Autonomía digital y tecnológica

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Have no doubt that these policies would have a profound impact on child health. Advertising restrictions work. A recent peer-reviewed study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine showed that thanks to the mayor of London’s junk food advertising restrictions on the capital’s buses and tube trains, families are now buying 1,000 fewer calories a week from food that is high in fat, salt and sugar.

The evidence could also not be clearer that policies that are good for child health can also be good for business. Before the Transport for London advertising restrictions came into force two years ago, the advertising and food industries were saying they would be hit hard and advertising revenues would tumble. What actually happened? Food companies simply started advertising their slightly healthier products and TfL advertising revenues actually increased by £2.3m that year.

In On the Generation of Animals, the Greek philosopher Aristotle characterised a female as a mutilated male, and this belief has persisted in western medical culture.

“Rather than acknowledge the limitations of medical knowledge, medicine expected women to take control (with their minds) of their disease (in their body) by accepting their illness, making ‘lifestyle’ changes and conforming to their gendered social roles of wife and mother. Moralising discourses surround those who rebel; they are represented as irrational and irresponsible, the safety net for medicine when it cannot fulfil its claim to control the body.”

Not only have doctors, scientists and researchers mostly been men, but most of the cells, animals and humans studied in medical science have also been male: most of the advances we have seen in medicine have come from the study of male biology.

Evolución de contagios por Coronavirus tras las medidas de confinamiento

Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don’t take these measures, tens of millions will be infected, many will die, along with anybody else that requires intensive care, because the healthcare system will have collapsed.

Me da miedo que se aplaudan decisiones coercitivas como el confinamiento forzoso que, incluso pudiendo ser necesario, es el resultado del fracaso de la propia ciudadanía para actuar cívicamente y evitar en la medida de sus posibilidades las interacciones sociales

Captura de pantalla de "Coronavirus Map: U.S. Cases Surpass 10,000"

The number of known cases of the coronavirus in the United States surged past 10,000 on Thursday morning as testing expanded and the virus spread. As of Friday morning, at least 12,392 people across every state, plus Washington, D.C., and three U.S. territories, have tested positive for coronavirus, according to a New York Times database, and at least 195 patients with the virus have died.

Foro para la discusión sobre la creación de respiradores / ventiladores abiertos. Estamos recopilando información, de forma colectiva, para el diseño de dispositivos médicos, abiertos, que ofrezcan alternativas en caso de necesidad.

Across the globe, a coronavirus culture is emerging, spontaneously and creatively, to deal with public fear, restrictions on daily life, and the tedious isolation of quarantine. “This is a bad science-fiction movie that is real,” Agustín Fuentes, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, told me, in a late-night discussion this week, about how COVID-19 may alter the human journey. He envisions a profound evolutionary process to insure the survival of the species as pandemics become more common. It’s already visible.

La globalización capitalista es biológicamente insostenible en ausencia de una infraestructura sanitaria pública internacional. Pero nunca existirá hasta que se acabe con el poder de las farmacéuticas y la sanidad con ánimo de lucro.

Al igual que lo hacen las gripes anuales, el virus está mutando a medida que atraviesa poblaciones con composiciones etarias e inmunidades adquiridas diferentes. La variedad que seguramente llegará a los estadounidenses ya es ligeramente diferente a la del brote original de Wuhan.

Sin embargo, no muy a menudo se reconoce que un 60% de la mortalidad mundial tuvo lugar en el oeste de la India, donde la exportación de cereales hacia el Reino Unido y unas brutales prácticas de requisamiento coincidieron con una grave sequía. La escasez de alimentos resultante condujo a millones de personas pobres al borde de la inanición. Se convirtieron en víctimas de una siniestra sinergia entre malnutrición, que inhibió su respuesta inmunitaria a la infección, y una neumonía bacteriana y vírica galopante. En otro caso, en el Irán ocupado por los británicos, varios años de sequía, cólera y escasez de alimentos, seguidos de un brote generalizado de malaria, sentaron las condiciones previas para la muerte de aproximadamente una quinta parte de la población.

…as consecuencias desconocidas de la relación entre malnutrición e infecciones existentes, debería alertarnos de que el COVID-19 podría seguir un camino diferente y mucho más mortífero en los suburbios de África y del sur de Asia. El peligro para los pobres del mundo ha sido ignorado casi por completo por los periodistas y por los gobiernos occidentales. El único artículo que he visto publicado afirma que como la población urbana de África Occidental es la más joven del mundo, la pandemia debería tener allí solo un impacto leve. En vista de la experiencia de 1918, la extrapolación parece ridícula. Nadie sabe lo que pasará en las próximas semanas en Lagos, Nairobi, Karachi o Calcuta. Lo único que es seguro es que los países ricos y las clases ricas se concentrarán en salvarse a sí mismas y prescindirán de la solidaridad internacional y de la ayuda médica. Muros y no vacunas: ¿puede haber un modelo más malvado para el futuro?

El acceso a las medicinas vitales, incluidas las vacunas, los antibióticos y los antivirales deberían ser un derecho humano, y estar universalmente disponibles sin coste alguno. Si los mercados no pueden proporcionar los incentivos para producir de forma barata estos fármacos, entonces los gobiernos y las organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro deberían asumir la responsabilidad de fabricarlas y distribuirlas. La supervivencia de los pobres debe considerarse una prioridad mayor que las ganancias de las grandes farmacéuticas.

…parece que la globalización capitalista es biológicamente insostenible en ausencia de una infraestructura sanitaria pública verdaderamente internacional

There was to be no outbreak of cholera in New Orleans, nor among the residents who fled. Despite raw sewage and decomposing bodies floating in the toxic brew that drowned the city, cholera was never likely to happen: there was little evidence that the specific bacteria that cause cholera were present. But the point had been made: Katrina had reduced a great American city to Third World conditions. Twenty-first-century America had had a cholera scare.

Teams are making ready-to-use COVID-19 datasets easily accessible for the wider data visualization and analysis community. Johns Hopkins posts frequently updated data on their github page, and Tableau has created a COVID-19 Resource Hub with the same data reshaped for use in Tableau.

These public assets are immensely helpful for public health professionals and authorities responding to the epidemic. They make data from multiple sources easy to use, which can enable quick development of visualizations of local case numbers and impact.

At the same time, the stakes are high around how we communicate about this epidemic to the wider public. Visualizations are powerful for communicating information, but can also mislead, misinform, and — in the worst cases — incite panic. We are in the middle of complete information overload, with hourly case updates and endless streams of information.

COVID19 is currently spreading exponentially, in a mostly unchecked fashion, throughout the world. Infection doubling rates are as high as 2-3 days. Under simplistic models, such unchecked growth means the disease infects most of the world in months. Current statistics indicate that 15-20% of people who get it require hospitalization for respiratory failure for multiple weeks, and often need intense healthcare from medical professionals who are at severe risk treating these highly infectious patients. If infections proceed at their current pace across the globe, we will not have enough supplies like ventilators, respirators, PPE, etc. to meet demand.

This group is being formed to evaluate, design, validate, and source the fabrication of open source emergency medical supplies around the world, given a variety of local supply conditions.

Existen algunos estudios científicos destinados a comprobarlo y la mayoría concluyen lo mismo: que la recuperación visible de los síntomas del animal depende de la percepción de los mismos de sus propietarios o el veterinario que le ha recetado la homeopatía, de modo que de nuevo hay un cerebro humano en el que puede estar calando el efecto placebo. En resumen, lo más probable es que un perro que ha tomado homeopatía siga igual de enfermo después, pero puede ocurrir que su dueño sí crea ver que los síntomas mejoran.

un estudio realizado en Facebook detectó que, de los 10 artículos más compartidos en esta red, 7 de ellos eran engañosos o contenían alguna información falsa. Además, en 2016, más de la mitad de los 20 artículos más compartidos con «cáncer» en sus titulares fueron desacreditados por médicos y autoridades sanitarias.

Los bulos más predominantes a los que se enfrentaban los médicos tenían que ver con las pseudoterapias, la alimentación, el cáncer y efectos secundarios de medicamentos. Sin embargo, la variedad de la desinformación sanitaria que se transmite por Internet es enorme: pollos a los que les administran hormonas para que crezcan, desodorantes y antitranspirantes que provocan cáncer de mama, un hospital que afirma que la quimioterapia es «la gran equivocación médica», el limón como cura del cáncer, plátanos infectados de SIDA…

La información sanitaria errónea siempre ha estado presente en las sociedades humanas, no es algo nuevo. No obstante, las nuevas tecnologías han cambiado las reglas del juego, por así decirlo. Los bulos de salud se expanden como nunca antes por las redes sociales gracias a su capacidad para llegar a miles o millones de personas en minutos u horas. Estas redes son amplificadores bestiales de la desinformación porque la desinformación suele presentarse de forma atractiva para el internauta. Los bulos más populares tienen contenidos claros, impactantes, llamativos o atractivos. También cuidan mucho la presentación y suelen ser muy visuales. Su rasgo más poderoso es despertar emociones en la audiencia, ya sea miedo, esperanza, sorpresa, curiosidad, indignación… Se sabe que las noticias se difunden mucho más cuando éstas despiertan reacciones emocionales porque nos sentimos más involucrados.

Además de las redes sociales, los buscadores de Internet son otro factor con un gran papel en la difusión de bulos de salud. Los grandes buscadores funcionan de forma automática basándose en unos algoritmos que determinan la posición de las páginas web en los resultados. No hay profesionales activos que filtren las informaciones sanitarias falsas o erróneas, sino que esto queda en manos de las «máquinas». Esto permite la visibilidad y difusión de ciertos contenidos en Internet que no llegarían muy lejos si existieran humanos vigilando.

Salus.coop aims to legitimize citizens’ rights to control their own health records while facilitating data sharing to accelerate research innovation in healthcare.

Why is this important

The future of our health significantly relies upon the potential of combining, integrating and sharing health data from different sources. However, the decision to share one’s data requires sizing many risks, which include privacy, security, and even the potential misuse of data. Who do we trust to make these judgements? Although European citizens legally own their health data, in practice they often cannot access their data or control its use. This is hindering innovation in healthcare and slowing down research.

Amazon has launched a new service that uses machine learning to extract key data from patient records and can potentially help healthcare providers and researchers save money, make treatment decisions, and manage clinical trials. The company announced the service, called Amazon Comprehend Medical

Amazon’s other recent forays into healthcare include paying almost $1 billion to acquire online prescription service PillPack

It joins other large tech companies that are increasingly focused on healthcare. For example, earlier this year Apple launched a feature that lets customers view their hospital medical records on their iPhones, while Google recently hired former Geisinger CEO David Feinberg to unify and lead the healthcare initiatives across its businesses, including search, Google Brain, Google Fit, and Nest.

Of course, the uploading of medical records to the cloud for machine-learning analysis might questions from patients about how Comprehend Medical will ensure their privacy. Amazon says patient data is encrypted and can only be unlocked by customers who have a key, and that no data processed will be stored or used for training its algorithms. Comprehend Medical complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Google is reportedly working on an A.I.-based health and wellness coach.

Thanks to its spectrum of hardware products, Google would have a notable advantage over existing wellness coaching apps. While its coach, as reported, would primarily exist on smartwatches to start, Android Police noted that the company could include a smartphone counterpart as well. The company could also eventually spread it to Google Home or Android TV. The latter is unchartered territory for these kinds of apps, which are typically limited to smartphones and wearables. With availability in the home, lifestyle coaching recommendations could become increasingly contextual and less obtrusive. If you ask for a chicken parmesan dinner recipe, it could offer a healthier alternative instead; or if you’re streaming music at 10 p.m. and have set a goal to get more sleep, perhaps it could interrupt your music playback to remind you start getting ready for bed. A smartwatch or phone could do this too, of course, but by linking up its product ecosystem, Google could deliver helpful notifications in the context that makes the most sense.

Some high-income countries have lowered their guard and their immunization rates have dropped. In certain countries, confidence in vaccines has begun to fall.

In fact, France is the country with the lowest vaccine confidence level, according to the project The Vaccine Confidence 2016, carried out by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for which 65,819 people were interviewed in 67 countries. 40% of French respondents (vs. an average of 12% worldwide) responded that they disagreed or strongly disagreed with the following statement: “Vaccines are safe”.