aardvark92

My anecdotal experience going on and off Paxil is that it does work for me, and no matter how badly I want to live Rx-free, I consistently devolve into a moody mess without them.

I guess it depends on who the coauthors and PI are - some academic mentors can be overly trusting and ‘hands-off.’ A lone medical student’s self published paper shouldn’t be worth much though…

If it had killed 11,000 people we’d be hearing much more about it. It made news that Ebola hit a record high of 1,000 cases this week.

The police are human too and often bored on shift. The world needs more whimsy!

I understand your perspective, but viewing police as solely as a potential threat is not spreading whimsy.

Saw the same thing first hand with Pathology data. Image analysis is far more straightforward problem than fMRI, but sorry, I do not trust your AI model that matches our pathologist’s scoring with 98.5% accuracy. Our pathologists are literally guesstimating these numbers and can vary by like 10-20% just based on the phase of the moon, whether the pathologist ate lunch yet, what slides he looked at earlier that day…that’s not even accounting for inter-pathologist variation…

Also saw this irl with a particular NGS diagnostic. This model was initially 99% accurate, P.I. smelled BS, had the grad student crunch the numbers again, 96% accurate, published it, built a company around this product —-> boom, 2 years later it was retracted because the data was a lot of amplified noise, spurious hits, overfitting.

I don’t know jack compared to the average HN contributor, but even I can smell the BS from a mile away in some of these biomedical AI models. Peer review is broken for highly-interdisciplinary research like this.

Yes! This plays into my favorite pet theory - that herpesviruses (and/or other microbes) are the cause of Alzheimers:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5457904/pdf/nihms85...

This paper gets ripped into in my favorite podcast, TWiV (This Week in Virology)!

Essentially, yes, neomycin in the nose, if timed perfectly, can activate the innate immune system, but en mass this practice would cause the spread of antibiotic resistance.

Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-week-in-virology/...

also am curious as to the dark side!

If you waited 8 years to marry her, I'm not surprised she moved on...

Yes! Looking for gene target failure rates is a valid, albeit indirect way of quantifying variants. You will only be able to detect variants this way if the variant contains a mutation within the primer binding region and if that mutation happens to affect primer binding causing signal drop-off (a lot of 'ifs'!).

Some labs quantify amount of variant by running multiple RT-qPCRs using primers specific to mutations unique to each variant (see https://www.promega.com/products/pcr/qpcr-and-rt-qpcr/sars-c...).

Both of these strategies leave much to be desired. For one, it's terribly costly to run multiple RT-qPCRs in parallel. It also fails to account for any novel variants whose mutations lie outside your primer binding region(s).

From what I've gathered, RT-qPCR is useful for quantifying what is already known while sequencing helps you discover what is unknown.

I guess if you had unlimited time and money you could order new primer/probe sets from IDT every time a new variant comes into play...kind of like a home-brew microarray? Honestly, I'm kind of surprised there aren't SARS-CoV-2 variant microarrays on the market yet...we're all just spitballing here.

Not sure what the water treatment plant steps are downstream, but I can tell you I've been processing SARS-CoV-2 positive wastewater samples for ages and managed not to catch COVID. Most of the gene fragments tested for in these studies are just that, fragments. The virus itself degrades pretty quickly under environmental stress (UV, heat, evaporation, etc).

I wouldn't be too worried about catching COVID from the water.

We're working on it! Demultiplexing the signal is tricky though.

Currently, labs have two main tools available - RT-qPCR and tiled amplicon sequencing. RT-qPCR provides cycle threshold (Ct) values which quantify the amount of virus RNA in a sample. RT-qPCR is not practical for finding and quantifying de novo variants as it relies on standard primer sets. Sequencing based approaches are less quantitative but provide more insight into the diversity of RNAs and mutations present in a sample - and thus which variants are present.

https://www.gisaid.org/hcov19-variants/ has a variant dashboard based on sequencing data, including Omicron. It's not as quantitative qPCR, but still may be of interest.

We found Omicron genomes in my county's wastewater. Give it like, two days and it'll hit the news.

SOURCE: I work in a leading U.S. wastewater testing lab.

Folks have been testing wastewater for legal and illegal drugs for years (https://score-cost.eu has an interesting report if you're interested).

There's been talk amongst Police Departments in whether investing in wide scale wastewater monitoring could help locate drug dealers/labs. Personally, I think this is a huge invasion of privacy, but since wastewater is a "public good" police currently can do whatever they want with it (source: I work in a wastewater testing facility).