Reading Room
The reading room includes articles and videos of potential interest to consumers and medical professionals. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the NC Medical Board, its members and staff. Note: Some links may require subscriptions.
Does the end of Covid emergency declarations mean the pandemic is over?
STATNews
May 8, 2023
If you have been looking for a sense of pandemic closure, the World Health Organization’s declaration Friday that it was ending the Covid global health emergency was about as close to it as you are likely to get. The reality is that although battlefield metaphors are often employed to describe humankind’s struggle with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, there will be no 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month-like moment signaling that an armistice has been achieved. There are no fixed borders between a pandemic, when a pathogen is new to humans and causing wide scale disease and often high levels of death, and the ensuing endemic phase, when the disease has settled into something that our immune systems can better cope with, explained Marc Lipsitch, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Are repeat COVID infections dangerous? What the science says
Nature
April 26, 2023
When the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was a strange and terrifying adversary that plunged the world into chaos. More than three years later, the infection’s symptoms are all too familiar and COVID-19 is here to stay — part of a long list of common diseases that infect humans. Experts estimate that the majority of the world’s population has been infected at least once; in the United States, some estimates suggest that as many as 65% of people have had multiple infections1. And it’s likely that in the decades to come, we’re all destined to get COVID-19 many more times.
Led by students, a nascent climate movement is taking hold in medical education
STATNews
April 26, 2023
When Cecilia Sorensen was an emergency medicine resident practicing at Denver Health in Colorado a few years ago, summer was known as “trauma season.” Gunshot and motor vehicle accident victims, people with heart attacks and COPD would stream into the ER. Later, on a fellowship, she witnessed the health impacts of drought in Syria. The common driver, she realized, was climate change and its impact, both locally and globally. “How did I hear nothing, nothing, about this during my entire medical training?” Sorensen found herself wondering. “Literally nothing.”
COVID XBB.1.16 Strain ‘One to Watch,’ says WHO
Medpage Today
April 4, 2023
The World Health Organization (WHO) is monitoring XBB.1.16, an Omicron subvariant that has been detected in over 20 countries and contributing to a recent surge of COVID cases in India. Known as “Arcturus,” XBB.1.16 has been listed as a WHO variant under monitoringopens in a new tab or window since March 22, with 800 sequences of the Omicron subvariant currently analyzed across 22 countries.
Building a better brain through music, dance and poetry
NPR
April 3, 2023
To make sense of difficult science, Michael Kofi Esson often turns to art. When he’s struggling to understand the immune system or a rare disease, music and poetry serve as an anchor. “It helps calm me down and actively choose what to focus on,” says Esson, a second-year student at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Esson, who was born in Ghana, also thinks his brain is better at absorbing all that science because of the years he spent playing the trumpet and studying Afrobeat musicians like Fela Kuti. “There has to be some kind of greater connectivity that [art] imparts on the brain,” Esson says.
