England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said once people become addicted to smoking 'their choice is taken away' bbc.com/news/uk-politi…

There's been a risk of re-emergence of orthodox virus (the family smallpox and Mpox belong to) since eradication of smallpox. We also have vaccines that are much safer and more effective than the old Vaccinia. It makes no sense that these aren't being distributed more.

Good to see. Meanwhile NZ seems intent on going in the opposite direction

tl;dr- the work shows the immune system prefers to recycle memory cells to target conserved sites instead of recruiting brand naive cells to target mutated sites. This work doesn't show that this is bad and IMO doesn't show that vaccination suppresses response against Omicron.

In The Slump, you up the support for disaster responders. You don’t take it away. We have been telling you that for four years NHS England

This is State Highway 6 between Franz Josef and Fox Glacier 1News

Remember that in birds, flu is a gastrointestinal infection.

Never ideal when practices look like the methods section of a gain-of-function experiment…

I’m seeing some “free market” simps defending Nature’s 12k open access fees. Guess it’s time to bring this back around.

This is a good post by Henry on one way the media could regain trust.

'It means treating audiences as adults who deserve to see some of the ingredients of the meal, not just what’s on the plate'

I'll be in Ōtepoti for this but there must be fairly short odds of it being cloudy and feeling like a normal gloomy winter evening 😂 rnz.co.nz/news/national/…

Jensen's inequality strikes again, this time it's Reviewer #2 who's the unwitting victim which makes a nice change from yours truly

In Australia, it is illegal to feed animal derived ‘meal’ to ruminants. But poultry waste litter can be used as a fertiliser on recently grazed pastures with a 3 week rest period before animals are provided access again.
👉url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/21BNCwVLG5hL…

What’s the leading cause of death in each country?

Fiona Spooner and I wrote a brief data insight at Our World in Data to explain this:

Despite being recommended for many years, less than half of NZ mums-to-be receive #whooping_cough or #influenza immunisations. How do we do a better job of protecting mothers and newborns? GeoHealth Laboratory UniofOtagoWellington

phcc.org.nz/briefing/prote…

New preprint: Reconstructed influenza A/H3N2 infection histories reveal variation in incidence and antibody dynamics over the life course

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

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T. Ryan Gregory There are decades of research evaluating how influenza & other respiratory viruses are multi-system pathogens. Not only do they impact the brain/nervous system (link below), they also impact CV/GI/renal/other systems. We take these viruses very seriously.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=influenz…

Trying to do my bit to speak up for the precious taonga that is the Growing Up in NZ study.
This study has so much to offer, and in all honesty belongs to the young people whose lives and stories are in it.
Tx John Gerritsen RNZ for covering.
rnz.co.nz/news/national/…

1/ Paxlovid for all? Nope.

'The time to sustained alleviation of all signs & symptoms of Covid-19 did not differ significantly between participants who received nirmatrelvir–ritonavir & those who received placebo.'

Not a surprise to many clinicians.

tinyurl.com/43jvp6wv

Changes to free flu vaccine eligibility are a missed opportunity to close NZ’s health equity gap theconversation.com/changes-to-fre… via The Conversation - Australia + New Zealand