Oh it's so much more than just antibacterial hand soap. Antibiotics should have been used sparingly but we give them out for just about anything. Doctors get reamed by their patients and get bad reviews if they don't give them out. Things like colds, which are 100% viral, get antibiotics from a huge number of doctors. We give antibiotics to livestock to fatten them up for more meat yield. We give antibiotics to plants to increase yield and to make sure they don't die. In large parts of the world, they're available over the counter. They're given as prophylactic treatment for dog/cat bites and scratches. We hand the pills out like candy, and because we're so casual about it, people don't fully understand and respect the bomb they're eating and as such, don't take the full course, which leads to only the strong surviving, but now having exposure to whatever was trying to kill it and building up immunity over time. We fucked up with antibiotics and are approaching a time when we will have few to no options available and are going to be in a post-antibiotic society, in which invasive surgery becomes a lot harder because if an infection happens, we can't just bomb you with antibiotics anymore because we won't have anything again.

We kinda have phage therapy, but I mean:

Phages are notoriously finicky and ESKAPE infections are just as fussy. For this last-ditch therapy to work, bacteria eater would have to be precisely matched to superbug.

Source ^ the article I posted there

The high bacterial strain specificity of phage therapy may make it necessary for clinics to make different cocktails for treatment of the same infection or disease because the bacterial components of such diseases may differ from region to region or even person to person. In addition, this means that "banks" containing many different phages must be kept and regularly updated with new phages.

Further, bacteria can evolve different receptors either before or during treatment. This can prevent phages from completely eradicating bacteria.[10]

Source for ^^ and ^ Wikipedia page for Phage Therapy

It's far from perfect, and will need massive amounts of spending, a shitton of luck, and a lot of testing to find out what organisms are susceptible to what phages. A lot of people will die in the process. Phages will likely be a lot more expensive than antibiotics at least to start. You need to match a very specific, purified phage to a very specific bacteria, and who knows what mutations can happen that allow phage escape like the antibiotic escape we're seeing now. All in all, it's a shot in the dark that Western Medicine hasn't considered in decades and in fact one of the only places it's been seriously considered over the past few decades has been the Tbilisi Institute in Georgia and other parts of the Eastern World, including Russia, and with all the Cold War shit that went on for decades, Russia scary, we can't use their technology, so the Western World has shunned the technology and not invested for a long time. In 2019 the FDA finally approved the first clinical trial on phage therapy.

Fuck Sheetz all my homies love Wawa

Pubski opened so early today!

Work! Yo y'all need to stop doing anything. Lock yourselves in your houses and hibernate for a month or so. Cases up hard. I've opened up 17 new facilities in the past week. Three of the past five working days had five opened per day. The facilities are doing a good job of reporting cases to the department, but my colleagues also apparently don't know how to report to me, so a lot have fallen through the cracks until the state yells at me. I've also become the only person doing congregate living settings, so now I get to do the weekly emails and meetings that I never had to do before. I was worried about the responsibility aspect of things when I took the job but that's going really well which is great. My old job still isn't filled. The supervisor over there thought it'd be filled by January. Pool season is rapidly approaching. No one is going to be trained for it and it's going to be a disaster.

The dryer broke. It's 15 years old at least. Hell of a good run. I was in favor of repairing it. I think only the heating element broke. Appliances seem to be getting moor poorly made so I'm guessing something from 15 years ago might be a little better to repair than buying a whole new one. Also less waste. Also cheaper. We've gone through three refrigerators in the past few years. One broke every few months like clockwork starting not a month after the warranty ended. Two was shipped damaged and defective. Three arrived a few weeks ago. Warranty on all three was just a year. Also why the fuck the fridge need to connect to wifi. I'm all for the old dumb dryer not whatever shit is coming. New one has touch controls which just says to me a new piece to break that's not a dial and easy to fuck with if if breaks. But whatever not my money. And I'm moving somewhere soon so there's that.

Living with the parents is... going. They have absolutely no respect that my job is like super HIPAA shit and I'm WFH two days per week, so they're running around all the time. They're both WFH every day and are using bedrooms for offices so I'm in the kitchen. They are so clearly listening to everything I say and as has always been the problem with them -- no privacy. We're not releasing what facilities have cases but my mom works with a bunch of these places and tries to find everything out. I can't and don't give it to her and she gets a bit pissy. But I'm doing my best. Less than four more months so that's nice. I need to ask my boss in a few months if I can go full time remote or if I get to train a replacement. I hate working remotely but money is money. And I'm about to be in debt. A lot of debt.

I appealed the financial aid decisions of "you get federal loans and jack shit else" and all three lovely institutions laughed at me. How much has y'all's endowment grown over the past year. Y'all have the money. Give me some. Please.

Anyway, the big question. The answer you've all been waiting for. It only feels right to let y'all know before anyone else (including the school!) And the answer is... Emory! CDC, puclic health capital of the world, lots of global health organizations, cheap enough living, still a global focused degree. It just feels right. Thanks to everyone listening to my ranting and throwing me advice throughout whatever this process has been y'all have been great.

Not only this as a "second class" vaccine, there are already huge amounts of vaccine hesitancy around the whole thing. It's a very specific grouping. I knew they were all the right age has it been confirmed all were on birth control? And has it been confirmed all had thrombocytopenia?

Definitely could have been handled better though I don't think it's necessarily the worst handling either. Restricting some instead of restricting all would be great, but the vaccine also isn't FDA approved yet, it's under EUA approval so they need to act quickly and with conviction with a stringent eye for safety. Not sure what normal vaccine approval is like but I know it's a horrendous process. Not sure what the normal course of action would be with something like this during trials, but I'm not sure how out of the ordinary their reaction truly is.

Actively going on, FDA and CDC press conference on it all, live questions being asked and such.

Update - It's done, should still be available to rewatch on their youtube page though.

Hubski building you up for nothing as always. Glad to hear it went well!

My second moderna shot was brutal. I got it at 9 AM and almost exactly 12 hours later I was in bed with chills and a fever, hiding under as many covers as I possibly could sweating profusely and very cold. I decided to try to drink water because I knew I'd be dehydrated and all that did was make my body hate me for introducing cold into it while it's trying to burn the virus inside me and get even worse chills. I rolled over to try to sleep and it was just night-long fever dreams. I woke thinking it was 6:30-6:45, right before my alarm because the night had lasted so long already. It was 2 AM. I was only halfway through. Second half of the night went a bit better. Woke up with a headache. Was fine by noon. Wild ride all around.

Brag away I just don't want you making love to streetlamps before it's safe for you to do so.

Also let me know how J&J is. Everyone I know was a two shot bitch but we just started getting and administering J&J too so I am really curious to hear how it goes. Side effects, ease, etc.

If you're just getting stabby stabby today you still have to wait for two weeks for full efficacy don't go licking doorknobs just yet.

Y'allreadyknow

_refugee_, lil, mk, spencerflem, elizabeth, Devac, steve, ButterflyEffect, am_Unition (if you can show up even for 5 mins I need blackbeard), thenewgreen, goldbludgeon

https://meet.jit.si/TheHubskiHappyHour

RI has great beers! Have a friend up there who I visit on occasion. He introduced me to Whalers Brewing and their Rise APA. That's a thing of beauty. I'll try to get a hold of Long Live at some point.

The beer shelf is a beautiful thing. What'd you get out there? I love Pliny the Elder from Russian River and it's impossible to get outside a very small area in California. I have a neighbor who also enjoys beer and his company is headquartered in Cali. He has a business trip next month and shipped two coolers out to the office to fill up and ship back while he's out there.

There's always next week.

Blasphemy this is a fake pubski all are welcome at the pubski speakeasy this week.

I think Hopkins has a bit of a toxic culture. They take their "#1 in public health for 20+ years" thing seriously and it makes for a very competitive group of kiddos. Which is also fair being that it's difficult to get in in the first place. I think Emory is a bit more friendly. Baltimore is a dangerous city. Atlanta isn't a ton better but it is better. Atlanta is very much so a global and public health capital. Emory's program is global and Hopkins' isn't. Georgetown is the only one that guarantees international experience but it should be possible elsewhere. DC is stupid expensive and very frat boy, mommy and daddy money kinda people who I hate. Baltimore and Atlanta are fairly cheap, Baltimore more so than Atlanta but Atlanta isn't expensive. I do think Emory is probably the best choice for me. I just need to actually play with finances some. I appealed the financial aid decisions and will hopefully hear by April 15th.

And if I work in fed or non-profit, they theoretically forgive student loans, but only after 120 qualifying monthly payments which is a decade and I'd love to not owe money for that long.

Y'all why is education so expensive. Got a week to decide. Hopkins offered a scholarship and is the most expensive. Scholarship brings it to Emory's price. Emory was like we can loan ya money but no freebies. Georgetown STILL HASN'T GIVEN ME INFO AND TOLD ME TO WAIT A FEW MORE MONTHS like no I need to decide in a week. It's all a load of bullshit. Probably gonna be Emory but not 100% sure yet. Anyone got a spare hundred thousand dollars lying around?

Sometimes you just gotta be in a mood y'all