#Health Gap

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Hello health emergencies. It will be our job to make sure everyone connects the dire consequences with the cause: this administration. Which is cutting everything and everyone off from everything else, consistent with their ideology and consistent with causing epic chaos, suffering, and death.

NYT: Without treatment, virus levels in people with H.I.V. will quickly spike, hobbling the immune systems of the infected people and increasing the odds that they will spread the virus to others.

About one in three untreated pregnant women may pass the virus on to their babies.

Interrupted treatment may also lead to the emergence of resistant strains that can spread across the world.

One study estimated that if PEPFAR were to end, as many as 600,000 lives would be lost over the next decade in South Africa alone. And that nation relies on PEPFAR for only 20 percent of its H.I.V. budget. Some poorer countries are almost entirely dependent on the program.

“This is another domino in the devastating impact of the harmful freeze to programs, leaving lives hanging in the balance,” said Jirair Ratevosian, who served as chief of staff for PEPFAR during the Biden administration.

More from that report:

The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.

The directive is part of a broader freeze on foreign aid initiated last week. It includes the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the global health program started by George W. Bush that is credited with saving more than 25 million lives worldwide.

The administration had already moved to stop PEPFAR funding from moving to clinics, hospitals and other organizations in low-income countries.

Appointments are being canceled, and patients are being turned away from clinics, according to people with knowledge of the situation who feared retribution if they spoke publicly. Many people with H.I.V. are facing abrupt interruptions to their treatment.

ut most federal officials are also under strict orders not to communicate with external partners, leading to confusion and anxiety, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.

U.S. officials have also been told to stop providing technical assistance to national ministries of health.

“The partners we collaborate with are in shock, and they do not know what to do because their lifesaving mission and commitment has been breached,” said Asia Russell, executive director of the advocacy group Health Gap.

Late on Sunday night, according to an email viewed by The New York Times, employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were instructed, effective immediately, to stop communicating with personnel at the World Health Organization.

They were later directed not even to be in the same meeting room — real or virtual — as W.H.O. employees or to participate in email conversations in which W.H.O. staff members are also engaged. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/health/pepfar-trump-freeze.html

[indianflash123]

Closing the Women's Health Gap The Unspoken Toll

[coachcatasha]

Black Birth Equity Fund

Dove Doula Grant for Black Families The Black Birth Equity Fund seeks to provide high-quality care to the community most affected by unnecessary medical deaths. The popular beauty brand Dove© created this grant to offer doula services for the black community to help close the maternal health gap in America. It’s estimated that 60% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. That number is…

[davidaugust]

[deoidesign]

"I'm the dog they put with cheetahs to keep them from going crazy in captivity" x "I'm the cheetah that is threatening to go crazy" 4 ever

(I make a webcomic about them)

[choccy-milky]

Finally had time to catch up on the raven and the snake. I am just in awe of everything.

Also, I kinda like Clora hanging out with Garreth and Leander. (don't kill me 🤐)

aw thank you!!🥹💖💖im happy to hear it! and NO i wont kill you, you are so right. the garreth/leander/clora hangout was my fav part of the chapter and also the most fun part to write, and it gave me an appreciation for the leander and garreth dynamic, which is amazing

i now headcanon their relationship like brothers LMAO, garreth constantly badgering leander and getting on his nerves, while leander is just exasperated in dealing with him (BUT IN A FRIENDLY WAY) theyre like characters in a sitcom tbh BAHAHA (and to anyone wondering, im gonna TRY to have the next chap up within the first week of feb!🙏 ive just been busy with the dark relic comic + work + and now i feel a bit under the weather. ive been sleeping almost nonstop for the past 2 days LOL oop)

[porosenoksposts]

i know elves and dwarves had the most rancid private discourse regarding legolas/gimli marriage. racism, "problematic age gap" concerns, potentially homophobia, classism (legolas is a prince!). racism again...

[australianwomensnews]

Medical research has a major problem: an alarmingly high number of trials are based on fake, fraudulent or misinterpreted data.

Research misconduct sleuths call them “zombie” studies. They look like real research papers but they’re rotten to the core. And when these studies go on to influence clinical guidelines, that is, how patients are treated in hospitals and doctors’ rooms, they can be dangerous.

Professor Ben Mol, head of the Evidence-based Women’s Health Care Research Group at Monash University, is a professional zombie hunter. For years, he has warned that between 20 and 30 per cent of medical trials that inform clinical guidelines aren’t trustworthy.

“I’m surprised by the limited response from people in my field on this issue,” he says. “It’s a topic people don’t want to talk about.”

The peer review process is designed to ensure the validity and quality of findings, but it’s built on the assumption that data is legitimate.

Science relies on an honour system whereby researchers trust that colleagues have actually carried out the trials they describe in papers, and that the resulting data was collected with rigorous attention to detail.

But too often, once findings are queried, researchers can’t defend their conclusions. Figures such as former BMJ editor Richard Smith and Anaesthesia editor John Carlise argue it’s time to assume all papers are flawed or fraudulent until proven otherwise. The trust has run out.

“I think we have been naive for many years on this,” Mol says. “We are the Olympic Games without any doping checks.”

How bad science gets into the clinic

Untrustworthy papers may be the result of scientists misinterpreting their data or deliberately faking or plagiarising their numbers. Many of these “zombie” papers emerge from Egypt, Iran, India and China and usually crop up in lower-quality journals.

The problem gets bad when these poor-quality papers are laundered by systematic reviews or meta-analyses in prestigious journals. These studies aggregate hundreds of papers to produce gold-standard scientific evidence for whether a particular treatment works.

Often papers with dodgy data are excluded from systematic reviews. But many slip through and go on to inform clinical guidelines.

My colleague Liam Mannix has written about an example of this with the hormone progesterone. Official guidelines held that the hormone could reduce the risk of pre-term birth in women with a shortened cervix.

But those guidelines were based on a meta-analysis largely informed by a paper from Egypt that was eventually retracted due to concerns about the underlying data. When this paper was struck from the meta-analysis, the results reversed to suggest progesterone had no preventative effect.

There’s a litany of other examples where discounting dodgy data can fundamentally alter the evidence that shapes clinical guidelines. That’s why, in The Lancet’s clinical journal eClinical Medicine, Mol and his colleagues have reported a new way to weed out bad science before it makes it to the clinic.

Holding back the horde

The new tool is called the Research Integrity in Guidelines and evIDence synthesis (RIGID) framework. It mightn’t sound sexy, but it’s like a barbed-wire fence that can hold back the zombie horde.

The world-first framework lays out a series of steps researchers can take when conducting a meta analysis or writing medical guidelines to exclude dodgy data and untrustworthy findings. It involves two researchers screening articles for red flags.

“You can look at biologically implausible findings like very high success rates of treatments, very big differences between treatments, unfeasible birth weights. You can look at statistical errors,” says Mol.

“You can look at strange features in the data, only using rounded numbers, only using even numbers. There are studies where out of dozens of pairs of numbers, everything is even. That doesn’t happen by chance.”

A panel decides if a paper has a medium to high risk of being untrustworthy. If that’s the case, the RIGID reviewers put their concerns to the paper’s authors. They’re often met with stony silence. If authors cannot address the concerns or provide their raw data, the paper is scrapped from informing guidelines.

The RIGID framework has already been put to use, and the results are shocking.

In 2023, researchers applied RIGID to the International Evidence-based Guidelines for Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), a long misunderstood and misdiagnosed syndrome that affects more than 1 in 10 women. As a much maligned condition, it was critical the guidelines were based on the best possible evidence.

In that case, RIGID discounted 45 per cent of papers used to inform the health guidelines.

That’s a shockingly high number. Those potentially untrustworthy papers might have completely skewed the guidelines.

Imagine, Mol says, if it emerged that almost half of the maintenance reports of a major airline were faked? No one would be sitting around waiting for a plane to crash. There would be swift action and the leadership of the airline sacked.

[ed-recoverry]

Daily reminder that your body shouldn’t look the same as did when you were 14. It’s not a matter of gaining or losing weight from that age, it’s the fact that your body literally changes over the years. Especially in your teens. It’s just how bodies work. Don’t punish yourself for something you have no control of.

[softghostbite]

Todays post it doodle is mr gap

[dunsbar]

the magnus archives is a podcast about the horrors of having a job

[mactiir]

The very funny thing about having finally recovered from depression after being depressed for literally decades is. Even though I'm no longer depressed. My kneejerk initial reaction when I get overwhelmed is like "fuck it time to die" and then, because I have spent a lot of time and intention and money on therapy, my IMMEDIATE next thought is "no you won't babe, eat some broccoli. Go for a run. Go see ur friends" and the moment I've done any combination of those things I'm like singing showtunes about how good life is. Like ok brain i understand you spent the last fifteen years in a critical state but maybe we can do the broccoli first next time. Vegetables before defaulting to Habitual Symptoms please.

[beescake]

found some old tweets frm my private diary acc logging errant thoughts i had while getting into hs

and well. smth abt the progression of it makes me emo. happy new year ig :')

[klutzytomb]

I never thought I'd say this, but there's no way I'm one of the only ones here that isn't chronically online. Right? Right??

[davidaugust]

Ronald Reagan���s real legacy, charted and graphed. Spoiler: It’s not the bedtime story we’ve been told.

A visual breakdown of the inequality, debt, and mass incarceration still shaping our lives.

'Trickle-down' economics was never real.