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Hi Reddit!
We’re a panel of Johns Hopkins faculty from the Schools of Public Health and Medicine, and we run the Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium (NCRC). We rapidly curate and review research preprints and articles about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. We screen every article that comes through PubMed, SSRN, medRxiv, and bioRxiv. Our goal is to flag key evidence for frontline public health practitioners, clinicians, and policy makers so that they can respond to the pandemic effectively. Occasionally, we post reviews about controversial articles that are receiving a lot of media attention.
The NCRC has eight teams, each with a different expertise. We can answer your questions about anything in those topic areas: vaccines, diagnostics, disease modeling, epidemiology, pharmaceutical interventions, clinical presentation and risk factors that affect disease severity, ecology and spillover, and non-pharmaceutical interventions (e.g., contact tracing, masks, school closures, policy evaluations).
Science is constantly evolving, but we do have a firm understanding of some things. Today we want to take this opportunity to engage with the public and share what we’ve learned so far. We are pleased to be hosting this panel to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic and are glad that you’re here!
We'll be answering questions starting at 12:00 PM (US Eastern), with more panelists joining at 1:00 PM! EDIT: Our panelists had a little bit of a late start but as of 12:20 they're hard at work writing up answers and will be coming in any minute now :)
We are:
Emily S. Gurley, PhD (bio) co-leads the NCRC and is an associate scientist in the Department of Epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (BSPH). She is a specialist in infectious disease epidemiology, disease surveillance and outbreaks, and One Health (which includes disease spillover from animals to humans). She co-leads the epidemiology and ecology teams.
Kate Grabowski, PhD (bio) co-leads the NCRC and is an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious at the School of Medicine (SOM) and BSPH Department of Epidemiology. She is a specialist in transmission dynamics, viral phylogenetics, and network epidemiology. She co-leads the non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions teams.
Elizabeth A. Stuart, PhD (bio) is a professor in the BSPH Department of Mental Health with joint appointments in both the Department of Biostatistics and Department of Health Policy and Management. She is an expert in methods for estimating causal effects and primarily focuses on reviewing papers that purport to evaluate non-pharmaceutical policies for pandemic control.
Andrew Redd, PhD is an assistant professor in the SOM in the Division of Infectious Diseases. He is a virologist with expertise in molecular biology, laboratory science, and international public health. He co-leads the NCRC’s vaccine team, which reviews protocols and trial results to test the efficacy of and reactions to vaccines.
Maria Deloria Knoll, PhD (bio) is a senior scientist in the BSPH Department of International Health and Director of Epidemiology for the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC). She is an expert in epidemiological studies and clinical trials to evaluate vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases. She co-leads the NCRC’s vaccine team.
Heba Mostafa, MD, PhD, D(ABMM) (bio) is an assistant professor in the SOM Department of Pathology and Director of the Molecular Virology Laboratory. She manages the implementation of SARS-CoV-2 molecular testing and genomic surveillance at Johns Hopkins. She also co-leads the NCRC’s diagnostic team.
Justin Lessler (bio) is an associate professor in the BSPH Department of Epidemiology. He is an expert in infectious disease dynamics (i.e., how diseases spread — think R0!) and control. He was previously involved in responding to the emergence of Zika and west African Ebola outbreaks.
Larry Chang, MD MPH (bio) a medical doctor and associate professor in the SOM Division of Infectious Diseases with joint appointments in the BSPH Departments of Epidemiology and International Health. He has expertise in both randomized controlled trials and observational studies. He co-leads the NCRC’s pharmaceutical interventions reviews papers that report on the efficacy of COVID-19 therapeutics like remdesivir and plasma therapy.
Shirlee Wohl, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow at the BSPH Department of Epidemiology. She is an expert in using genomic epidemiology to track the spread of infectious diseases. She currently leverages phylogenetic methods to understand the viral transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
Sheree R. Schwartz, PhD (bio) an assistant scientist in the BSPH Department of Epidemiology and co-leads the NCRC’s epidemiology team. She is a specialist in infectious disease epidemiology, evaluating study designs for sources of bias, and implementation research (i.e., studying techniques to improve uptake of evidence-based science into everyday life).
Sabina A. Haberlen, PhD (bio) is an assistant scientist in the BSPH Department of Epidemiology and co-leads the NCRC’s clinical team. She is a specialist in infectious disease epidemiology as well as sexual and reproductive health.
Nikolas Wada, PhD is an alum of the BSPH Department of Epidemiology and co-leads the NCRC’s clinical and non-pharmaceutical interventions team. He is a specialist in infectious disease epidemiology; longitudinal data from cohort studies; and spotting potential issues with measurement, participant selection, and confounding that might threaten study validity.
At 12:00pm ET, Drs. Stuart, Grabowski, Gurley, and Wada will be live to kick off the panel. The rest of us will join at 1:00pm. Each team plans to answer questions for ~2 hours, so please come hang out!
H/T to students Brooke Jarrett (u/theoriginalbrk), Danielle Awabdeh (u/dawabdeh), Yanal Alnimer (u/yalnimer), Carli Jones, Rohan Panaparambil, Lauran Peetluk, and Ruth Young for assisting in the coordination of this event.
To access our compendium of curated articles and reviews: https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/
Sign up for our weekly newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/f29df5a985f9/ncrc-signup
Stay in touch with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JHSPH_NCRC
Update: Big thanks to our panelists who have answered in depth a huge amount of questions! The discussion is tapering off and several panelists may return to keep answering tonight or into the next few days. Thanks everyone for participating!
While the adoption of social media has been growing steadily globally for over a decade, the scientific study of social media is still in its youth. There's been a lot of press about the role that social media has played on such grandiose occasions as the the Arab Spring and the Ukraine's EuroMaiden revolution, but often times its impact is much more subtle, even if just as powerful. Social media has the power to polarize us politically, engage us and disaffect us, to inform us and disinform us. America's former President Donald Trump credits social media with his political success, and the 2020 U.S. Presidential election saw the rise and fall of one of history's most notorious bunk political conspiracies, organized almost entirely through social media.
We're a panel of researchers who look at the various ways that people organize themselves on social networks and the ways these networks shape our beliefs and behaviors. We study the evidence-based science of social media with a focus on understanding and quantifying the impacts of our exposure (or lack of exposure!) to ideas on social media, and we're here to answer your questions about it! We will begin answering questions circa 2pm Eastern.
We are:
Amy Bruckman (u/asbruckman): I am a Professor and Senior Associate Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. I study social computing, with interests in content moderation, collaboration, and social movements. I got my PhD from the MIT Media Lab in 1997, and am an ACM Fellow and a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy.
Damon Centola (u/DamonCentola): I'm Damon Centola, a professor of Sociology, Engineering, and Communication and Director of the Network Dynamics Group at UPenn. I study how social change spreads using computational models based on work done in Physics. I was raised in a community of artists, activists and entrepreneurs who were all working to spread awareness about social issues like water conservation, gender equity, atomic weapons, and fair policing practices. My new book, Change, just came out—it's a summary of nearly two decades of research on how social change actually takes place.
Jacob Groshek: I am currently the Ross Beach Research Chair in Emerging Media at Kansas State University. I earned my Ph.D. in media research at Indiana University Bloomington, where I specialized in international political communication and econometric methods. Topically, my areas of expertise now address online and mobile media technologies as their use may relate to sociopolitical and behavioral health change at the macro (i.e., national) and micro (as in individual) levels. My work also includes analyses of media content and user influence in social media, particularly through computational and data-driven approaches.
Charisse L'Pree: I'm an Associate Professor of Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Although my PhD is in Social Psychology from USC (SoCal), I have been working at the intersection of psychology and media for decades investigating how media affects the way we think about ourselves and others as well as how we use media to construct identity. I address the history of these interactions over the past 150 years in my most recent book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche.
As of 5:45pm Eastern, this discussion is winding down! Thank you so much to our panelists for taking the time to answer so many questions with so much detail. The post will stay open and our panelists have indicated that they are going to be around later in the evening and even tomorrow to provide additional answers asynchronously!
Open Science (a movement to make all phases of scientific research transparent and accessible to the public) has made great strides in the past decade, but those come with new ethical concerns that the COVID-19 Pandemic has highlighted. Open science promotes transparency in data and analysis and has been demonstrated to improve the quality and quantity of scientific research in participating institutions. These principles are never more valuable than in the midst of a global crisis such as the COVID pandemic, where quality information is needed so researchers can quickly and effectively build upon one another's work. It is also vital for the public and decision makers who need to make important calls about public health. However, misinformation can have a serious material cost in human lives that grows exponentially if not addressed properly. Preprints, lack of data sharing, and rushed peer review have led to confusion for both experts and the lay public alike.
We are a global collaboration that has looked at COVID19 research and potential misuses of basic transparency research principles. Our findings are available as a preprint and all our data is available online. To sum up, our findings are that:
Preprints (non peer-reviewed manuscripts) on COVID19 have been mentioned in the news approximately 10 times more than preprints on other topics published during the same period.
Approximately 700 articles have been accepted for publication in less than 24 hours, among which 224 were detailing new research results. Out of these 224 papers, 31% had editorial conflicts of interest (i.e., the authors of the papers were also part of the editorial team of the journal).
There has been a large amount of duplicated research projects probably leading to potential scientific waste.
There have been numerous methodologically flawed studies which could have been avoided if research protocols were transparently shared and reviewed before the start of a clinical trial.
Finally, the lack of data sharing and code sharing led to the now famous The Lancet scandal on Surgisphere
We hope that we can all shed some light on our findings and answer your questions. So there you go, ask us anything. We are looking forward to discussing these issues and potential solutions with you all.
Our guests will be answering under the account u/Cov19ResearchIssues, but they are all active redditors and members of the r/science community.
This is a global collaboration and our guests will start answering questions no later than 1p US Eastern!
Bios:
Lonni Besançon (u/lonnib): I am a postdoctoral fellow at Monash University, Australia. I received my Ph.D. in computer science at University Paris Saclay, France. I am particularly interested in interactive visualization techniques for 3D spatial data relying on new input paradigms and his recent work focuses on the visualization and understanding of uncertainty in empirical results in computer science. My Twitter.
Clémence Leyrat (u/Clem_stat): I am an Assistant Professor in Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Most of my research is on causal inference. I am investigating how to improve the methodology of randomised trials, and when trials are not feasible, how to develop and apply tools to estimate causal effects from observational studies. In medical research (and in all other fields), open science is key to gain (or get back?) the trust and support of the public, while ensuring the quality of the research done. My Twitter
Corentin Segalas (u/crsgls): I have a a PhD in biostatistics and am now a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on statistical methodology. I am mainly working on health and medical applications and deeply interested in the way open science can improve my work.
Edit: Thanks to all the kind internet strangers for the virtual awards. Means a lot for our virtual selves and their virtual happiness! :)
Edit 2: It's past 1am for us here and we're probably get a good sleep before answering the rest of your questions tomorrow! Please keep adding them here, we promise to take a look at all of them whenever we wake up :).
°°Edit 3:** We're back online!
Social epidemiology is a field of research that explicitly investigates the social factors that determine health, disease, and wellbeing in populations. Poverty, social isolation, education, income, stress, and other factors biologically impact people's health from birth until death. Social factors often interact with other individual circumstances (e.g. genetics, other disease, or exposure) to impact health. Today's discussion focuses on disparities in health based on race and ethnicity, and the social determinants of health that impact people over the course of their life. With us today are experts in social epidemiology, health inequity, genetics, and sociology who study the impacts of race on health.
As mentioned in a previous announcement post, the moderators of /r/science have worked in collaboration with the moderators of /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/blackladies to create this series of discussion panels focused on race in America. These panels will be led by subject area specialists including scientists, researchers, and policy professionals so that we can engage with multiple expert perspectives on those important topics. A list of the panels, guests, and dates can be found here.
Our guests will be joining this discussion throughout the day under the account u/health_disparities. With us today are:
Jennifer Manly: I am a Professor in the Department of Neurology at the Taub Institute for Research in Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University. My research focuses on mechanisms of disparities in cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s Disease. In order to do this research, my team has partnered with the Black and Latinx communities around Columbia Medical Center and around the country to design and carry out investigations of social factors across the lifecourse, such as educational opportunities, racism and discrimination, and socioeconomic status, and how these factors relate to cognition and brain health later in life.
Darrell Hudson: I am Darrell Hudson, an associate professor of public health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis where I also have appointments with the Department of Psychiatry and the Department of Sociology. My career is dedicated to the elimination of racial/ethnic health inequities. My research agenda centers on how social determinants of health, particularly racism, affect multiple health outcomes.
Judy Lubin: I am a sociologist, racial justice advocate and president of the Center for Urban and Racial Equity. I also serve as principal investigator of two National Park Service-funded studies at Howard University focused on parks, gentrification and environmental justice. My research interests focus on the intersection of health, race and public policy.
Fatimah Jackson: I received my Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in 1981. I am a Professor of Biology at Howard University where I teach courses in human evolutionary biology, genetics, and biological anthropology. My research focuses on the genetics of peoples of African descent. I am the 2020 recipient of the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award.
Though science aims to be unbiased and objective, the backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives of who is doing and informing the research impact the questions asked, analysis done, and who benefits from the outcomes. Cultural ideas about people influence how scientists view animal species. The make-up of research teams impacts whose stories are worth investigating, what kinds of questions get financially supported, and even who is represented in the research studies. For example, facial recognition software and metadata of photos taken at protests have been shown to have a higher rate of false positive matches for Asian and African-American faces over white faces, sometimes by a factor of 10 or even 100, in part due to training the algorithm on primary white faces. Structural racism is pervasive in precision medicine, and it deeply influences how scientists and physicians develop health guidelines. How and why such technologies, which engrain racism in our everyday lives, were developed and selected over others are questions that are framed by social history in America and elsewhere. Increasing diversity in science and samples/participants in a study can improve our research and applications of everything from artificial intelligence and machine learning to biobanks and precision medicine to archaeology and geology. Even in psychological science, in which racial biases are often put under intense scrutiny, structural racism shapes who and what gets published. We’re experts in the ways that racism and lack of diversity hurts Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math and perpetuates inequalities - let’s discuss!
As mentioned in a previous announcement post, the moderators of /r/science have worked in collaboration with the moderators of /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/blackladies to create this series of discussion panels focused on race in America. These panels will be led by subject area specialists including scientists, researchers, and policy professionals so that we can engage with multiple expert perspectives on those important topics. A list of the panels, guests, and dates can be found here.
Our guests will be answering under the account u/Race_in_tech. With us today are:
André Brock: André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He studies the rhetoric of technology, Black technoculture, and Black cybercultures; his scholarship examines Black and white representations in social media, videogames, weblogs, and other digital media
Whitney Battle-Baptiste: Whitney Battle-Baptiste is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A historical archaeologist of African and Cherokee descent, she has done fieldwork at Colonial Williamsburg, the Hermitage, the W. E. B DuBois Homesite, and other sites. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin, and conducts research on plantations in the U.S. Southeast, the materiality of contemporary African American popular culture, and Black Feminist theory and its implications for archaeology.
Shirley Malcom: I am senior advisor and director of SEA Change at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where I have worked for over 40 years to improve the quality and increase access to education and careers in STEMM. An ecologist by training, I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. My life has been shaped by two important sociopolitical movements: America’s post-Sputnik attention to and emphasis on science, including education and careers, and growing up in the epicenter of the civil rights movement.
Steven O. Roberts: I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, which is where I direct the Social Concepts Lab. My research team seeks to identify and dismantle the psychological biases that maintain and reinforce racism. We work with adults and young children.
Rachel E. Bernard: Hi! I'm Dr. Rachel Bernard and I am a geologist who studies the material properties of the Earth's lower crust and mantle. I received my undergraduate degree in geological engineering from Princeton in 2009, worked for two years on onshore and offshore oil and gas rigs, worked for another two years at the National Science Foundation, and then completed a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. I am currently a visiting Assistant Professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
Lisa Rice: Lisa Rice is the President and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), the nation’s only national civil rights agency solely dedicated to eliminating all forms of housing discrimination. Lisa has led her team in using civil rights principles to bring fairness and equity into technologies used in the housing and lending sectors. She serves on the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Civil Society Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence and FinRegLab’s Machine Learning Advisory Board. Follow Lisa on Twitter u/ItsLisaRice
Race impacts our experiences and opportunities in the world. Where we live and how we are perceived by those around us informs the realities we must navigate. For example, redlining was a process of marking neighborhoods where people of color could buy or rent homes in contrast to areas marked with green that were deemed “safe” for white families. The racial segregation of American cities was not accidental. Redlined areas had poorer access to safe housing, good schools, reliable transit, healthy foods, and good jobs. Inability to rent or purchase in better areas meant many families of color were denied access to improving their lives. This formalized racism began in the 1930s and was outlawed 50 years ago but we still see the legacy and informal continuation of this policy in housing and differential access today. Research suggests redlining is a significant contributor to the racial wealth gap. Join us to discuss how these inequalities in the built environment impact people today and what policies and solutions might help address these issues.
As mentioned in a previous announcement post, the moderators of /r/science have worked in collaboration with the moderators of /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/blackladies to create this series of discussion panels focused on race in America. These panels will be led by subject area specialists including scientists, researchers, and policy professionals so that we can engage with multiple expert perspectives on those important topics. A list of the panels, guests, and dates can be found here.
Our guests will be answering under the account u/Economic_impact_race. With us today are:
Bios:
Richard Rothstein: I am the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, and a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). I am also the author of other books and articles on education and race, available at my webpage at the EPI site. I’ve also helped to produce a free 17-minute animated film, Segregated by Design, appropriate for high school students and adults, that describes the origins of segregation in racially explicit public policy.
Sarah B. Schindler: I am the Edward S. Godfrey Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Maine School of Law. I am the author of Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment, published in the Yale Law Journal. I teach and write about property, land use, local government, and real estate law. My research focuses on the sometimes amorphous line between public and private space, and the ways that the built environment functions in exclusionary ways.
Lisa Rice: Lisa Rice is the President and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), the nation’s only national civil rights agency solely dedicated to eliminating all forms of housing discrimination. Lisa has led her team in using civil rights principles to bring fairness and equity into technologies used in the housing and lending sectors. Ms. Rice is a member of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Board of Directors, Center for Responsible Lending Board of Directors, JPMorgan Chase Consumer Advisory Council, Mortgage Bankers Association's Consumer Advisory Council, Freddie Mac Affordable Housing Advisory Council, Urban Institute’s Mortgage Servicing Collaborative, Quicken Loans Advisory Committee. She also serves on the Bipartisan Policy Center Civil Society Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence and FinRegLab Machine Learning Advisory Board.
Natosha Reid Rice: Natosha Reid Rice currently serves as the Associate General Counsel for Real Estate and Finance at Habitat for Humanity International, Inc. where she initiates and manages financing programs and strategies to generate sources of capital that enable Habitat affiliates to provide decent, affordable housing to families throughout the country. In addition to her work at Habitat, after serving as an Associate Pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Natosha also serves as the Minister for Public Life at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Atlanta, GA.
Through her work as an attorney and faith leader, Natosha works to provide a voice to the voiceless and opportunities to communities that have been historically disadvantaged. She currently serves on the boards of the global Harvard Alumni Association as an Elected Director, the Atlanta Community Foodbank, the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, Invest Atlanta’s Atlanta Emerging Markets, Inc. and the Advisory Board of the Harvard Debate Council. She has been actively involved in advocacy efforts to increase housing affordability and efforts to pass legislation and policies to protect victims of human sex trafficking in Georgia and provide for a fair workplace for women. In addition, she is a highly regarded keynote speaker and workshop facilitator and delivered her TEDx talk “If We Are More Alike Than Unalike, Then…” - www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4gv6qvYJFQ for TEDx Centennial Park Women.
Tiffany Manuel: Dr. Tiffany Manuel is President and CEO of TheCaseMade, an organization dedicated to helping passionate social changemakers, innovators and adaptive leaders around the United States make the case for building stronger communities that are diverse, equitable and inclusive. By aligning their community stakeholders around the kind of deep systems change that can improve population outcomes, these leaders are able to grow their impact, scale their programs, and harness the investments they need to improve their communities. Dr. Manuel has written extensively on how we make the case for systems change and her book on public will building lays out the core principles of effective casemaking. She believes that this is a powerful moment in our nation to live into our values and she works with social changemakers to ensure that we do.
Walter Gilliam: I am the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology at the Yale University Child Study Center, as well as the Director of The Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. My work spans education, health and mental health, and child development, with a specific interest in the role of policy and systems.
Black people in the United States face increased likelihood of adverse health outcomes compared to white people. For example, rates of heart disease, stroke, and infant mortality are higher for Black people -- Black babies are over twice as likely to survive when treated by Black doctors. Health outcome models and algorithms even predict that Black people are sicker than white people with similar health risk. Medical research and practice have long devalued the humanity of Black people in the United States, too: Black men were misled, mistreated, and abused by studies like the Tuskegee syphilis study; Black women have much higher likelihood of dying from pregnancy complications, their symptoms often being dismissed by doctors; and Black people in the United States receive worse healthcare than white people while also having less access to high-quality care. Today, our panelists will discuss these issues and more.
As mentioned in a previous announcement post, the moderators of /r/science have worked in collaboration with the moderators of /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/blackladies to create this series of discussion panels focused on race in America. These panels will be led by subject area specialists including scientists, researchers, and policy professionals so that we can engage with multiple expert perspectives on those important topics. A list of the panels, guests, and dates can be found here.
Our guests will be answering throughout the day under the account u/health_inequities. With us today are:
Consuelo H. Wilkins: Consuelo H. Wilkins, MD, MSCI, a trained geriatrician, is Vice President for Health Equity at Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean for Health Equity at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine; and Executive Director of the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance. Dr. Wilkins is a nationally recognized thought leader in health equity and in addressing the elimination of systemic inequities that impact the health and well-being of racial/ethnic minorities. As a community engagement research scientist, Dr. Wilkins has pioneered new approaches to engaging vulnerable, socioeconomically disadvantaged, and minority populations. She is Principal Investigator (PI) of three NIH-funded centers focused on translational science; precision medicine; and disparities, and PI of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation award on engendering trust in health care among African American men.
Derek M. Griffith: Dr. Derek M. Griffith is Professor of Medicine, Health and Society, and he is the Founder and Director of the Center for Research on Men’s Health at Vanderbilt University. Trained in psychology and public health, Dr. Griffith has collaborated with colleagues in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States to address institutional racism in public health departments and systems, and to pursue health equity, particularly by race and gender. Dr. Griffith has published more than 120 peer-reviewed manuscripts and he is a contributor to and editor of two recent books – Men’s Health Equity: A Handbook, and Racism: Science and Tools for the Public Health Professional.
Georges Benjamin: Georges C. Benjamin, MD, MACP, FACEP (E), FNAPA is the executive director of the American Public Health Association and a former Secretary for Health for the state of Maryland. A graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University Of Illinois College Of Medicine, he is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Stephen B. Thomas: I am a 'troublemaker' ... I make Good Trouble! I am Professor of Health Policy and Management and Director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland in College Park. I translate the science of medicine and public health into culturally tailored community-based interventions. Building bridges, building TRUST is our way to build Healthy Communities.
Thomas A. LaVeist: Thomas LaVeist is dean of the Tulane University, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He has written over 150 scientific articles, numerous mass media outlets, authored six books, and is executive producer of “The Skin You’re In,” documentary series about racial inequalities in health. An award winning research scientist, Dr. LaVeist has received the “Innovation Award” from National Institutes of Health, the “Knowledge Award” from the U.S.A. Department of Health and Human Services and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Hello Reddit! Science has a diversity problem. From 2002 to 2017, around 50,000 people earned Ph.D.s each year, but the percentage of Black PhDs graduating increased from just 5.1% to 5.4%. This is concerning for a number of reasons. A large body of research shows that diversity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) improves the outcomes of the scientific enterprise. Further, the lack of diversity is damaging to the public when it comes to trust in science, willingness to listen to expert scientific suggestions, and patient health. For example, research shows that African American patients receive better care and are more likely to agree to invasive interventions if they have a doctor that looks like them. However, since 2000, the number of Black students in medical schools has only grown by 1%. Currently, only 6.9% of medical students are Black and they only make up 7.3% of medical school applications. Additionally, studies show that Black medical students, faculty, and doctors face significant discrimination, which leads them to leave the profession. Other studies have shown discrimination against Black scientists across multiple scientific fields when it comes to funding, Black academics face bias when presenting at professional settings, BIPOC faculty receive worse student evaluations, and they experience racism even in non-academic fields like tech. So even increases in Black students majoring in STEM fields do not resolve all of the issues.
Join us for an open dialogue about the reasons for the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in STEM, the impacts that has, and potential ways to improve the representation in STEM for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).
As mentioned in a previous announcement post, the moderators of /r/science have worked in collaboration with the moderators of /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/blackladies to create this series of discussion panels focused on race in America. These panels will be led by subject area specialists including scientists, researchers, and policy professionals so that we can engage with multiple expert perspectives on those important topics. A list of the panels, guests, and dates can be found here. As mentioned in a previous announcement post, the moderators of /r/science have worked in collaboration with the moderators of /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/blackladies to create this series of discussion panels focused on race in America. These panels will be led by subject area specialists including scientists, researchers, and policy professionals so that we can engage with multiple expert perspectives on those important topics. A list of the panels, guests, and dates can be found here.
Our guests will be on throughout the day chatting with you under this account u/BIPOC_in_STEM. With us today are:
Ciara Sivels: I am a nuclear engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where I work on a variety of projects using radiation detection and modeling. I obtained my nuclear engineering degrees from MIT and University of Michigan. I was the first black woman to earn a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan. I am an AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador where the goal is to highlight a variety of STEM fields and show girls the different career pathways they can pursue and how STEM impacts their lives every day.
Yasmiyn Irizarry: I am a sociologist in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. My work uses critical methodologies and large-scale data to challenge conventional racial logics and deficit narratives in quantitative research on BIPOC. My current study examines the prevalence and impact of racialized tracking on the STEM experiences and trajectories of Black youth. I also teach critical statistics courses that show students how to wield numbers in the service of racial justice and liberation. Catch me on Twitter and don’t forget to #CiteBlackWomen!
Anne-Marie Núñez: As a Professor of Educational Studies at Ohio State University, my scholarship and initiatives have focused on advancing racial equity in STEM (especially the less diverse fields of geoscience and computer science) at Minority-Serving and other institutions. One example explores the application of the lens of intersectionality to transform geosciences. You can follow me on Twitter @AM_NunezPhD and my website annemarienunez.com
Tia Madkins: I am an assistant professor in the College of Education and a faculty research affiliate with the Population Research Center and the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at The University of Texas at Austin. My research focuses on issues of equity in PK-12 STEAM education and supporting teachers to transform STEAM classrooms for minoritized students. My current projects focus on sociopolitical consciousness, fostering inclusive STEAM classrooms (including a project with Dr. Irizarry!), and STEAM teachers' recognition of #BlackGirlMagic. Follow me on Twitter (@ProfTiaMadkins) to learn more about equity in STEM and other STEMinists, check out my curated list of resources to better understand #BLM, and remember to #CiteBlackWomen!
Hi reddit! For far too long, the mental health profession has taken a race-blind approach to treatment, research, and conceptualizing human behavior. The result has been that Black people and other people of color are underrepresented in psychological research, and are subsequently assumed to have similar experiences, adversities, cultural backgrounds, and reactions to treatment as do their White counterparts. White experiences and behaviors are often the assumed normative default, leading to mental health disparities both in who has access to mental health treatment, and who feels understood and represented in both research and treatment. We are practitioners and researchers whose work focuses on these long-neglected areas.
As mentioned in a previous announcement post, the moderators of /r/science have worked in collaboration with the moderators of /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/blackladies to create this series of discussion panels focused on race in America. These panels will be led by subject area specialists including scientists, researchers, and policy professionals so that we can engage with multiple expert perspectives on those important topics. A list of the panels, guests, and dates can be found here.
Today our guests are answering under the account u/BIPOC_Mental_Health. With us today are:
Monnica Williams, PhD: I am an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa, where I serve as Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Disparities. I am a board-certified, clinical psychologist, licensed in the US and Canada. I train and supervise clinicians in cognitive-behavioral therapies and culturally-informed techniques. I am the Clinical Director of the Behavioral Wellness Clinic, LLC in Tolland, Connecticut, where we specialize in OCD, race-based trauma, and psychedelic-assisted therapies. My research interests include Black mental health and mental health access and equity. I have authored 130 scientific articles and 4 books, and I maintain a blog on Psychology Today called Culturally Speaking. My current projects are focused on racial trauma, microaggressions, and White allyship. I am a national and international expert on racism. Learn more about me at monnicawilliams.com or follow me on Twitter at @DrMonnica.
Kevin Cokley, PhD: My name is Kevin Cokley, and I hold the Oscar and Anne Mauzy Regents Professorship for Educational Research and Development at the University of Texas at Austin. I am a Fellow of both the University of Texas System and University of Texas Academy of Distinguished Teachers, Director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis, and Professor of Educational Psychology and African and African Diaspora Studies. My research and teaching can be broadly categorized in the area of African American psychology, with a focus on racial identity, African American students’ academic achievement, and exploring the impact of the impostor phenomenon on mental health and academic outcomes. My research has been cited by the New York Times, USA Today, and Inside Higher Education. For more information: kevincokley.com. My Twitter handle is @KevinCokley1.
Nicole L. Cammack, PhD: I am Dr. Nicole L. Cammack and I am a licensed Clinical Psychologist, who is passionate about mental health awareness, treatment, and reducing the mental health stigma, particularly as it relates to Black communities. I currently serve as the President and CEO of Black Mental Wellness, a corporation founded by clinical psychologists to shift the narrative of mental health in the Black community through providing resources about mental health and behavioral health topics from a Black perspective, highlighting and increasing the diversity of mental health professionals, and decreasing the mental health stigma in the Black community. For more information about my work, click here.
Tumaini Rucker Coker MD, MBA: I am an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Director of Research at Seattle Children's Center for Diversity & Health Equity. In my research, I collaborate with community clinics and pediatric practices to improve the delivery of primary care services to children and achieve health equity. I bring my perspective as a practicing pediatrician, researcher, and African American mother of twin boys with ADHD, to the research that I conduct to improve equitable child mental health care to children of color in low-income communities. My research has been funded by multiple federal agencies and foundations, published broadly in the scientific literature in over 70 peer-reviewed articles, and covered by mainstream media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, CNN, USA Today, and NBC. Learn more my Innovation in Child Healthcare Delivery Lab. Twitter: @tumainic.
Robert T. Carter, PhD: I am Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. I am an expert on the stressful and traumatic effects of racism. I have authored 120 articles and 9 books. Recent books include - Carter and Scheuermann, (2020); Confronting racism, (Routledge); and Carter and Pieterse (2020); Measuring the Effects of Racism (Columbia University Press). I am a fellow in the American Psychological Association and have won several national awards. For more, please see my website: rtca411.com.
Paul L. Morgan, PhD: I am the Henry and Marion Eberly Fellow, Professor of Education and Demography in the Department of Education Policy Studies, and Director of the Center for Educational Disparities Research at Penn State. My work investigates how children who are struggling in school can be better helped. This work repeatedly finds evidence of disparities in disability identification and treatment attributable to race/ethnicity, social class, and national origin including for ADHD, autism, learning disabilities, and other conditions. This work has been cited by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. I have published over 60 peer-reviewed studies including in Pediatrics, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Child Development, and Educational Researcher. My research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. You can find links to my research at https://paulmorgan.carrd.co. I am on Twitter at @PaulMorganPhd. I look forward to our conversations!
Our guests will be on throughout the afternoon to answer your questions and discuss with you!
George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Philando Castille. Their lives were cut short by police brutality and their stories have galvanized waves of protests across the world. Yet police brutality is not a new issue. For many Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, the impact and fear of police brutality is felt daily and has been for generations. We are researchers who study how policing affects Black Americans’ physical and mental health. We also research interventions to better understand what might reduce police brutality and what measures can help impacted communities heal. Join us for an evidence based discussion about the effects of policing and police brutality in America.
As mentioned in a previous announcement, the moderators of /r/science have worked in collaboration with the moderators of /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/blackladies to create this series discussion panels focused on race in America. These panels will be led by subject area specialists including scientists, researchers, and policy professionals so that we can engage with multiple expert perspectives on these important topics. A list of the panels, guests, and dates can be found here. Our guests will be on throughout the afternoon to answer your questions and discuss with you.
Today our guests are answering under the account u/police_discussion. With us today are:
Sirry Alang: I am an Associate Professor of Sociology and Health, Medicine and Society at Lehigh University. My work explores the role of social structures and institutions in creating health inequities. I examine the impact of police brutality on racial health inequities, and study the implications of police brutality as a social determinant of health.
Rachel Hardeman: I am a tenured Associate Professor in the Division of Health Policy & Management, University of Minnesota, School of Public Health and the Blue Cross Endowed Professor in Health and Racial Equity. As a reproductive health equity researcher, I apply the tools of population health science and health services research to elucidate a critical and complex determinant of health inequity—racism. My overarching goal is to contribute to a body of knowledge that links structural racism to health in a tangible way, identify opportunities for intervention, and dismantle the systems, structures, and institutions that allow inequities to persist.
Hannah Cooper: I hold the Rollins Chair in Substance Use Disorders at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. As a public health researcher, I have dedicated my days to studying and intervening in the ways that social, economic, physical environments shape the health of people who use drugs, and in particular the ways that racialized environments shape inequities in drug-related health outcomes. This commitment has led me to study and work to end police brutality. I had the pleasure of writing a book on police brutality as a public health issue with Dr. Mindy Fullilove.
Rashawn Ray: I am Dr. Rashawn Ray, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at The Brookings Institution and Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. I conduct research on ways to ameliorate systemic racism. I focus primarily on police reform and ways to reduce police killings and police brutality. My work also addressing the health spillovers of policing and criminalization. As the Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research, I helped develop an innovative virtual reality decision-making program for law enforcement to measure their decision making including behaviors, attitudes, and physiology. My Brookings bio is here and some of my articles here. I am on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook u/SociologistRay.
Donna McAlpine: I am a medical sociologist and associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. I direct the graduate program in Health Services Research and Administration. My research looks at the meaning of mental health and illness, who gets services, and barriers to treatment. I also research health inequities, including police brutality as a social determinant of health.
Guests will begin answering this afternoon to provide time for Redditors to ask and vote on questions.
Hi Reddit! We are Lauren, Luke, Patrick and Yoshi, Particle Physicists at Imperial College London.
We are interested in making extremely detailed observations of the fundamental particles of nature, which can help answer big questions about the Universe. Earlier this year we were part of a global team that showed neutrinos may help to explain why our universe is dominated by matter, which was featured on the cover of the journal Nature. Ask Us Anything!
The neutrino, a type of fundamental particle, was first theorised in the early 20th century, and we know that trillions of them pass through our bodies every second. Earlier this year we helped publish the strongest indication yet that neutrinos and their antimatter partners, antineutrinos, behave differently, a finding that could shed light on some fundamental mysteries.
Why is the universe full of stuff? Why is ours a universe of matter, of stars, galaxies, planets? It seems an obvious question but why the universe exists in the way it does has puzzled scientists for decades.
That is because our best theories suggest equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created at the beginning of the universe. But this would mean they should have wiped each other out, annihilating the universe as it began. As a result, the search is on for differences in the way they behave that may explain why matter won out. We contribute to this search by observing the fundamental building blocks of nature and their antimatter companions in unprecedented detail to look for any differences.
The new results come from the T2K experiment – quite a feat of engineering where intense beams of neutrinos which are fired almost 300 km across Japan before they are detected using a 50,000 tonne pool of ultrapure water located 1 km under a mountain, the Super-Kamiokande detector. As well as detecting neutrinos from the T2K beam, Super-Kamiokande performs various physics analyses through the detection of neutrinos from the sun, cosmic rays, and astronomical events such as supernovae. Our Imperial group has been working on T2K for over 15 years, being the first UK group to join the international collaboration. In the early days we helped design and build many aspects of the experiment.
In addition to being heavily involved in T2K data analyses, the group is also looking forward to the next generation of experiment, namely Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE. We are living in truly remarkable times in fundamental physics. The mysteries of the neutrino, a particle once thought could be unobservable, have puzzled us ever since they were first detected over 50 years ago. This latest breakthrough shows how far we have come in making detailed measurements using these particles, and points the way forward for even more discoveries in the coming decade or so.
- The paper published in Nature can be found here
- Strongest evidence yet that neutrinos explain how the universe exists (Imperial News story)
- Behind the paper: CP violation in neutrino oscillations (A blog about the paper written by T2K team)
- T2K Experiment webpage
Yoshi: I lead Imperial's involvement in the T2K experiment, having been among those who got together from around the world over fifteen years ago to figure out how best to build it. Direct contributions include the R&D and physics designs for the “ND280” neutrino detector placed at the start of the neutrino beam, and the software suite that we designed the detector with and that is still being used to decode and analyse the data. Building an experiment is just like asking the Universe a question, and taking data with one is like listening to the response—an amazing feeling. I used to be afraid of dogs, but T2K cured me.
Lauren: My focus is on R&D of water Cherenkov neutrino detector calibration sources. As part of my PhD, I spent the summer of 2018 working on the Super-Kamiokande (SK) refurbishment, where I was lucky enough to lead the installation of a new calibration source. Alongside this, I performed a T2K-SK physics analysis which worked toward reducing systematic errors in the T2K electron neutrino appearance analysis.
Currently I am working on building detector simulation programs for future water Cherenkov experiments, based on technical drawings by our engineers at Imperial college. This work will allow us to improve the accuracy of simulations of future detectors such as Hyper-Kamiokande, and will help us achieve our physics goals. I also used to be afraid of dogs.
Luke: On T2K, I try to characterise the uncertainty on our understanding of how neutrinos interact with matter (interaction models). This involves working quite closely with the data analysers (e.g. Patrick) to interpret the observed data through the lens of these 'interaction models'.
I also work on the design of the next generation experiment, DUNE (the neutrinos must flow). I am part of a group developing a novel analysis technique that will make use of a moveable detector to side-step the problems inherent in trusting 'interaction models', like we have to on T2K.
Patrick: I work on carrying out the final data analysis, so I do a lot of coding, statistical analysis and working out how all the different bits of the experiment affect our measurement. I’m also working on building new detectors for the future DUNE experiment. In the past I did my PhD on the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, looking for dark matter using the Higgs boson.
I also just presented our results to over 1000 people at the biggest conference in the field, which requires a lot of brushing up on our work right now, and I’m hopefully ready to answer your questions! I am still afraid of dogs.
Our guests will be answering between 5-7 PM BST (12-2 PM Eastern)
Update: our guests are finished answering questions today! Thank you so much!
Hello r/Science! My name is James Duehr, PhD, but you might also know me as u/_Shibboleth_.
You may remember me from last week's post all about bats and their viruses! This week, it's all about origin stories. Batman's parents. Spider-Man's uncle. Heroes always seem to need a dead loved one...?
But what about the villains? Where did CoVID-19 come from? Check out this PDF for a much easier and more streamlined reading experience.
I'm here today to discuss some of the theories that have been circulating about the origins of CoVID-19. My focus will be on which theories are more plausible than others.
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[TL;DR]: I am very confident that SARS-CoV-2 has no connection to the Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other laboratory. Not genetic engineering, not intentional evolution, not an accidental release. The most plausible scenario, by a landslide, is that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from a bat (or other species) into a human, in the wild.
Here's a PDF copy of this post's content for easier reading/sharing. But don't worry, everything in that PDF is included below, either in this top post or in the subsequently linked comments.
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A bit about me: My background is in high risk biocontainment viruses, and my PhD was specifically focused on Ebola-, Hanta-, and Flavi-viruses. If you're looking for some light reading, here's my dissertation: (PDF | Metadata). And here are the publications I've authored in scientific journals: (ORCID | GoogleScholar). These days, I'm a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, where I also research brain tumors and the viral vectors we could use to treat them.
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The main part of this post is going to consist of a thorough, well-sourced, joke-filled, and Q&A style run-down of all the reasons we can be pretty damn sure that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from zoonotic transmission. More specifically, the virus that causes CoVID-19 likely crossed over into humans from bats, somewhere in rural Hubei province.
To put all the cards on the table, there are also a few disclaimers I need to say:
Firstly, if this post looks long ( and I’m sorry, it is ), then please skip around on it. It’s a Q & A. Go to the questions you’ve actually asked yourself!
Secondly, if you’re reading this & thinking “I should post a comment telling Jim he’s a fool for believing he can change people’s minds!” I would urge you: please read this footnote first (1).
Thirdly, if you’re reading this and thinking “Does anyone really believe that?” please read this footnote (2).
Fourthly, if you’re already preparing a comment like “You can’t be 100% sure of that! Liar!!” … Then you’re right! I cannot be 100% sure. Please read this footnote (3).
And finally, if you’re reading this and thinking: ”Get a load of this pro-China bot/troll,” then I have to tell you, it has never been more clear that we have never met. I am no fan of the Chinese government! Check out this relevant footnote (4).
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Table of Contents:
- [TL;DR]: SARS-CoV-2 has no connection to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). (Top post)
- Introduction: Why this topic is so important, and the harms that these theories have caused.
- [Q1]: Okay, but before I read any further, Jim, why can I trust you?
- [Q2]: Okay… So what proof do you actually have that the virus wasn’t cooked up in a lab?
- 2.1) The virus itself, to the eye of any virologist, is clearly not engineered.
- 2.2) If someone had messed around with the genome, we would be able to detect it!
- 2.3) If it were created in a lab, SARS-CoV-2 would have been engineered by an idiot.
- Addendum to Q2
- [Q3]: What if they made it using accelerated evolution? Or passaging the virus in animals?
- [Q4]: Okay, so what if it was released from a lab accidentally?
- 4.1) Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi and WIV are very well respected in the world of biosecurity.
- 4.2) Likewise, we would probably know if the WIV had SARS-CoV-2 inside its freezers.
- 4.3) This doesn’t look anything like any laboratory accident we’ve ever seen before.
- 4.4) The best evidence we have points to SARS-CoV-2 originating outside Wuhan.
- [Q5]: Okay, tough guy. You seem awfully sure of yourself. What happened, then?
- [Q6]: Yknow, Jim, I still don’t believe you. Got anything else?
- [Q7]: What are your other favorite write ups on this topic?
- Footnotes & References!
Thank you to u/firedrops, u/LordRollin, & David Sachs! This beast wouldn’t be complete without you.
And a special thanks to the other PhDs and science-y types who agreed to help answer Qs today!
REMINDER-----------------All comments that do not do any of the following will be removed:
- Ask a legitimately interested question
- State a claim with evidence from high quality sources
- Contribute to the discourse in good faith while not violating sidebar rules
~~An errata is forthcoming, I've edited the post just a few times for procedural errors and miscites. Nothing about the actual conclusions or supporting evidence has changed~~
Hello /r/Science! I’m /u/_Shibboleth_ and I’m a Virologist/Immunologist.
The 4.5 years I spent getting a PhD were dedicated to studying antibody responses against emerging viruses like Ebola and Marburg. So you can imagine how much time I’ve spent thinking about bats.
Here’s some answers about why they always seem to be the culprit when it comes to outbreaks.
Q: Why is it always bats? (that harbor dangerous viruses that spill over into humans)
A: It's complicated.
TL;DR - Bats are a perfect storm of: genetic proximity to humans (as fellow mammals), keystone species interacting with many others in the environment (including via respiratory secretions and blood-transmission), great immune systems for spreading dangerous viruses, flight, social structure, hibernation, etc.
You may not be fully aware, but unless your head has been stuffed in the sand, you've probably heard, at some point, that X virus "lives in bats." It's been said about: Rabies, Hendra/Nipah, Ebola, Chikungunya, Rift Valley Fever, St. Louis Encephalitis, and yes, SARS, MERS, and, now probably SARS-CoV-2 (with the addition of another intermediate species?)
Bats really do harbor more viruses than other species groups!
But why? Why is it always bats? The answer lies in the unique niche bats fill in our ecosystem.
Bats are not that far off from humans genetically speaking
They're placental mammals that give birth to live young, that are about as related to us (distance-wise) as dogs. Which means ~84% of our genomes are identical to bat genomes. Just slightly less related to us than, say, mice or rats (~85%).
(this estimate is based upon associations in phylogeny. Yes I know bats are a huge group, but it's useful to estimate at this level right now.)
Why does this matter? Well, genetic relatedness isn't just a fun fancy % number. It also means that all the proteins on the surface of our cells are similar as well.
For example, SARS-CoV-2 is thought to enter our cells using the ACE2 receptor (which is a lil protein that plays a role in regulating blood pressure on the outside of cells in our lungs, arteries, heart, kidney, and intestines). The ACE2 between humans and bats is about 80.5% similar (this link is to a paper using bat ACE2 to figure out viral entry. I just plugged the bat ACE2 and human ACE2 into protein blast to get that 80.5% number).
To give you an idea of what that means for a virus that's crossing species barriers, CD4 (the protein HIV uses to get into T cells) is about 98% similar between chimpanzees and humans. HIV likely had a much easier time than SARS-CoV-2 of jumping onto our ship, but SARS-CoV-2 also has a trick up its sleeve: an extremely promiscuous viral entry protein.
These viruses use their entry protein and bind to the target receptor to enter cells. The more similar the target protein is between species, the easier it will be for viruses to jump ship from their former hosts and join us on a not-so-fun adventure.
Another aspect of this is that there are just so many dang bats. There are roughly 1,300 bat species making up 20-25% of all mammals. So the chances of getting a virus from a bat? Pretty good from the get go. If you had to pick a mammalian species at random, there's a pretty good chance it's gonna be a rodent or a bat.
From: http://palaeos.com/vertebrates/eutheria/eutheria2.html (https://i.imgur.com/kRoRSMU.png)
Bats are in a perfect place to serve as a nexus connecting a bunch of different species together and transmitting viruses
Various bat species do all or some of:
- Drink the blood of other animals (and are in turn fed on by mosquitos)
- Eat, piss, and shit on fruit that other animals eat
- Eat moths, gnats, flies, and mosquitos that have fed on live or dead animals
- Help to pollinate and spread seeds for a zillion different important plants
- Shit on cave floors, producing precious guano that is used by fungi and bacteria
- These microorganisms are then, in turn, eaten by fish, salamanders, frogs, etc.
- Bats are also food for hawks, weasels, and even arthropods like spiders and centipedes. And yes, even humans eat bats.
All of this means two things:
- bats are getting and giving viruses from all of these different activities. Every time they drink the blood of another animal or eat a mosquito that has done the same, they get some of that species' viruses. And when they urinate on fruit that we eat, or if we directly eat bats, we get those viruses as well.
- Bats are, like it or not, an extremely crucial part of the ecosystem that cannot be eliminated. So their viruses are also here to stay. The best thing we can do is pass laws that make it illegal to eat, farm, and sell bats and other wild zoonotic animals, so that we can reduce our risk of contracting their viruses. We can also pass laws protecting their ecological niche, so that they stay in the forest, and we stay in the city!
From: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1010539512471965 (https://i.imgur.com/YeO2R5F.jpg)
The bat immune system is well tuned to fight and harbor viruses
Their immune systems are actually hyper-reactive, getting rid of viruses from their own cells extremely well. This is probably an adaptation that results from the second point: if you encounter a ton of different viruses, then you also have to avoid getting sick yourself.
This sounds counter-intuitive, right? Why would an animal with an extremely good immune system be a good vector to give us (and other animals) its viruses?
Well, the theory goes that bats act as a sort of "training school" where viruses are educated against robust mammalian immune responses, and learn to adapt and control the usual mechanisms that mammalian cells use to fight back.
The second aspect of this is that bat immune systems* allow for background replication of viruses at a low level, all the time, as a strategy to prevent symptomatic disease. It's a trade-off, and one that bats have executed perfectly.
It just happens to mean that when we get a virus from bats, oh man can it cause some damage.
I do have to say this one is mostly theory and inference, and there isn't amazingly good evidence to support it. But it's very likely that bat immune systems are different from our own, given the overall divergence of their immune system genes in relation to our own and those of other mammals.
My opinion (which echoes most ecologists) is that it's more about the position that bats hold in the environment, their behaviors, their longevity, and their sheer numbers. In general zoonotic transmission is a roulette, and bats have the most positions (and the most advantageous positions) on that wheel.
I think this idea has picked up so much steam because molecular biologists often find ways to use what they know about the micro world to explain phenomena in the macro world. It’s honestly probably counterproductive, since most things are quite a bit more complex than we realize while looking at their analogues in Petri dishes.
That being said, I also think ecologists often underestimate what is possible to figure out in a Petri dish, and undervalue the impact of a robustly well-controlled interventional experiment. But that's a conversation for another day.
Bats can FLY!
This allows them to travel long distances, meet and interact with many different animals, hunt and be hunted, and survive to tell the tale. Meaning they also survive to pass on their virus.
Bats are unusually long lived!
Many bat species live longer than 25 years. On the curve of "body size and metabolism" vs "lifespan" bats are a massive over-performer. The closely related foxes, for example, live on average 2-5 years in the wild.
This is probably interrelated with all the other factors listed. Bats can fly, so they live longer; bats live longer, so they can spread slowly growing virus infections better. This combination of long lifespan and persistent viral infection means that bats may, more often, keep viruses around long enough to pass them onto other vertebrates (like us!).
From: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004524.g002 (https://i.imgur.com/7j7DJ3i.png)
Their social structure and hibernation behaviors
These characteristics are uniquely positioned to help them harbor a number of different viruses.
Bats roost, meaning they hole up inside the roofs of caves and hibernate together for long periods of time (on the order of months), passing viruses amongst the colony in close isolation. The Mexican free-tailed bat, for example, packs ~300 bats/ft^2 in cave systems like Carlsbad caverns in the southwestern United States.
The complex social hierarchy of bats also likely plays a role. Bats exist in so-called "micropopulations" that have different migratory patterns. They interweave and interact and combine and separate in a dizzying mix of complex social networks among different "micropopulations."
A given virus may have the chance to interact with hundreds of thousands or millions of different individual bats in a short period of time as a result. This also means that viruses with different life cycles (short, long, persistent, with flare-ups, etc) can always find what they need to survive, since different bat groupings have different habits.
And this may partially explain how outbreaks of certain viruses happen according to seasonality. If you're a virus and your bat micropopulation of choice is around and out to play, it's more likely you will get a chance to jump around to different species.
From: https://doi.org/10.1890/ES13-00023.1 (https://i.imgur.com/QLYevsN.png)
Echolocation may also play a role
Bats echolocate, and it involves the intense production of powerful sound waves, which are also perfect for disseminating lots of small virus-containing respiratory droplets across long distances! (1 2)
Finally, a note on viral ecology in general:
If you read this post, and think bats are the only ones out there with viruses, then I have failed.
The reality is that every species out there, from the tiniest stink bug to the massive elephant, likely has millions of different viruses infecting it all the time! If you take a drop (mL) of seawater, it contains ~10 million bacteriophages.
In our genome, there are remnants and scars and evidence of millions of retroviruses that once infected us. Greater than 8% of our genome is made up of these "endogenous retroviruses," most of which don't make any RNA or proteins or anything like that. They just sit there. They've truly won the war for remembrance.
That's what viruses do, they try and stick around for as long as possible. And, in a sense, these endogenous retroviruses have won. They live with us, and get to stick around as long as we survive in one form or another.
The vast vast majority of viruses are inert, asymptomatic, and cause no notable disease. It is only the very tip of the iceberg, the smallest tiny % of viruses, that cause disease and make us bleed out various orifices. Viral disease, in terms of all viruses, is the exception, not the rule. It's an accident. We are an accidental host for most of these "zoonotic" viruses.
Viruses are everywhere, and it is only the unique and interesting aspects of bats noted above that mean we are forced to deal with their viruses more than other species.
(Dengue, like most viruses, follows this idea. The vast majority of people are asymptomatic. Pathogenicity and disease are the exception, not the rule. But that doesn't mean they don't cause damage to society and to lots of people! They do!)
From: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-019-0123-x (https://i.imgur.com/KcuutRz.png)
The last thing I want to reiterate at the end of this post is something I said earlier:
Bats are a keystone species!
A keystone species is one that, when you remove it, the system falls apart. Much like the keystone in an arched entryway.
Removing bats from the Earth would likely kill many more millions of humans than CoVID-19 or Ebola ever could.
We rely on the plants they pollinate for the food we eat and for the air we breathe. We rely on them for pest control and for population control. And, in turn, they serve as good for other crucial species.
Bat populations keep mosquitos like Aedes and Anopheles species in check. Aedes Aegypti kills many more millions than CoVID-19 by spreading dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, Zika, and other viruses. Anopheles females spread malaria, one of the most deadly diseases in human history. Without bats, these mosquitoes could overgrow to unknown and unpredictable levels, and the diseases they transmit could spread even further, like wildfire, decimating the earth's human population.
In terms of pure biomass and impacts...to remove 20% of mammals on the Earth... That could be absolutely devastating! Possibly world-ending on its own.
We need bats.
We also don't know what would replace the niche that bats hold in the Earth's ecosystem. And whether or not that animal or animals would be worse or better for human zoonotic infections.
We need bats. We just don't need them to be close enough to human society that we contract their viruses so easily.
Other people have actually done this calculation. And they agree with me:
Bats are, like it or not, an extremely crucial part of the ecosystem that cannot be eliminated. So their viruses are also here to stay.
The best thing we can do is pass laws that make it illegal to eat, farm, and sell bats and other wild zoonotic animals , so that we can reduce our risk of contracting their viruses. We can also pass laws protecting their ecological niche, so that they stay in the forest, and we stay in the city!
Deforestation, climate change, the bushmeat trade, and the trafficking of animals for alternative medicine are what is to blame for this mess. Not bats.
Further reading/sources:
Hi reddit! We are researchers who work to understand the cause of and find treatments for human diseases. To do this, we use animals to help us model human conditions in the lab. Studying animal models is important because researchers need to show that therapies are safe and effective in animal models before they can be used in humans. Research in animal models has helped uncover the function of hundreds of genes that cause human diseases, including multiple new genetically-targeted drugs for cystic fibrosis, which was developed with the help of mouse, rat, pig, and ferret models. Cystic fibrosis is a rare, progressive, and severe disease that causes severe lung infections and breathing difficulties. Treatments developed based on information we have learned from animal models have allowed patients to live longer, healthier lives.
Scientific advances now allow us to pinpoint disease-causing changes across the human genome by studying their effects in animals. Let’s discuss!
On today’s panel we have:
Claudia Gonzaga-Jauregui, PhD: I am a geneticist and genomicist working on rare, undiagnosed, and Mendelian diseases. I currently work at Regeneron leading the Mendelian and rare disease genetics projects at the Regeneron Genetics Center. I analyze the genomic data derived from exome or genome sequencing of individual patients and families to identify the molecular causes of genetic disorders. I use animal models, primarily mouse, but have worked with zebrafish as well, to model the genetic variants identified in patients with genetic disorders to better understand their functional effects and consequences at the organismal level, and ultimately the disease. These animal models of disease can also serve to test treatments and therapies that can eventually help human patients.
Elaine Ostrander, PhD: I’m Chief and Distinguished Investigator of the Cancer Genetics and Comparative Genomics Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute, at the National Institutes of Health. My lab is interested in understanding the genetics of canine morphology, behavior and disease susceptibility. and to that end are using DNA sequencing to understand how breeds were developed and the selective mechanisms that lead to the diversity of breeds in the world today. Inherent in that diversity is breed susceptibility to specific diseases. Our studies of canine cancer genes have informed human studies of similar cancers and provided a foundation for studies of common and rare cancers in humans and dogs.
Hugo J Bellen, DVM, PhD: I’m an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor and Principle Investigator of the Model Organism Screening Center of the Undiagnosed Diseases Network at Baylor College of Medicine at the Neurological Research Institute of Texas Children Hospital. We collaborate with hundreds of physicians worldwide to help diagnose new human genetic disease. We use the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to study the corresponding genes, and test the variants found in patients in flies. Functional studies allow us to identify the biological or biochemical pathways in which these genes operate and sometimes identify drug targets that can be tested in flies and humans.
Shawn Burgess, PhD: I am a Senior Investigator at the National Human Genome Research Institute where I have worked for 19 years. The majority of my research uses zebrafish genetics and genomics to understand wound healing and organ regeneration. I have also worked with the Undiagnosed Diseases Program and other clinical researchers at the NIH to confirm candidate disease genes or study rare genetic disease pathologies using zebrafish as a model.
The American Society of Human Genetics was a partner in organizing today’s talk. For more information on human disease genetics, check out their Discover Genetics page: https://www.ashg.org/discover-genetics/genetics-basics/
We will be back in the early afternoon (~ 1pm Eastern) to answer your questions and discuss how animal models can help us study human genetic disease!
Hello /r/Science! I’m u/_Shibboleth_, PhD and I’m a Virologist & Immunologist.
My doctoral thesis was on antibody responses against emerging viruses like Ebola, Hanta, and Zika. So you can imagine how much I care about getting this stuff right.
Recently, I've seen how often the topic of “immunity certificates” has come up. So I decided to write a longform introduction and answer a few questions.
The explanation is long, but worth the read! I promise!
Q: Are "immunity passes" really a good idea?
A: It's complicated, and I'm sorry for how complicated it is.
TL;DR--A lot of things will need to happen correctly for this to be a good idea: specific criteria for who gets tested & making sure that a positive on the test means you're truly immune to reinfection. Why? Because of the fundamental science of the test. But if it works, it could be a really good thing.
Okay so we've come to the hard part of the curve. Companies are developing antibody tests, and people are asking "I already got sick, can I go back to work now???" Governments are considering implementing "immunity passes" or "immunity passports" to allow exactly that. It's at least a few months away, but an important discussion to start having now.
(If you've never heard the term "immunity pass," check out this link)
(Important point: IgG serological tests are evaluating whether or not you've already had the virus and have gotten better. Not whether or not you currently have it. That is a different thing, often called a "molecular test." For more info, check out this link)
Why no test is perfect: Harry Potter and the paradox of Positive Predictive Value (PPV)
To answer this question, we need to understand antibody tests and clinical testing in general. These tests are not infallible. NO TEST IS PERFECT.
Good tests can, however, predict whether or not people are immune to the virus.
(if our understanding so far of reinfection holds true <-- and that's a big if, keep reading)
Any test, of any kind, has what's called a "Positive predictive value" i.e. If you test positive, how likely is it that you're a true positive? In this case, a true positive is someone who was already infected and has gotten better.
Even the best antibody test we have right now only has a PPV of ~18% in the general population. Meaning if I just go out and test 10,000 random people, and 300 of them come up positive, 246 of those people will be "false positives" -- they didn't actually get infected and it wouldn't be safe to have them go back to normal life.
For more on this math, here's an excellent thread from @taaltree (I cannot overstate to you how good this thread is at explaining True and false positives/negatives, PPV, NPV. I don't get into it here with as much detail but it's very useful knowledge)
Think about PPV when you see studies where they use serological testing to estimate the extent of viral spread. They will often test everyone indiscriminately, meaning their results are less accurate. And that's okay! Because they're not using the test to decide who can go back to work or w/e. They're using it to estimate the extent of disease in the general population. Different purpose. And they often correct for these sources of error, calculating that % of infected by only taking the proportion that are likely “true” positives. Remember that, if they don’t correct for false positives, their results could be way off! 82% off even! Because of this PPV problem.
Clinical tests are hard to make! A few reasons why:
And why is the PPV so low for general use? Because making good clinical tests is hard!
One reason for this is because of how the testing works. These are some of the most ubiquitous clinical assays in the world. We use them all the time in the lab and in the clinic. Ever wondered how they check if your mumps or rubella vaccine worked when you were a kid?
They did an IgG serology test!
An IgG serology test takes a certain CoV protein and puts it on a plate. Then it puts a part of your blood (called "serum") on top of those CoV proteins and asks "Do any of the antibodies in this serum bind this CoV?" If enough do (and with enough strength), then you've got a positive!
IgG = A very specific antibody type called "Immunoglobulin G"
The problem is that antibodies are sticky. They're supposed to be sticky. It's their job. They stick to bad things in your blood/lungs so you don't get sick. So when we're trying to figure out if you have a certain antibody in your serum, we need to figure out how to detect that specific antibody and get it to stick to our SARS-2 “bait” without catching any of the other thousands of antibodies you have in your serum. Especially if you have any antibodies against other related viruses (like SARS-CoV-1 (the 2003 virus) or MERS-CoV, or any of the ones that cause a common cold). All of those antibodies could pose a problem. They do stuff like wash the plate with saline to make all those other sticky non-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies fall off. But it's not perfect.
Get the idea?
It's especially hard to, with a quick and repetitive test, catch all the right sticky CoV antibodies (be "highly sensitive"), but also as few of the wrong sticky non-CoV antibodies as possible (be "highly specific"). It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea.
As a result, it's difficult to make high PPV tests.
The influence of % infected on PPV
The other reason is something that has nothing to do with the test itself: how many people are actually infected in the population! The % infected! This is the single most influential statistic on PPV. The lower the % infected in the group you're testing, the lower the PPV. And the opposite is also true: higher prevalence, higher PPV.
Said another way:
Fewer infected, more false positives. More infected, fewer false positives.
With 1% infected, there will be ~82% false positives w/ Cellex's FDA-approved test.
If we get to ~10% infected in the population, then all of a sudden the test becomes much better: only around 30% false positives!. Corresponding visuals are from twitter user @LCWheeler9000.
These images are not CoV-specific, though the math works out similarly.
Between those two images, nothing about the actual test has changed. Nothing about the chemicals or the way we do it in the lab has changed. The only thing that has changed is the % infected in the population.
For a different visual explanation, check out this video.
Here is a graph of PPV vs prevalence for the Cellex test.
Okay, so how screwed are we?
Fortunately, there are things we can do to increase PPV!
If we use more than one test in a row, with different mechanisms, the PPV goes up.
If you only test people if they're in NY or WA, the PPV goes up.
If we only test people who were hospitalized, PPV goes WAY UP!
Et cetera.
A test is not just the thing we put proteins and antibodies into, it's the entire regimen/plan around it. The questions, the clinical judgment, etc. And so we need to do some experiments and publish papers to figure out the best way of testing!
If you combine these things as criteria, but only require one of them, you get a mixed bag between the worst and best criteria. If you combine these things, and require all of them to administer the test, then the test is really good, but almost nobody gets to have it done! That's also a problem.
There are basically zero tests that we give to anyone/everyone, regardless of clinical questionnaire. HIV is close, but even then we use multiple tests, ask about exposure, etc. to increase PPV.
(If you're a virgin, and you've never used IV drugs or gotten a blood transfusion, much harder to get an HIV test. The same is likely gonna be true for people in low-risk CoVID areas with no recent travel or symptoms.)
Ultimately papers will be published and clinical reviews written by panels of experts that debate what the best methods for testing CoV immunity are going to be. Same thing happened in HIV. They weigh the pluses and minuses of having more or less strict criteria for who gets the test, and then they settle on the best combo. And that's usually what the CDC and FDA end up recommending.
After that, we have the test! (yay!) but we will still continually have to reassess how that test is performing in use. Forever, while it's being used, we need to know if it's being used correctly and if it's still doing its job.
How does this connect back to immunity certificates?
We then need to figure out what relationship that "positive test result" actually has to "reinfection risk." I said on a previous post that it's really unlikely that the recovered can be reinfected (in the short term).
And I still believe that's true! But I also need to tell you that "really unlikely" is just plain not good enough for this kind of decision. We need to keep checking and check in better and more innovative ways, and determine that a "positive test result" makes reinfection very very very unlikely.
note I didn't say " antibodies " or " immunity " I said " positive test result ."*
I did this because when you're making these difficult decisions, you only have test results, not objective knowledge. You're viewing reality through a glass, darkly.
Reactive vs Neutralizing vs Protective antibodies
The other complication to this is that antibodies on their own, are not enough. You need to have a certain type of antibodies and in large enough quantities in your blood in order to actually be protected against reinfection. This is the part we really need to investigate further before this is safe.
A “reactive” antibody is one that just binds to the protein it’s been made against. It would be useful in detecting the virus in a lab test, but not very useful in helping you avoid getting sick.
A “neutralizing” antibody is one that binds the virus in a very special way, that prevents the virus from getting into your cells. These are the antibodies we need to see in your blood. And we actually need to see them in high enough amounts as well. This is what is called a correlate of protection.
Normally, for most viral diseases, what we do is we get a big group of animals (usually mice, but sometimes ferrets or monkeys), and we vaccinate them, and figure out how much of the second kind of antibody (neutralizing) they have in their blood. Then we try our hardest to infect them. And we figure out at what level of neutralizing antibody they stop getting sick. This is then called the “protective antibody titer” (titer meaning “count”).
We have just drawn a “correlate of protection.” By correlating protection (not getting infected) with something we can measure (neutralizing antibody level in the blood).
This can take a long time to be accepted in the scientific community. For CoV, since it’s a problem right now, it may be done differently, by statistically analyzing huge groups of humans, but will also likely be done in animals like I just described at some point down the road. But in the next section I get into more detail about epidemiologically proving immunity.
* Oxford University has an article on the complexities of this if you want more detail.
How are we actually going to do this? Clinical Trials!
What's likely going to happen, is researchers here and in other countries are going to do some small scale trials, with the best possible methods, to try and figure out who is immune. And whether those immune individuals are unable to get reinfected.
We need to do both molecular (in the lab) and epidemiological (in huge groups of humans) studies about this and figure out if and how we can evaluate immunity.
Germany is already starting to test the waters. Based on both objective (i.e. were you in the hospital) and subjective (did you have symptoms) criteria, they give you the test. Only some people actually get it. And that's not necessarily because we won't have enough, although there will likely also be supply chain issues. It's also because a test doesn't work as well if we give it to anyone and everyone (as I said above).
And then after they do all that testing, they're going to do one of two things:
(different countries will likely do A or B, depending on their ethical appetite for A)
A) involves what are called challenge studies where they actually straight up try their hardest to infect the people who have a positive IgG test.
And I recognize this is not super palatable to a lot of people. Purposely infecting humans?? Knowing that some might get sick??
Well they would only do this in young people (18-40) with very low risk for death or disability. And they only do it in the extremely safe environment of a clinical trial where you're being closely monitored and given the best medical care money can buy.
And it's done for the good of society! The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, etc. We give people money to participate, make sure they understand the risks, and so on.
(A may be less likely in the US, given the government’s risk aversity, though it could be done safely [in young people] in my opinion.)
B) involves giving a bunch of people this best possible testing regimen (multiple tests, pre-screen, w/e) and then you separate them into two groups.
Group 1 was positive on the test, Group 2 was negative. You let both groups go about their lives and then you continually monitor them extremely closely (swabbing their noses once or twice a day) and figure out if they're getting reinfected or capable of spreading virus.
If Group 1 (IgG+ via the test) gets the virus less often than Group 2 ( IgG- via the test), and to a degree that we're all comfortable with (let's say 100x less often, again panels of experts and a few lay people will decide this), then we let the positives go do their thing in society.
(Note: there's always lay people on these panels for the public perspective! Don't let anyone say that America doesn't respect the opinion of the common man.)
A>B in terms of proof of immunity = no reinfection. Option A also requires fewer people than B. Option B will likely need many thousands to be properly "powered" (statistical term meaning capable of telling with reasonable confidence) to answer the question of reinfection risk. But A can probably be done with a few hundred people.
And if it turns out that reinfection risk is less common in the test + group, then we let this test + group go back to patronizing businesses and possibly helping with relief efforts, go back to work, etc.
The role of PPV and Herd Immunity in this rollout
And we'll have to develop a second PPV, let's call it PPV2. PPV1 is "how likely was it that you had the virus, given a positive test result?" PPV2 is "how likely is it that you are immune and unable to get reinfected, given a positive test result?"
Two separate questions, two separate PPVs.
PPV2 needs to be high enough for "immunity certificates" to be possible.
Exactly how high is probably a factor of herd immunity. If we can be confident that 70ish% of these people are true positives, then herd immunity could be enough. This needs to be modeled based on the R0.
R0 is a number called "infectivity." -- basically means: If I'm infected, how many people do I spread the virus to? Estimates for CoV's R0 vary widely, between 2.5 at the lowest and 6 at the highest. It's a living and breathing number that factors in how well we are "sheltering in place."
But we can't just count the population we tested, we'd have to also count the essential workers those tested people will have to interact with, who may not have gotten the test, and may not have antibodies! It would have to be 70% of ALL PEOPLE who aren't in self-isolation to be true positives for that to work.
70% = (True positives)/(all the positives + all essential workers)
But even if we do issue these "immunity certificates," we have to keep checking, continually, to make sure that their immunity is still holding true. We can let all the positive people go back to higher risk activities, but then we need to keep doing B continually, and checking to make sure the positives are not at higher risk.
And so even if we do A at first, we often end up doing B afterwards on a rolling basis. We need to make sure these "immune" people aren't getting reinfected at a higher rate than the sheltered-in-place. Or at least at not at too much higher of a rate. If they are getting reinfected too often, it won't be worth it to let them return to businesses, help out with relief efforts, etc. They would pose too great a risk to everyone else.
If the numbers aren't good, then we're SOL until a better testing regimen comes along, or until we get a vaccine. But there is a chance at present that this will play out in our favor.
But if it does work, and the IgG+ are incapable of reinfection for the most part, then they could help slowly restart our economy and slowly help society return to normal...
This is probably one of the most complex, annoying, and counterintuitive parts of medical statistics, clinical pathology, etc. And it's not easy for people to understand, even doctors and scientists have trouble with this!
Other things to consider:
We need national legislation making it illegal to discriminate against WFH, or in any way restrict WFH (work from home) in non-essential industries/jobs. We cannot let the disabled or the elderly get the short end of the stick just because the immune healthy people get to go back to work IRL.
The testing would need to be offered for free or at low cost via the local health department, so it doesn't make worse inequities among the haves and have-nots.
It needs to be prioritized for healthcare workers and other essential workers, so we are protecting the non-immune ones from infection as much as possible. These essential workers are a resource, as much as ventilators and medicines. We need to conserve them and keep them healthy!
We need to be careful about intentional infection (CoVID Parties). The only way to implement something like this is slowly and methodically. We would have to do two things:
A) Examine how other countries do it and how it’s going (Because I think Americans, for example, are individualistic and crazy enough to lick doorknobs, but I’m not sure they’re that much crazier or desperate than, say, Germans, French, or Italians);
B) Do it slowly, and study the prevalence of these “negative internalities” (figure out how much bad shit is actually happening as a result of the certificates).
It may not even be intentional infections that are the issue! People could forge certificates.
All of these costs would need to be measured, and compared to the benefits. Things like more jobs, fewer bankruptcies, improved mental health, fewer suicides, etc. If negative effects outweigh positive ones, then we probably shouldn’t implement it.
If we’re going to act like scientists, in a conversation about public policy & public health, then we need to do so free from inherent biases or preconceived notions. We need to put all the cards on the table, see which ones work, and then play them.
“Immunity certificates” is just one card in that hand.
The NIH is starting a serosurvey!
Also check out this study from the NIH and consider participating if you qualify.
(Email clinicalstudiesunit@nih.gov to participate)
They're testing only people with no history of a prior result (+ or -). If you've ever been tested, you can't sign up. But for everyone else, go for it! These studies will help improve the models we have and help us understand the test itself! By getting a better estimate of overall % infected and recovered.
But remember this essay, bookmark it, and come back and reread it when you see the NIH study's results. And think about how PPV and prevalence are directly linked. Lower % infected, more false positives.
And remember also that these studies are not yet designed to figure out if these people are actually immune to reinfection. They’re trying to figure out who has already been infected. Different questions. Different approaches. Different studies.
Additionally, I'll be in and out of this thread to answer any questions that come up in the comments. Fire away! I'm always down to talk about science.
Here are some other good articles, explainers, videos:
The WHO put out a statement about this! And it agrees with pretty much everything I’ve said here. One big caveat I would make is that WHO says there is no evidence of immunity. That’s misleading. We have some evidence that people recovered from severe CoVID cases should form protective immunity, but it’s far from conclusive.
Twitter thread from @taaltree (I cannot reiterate enough how good this thread is at explaining TP, FP, PPV, NPV. I didn't get into it here but it's very useful knowledge)
This ~10 min clip about CoV Clinical Tests from the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe Podcast #772
MGH FLARE Review of the evidence for immunity against SARS-CoV-2 (subscribe here!) (This listhost is run by a bunch of Boston MDs and summarizes CoVID stuff daily)
Oxford University article on the complexities of serological testing and reinfection (I didn't get that deep into the topic of neutralizing vs protective vs just reactive antibodies, which is another layer to this. We need the first two, not just the third)
Hi reddit! Today seems like a good day to talk about what we know (and don’t know) about the health effects of cannabis and the emerging evidence about adult-use legalization. With so much attention being paid to the political, economic and social impacts of cannabis, it’s important for the scientific community to provide evidence-based input that can be used as a basis for these crucial discussions.
During this AMA organized by LabX, a public engagement program of the National Academy of Sciences, we’ll answer your questions about the current state of cannabis research, discuss how laboratory research is being implemented clinically, and talk about the implications on policy. We’ll also provide links to high-quality, evidence-based resources about cannabis.
In particular, we’ll highlight the 2017 report “The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids” from the National Research Council, which explored the existing research on the health impacts of cannabis and included several conclusions and recommendations for scientific researchers, medical professionals, policymakers and the general public.
· Monitoring and evaluating changes in cannabis policies: insights from the Americas
· Navigating Cannabis Legalization 2.0
· The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids
With us today are:
I am Dr. Ziva Cooper, Research Director for UCLA’s Cannabis Research Initiative and Associate Professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. My research involves understanding the neurobiological, pharmacological, and behavioral variables that influence both the abuse liability and therapeutic potential of cannabinoids (cannabis, cannabinoid receptor agonists, and cannabidiol) and opioids. Over the last ten years, I have sought to translate preclinical studies of drug action to the clinic using controlled human laboratory studies to investigate the direct effects of abused substances.
I am John Kagia, Chief Knowledge Officer with New Frontier Data. I have developed market leading forecasts for the growth of the cannabis industry, uncovered groundbreaking research into the cannabis consumer, and led the first-of-its-kind analysis of global cannabis demand. In addition, I have played an active role in advising lawmakers and regulators looking to establish and regulate cannabis industries.
I am Dr. Beau Kilmer, director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. I started as an intern at RAND more than 20 years ago and never really left! Some of my current projects include analyzing the costs and benefits of cannabis legalization; facilitating San Francisco’s Street-level Drug Dealing Task Force; and assessing the evidence and arguments made about heroin-assisted treatment and supervised consumption sites. I have worked with a number of jurisdictions in the US and abroad that have considered or implemented cannabis legalization and am a co-author of the book “Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know.”
I am Dr. Bryce Pardo, associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. My work focuses on drug policy with a particular interest in the areas of cannabis regulation, opioid control, and new psychoactive substance markets. I have over ten years of experience working with national, state, and local governments in crime and drug policy, and I served as lead analyst with BOTEC Analysis Corporation to support the Government of Jamaica in drafting medical cannabis regulations.
I am Dr. Rosanna Smart, economist at the RAND Corporation and a member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School faculty. My research is in applied microeconomics, with a focus on issues related to health behaviors, illicit markets, drug policy, gun policy and criminal justice issues. I have worked on projects estimating the health consequences of increased medical marijuana availability on spillovers to illicit marijuana use by adolescents and mortality related to use of other addictive substances, as well as understanding the evolution and impact of recreational marijuana markets.
We will be back this afternoon (~3 pm Eastern) to answer questions and discuss cannabis research with you!
Let's discuss!
Hi reddit! We’re an international team of researchers working to understand the microbiology of how the novel coronavirus infects and takes over healthy cells, in order to interrupt the infection and transmission processes with drugs.
The Krogan Lab at UCSF has already identified more than 300 human proteins that interact with SARS-CoV-2 during infection, and created an “interactome” showing how human proteins cooperate with viral ones. Blocking these interactions may prevent the virus from making copies of itself, thereby slowing down both infection and transmission.
On today’s panel we have:
Nevan Krogan, PhD: I’m a professor and the director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) at UCSF and a Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes. I led the work to create the SARS-CoV-2 interactome and assembled the QBI Coronavirus Research Group (QCRG), which includes hundreds of scientists from around the world. My research focuses on developing and using unbiased, quantitative systems approaches to study a wide variety of diseases with the ultimate goal of developing new therapeutics.
Kevan Shokat, PhD: I’m a UCSF professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and an expert in drug design. In my role on the QCRG, my lab at UCSF is combing through existing FDA-approved drugs and clinical trial databases to find candidates that match up well with the human host proteins shown to interact with SARS-CoV-2, and may therefore block the actions of the virus.
John Young, PhD: I'm a virologist by training and the Global Head of Infectious Diseases at Roche Pharma Research and Early Development in Basel, Switzerland. I oversee infectious disease research and early clinical development programs. I'm collaborating with Krogan’s team to characterize the interactions between the virus and cellular proteins with the goal of identifying new therapeutic approaches.
Brian Shoichet, PhD: I’m a UCSF professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and an expert in drug discovery. Working within the QCRG, my lab is bringing large scale computational methods--"virtual pharmacology"--to discover drugs, investigational drugs, and wholly new molecules to modulate both the host proteins that interact with SARS-CoV-2, and viral proteins directly, blocking the viral life cycle.
Here’s coverage of our work written up by UCSF.
Here’s coverage of our work from the New York Times.
Nevan Krogan wrote about this work in The Conversation.
We'll be back around 2 pm Eastern to answer your questions and join the discussion.
Update: We're excited to announce that we have another panel member joining today! UCSF professor Brian Schoichet will be our fourth panelist today. Thank you for all the great questions, we're going to dive in with answers now.
Update again: Thank you to the r/Science community for all the questions and great conversation. We are signing off now and getting to work!
Just like last year, and 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015), we are not doing any April Fool's day jokes, nor are we allowing them. Please do not submit anything like that.
This year we are doing something a little different though! Our mods and flaired users have an enormous amount of expertise on an incredibly wide variety of scientific topics. This year, we are giving our readers a chance to Ask Us Anything!
How it works- if you have flair on r/science, and want to participate, post a top-level comment describing your expertise/area of research. All comments below that are effectively your own personal AMA. Readers, feel free to ask our team of experts anything under these parent comments (usual rules that comments must be polite and appropriate still hold)! Any top level comments that are not in the AMA style will be removed (eg "I'm a PhD student working on CRISPR in zebrafish, ask me anything!"), as will top level comments from users without flair or that claim expertise that is not reflected by the flair.
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Hi reddit! In our new world of social distancing, people are constantly scrolling through their phones, looking for the latest news on COVID-19. Where is it? What's it doing? Science journalists are working overtime to provide the answers, and in this AMA they will answer your questions: Where we get our information, and how to evaluate the real-time science flooding the internet.
I am Laura Helmuth (@laurahelmuth). I’m the health and science editor for the Washington Post for a few more days, and soon to be the editor-in-chief of Scientific American. I’ve also been an editor for National Geographic, Slate, Smithsonian, and Science magazines, and I’m the immediate past president of the National Association of Science Writers.
I am Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell). I’m a senior writer at STAT, an online news publication focused on health, where I cover infectious diseases and global health. I am a veteran of a number of major disease outbreaks, including the 2003 SARS outbreak, the Zika outbreak of 2015 and numerous Ebola outbreaks. I was a 2011 Nieman Global Health Fellow at Harvard and a 2004 CDC Knight Fellow.
I am Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer). I am the science columnist for the New York Times, where I've been writing recently about the biology of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. I'm also the author of A Planet of Viruses and a dozen other books about science.
We'll be back around noon EST to answer your questions and discuss COVID-19 journalism with you!
2pm EDT: We've got to get back to our deadlines and newsrooms. Thank you so much for your time and questions!
Hi Reddit! With the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak recently declared a public health emergency by the WHO and making headlines around the world, we would like to welcome Dr. Carlos del Rio, Dr. Saad B. Omer, and Dorothy Tovar for a panel discussion to answer any questions on the current outbreak.
Dr. Carlos del Rio (u/Dr_Carlos_del_Rio) is the Executive Associate Dean for Emory School of Medicine at Grady Health System. He is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, co-Director of the Emory Center for AIDS Research, and co-PI of the Emory-CDC HIV Clinical Trials Unit and the Emory Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit. For the past decade Dr. del Rio was the Richard N. Hubert Professor and Chair of the Hubert Department of Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health. @CarlosdelRio7
Dr. Saad Omer (u/s_omer) is the Director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. He is the Associate Dean of Global Health Research and a Professor of Medicine in Infectious Diseases at the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Omer is also the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. @SaadOmer3
Dorothy Tovar (u/Dorothy_Tovar) is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, co-advised in the Ecology and Evolution program. She is interested in ecological and evolutionary factors that drive the spread of deadly viral diseases from bats into humans and livestock. Her research utilizes cells harvested from bats and cultivated in lab to investigate cellular immune responses, with the goal of understanding how some species are able to tolerate infection without apparent signs of illness. She is also an AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador.
Our guests will be joining us from 3pm to 5pm EST (8:00pm to 10:00pm UTC) to answer your questions and discuss!
The moderators over at r/AskScience have assembled a list of Frequently Asked Questions that you may also find helpful!
Today we have two opportunities for you to participate in citizen science:
- We are interested in learning more about the biological basis of rhythm ability in adults. We invite English speaking adults to participate in our study. Participants will complete a 10-20 minute online task involving listening to different sounds and responding to questions, provide contact information, and may be asked to provide a saliva sample by spitting into a special kit, provided through the mail. If you participate, you can choose to be entered in a raffle to win a $100 Amazon gift card. Please click here to participate. You are also welcome to contact our team at [VanderbiltMusicalityResearch@gmail.com](mailto:VanderbiltMusicalityResearch@gmail.com) with any questions.
- I (Shelly Jo Kraft) am leading a study to discover more about the genes and biological mechanisms that increase risk of stuttering. To identify these genes, we are working to collect as many saliva samples as possible from people around the world who stutter. I can answer any questions you might have about developmental stuttering, how we know it is genetic, and about participating in the study. If you are a person who stutters, or has ever stuttered, and you are interested in participating in our research study, please click here to register.
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The volume of scientific research focused on explaining musical behavior has exploded in recent years. Recent research has emphasized the universality of musical behavior as a fundamental practice across human cultures, while also highlighting great variability from one individual to another in musical ability and interests. Scientists in this arena are interested in how these behaviors emerge from human biology and how musical activities such as lessons and practice, group music-making, and parent-child musical interactions might change our brains and affect non-musical aspects of life, such as academic achievement, social relationships, and even health. There are particularly striking connections between music and speech, which may have profound health implications when one system breaks down (such as dyslexia, developmental stuttering, or atypical rhythm) and whether musical interventions have therapeutic benefits (i.e. for age-related hearing loss or autism). Advances in genetic methods also hold promise for large-scale population-based studies aimed at understanding the underlying biology differentiating musical abilities such as rhythm.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recognized the importance of research on music, neuroscience, and health, having recently awarded $20 million in new grants on this topic. These sorts of new efforts may shed light on open questions in the field: Does music training or even “innate” music ability change how we hear speech and how we learn language as children and into adulthood? As we are learning more every day about individual differences in music skills and their genetic basis, we are curious about whether tone deafness and poor rhythm occur in isolation, or is there a deeper relationship to health and brain? Can the socio-emotional benefits of musical experiences be mobilized to improve society at large? What can research in non-human animals (i.e., songbirds) reveal about the evolutionary and cultural forces that may shape musical learning and more broadly, auditory communication?
To answer your questions about the biology of music and language, we have a panel of experts:
Psyche Loui, PhD (u/Psyche_Loui): I am an Assistant Professor of Creativity and Creative Practice in the Department of Music at Northeastern University, and I am director of the MIND (Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics) Lab, a multidisciplinary laboratory which studies the neuroscience of music perception and cognition. My work broadly addresses questions in the science of music, including why music elicits strong emotions, how the brain learns to perceive and produce music, and how music can be used to help those with neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Simon Fisher, PhD (u/Simon_Fisher_PhD): I am a neurogeneticist investigating biological pathways that underlie distinctive aspects of human cognition and behaviour. As a postdoc, I was co-discoverer of FOXP2, the first gene implicated in a developmental speech and language disorder. Currently I am a director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Professor of Language and Genetics at the Donders Institute of Radboud University, both located in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Laura Cirelli, PhD (u/Laura_Cirelli): I am an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Toronto. I study how engaging in musical activities can be a social and an emotional experience for infants.
Cyrille Magne, PhD (u/Cyrille_Magne): I am a Psychology Professor at Middle Tennessee State University. My current research focuses on the neural basis of prosody perception and the link between sensitivity to speech rhythm cues and reading skills.
Shelly Jo Kraft, PhD, CCC-SLP (u/ShellyJo_Kraft): I am a clinician, scientist, and associate professor specialized in the etiology of developmental stuttering. My current research focuses on the biological and behavioral genetics of stuttering, epigenetic complexity and gene-to-gene interactions influencing speech production and the multiform stuttering phenotype.
John Iversen, PhD (u/John_Iversen): I am a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego; I have a background in physics developing tools to study dynamic mechanisms of cognition and development. One focus of my work is on the perception and production of temporal rhythms in music and language and potential therapeutic and educational applications of music.
Reyna Gordon, PhD (u/Reyna_Gordon): I am an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where I direct the Music Cognition Lab (u/VandyMusicCog) and collaborate with the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute. My interdisciplinary research program is focused on the relationship between rhythm and language abilities from behavioral, cognitive, neural, and genetic perspectives. I also want to share an ongoing research participation opportunity:
Hi reddit! We're a group of scientists and advocates who believe that the traditional genetics research model is outdated. We think that people who participate in genetic studies should be involved in decision-making, that research projects should collaborate, that samples should be diverse, and that studies should use real world data. We need these changes to improve our ability to discover treatments and cures for diseases. But at the same time, researchers also need to ensure participant privacy, data security, and give participants the chance to weigh in on and directly benefit from research- medically, informationally, and financially. Let's discuss!
With us today are an array of researchers and leaders from a variety of genetics backgrounds working with a company, LunaPBC, on these questions.
Dawn Barry (u/Dawn_Barry): I’m the President and Co-founder at LunaPBC, Board Chair at Alzheimer’s Association San Diego/Imperial Chapter, and former VP Applied Genomics at Illumina. The twelve years I spent at Illumina, Inc., I led pioneering teams in preemptive health screening, nutrition security, and transplant diagnostics. I was also the co-founder of the Illumina Understand Your Genome symposium, which is now owned by Genome Medical.
Bob Kain (u/Bob_Kain): I’m the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder at LunaPBC, 2019 World Economic Forum’s Tech Pioneer, and former Chief Engineering Officer at Illumina. During my 15-year tenure, Illumina grew from a research start up of 30 employees to a global genomics leader of 3,000 employees with $1.5 billion in revenue. My team helped reduce the cost of genome sequencing from a million dollars in 2006 to $1,000 in 2015. The products developed enabled new applications for DNA sequencing in agriculture, pathogen identification and precision medicine. Today, I’m building a talented, ethical team with unifying visions to create a world-changing solution and improve the quality of life for all at LunaPBC.
Scott Kahn, Ph.D (u/Scott_Kahn): I’m the Chief Information Officer at LunaPBC, Board of Directors at Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine, and former Chief Information Officer and Vice President Commercial, Enterprise Informatics at Illumina. I’m integrating data privacy and security provisions that comply with GDPR and HIPAA at the world’s first community-owned health database that offer shares of ownership to health data contributors.
Kirby Bloom (u/Kirby_Bloom): I’m the Chief Architect at LunaPBC, former Head of Software for Applied Genomics at Illumina, and MIDS candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. I'm helping bridge the gap between research scientists and large scale data analytics by building the tools needed to produce better insights for health discovery.
Sharon Terry (u/Sharon-Terry): I’m the President and CEO of the Genetic Alliance, a network transforming health by promoting openness and is founding CEO of PXE International, a research advocacy organization for the genetic condition pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE). My memberships and advisories include the International Rare Disease Research Consortium and the Institute of Medicine Science and Policy Board. I was instrumental in the passage of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. Among other awards I received was the Clinical Research Forum, Foundation’s Annual Award for Leadership in Public Advocacy in 2011, and PMWC 2019 Luminary Award Recipient.
Yaniv Erlich, Ph.D (u/Yaniv-Erlich): I'm the creator of DNA.Land, Chief Science Officer of MyHeritage.com, and until recently, an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computational Biology at Columbia University. I’m a TEDMED speaker (2018), the recipient of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award (2017), the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award (2013) and the Harold M. Weintraub award (2010).
Aristides Patrinos, Ph.D (u/Aristides_Patrinos): I am the Chief Scientist and Director for Research of the NOVIM Group, Former Lead at the Human Genome Project, LunaDNA Advisor, and leading authority on structural biology, genomics, global environmental change, and nuclear medicine. I'm dedicated to the development of synthetic biology and in the development of clean and renewable fuels and chemicals, sustainable food products, and novel medical applications.
EDIT:
Thank you to everyone who participated in this important discussion about the future of health discovery. We believe the fastest, most impactful change can only happen at the level of community. Your voice matters. Please feel free to continue the conversation at lunadna.com and @LunaDNA_ on Twitter. Until then, it was our pleasure chatting with you!