Musings

Tattoos may be linked to an increased risk of lymphoma

These findings need to be validated, but they are interesting. From a Medscape UK summary:

“In the first large study of its kind, tattoos were found to raise the risk for malignant lymphoma by about 20% compared with no tattoos. Tattoo ink often contains carcinogens and, when applied to the skin, triggers an immunologic response.

METHODOLOGY:
This study was a population-based case-control study of all incident cases of malignant lymphoma in Swedish adults (aged 20-60 years) in the Swedish National Cancer Register between 2007 and 2017 (n = 11,905). Tattoo exposure was assessed by a structured questionnaire in both cases and three random age- and sex-matched controls without lymphoma. The primary outcome was the incidence rate ratio of malignant lymphoma in tattooed vs nontattooed individuals.
TAKEAWAY:
The prevalence of tattoos was 21% among cases and 18% among controls. After adjustment for confounders, tattooed participants had a 21% higher risk for overall lymphoma than non-tattooed participants (incidence rate ratio = 1.21; 95% CI, 0.99-1.48).“

And a link to the original paper, Tattoos as a risk factor for malignant lymphoma: a population-based case–control study, by Nielsen, Jerkeman, and Jöud.

I guess I’m happy to be ink-free…

John Patrick2024-05-31T17:08:03-05:00May 31st, 2024|Home, Musings|

Refuting the latest lies from *rump

• Glen Kessler from the Washington Post refutes *rump’s latest hash of untruths regarding his trial and conviction.

John Patrick2024-05-31T16:37:35-05:00May 31st, 2024|HomeRecommended|

Yglesias on *rump

• Matt Yglesias does a good job reporting on the ways *rump has mistreated people in his May 22 Slow Boring newsletter Trump Scams the People Who Trust Him. An excerpt:

“What makes Trump uniquely dangerous is his disregard for the rule of law. But while it’s certainly possible that Trump will leverage that disregard to advance conservative policy aims, what he has actually consistently done throughout his career is seek personal financial benefit, specifically at the expense of his fans and admirers.”

John Patrick2024-05-25T12:57:51-05:00May 25th, 2024|HomeRecommended|

Israel’s Problematic Government

• If you really want to understand how Israeli government policies contributed to the development of the current terrible conflict, this well-researched NYT article by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti does a superb job of documenting the problematic history.

John Patrick2024-05-18T18:12:05-05:00May 18th, 2024|HomeRecommended|

Liz Cheney: The Supreme Court Should Rule Swiftly on Trump’s Immunity Claim

• Liz Cheney writes in the NYT about why the Supreme Court should rule quickly on DJT’s immunity claim. The most trenchant quote from that piece:

“It cannot be that a president of the United States can attempt to steal an election and seize power but our justice system is incapable of bringing him to trial before the next election four years later.”

I agree.

John Patrick2024-04-22T16:31:12-05:00April 22nd, 2024|HomeRecommended|

Good News – Pediatric Mortality Is Declining Dramatically

• Kristen Panthagani MD, PhD as usual writes quite effectively in Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist Substack space on the dramatic benefits of the modern world (including vaccines) on pediatric mortality. An excerpt, and illustrative graphs:

“Deaths from infectious diseases have plummeted with the discovery of bacteria and viruses, improved sanitation, pasteurization, the discovery of antibiotics, and the development of vaccines. Childhood mortality dropped astronomically, and life expectancy in grew by three decades in the twentieth century alone. The most dramatic increases are among children under 5 years old.”

John Patrick2024-04-18T18:42:53-05:00April 18th, 2024|HomeRecommended|

Wallace-Wells AI in Warfare

David Wallace-Wells once again writes an important piece in the NYT illustrating some of the current uses of AI in warfare. An excerpt:

“The more abstract questions raised by the prospect of A.I. warfare are unsettling on the matters of not just machine error but also ultimate responsibility: Who is accountable for an attack or a campaign conducted with little or no human input or oversight? But while one nightmare about military A.I. is that it is given control of decision making, another is that it helps armies become simply more efficient about the decisions being made already. And as Abraham describes it, Lavender is not wreaking havoc in Gaza on its own misfiring accord. Instead it is being used to weigh likely military value against collateral damage in very particular ways — less like a black box oracle of military judgment or a black hole of moral responsibility and more like the revealed design of the war aims of the Israel Defense Forces.”

John Patrick2024-04-11T16:34:21-05:00April 11th, 2024|Home, Musings|

Who Won Covid

• Another good piece from David Wallace-Wells in the NYT: Who ‘Won’ Covid? It Depends How You Measure. An excerpt:

“In the end, everyone got it, and probably the most important factor shaping national death totals was how many people were vaccinated before their first infection and how many weren’t. The United States could’ve done much better on that test, given that more Americans have died of Covid since the vaccines were made available to anyone who wanted them than had died to that point. But by some estimates, those vaccines also saved more than three million American lives.”

John Patrick2024-04-03T15:50:14-05:00April 3rd, 2024|HomeRecommended|

Some evidence that AI scribes may benefit physicians

Kaiser Permanente trialed using ambient AI scribes to determine whether they were of net value to providers and deemed it a success, “saving most of the physicians using it an average of one hour a day at the keyboard” and that the quality of the transcriptions was for the most part quite acceptable. See the implementation described here in NEJM Catalyst.

John Patrick2024-03-26T15:40:20-05:00March 26th, 2024|HomeRecommended|

Covid Vaccine Benefits (for those getting immunized, that is)

More good work from Dave Leonhardt and Ashley Wu in March 11th’s NYT’s The Morning:

“To this day, more than 30 percent of self-identified Republicans have not received a Covid vaccine shot, compared with less than 10 percent of Democrats…

While many liberals exaggerated the value of pandemic restrictions, they were right about the vaccines. After vaccines became available, a huge partisan gap in Covid deaths opened. Even today, when most Americans have had the virus and have some natural immunity as a result, unvaccinated people are at much more risk. Consider that about 95 percent of recent Covid-related hospitalizations in the U.S. have occurred among people who had not received an updated vaccine.”

John Patrick2024-03-11T14:38:13-05:00March 11th, 2024|Home, Musings|