Becky Smith

The Lyme vaccine: a cautionary tale People living in endemic areas acquire Lyme disease from the bite of an infected tick. This infection, when diagnosed and treated early in its course, usually responds well to antibiotic therapy. A minority of patients develops more serious disease, ...

226/250 is The Lyme vaccine: a cautionary tale

Great story about a complicated story. There's potential for some interesting history with LYMErix and RotaShield

Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook Low uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in the US has been widely attributed to social media misinformation. To evaluate this claim, we introduce a framework combining lab experiments (total N = 18,725), c...

225/250 is Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook

Just asking questions articles from the MSM have the potential for far more harm than misinformation because they have more reach

Changing climate and socioeconomic factors contribute to global antimicrobial resistance - Nature Medicine Forecast models of bacterial antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance records from 101 countries reveal that the global burden of AMR is associated with the impact of climate change intertwined wit...

224/250 is Changing climate and socioeconomic factors contribute to global antimicrobial resistance

I'm having a hard time with the claims based on "ignoring the heterogeneity between surveillance networks"

Oh no! I'm sorry!

I'm heading off the grid for 3 days, so that's good

One good thing

This is one of the last days I get to post these absolutely curséd animations I made for eel facts season. I think I'll post them in a thread here for posterity.

Get a calendar at EelFacts.net

Viral diversity and zoonotic risk in endangered species A growing body of evidence links zoonotic disease risk, including pandemic threats, to biodiversity loss and other upstream anthropogenic impacts on ecosystem health. However, there is little current...

NEW! 🦠🦧 We revisited a perplexing paradox: do wildlife really pose less of a risk to human health as they become more endangered? Turns out, it's sampling bias all the way down: conservation risks correlate with disease surveillance blindspots. 🔓 esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Okay, sometimes the "everything in the cloud" is handy for setting up a new computer

But sometimes Office 365 refuses to recognize your account and you can't do anything practical on said new computer

USDA's HR system wouldn't let me apply for vet jobs until I had my license, so I figured I'd do a master's to avoid being unemployed with $60k in debt

a man wearing a black sweater and a white shirt is making a face . Alt: a man wearing a black sweater and a white shirt is making a cringe face

I just reported a YT ad for the first time. No, you should not be offering people an ivermectin/fenbendazole detox to "get what the doctor missed"

1/ Today, ProPublica is running a piece I've been working on for a bit. It's about what happened with a devastating wave of bird flu earlier this year, as egg prices hit record highs.

And it's a story that illuminates the ways the U.S. is failing to control what could become the next pandemic. 🧵

Illinois Mosquito and Vector Control Association meeting starts with 3 hours (!) of student talks. The kids are alright!

A screenshot of a post from @eweissunburied.bsky.social reading: If you haven't read my book, On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors, make sure to get a copy! With a picture of her book showing her in a back room of a museum with a bunch of boxes.

Recommend everyone block this racist lady whose whole raison d’être is NOT returning stolen Indigenous remains. Don’t engage, she came over here because she misses disrespecting you.

Epistemic preparedness Preparedness strategies for emergent infectious diseases have focused on microbial surveillance, medical stockpiling and healthcare infrastructure resilience. But what does it mean to be epistemically...

223/250 is Epistemic preparedness

Good thoughts to consider. Some of the framing resembles what we have tried to do with our book, to consider preparation as a trust-building and equity exercise

This phrase has been living in my head rent-free all day. Truly perfect

222/250 is Linking Consumers’ Food Choice Motives to their Preferences for Insect-based Food Products: An Application of Integrated Choice and Latent Variable Model in an African Context

Interesting to consider the use of latent variables

221/250 is Antibiotic resistance determination using Enterococcus faecium whole-genome sequences: a diagnostic accuracy study using genotypic and phenotypic data

This is great, they re-tested a lot of the off-diagonals and found misclassification!

More author disclosure: solution or absolution? - PubMed More author disclosure: solution or absolution?

220/250 is More Author Disclosure: Solution or Absolution?

Interesting to think about. Human behavior is complex, and scientists are so very human.

219/250 is Identifying control strategies to eliminate African swine fever in the United States swine industry in under 12 months

Necessary planning work. Also, it appears there could be an interesting distribution in outcomes, but not enough data shown (not everything is normal and gets a boxplot)

Explaining to a colleague that 2 courses that include "R programming and statistics" won't necessarily have any overlap . . . especially since one is applied data analysis for lab scientists and the other is microbiome . . .

Exciting! I've been telling people about this and they keep asking when they can read it!

Chiffonade Brussel sprouts, roasted with olive oil and parmesan. Walnuts or bacon if you feel fancy

On the left, a bearded dragon in a glass enclosure, head up. On the right, a black cat sitting on a cat tree, looking at the camera

Happy #caturday! Orville started the day in conference with Nami

Anthrax, livelihood vulnerability, and food insecurity in selected game management areas in Zambia: A mixed-methods analysis at the human-wildlife-livestock interface Author summary Anthrax is a recurring zoonotic disease in Zambia, particularly in Game Management Areas (GMAs), where human-wildlife-livestock interactions are high. This study examines the socio-econ...

218/250 is Anthrax, livelihood vulnerability, and food insecurity in selected game management areas in Zambia: A mixed-methods analysis at the human-wildlife-livestock interface

Minimal data from the qual side, and the quant didn't report anthrax ?s, but good overall findings

Dismantling pandemic preparedness
@science.org
www.science.org/content/arti...

I-L-L

217/250 is Toward precision veterinary epidemiology: applications, challenges, and opportunities of digitalization and the Big Data revolution in livestock health

Great thoughts, but we'll need to do more than hand-wave the privacy issues

What is the optimal In2Care stations density to achieve Aedes aegypti population reduction in a dengue endemic setting? Author summary Autodissemination traps are an exciting new approach to controlling mosquito populations. These traps are especially useful for fighting Aedes aegypti mosquitoes because of their unique...

216/250 is What is the optimal In2Care stations density to achieve Aedes aegypti population reduction in a dengue endemic setting?

Auto-dissemination is a great idea for Aedes control. Curious if it would help with Culex or not

A quantitative and qualitative assessment of differential privacy’s ability to support collaborative research using a real-world data analysis AbstractObjective. Sharing clinical data for research that is both collaborative and privacy-preserving remains a challenge. Differential privacy (DP) offe

Another new paper, a little different for me - can we use differential privacy to conduct epi research on EMR? Yes, but . . . we lose a lot of power, but it works fairly well for more aggregated counts

Mechanistic evidence of widespread insecticide resistance among the Illinois West nile virus vectors Culex pipiens and Culex restuans - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Mechanistic evidence of widespread insecticide resistance among the Illinois West nile virus vectors Culex pipiens and Culex restuans

215/250 is Mechanistic evidence of widespread insecticide resistance among the Illinois West nile virus vectors Culex pipiens and Culex restuans

I'm curious about the high prevalence of kdr in S. IL, where there's less public health spraying. Ag?