jpedmd2025-10-01T10:37:33-05:00October 1st, 2025|

Having in the past administered a lot of rabies PEP with RIG and the vaccine, I thought this new rabies PEP alternative was pretty cool; from a UMass Chan press release:

A new post-licensure clinical study published in The Lancet further demonstrates that Rabishield, a monoclonal antibody therapy developed by UMass Chan Medical School in partnership with the Serum Institute of India, offers a safe and effective alternative to older rabies treatments. In India, rabies kills an estimated 20,000 people every year—two people every hour. 

In the new study, more than 4,000 patients in India who had high-risk animal bites received either Rabishield plus a rabies vaccine or the traditional equine rabies immunoglobulin plus vaccine. Both groups developed strong immune responses, but Rabishield was better tolerated, with fewer serious side effects. Importantly, no participants developed rabies during a year of follow-up. 

jpedmd2025-09-13T16:20:09-05:00September 13th, 2025|

Sadly, I’ve come to conclude that social media, relying as it does for its sustainability on some of our worst human impulses (e.g. unfettered profit seeking, prurient interest in the misfortunes of others, etc.) and capable of widespread rapid dissemination without effort or cost, has become destructive to society and mental health. It’s now a net negative. The hopes that it might become a force for good by freely sharing truth and knowledge have been dashed and are irrecoverable.

• Brian Lee PhD, one of the authors of the 2024 JAMA sibling study suggesting that there is no causal relationship between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and neurodevelopment disorders talks about this study in this free interview in JAMA.

He mentions a more recent 2025 Japanese study that came to the same conclusions:

“A nationwide Japanese study with about 200 000 persons looked at this exact same question and also did a sibling analysis. The use of acetaminophen in this population was roughly 40%. And they found the exact same thing that our Swedish study did, where there’s an apparent statistical association initially, but it completely disappears when you do the sibling control analysis. And so, the evidence is pointing a certain way that is going to be challenging for other studies to try and overcome.”

• Frank Bruni outdoes his usual excellence in this week’s NYT newsletter “The Unchecked, Unbalanced Reign of King Donald.” His For the Love of Sentences is especially good as well. Some examples:

Frank’s own, nominated by me:

“But the Republicans who control the House and the Senate have instead surrendered all control to Trump, whose vanquishing of Democrats and potential wrath speak more loudly to them than ethics, a word I feel silly typing. They’re dutiful handmaidens and gushing cheerleaders who have given him whatever he wants, including a roster of senior administration officials who are, incredibly, yet more dutiful and gushing than they are. Where two or three gather in Trump’s name, there he is to bask in their obsequiousness, as if he were extending his legs for a pedicure and each of them were calling dibs on a different toe.”

and from others:

In The Pickup, John Paul Brammer took issue with a proposal to build the tallest skyscraper in the United States in a very flat state: “It’s difficult to communicate just how dramatically its completion would transform the Oklahoma City skyline, but picture, if you would, a pancake with a yardstick plunged into it.”

In her newsletter, Mary Geddry experienced Trump’s ramblings to journalists in the Oval Office last Monday as “less a press conference than a slurred soliloquy of decay, staged under the chandeliers of American decline.”

• David French, writing in the Times, explains why this one sentence in Article II of the Constitution is now such a problem: “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.”  His proposed remedy:

“There is a constitutional answer to this national challenge. We can — at long last — heed the warnings of the antifederalists, and we can do it simply enough, by changing the first sentence of Article II. Instead of declaring, “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America,” it should read, “A president of the United States of America shall execute laws passed by Congress.””