@TheAtlantic staff writer. I cover science, medicine, humans. Say hi at szhang@theatlantic.com
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Mar 18 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I have a story in @TheAtlantic today that I have been thinking about for years.
I've written a lot about shocking discoveries from 23andMe and AncestryDNA tests, but several years ago, I heard about a support group for what might be the most shocking discovery of all.
DNA tests have uncovered the surprising prevalence of incest.
A geneticist has found that 1 of 7000 people in the UK Biobank have parents who are themselves brother/sister or parent/child. The genetic genealogist @CeCeMoore told me she’s seen well over 1000 cases.
Sep 13, 2022 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Over the past century, humans have been slowly losing our distance vision. My latest @theatlantic feature is about the rise of myopia, especially in kids. 1/x
Myopia is highest in Asia, where 80-90% of teens end up nearsighted. It’s rising in the U.S. and Europe too. What’s happening in Asia may be a preview for the rest of the world. 2/x
A lot we still don't know, but this much is becoming clear: Cases are rising very, very fast in places with high immunity to COVID
1/
theatlantic.com/health/archive…
Even if most cases are mild—though, as I explain in the piece, Omicron may not end up as mild as it currently looks—we have a simple math problem on our hands.
A tiny % of a huge # is still a big #. With Omicron, we really could get to a huge # of cases. More than Delta
2/
Aug 17, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
A year ago, I wrote that the coronavirus is never going away. A year later, that has unfortunately only become more and more clear
theatlantic.com/health/archive…
I have a new story about what living with the coronavirus now looks like in the long term. Things understandably feel uncertain with Delta right now, but the pandemic will end, one way or another.
Can we take a step back to acknowledge how remarkable it is we even know about the coronavirus variants? I wrote about how this is a massive sea change in our pandemic response 1/
theatlantic.com/science/archiv…
We know about the COVID-19 variants because we've been sequencing so, so many viruses. There are—as of this minute—723,842 genomes for this coronavirus.
We're sequencing so fast this number will probably be outdated by the time you see this tweet 2/
I wrote about something I've thinking about a lot recently:
19th century doctors were themselves obsessed with ventilation. How did we manage to forget that? 1/
theatlantic.com/health/archive…
Florence Nightingale was the original ventilation influencer. As a nurse in the Crimean War, she saw 10x soldiers die of disease than wounds.
She was also a pioneering statistician. This is her famous infographic illustrating deaths during the war
2/
Feb 9, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I wrote about how all the signs are pointing to herd immunity against COVID-19 becoming impossible.
This is how the pandemic ends instead—because yes, it can still end.
theatlantic.com/health/archive…
1/
For herd immunity, we need vaccines to prevent transmission. They probably will to some extent but we should expect that protection to
- be weaker than protection against symptomatic infection
- wane over time
- be eroded first by new variants
2/
Nov 18, 2020 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
1/ Hello, I have a story I've been working on for a long time—long before there was a pandemic, if you can believe it. It’s about the past and future of our children’s DNA.
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…2/ I went to Denmark, where prenatal screening for Down syndrome is near universal and only 18 children with Down syndrome were born in the entire country last year.
But, this isn’t only about Denmark or only about Down syndrome...
Jun 16, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Ever since the pandemic began, I've been haunted by stories of coronavirus patients dying alone.
I spoke to a palliative care team caring for these patients in a Boston ICU. They were often the last ones—the only ones—in the room when a patient died.
It's so hard to hold the plastic-wrapped iPad so that everything is in the camera frame. An intimate and sacred moment, made almost absurd by tech difficulties.
In 2016, I was writing about the return of flesh-eating screwworms in Florida, when I learned about a U.S. government program that sounded totally bonkers
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