Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

Big Cheese did it

"The popularity of fondue wasn't an accident. It was planned by a shadowy association of Swiss cheese makers. A cheese cartel basically ruled the Swiss economy for 80 years, until fairly recently."

https://www.npr.org/2015/04/23/401655790/how-a-swiss-cheese-cartel-made-fondue-popular

"Immune checkpoint inhibitors such as pembrolizumab or nivolumab, which inhibit PD-1, have greatly improved survival for many patients with cancer, but are prohibitively expensive and unattainable for most of the global cancer population. Optimized dosing, with a reduced unit dose, less frequent schedule and/or shorter duration of treatment could reduce costs and potentially toxicity, thereby improving global access to effective cancer therapy."

#Immunology #Immunotherapy #NatureMedicine

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02029-1

"Unbeknownst to me as a young physician, certain scholars and pundits in the 1960s were opining that with the advent of highly effective vaccines for many childhood diseases and a growing array of antibiotics, the threat of infectious diseases — and perhaps, with it, the need for infectious-disease specialists — was fast disappearing."
- Anthony Fauci #NEJM

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2213814

"Quammen, 74, is the favorite science writer of many people who don’t usually read science writing. He also happens to be the favorite science writer of many science writers, a foundational figure. Among the kinds of people who cover anything from space telescopes to treatment-resistant bacteria, Quammen is a writer to geek out over."

#SciComm #Books #DavidQuammen

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/11/david-quammen-breathless-covid-science-book/672151/

"A week later the phone rang and I was told that I had a cancer of the testicles that had spread to a lymph node and to one lung. Instead of seeing the urologist, I would now need to see an oncologist. For a few days I comforted myself by pretending that, because of my abiding interest in the mysteries and niceties of Being, I had to see an ontologist. Nobody except one of my fellow Irish novelists thought this was funny. "

#books #ColmToibin

'In his biography of Farmer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” from 2003, Tracy Kidder noted that even as tuberculosis killed more adults than any other disease in Haiti, not a single person had died of it since 1988 in the P.I.H. hospital that served a desperately poor rural area with a population of about 100,000 people. Protocols the group developed in Peru for successfully treating multidrug-resistant tuberculosis were adopted globally.'

#PublicHealth

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/03/opinion/charity-holiday-gift-partners-in-health.html

Really cool work in #Immunity by Annika Frede, Eduardo Villablanca et al. using a mouse DSS model of intestinal damage

"Although neutrophils and monocytes expanded transiently during the inflammatory process, B cells continued to expand during the recovery phase, becoming the most dominant cell type within the colon LP. Using flow cytometry, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), immunofluorescence, and RNAscope, we identified an interferon (IFN)-induced B cell subtype that accumulates in damaged areas of the regenerating colon. B cell depletion (BCD) during the recovery phase enhanced tissue repair and a transcriptomic program associated with the extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling. "

#MucosalImmunology #Immunology #TissueRepair #IBD #Colitis

https://www.cell.com/immunity/fulltext/S1074-7613(22)00592-1?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1074761322005921%3Fshowall%3Dtrue