Intercepting symbiomes

Intercepting pandemics through genomics

It makes sense:

There is an urgent need to establish a global, genomic-based biosurveillance platform, a developmentwhich would be of immense value to biosecurity, biodefense, and the economy. If implemented, this“pandemic interception system” would hugely advance our understanding of the natural world. Three major research programs are poised to support this effort: BIOSCAN, the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), and the Global Virome Project (GVP). Each of these global programs is now working to develop approaches in comparative genomics that are needed to discover all species and to reveal their interactions. The diversity of infectious agents involved in host–pathogen interactions needs immediate clarification, especially  with regard to those agents that transfect phylogenetically divergent lineages.

A pandemic interception system needs to be based on detailed knowledge of symbiomes, which are the constellations of organisms that interact with all multicellular species. Efforts to describe the structure of symbiomes are motivated by the fact that parasites, parasitoids, and microbes can devastate host populations, especially those that are evolutionarily naïve. Symbiome complexity is governed by rules.

Daido Moriyama

Tackling COVID-19 beyond testing

How We Can Tackle the COVID-19 Crisis Beyond Testing

If you wear a smartwatch or fitness tracker, you can play a role in monitoring the spread of COVID-19 and other viral diseases like the flu. In this Front Row lecture, Eric Topol, MD, and Jennifer Radin, PhD, discuss how they’re calling on the public to share data from wearable devices for a study that’s helping scientists flag the early onset of contagious respiratory illnesses. By harnessing this key data—including heart rates, sleep and activity levels—from hundreds of thousands of individuals, they seek to improve real-time disease surveillance.

Regulating the healthcare bazaar

What to Do about Health-Care Markets?
Policies to Make Health-Care Markets Work

Martin Gaynor in the Brookings Report proposes three types of policy reforms that would increase competition in health care and improve market functioning:

• Reduce or eliminate policies that encourage consolidation or that impede entry and competition.
• Strengthen antitrust enforcement so that federal and state antitrust enforcement agencies can act effectively to prevent and remove harms to competition.
• Create an agency responsible for monitoring and overseeing health-care markets, and give that agency the authority to flexibly intervene when markets are not working

Well, these are only 3 issues, the report highlights the details into the implementation. And if you want to know how far healthcare is from competitive markets, you must start understanding markets. There is a book that may help as a useful guide to start:

Forming beliefs

The Value of Beliefs

Relevant article with key messages:

We construct our beliefs to meet two sometimes conflicting goals: forming accurate beliefs to inform our decisions and forming desirable beliefs that we value for their own sake. In this NeuroView, we consider emerging neuroscience evidence on how the brain motivates itself to form particular beliefs and why it does so.

Our beliefs are fundamental parts of what makes each of us unique. They are a major cause of both harmony and discord; shared beliefs bring people together, while divergent beliefs can spark revolutions. In this age of the internet and social media, the ability of beliefs to both invigorate and polarize is more apparent than ever. This raises a fundamental question: how do people arrive at their beliefs? A traditional approach to studying beliefs is grounded on the idea that people build an internal model of the world for the purpose of informing their decisions to help them achieve external goals, such as gaining rewards and avoiding punishments.

 In particular, individuals often prefer to hold positive beliefs and hold beliefs with high certainty. To achieve this, changes in information seeking and belief updating are motivated by tapping into the same circuits that drive primary reward seeking. However, unlike primary rewards such as food, beliefs on their own do not directly promote survival.

The narrative of pandemics (2)

Información científica especializada, información pública y medios de comunicación durante la crisis del coronavirus

Today you'll find our article on communication in pandemic times in Blog Economía y Salud AES, how markets of attention and radical uncertainty drive current situation.

David Hockney

Public Health ethics

Ética en, para y de la Salud Pública

From Andreu Segura, a good article on public health ethics:

Modern public health has not paid much attention to ethics until very recently. Perhaps because a large part of their functions have been developed in public administrations, which are subject to regulations and laws and not to the deontological standards of professional corporations, but also because having such a lovely formal purpose -- health promotion and protection-- it seems that it is not  necessary to go to ethics to assess their activities. As it happened in the time of Enlightened Absolutism. An arrogant attitude that could explain popular distrust of some of their recommendations. One obstacle that the application of ethics could overcome.

David Hockney

In memoriam: Adam Wagstaff, a giant of health economics

The Virtual Legacy of Adam Wagstaff in Health Economics: So Much More than Old Wine in New Bottles

On 10 May 2020, the health economics community lost one of its giants with the death of Adam Wagstaff. During his career, Adam made tremendous contributions to the development and analysis of health care financing policies, with a focus on both health equity and efficiency in countries around the world. The huge volume of his work is partially reflected through articles and citations to his work published in Health Economics. The Health Economics Editorial Board, in conjunction with Wiley, prepared this Virtual Issue in Adam's honor. The issue starts with remembrances of Adam by Eddy van Doorslaer, a long-time friend and colleague. The issue also contains, in chronological order, links to the 28 Health Economics articles which Adam wrote or co-authored. We hope this compilation increases awareness of the brilliance of a leading health economist whose contributions were cut short by most unfortunate illness.

Hopper