaccination centres over the last two weeks to convey their thanks to staff and volunteers for their work.

Data from Public Health England suggest that the vaccines are 80% effective in preventing serious COVID in the elderly.

Source: Reuters

Categories : COVID General InterestTags :

Gratitude for Engineer’s ‘Hack’ Website for Vaccination Appointments

On By ModernMedia

Frustrated with the difficulties faced in scheduling a vaccination appointment, a New York software engineer developed a website to make it easier for his fellow New Yorkers to schedule an appointment.

Huge Ma was trying to get a COVID vaccination appointment for his mother. “You had to basically open three tabs, one for each major government vaccine portal, and then refresh all day until you got an appointment,” the 31-year-old told The Guardian. This experience inspired him to create a website, Turbovax, that helped people to book their appointments more easily. After taking a “look under the hood” in January and doing two weeks of coding, he unveiled his website – essentially a bot that trawls relevant New York sites for appointments and shares them on Twitter and on a website.

Almost immediately, the website took off, with one million page views a day, with tens of thousand of people having booked appointments using the bot, Mr Ma estimated. People have even asked him to bring TurboVax to their cities.

“The response has been incredibly overwhelming,” he said. “There’s been so much gratitude. Hundreds, thousands of emails from people who have gotten appointments through TurboVax, which is honestly kind of just mind-blowing, and humbling as well.” 

He was unprepared for the reaction. “I would never have thought that I could have built something that has such tangible impact on other people’s lives.” 

However, running the site is difficult as Mr Ma has to balance this with his day job working at Airbnb, and the Google Docs-based site is buckling under the demand.

“Technically it’s kind of a hack. It’s not built in the way that modern websites are supposed to be built,” said Ma. “These are the shortcuts that we take to put something in the world that we think is useful and I think that’s a trade-off that I would still make.”

Though it is free, Mr Ma accepts donations and has gathered $35 000 so far. TurboVax is one of a number of citizen-led services that have popped up to help Americans deal with the difficulties of vaccine appointment bookings, such as NYC Vaccine List in New York and VaccinateCA in California.

Mr Ma shut down the website over the weekend in protest against a spate of hate crimes targetting Asian Americans, tweeting, “Anti-Asian hate crimes are out of control. I am taking a stand because I fear for my friends and family.” However, local law enforcements said there is no sign that a number of recent assaults against Asian Americans were racially motivated.

Since far more white people have received vaccinations than black or Latino people, Mr Ma said the technology can “help level the playing field”.

“Not everyone has the ability to sit in front of a computer and refresh all day,” he explained. “That said, I know that no system is perfect. This tech can help but it can’t solve other inequities in the system.”

Source: The Guardian