Post

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
Click again on or Share Via icon
Click on Copy Link to Tweet
Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
More info at Twitter Help

Niall Conroy

Nov 18, 2021 • 9 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X

Mask-wearing cuts Covid incidence by 53%, says global study | Coronavirus | The Guardian This is all over my timeline today. I’m a fan of masks, and it is AMAZING progress to see a meta-analysis of public health interventions for covid. But….. theguardian.com/world/2021/nov…

..we need to look past headlines. This study looked at a range of measures, including masks, handwashing+disinfection. It’s well written and methodologically fine. But a meta-analysis can only analyse primary research and it’s conclusions are only as good as those studies….

…While people have been screaming at public health to “follow the science”, public health has been saying the science is blighted by confounders. So we need to be careful about interpreting the finding around masks, as the authors themselves point out. 6 studies. Big bias risk…

…Authors also concluded that handwashing is useful. But wide confidence intervals make it hard to determine effect size. Reassuring to see that handwashing *seems* to be beneficial. Important to note they’re doing a meta-analysis of mostly retrospective observational studies…

…They also looked at social distancing. 25% risk reduction looks about right, but is clearly dependent on the actual distance in the real world. Again, these studies weren’t particularly well designed for the outcome in question, so no surprise that the risk of bias was high…

..Disinfection of surfaces in households got a look-in too. Interesting to see very high reduction in odds of transmission, but mega wide confidence intervals and only one study made the grade. So, again, this shows the uncertainty we work with every day in managing this virus…

…I think it’s important for people not to pull the pieces that they’re ideologically tethered to out of this study to increase the “follow the science” noise in the pandemic space. Let’s just acknowledge uncertainty. The accompanying editorial to this paper says it best…

…Here’s what the editorial says about the section on masks, as this is pretty measured and I suspect the headlines generated from this paper will mostly be about masks. Most likely a small but welcome reduction in risk…

https://twitter.com/bobepidemiology/status/1461212866971717633

..A bit more context on this from someone who knows what he’s talking about.

https://twitter.com/bobepidemiology/status/1461212866971717633

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @NICU_doc_salone

Niall Conroy

@NICU_doc_salone

Feb 4

A short thread for parents, which will hopefully show why we can be confident that *nobody* is at risk of autism from the MMR vaccine. Below are some of the studies that look at the MMR and autism rates in different countries. Spoiler: The link does not exist…

….Firstly, the Lancet back in 2004, when all this was being debated, looked at people with autism and people who didn’t have autism, to see if there was any difference in their vaccination rates for MMR….

….These guys looked at both autism and the broader group of pervasive developmental disorders, of which autism is one type. They found absolutely no link between the MMR and autism or any similar conditions….

Read 17 tweets

Niall Conroy

@NICU_doc_salone

Jan 16, 2022

Interesting work on Hendra Virus in grey headed flying fox bats in Australia shows the presence of a new variant of Hendra (Hendra G2) in a sample of bats tested for Australian Bat Lyssavirus since 2013. For those not working in Oz, Hendra is a low-frequency high-consequence…

…infection that is responsible for the deaths of 5 people who became unwell after exposure to sick horses. The bats infect the horses, who then infect humans. Infection of horses seems to occur when they feed underneath bat colonies and are exposed to falling birth products or…

…urine and saliva, which contaminates their feed. The horses develop respiratory and/or neurological symptoms and often die. People who have close contact with them while they’re unwell can contract the disease. Up until a few years ago, we knew about one type of Hendra virus…

Read 7 tweets

Niall Conroy

@NICU_doc_salone

Jan 13, 2022

Incursion of European Bat Lyssavirus 1 (EBLV-1) in Serotine Bats in the United Kingdom - Interesting to see European Bat Lyssavirus (my third favourite bat lyssavirus 😂) establishing itself in another species of bat in the uk. EBLV is rabies’ brother… pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34696409/

…and is fatal in humans (though rare). It used to be pretty much only seen in Daubenton’s bat (which are also found in Ireland) but now seem to be establishing themselves in Serotine bats. Samples mostly taken in Southern England. Not sure if this species is seen in Ireland…

..as Serotine bats traditionally lived in continental Europe but seem to have adapted to southern UK. Surveillance is always going in in the background for low-incidence high-consequence diseases like these. Core public health work. #OneHealth

Read 4 tweets

Niall Conroy

@NICU_doc_salone

Oct 18, 2021

It’s been a real Rabies/Lyssavirus week for me. And whenever that happens, I’m always amazed how much of an absolute operator the virus is. Some of it’s basic abilities include - Fooling your body into reducing its immune response (considering these viruses are 100% fatal….

…that’s quite the evolutionary achievement). One of the ways it does this is by inhibiting your body’s ability to produce B-interferon, which is a vital part of our immune machinery. In fact the #rabies virus has a whole chunk of its genome dedicated to doing just that….

…Rabies/lyssavirus also heads straight for your brain, where it increases the concentration of nitric oxide by about 25 times. That leads to a LOT of CNS overexcitement and it decreases your ability to fight off cell death; bad news when that’s happening in your 🧠……

Read 15 tweets

Niall Conroy

@NICU_doc_salone

Oct 16, 2021

https://twitter.com/allysonpollock/status/1449409369955782665

As an end-user of the frankly awful data in the covid public health space, the best contributions that the various scientific advocacy groups and individuals around the globe could make, in my opinion, would be proper rigorous *systematic* reviews, especially around efficacy….

https://twitter.com/allysonpollock/status/1449409369955782665

…of various mitigation strategies (many of which seem to be over-sold to the public) and the actual prevalence of the now well-defined long covid in different age groups. Without certainty around these questions, it’s really difficult to conduct rigorous risk assessments….

…,which are really the key to proper health protection. Instead we just get noise, with the public believing the 99% of stuff on twitter that is pure fiction, even from people who seem very credible and post links to convincing-looking papers. Most of what I see here is wrong.

Read 4 tweets