Defender of evidence-based medicine

We advocate for our patients and do everything that we can within our hospital to provide the best standard of care, but it can be quite overwhelming at times when what happens outside of our fences is completely beyond your control.

One of the things I do in these moments to help keep things in perspective, is to take a few moments to walk around the health facilities we have here. I remind myself to focus on all the things that we CAN actually do, and that do make a huge difference.  

It is amazing how much is still able to be done right here in our hospital, even with all the constraints on time, resources and people power. At these short stitches in time I just marvel at all the activities that are happening simultaneously at any one moment: you can walk past the ER where people are resuscitated and brought back to life with emergency treatments, then past the out-patient clinics and see patients receiving life-changing mental health counseling and support for the terrible traumas they have endured. 

You can stop in at the training tent and see a new generation of dedicated nurses and clinical officers participating so attentively in learning sessions to improve their clinical skills and knowledge, wanting to provide the best standard of care to their patients. 

Dr. Saschveen blogs from Tanzania: http://blogs.msf.org/en/staff/blogs/msf-in-tanzania/treating-refugees-in-tanzania-perspective

Two different patterns of the Circle of Willis

The circle of Willis receives all the blood that is pumped up the two internal carotid arteries that come up the front of the neck and that is pumped from the basilar artery formed by the union of the two vertebral arteries that come up the back of the neck, all the principal arteries that supply cerebral hemispheres of the brain branch off from the circle of Willis.

What New Coronavirus Looks Like Under The Microscope

The images of the current outbreak of the new coronavirus have so far been very human: air travelers wearing masks, tourists stranded on cruise ships, medical workers wearing protective suits.

But new images of the virus show us what it looks like up close.

These images were made using scanning and transmission electron microscopes at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont. NIAID is part of the National Institutes of Health.

Emmie de Wit, chief of NIAID’s Molecular Pathogenesis Unit, provided the virus samples. Microscopist Elizabeth Fischer produced the images, and the lab’s visual medical arts office digitally colorized the images.

NIAID notes that the images look rather similar to previous coronavirus MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, which emerged in 2012) and the original SARS-CoV (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, which emerged in 2002).

“That is not surprising: The spikes on the surface of coronaviruses give this virus family its name – corona, which is Latin for ‘crown,’ and most any coronavirus will have a crown-like appearance,” the institute explains in a blog post.

The World Health Organization formally named the disease caused by the new coronavirus: COVID-19.

Image 1: COVID-19 coronavirus is seen in yellow, emerging from cells (in blue and pink) cultured in the lab. This image is from a scanning electron microscope. NIAID-RML

Image 2: This image from a scanning electron microscope shows, in orange, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19. The virus was isolated from a patient in the U.S. and is seen here emerging from the surface of cells — in gray — cultured in the lab. NIAID-RML

Image 3: In this image from a scanning electron microscope, the new coronavirus is in orange. NIAID-RML

Image 4: This image of the virus is from a transmission electron microscope. NIAID-RML

Aaron Earned An Iron Urn

Signed,

Then I got it. She didn’t know how. Oh.