When I first landed this job as a case manager (social worker), I was given Robert R. as a client. He was at his worst then, soiling himself virtually every day, with no change of clothing available. I remember him wearing a piece of colored cloth arou…
I have been getting lots of requests for my opinion about where we are and what is coming. The first question is: How bad will the coronavirus epidemic be in the U.S.? The short answer is, we don’t know – but it could be pretty nasty. An im…
Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is an acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy in which the body’s immune system attacks peripheral nerves. Clinical and epidemiological evidence seems to indicate that most cases are preceded by an infection …
While it’s well known that China and Iran have under-reported their COVID-19 statistics, Italy has been fully transparent. What we are learning is very concerning. The Lombardy province alone has experienced a surge in deaths due to the coronavirus— fr…
Susan Desmond-Hellmann has a unique set of experiences. Until February, she was the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where part of her job was thinking up new ways to battle infectious disease. Before that, she was the chancellor of the …
The Harvard historian Jill Lepore recounted recently in The New Yorker magazine that when democracies sink into crisis, the question “where are we going?” leaps to everyone’s mind, as if we were waiting for a weather forecast to tell us how healthy our…
As the U.S. battles to limit the spread of the highly contagious new coronavirus, the number of health care workers ordered to self-quarantine because of potential exposure to an infected patient is rising at an exponential pace. In Vacaville, Californ…
The arrival of the novel COVID-19 to the U.S., and the inevitability of its eventual spread, raises an interesting question: Should we avoid exposing residents to the virus? Before we try to answer this question, we should start with some important qua…
The arrival of the novel COVID-19 to the U.S., and the inevitability of its eventual spread, raises an interesting question: Should we avoid exposing residents to the virus? Before we try to answer this question, we should start with some important qua…
Being an oncologist in New York, having recovered from the trauma of flooding from Hurricane Sandy and the aftermath that ensued when hospitals were flooded in 2012, my anxieties are now heightened again over the global threat and uncertainties surroun…
