Micromom 🇨🇦

Retired microbiologist/epidemiologist. Interested in public health, population health, epidemics, infection control. Still taking piano lessons.

[Geoffrey P. Johnston😎😷🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈🇨🇦💉 @GeoffyPJohnston]

Data submitted to https://t.co/pSOBr1uEVB as of June 23 shows that confirmed tick reports are up 38.5 per cent in Canada so far this year compared to the same period in 2025. https://t.co/y32sYb6mKe

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

🧵1/2
🌐🇨🇦 We're excited to announce the installation of Internet Archive Canada's first Canadian web discovery kiosk, hosted by Vancouver Public Library!

Visitors can explore 100,000 preserved .ca websites and discover 30 years of Canadian web history using just an arcade joystick 🕹️ and a microphone. 🎤

Learn more 👇
https://t.co/pDemC0THwp

[ArianeK 💜 #Care4Complex (she/her) @arianek]

Now this is a hot take I can largely get behind. I get why this is as much as anyone, but taking it out on those who are sincerely trying to help us ain’t it. #Care4Complex

[James Neill  ≠ 𝕏 @jneill]

IN. PLAIN. SIGHT.
It was today I belatedly learned the
Blackshirt wearing CEO of Palantir, Louis Mosley, is the grandson of fascist Oswald Mosley and Hitler fangirl Diana Mitford.
His paternal grandparents married in secret at Goebbels's house with Hitler as guest of honour.

[S Blitshteyn MD, FAAN, FANA, Dysautonomia Clinic @dysclinic]

Are you taking duloxetine (generic for Cymbalta)? There is an FDA recall of this drug so please check with your pharmacist.
https://t.co/z7EHNF0S9g

[🌸Bibi🌸♿ @BibiBlossoms]

Yesterday I found out that many doctors have gaslighted me for years regarding my breathing issues. The pain doctor said that years ago. I got diagnosed with Dyspnea (shortness of breath) after seeing a pulmonologist because my lungs can't expand properly due to my spine issues.

[Deborah Holloway 😷 🇺🇦🇨🇦 @DebHolloway]

"For all of us who have spent six and a half years trapped in broken bodies, a paper that proudly concludes that the survey math is incredibly complicated is worse than useless. It is an insult to our urgency. It is an academic luxury funded by a ticking clock that dying patients simply do not have."

[Deb N-T 💜 @tryna_do_rite]

When I send stuff like this to doctors who think the pandemic is over and don't mask, they get pretty ticked off. I wonder why?

[Monica Santese @dragonflymsngr]

PSA for patients re meds in hospital.
Know what you're taking. If in doubt, check!
At breakfast I got a whole bunch of meds in a cup, I recognised 1 only, the rest I didn't so I didn't take. I asked to review what was charted and they're all wrong. Lucky I checked ✔️

[Micromom 🇨🇦 @microbio69]

@DFO_Pacific Those idiots on jet skis are still roaring at full speed out of False Creek almost every morning. Right past the Coast Guard station.

[Jon Douglas @atranscendedman]

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg researchers argue chronic absence is a public health vital sign.

Missing 10% of school days can signal unmet health, housing, food, safety, or transport needs, not just disengagement.

https://t.co/xltjFrZ28U

[Forest Park Pharmacy @ForestParkPharm]

My wife and I own Forest Park Pharmacy, and we don't accept insurance. None of it. That decision is exactly why we could fix what happened to a patient today.

A family came in wanting to transfer their kid's antibiotic to us. The child had already STARTED the course. Then, mid-treatment, the insurance company decided the last 14 tablets suddenly needed a "prior authorization" before the other pharmacy could hand them over. A sick kid, halfway through an antibiotic, and the answer was "please hold."

The drug is linezolid. It's a generic. It's been generic for over a decade. It treats serious gram-positive infections — the kind you do NOT want to stop antibiotics in the middle of, because an interrupted course is how you breed resistant bugs and end up right back where you started.

So why the hold-up on a cheap, common generic? Follow the fake math.

Insurance and the PBMs behind them price drugs off a number called AWP — "Average Wholesale Price." People in my industry have another name for it: "Ain't What's Paid." It's a benchmark number, not a real-world cost. On paper, the AWP for just those last 14 tablets is about $2,500.

My cash price for the same 14 tablets? $18.

Read that again. The system that's supposedly "protecting" this family from cost is the same system that inflated an $18 medication into a $2,500 line item, then slapped a prior auth on it to "review the expense" THEY invented. They manufactured the problem, then billed everyone for the privilege of solving it — and made a sick kid wait while they did it.

This is the whole game. When a drug is priced honestly, there's nothing to "manage." When it's priced off a fantasy benchmark, you get spread pricing, PA paperwork, pharmacy phone trees, and delayed treatment — all dressed up as cost control.

Here's the part nobody tells you: roughly 90% of prescriptions are low-cost generics. For the vast majority of what people pick up every day, running it through insurance does two things — raises the real cost and risks delaying your care. That's it. That's the value-add.

That's why we fired the insurance companies. No middleman deciding your kid can't finish their antibiotics on schedule. No fake prices. Just the real number, on the shelf, today.

The medication was always cheap. The insurance was the expensive part.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Oak trees have evolved a smart way to overwhelm the animals that eat acorns.

Every few years, across hundreds of miles, they drop a massive number of acorns all at once. The year before, almost nothing. The year after, almost nothing again.

It's called masting, and the strategy is brilliant. Squirrels, deer, blue jays, turkeys, and bears all eat acorns. If oaks produced a steady crop every year, the animals would maintain populations sized exactly to eat most of it. By producing almost nothing for several years and then flooding the forest floor all at once, the trees overwhelm the predators.

There are simply too many acorns for the animals to eat, and the surplus germinates into the next generation of oak trees. The ones that hoard and forget, squirrels especially, become inadvertent planters.

What's harder to explain is the synchrony. How do oaks across 700 kilometers coordinate the same decision in the same year?

The leading explanations involve shared weather cues, a specific temperature pattern in spring that acts as a trigger across the whole region, and possibly pollen coupling, where trees that need pollen from other trees synchronize flowering and, by extension, fruiting. Chemical signaling through the air or soil is a third hypothesis still being investigated.

None of these fully accounts for the scale. The trees aren't talking in any way we can intercept and understand. They're responding to the same world and arriving at the same answer, simultaneously, across a landscape larger than most countries.

[S Blitshteyn MD, FAAN, FANA, Dysautonomia Clinic @dysclinic]

Excellent neuroscience from Yale and further confirmation that the brain and the nervous system are likely involved in every systemic disease and one of the connections is through the autonomic nervous system.
In my paper, I discuss these topics in details.
https://t.co/8uK62B0Kt6

[Laura Babcock 🇨🇦 @LauraBabcock]

Yes it’s DISGUSTING and should be illegal for ANY government to doctor images to erase protestors and alter the public record! Can’t wait to discuss this with you @MaritStiles on The OShow #Onpoli 🤬🤬🤬

[Conor Browne @brownecfm]

Outstanding point in an excellent thread.

'If this signal holds, we will have run an uncontrolled neurodegeneration experiment on the whole population and called it returning to normal'.

This is why I mitigate against infection.

[KimBearley (she/her) @BearleyKim]

This is SO wrong. And I'll repeat - the AISH program already has policies & procedures in place for those who seek employment. There is absolutely NO need for the new ADAP program. NONE. Alberta's #UCP continues to punch down on the vulnerable & poor. #abpoli #ableg #AISH

[Zdenek Vrozina @ZdenekVrozina]

New study in Journal of Sleep Research links long COVID to a higher burden of prodromal Parkinson's like features. 11,261 people, 16 countries.
The headline is weaker than it looks - but there is the one finding in this paper that should genuinely scare you, and almost nobody is quoting it 🧵

[Zdenek Vrozina @ZdenekVrozina]

And public health treated prevention as optional. No clean air mandate, mild reframed as fine, reinfection normalized. If this signal holds, we will have run an uncontrolled neurodegeneration experiment on the whole population and called it returning to normal.

[Laura Babcock 🇨🇦 @LauraBabcock]

America please learn from Albania!