Happy Wednesday! Postcall here, handing over our morning greeting to this cat:

We’re over a week into 2024, so we’re wondering… how are you doing with your New Year’s Resolutions? 🥳

Here’s the heat, right off the press:

Table of Contents

• 💉 RSV is taking over

• A link between perinatal depression and autoimmune disease?

• Small molecule inhibitors in HCM

• New treatment for Monkeypox

• ✨ The girls who ate radium

• Staffing crisis among Ontario allied healthcare workers

• Egg-freezing doubled in the last couple years

• ✅ Postcall Picks

• 🕹️ Crossword Challenge ⛳️

Driving these numbers:

US stocks and bonds had their worst first-week of the year in 21 years. But Canadian investor sentiment improved as new data showed home sales in Toronto and Vancouver dropped by double digits last year — another sign that rate cuts are coming. Company earnings to watch this week: Postmedia and Corus.

RSV: The Uninvited Guest at the Cold Party 🎉😬

RSV — also shorthand for Really Sneaky Virus.

What happened: Health Canada greenlit Pfizer's new RSV vaccine, Abrysvo, and it's bringing serious firepower against the respiratory syncytial virus. This vaccine targets pregnant individuals in their 3rd trimester and Canadians 60+. This is the first RSV vaccine in Canada for pregnancy, offering protection for newborns from birth - 6 months. The individual passes antibodies to their soon-to-arrive bundle of joy through the placenta via passive immunity.

Why it’s interesting: RSV hits kids hard, catfishing as a regular cold — runny nose, fever, coughs. It’s a leading cause of infants and young children hospitalization. Mucus and other secretions plug up small airways, making it hard for them to breathe. Officials are in talks with provinces and territories, aiming for Abrysvo's debut in winter 2024-25.

In a 2017-22 study, researchers found that RSV: 

• Peaks at different times across Canada

• Hits Quebec first and hardest. 

• Caused Prairie doctors to work overtime into spring. 

• Inuit infants up north face higher risks than almost anywhere else globally.

Bottom line: RSV rules the charts as the leading cause of hospital admissions for babies under age 1 in Canada. Thanks to pandemic lockdowns, many kids lack strong immunity, as they weren’t exposed before. Similarly, many birthgivers don’t pass on immunity due to limited exposure. So here’s to all the vaccine heroes spotting these sneaky viruses 💪.

Things your attending might pimp you on 🙋🏽‍♀️👨‍⚕️ 

1. “Is there a link between perinatal depression and autoimmune disease?”

A case-control, matched cohort study from Sweden investigated the bidirectional association between perinatal depression and autoimmune disease. Women with an autoimmune disease had a 30% higher risk of subsequent perinatal depression, and women exposed to perinatal depression had a 30% higher risk of a subsequent autoimmune disease. The bidirectional association was more pronounced among women without psychiatric comorbidities and strongest for multiple sclerosis.

2. “Small molecule inhibitors in HCM?”

The SEQUOIA-HCM trial studied aficamten, a small molecule cardiac myosin inhibitor, in the treatment of over 200 patients with symptomatic obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). Turns out the trial is positive -  aficamten was not only well-tolerated, but also significantly improved exercise capacity. 

3. “New treatment for Monkeypox?”

A cohort study of about 100 patients with HIV studied treatment with tecovirimat within 7 days of mpox symptom onset. Mpox disease progression occurred in 5% in the early tecovirimat group compared to 27% in the late or no tecovirimat group, supporting starting tecovirimat in all people with HIV as soon as an mpox diagnosis is suspected. 

Girls Gone Glowing 👻⭐☢️

What’s the secret cure doctors don’t want you to know for arthritis, high blood pressure, eczema, and aging? 

Buckle up — Postcall is revisiting medical stories from the past.

What happened: In the 1900s, radium –a shiny metal that glows in the dark – was a hot trend among medical professionals and the public alike. Beyond its use in treating cancer, radium became hyped as the "elixir of life”. It found its way into body lotions, cough syrups, lipsticks, toothpaste, health tonics – and luminous paint for use on watches and military dials for soldiers.

During WWI, dial-painting became a well-paying, glamorous job for young working-class girls. These workers were nicknamed "ghost girls” from the radioactive dust that made their hair and clothes glow. They wore their best dresses to work and partied at night.

The twist?: These young painters quickly became the canary in the radium mine. To paint tiny dials precisely, workers put paint brushes in their mouths, a practice called lip-pointing. Although the danger of radium was understood by scientists and chemists, it seemed no one informed the thousands of women painting watch dials in factories. By the 1920s, these girls, now women, suffered from a flurry of agonizing symptoms including aching joints, loosened teeth, collapsed spines, hemorrhaging, anemia, and sarcomas. Dentists sometimes extracted multiple teeth at a time, accidentally pulling out jawbone fragments too. In one extreme case, a patient’s entire lower jaw came away in the dentist’s fingers. The radium had perforated the bone, leaving them ashy and brittle.

In 1925, 5 dying women filed a lawsuit against their employer, the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, eventually accepting an out-of-court settlement. It wasn’t until 1938 that a case was finally won against the Radium Dial Co., and the issue of workplace health and safety was settled.

Bottom line: Remember when Postcall covered women facing skepticism about their health concerns? It’s a problem that’s plagued women throughout history. The radium girls had their symptoms dismissed, or misdiagnosed as syphilis -- with all the social stigma attached, as highlighted by Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls. 

Radium wasn’t the promised elixir of life, but the radium girls’ legal case fuelled workplace safety rights, and many later donated their bodies to help scientists understand the impact of radiation on the human body. Now that’s what we call a radiant legacy! ✨ 

🍔 Quick Bites

1: 🏥 According to a recent survey of 750 Ontarian hospital workers in the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU), almost 4 out of 5 report a lack of confidence in the government’s plan to improve healthcare employee welfare and more than 2 in 5 are considering quitting their jobs. According to the OCHU, this staffing crisis is “reaching a new breaking point” and has been “years in the making.” The OCHU represents about 50,000 registered practical nurses, personal support workers, housekeepers, and clerical staff.

2: 🩸 Canada’s health regulator has approved Pfizer’s gene therapy for hemophilia B — a rare, inheritable bleeding disorder that affects 1 in 40,000 people. This comes before the U.S. health regulator’s decision, which will be in the 2nd quarter of 2024. Pfizer is also seeking U.S. approval for an experimental antibody that treats both hemophilia A and B.

3: 🥚 Statistics show that egg-freezing treatments have surged in popularity across Canada over the last decade. According to the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society, 94 egg-freezing treatments occurred in 2013. In 2022, there were more than 1,524 treatments. This includes a huge spike during the pandemic — nearly twice as many people sought treatment in 2021 than 2020. Quite an eggs-plosive trend!

4: 🛒 After years of harassing customers (who they suspect of shoplifting), Rite Aid is no longer allowed to use AI facial recognition technology. Because the stores didn’t take enough safety precautions, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ruled that many customers — especially women and people of colour — were unfairly targeted. Not only that, 60% of the stores featuring AI tech were located in predominantly non-white areas, despite the fact that 80% of Rites are in mostly white areas. Rite Aid is complying… just as soon as they’ve finished with their bankruptcy proceedings, that is.

5: 🧑‍🎓 Harvard president Claudine Gay resigns from her role, amid challenges of plagiarism and on-campus antisemitism. She sparked backlash from lawmakers when she suggested that advocating for the genocide of Jews may or may not breach her colleges' codes of conduct. Later, several instances of “duplicative language” were found in her academic work.

6: 🥇 At the 2024 Golden Globes this past weekend, "Oppenheimer," "Succession," and "Beef" took home major awards, while box office hit Barbie was largely snubbed. The night was also marked by mixed reactions, notably towards host Jo Koy's performance.

Postcall Picks ✅ 

🛫 Travel: with peace of mind. Air Canada and Westjet report they do not fly the Boeing 737-9 MAX (the Alaska Airlines aircraft that was grounded Friday after experiencing a window blowout midair).

🥧 Sleep: Having trouble sleeping? Try this breathing technique recommended by cognitive neuroscientist Caroline Leaf: Breathe in for four, hold for seven, and then release for eight.

💳️ Buy: A new phone plan on sale while you can? Rogers and Bell may increase the cost of some of its plans by ~$6-10/month in the next month or so.

🕹️ Crossword Challenge ⛳️

Crossword puzzle, or odyssey of the mind?

First question: What do you call the abnormal curvature of the spine in two planes?

How’d you do compared to last week’s average of 3:17?

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