FSM News and Articles
A moral responsibility to get Australians home: Friend of Science in Medicine, Prof. John Dwyer discusses the ban on travel from India, approaches that could help Australians come home, and the technical/logistical challenges that would need to be met. “The challenge is to find a way to bring Australians home and allow them to self-isolate at home, rather than in a hotel, without putting resident Australians at risk from so doing.
Imagine that Mr and Mrs Smith, trapped in New Delhi for the last few months, desperate to get home and scared that they may get infected in a country with neither hospital beds nor oxygen are available, get a message on their phone from the Australian High Commission in New Delhi with whom they are registered. The message says that they can return to Australia in three weeks under certain conditions. If they have not been vaccinated, they are to come to the Commission at a given time for a COVID test. If negative, as anticipated, they will be given a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine. They will be booked on a flight home three weeks later. Until then they are to be diligent about the continuation of all public health measures that would best protect them from infection. They will be tested the day before the flight which they would not be able to take in the extraordinarily unlikely circumstance that this COVID test was positive. On arriving in Australia they would be required to wear a mask on arrival and would be tested yet again. If negative, as would almost certainly be the case, they would be allowed to exit the airport via a ‘red zone’ and go to their home for two weeks of self isolation. The chance that individuals subjected to this protocol would pose any threat to the resident community is virtually nil.”
FSM Friends’ News and Articles
Time to say good-bye? Homeopathy, skeptics and thoughts on how to proceed:
• • “Ongoing debates concerning its effectiveness”: this debate has been ongoing for 200 years but it has now come to a conclusion, namely, that homeopathy is a placebo therapy.
• • “No unifying explanation how homeopathy works exists”: we do know, however, that the laws of nature, as we understand them today, must be wrong if homeopathy did work.
• • “Homeopaths are frequently challenged by skeptics”: the main challenges currently come not from skeptics but from health experts who rightly insist on sound evidence.
General
We’re gathering data on COVID vaccine side effects in real time. Here’s what you can expect: As more people get vaccinated, we have more and more data on vaccine side effects – we no longer have to rely on clinical trials conducted in populations that may not reflect our own. The current stats for Comirnaty (Pfeizer mRNA) and Astra-Zeneca vaccines can be viewed at: https://www.ausvaxsafety.org.au/safety…/covid-19-vaccines
Minor side effects like swelling, injection site pain, some fatigue and general ‘unwellness’ symptoms are expected – and possibly a good sign that the the vaccine is inducing an immune response. Severe side effects, including the blood clots that have been reported, are much much rarer. “Many of the side effects we experience after a vaccination (of any sort, not just against COVID-19) are actually because our immune system is doing its thing. If we train for a sport we expect to get sore muscles from training, as well as when we actually compete. Training our immune system is no different.”
Great Moments in Health and Science
The Discovery of Neurotransmitters – History of Neuroscience: Otto Loewi: The knowledge of how nerves send signals has been essential in understanding and treating numerous diseases that are affected by the nervous system, including epilepsy and heart arrhythmias.