I see many news headlines reporting that the CDC may be planning to drop the 5 day Covid-19 isolation guidelines. For now I’m taking that as a rumor until the CDC website says something official about it.
Word on the street is that we may know more in April.
Recall that I had been checking to see if the Distinguished Education Lecture given by Dr. Russell Ledet, MD, PhD on January 17, 2024 during the MLK Celebration of Human Rights would be available for the general public. While somebody may be working on that, I managed to find Dr. Ledet’s YouTube, entitled “Bootless II.” I think it’s a great distillation of his major theme.
I just started reading Michele Norris’s book, “Our Hidden Conversations.” It’s based on her Race Card Project, which has been going on for 14 years and counting. It’s about more than racism between black and white people. I’ll let you know what I think about the book from time to time.
I just read this JAMA Network article on trip-killers. It’s about using drugs to stop bad trips caused by hallucinogens.
One mentioned was ketamine. When I was working as a consultation psychiatrist, I was called occasionally to evaluate patients in recovery rooms who were delirious from the ketamine that was sometimes used by anesthesiologists.
I found a paper with a list of ketamine’s limitations, which I think is helpful.
Trips and trip-killers can cause problems.
The Afro-American Cultural Center in Iowa City has many activities scheduled for Black History Month 2024. Check it out!
How about some good news? The CDC Respiratory Virus Data Channel reports decreasing respiratory virus activity as of January 26, 2024.
In the spirit Black History Month: African Americans and the Arts, Power and Impact is an exhibit of art work by notable Black artists in Iowa. It’s a partnership of the African American Museum of Iowa and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.
The exhibit runs between October 28, 2023 and March 31, 2024.
February is Black History Month and the University of Iowa events begins soon. There will be an inaugural Black History Ball and more!
Yesterday, I was thinking about Artie Hicks, one of my old English teachers at Huston-Tillotson University, which was Huston-Tillotson College back in the mid-1970s when I was a student there. I looked him up on the web, just out of curiosity—and found his obituary. That seems to happen a lot lately.
Anyway, he was a gifted teacher and had a great sense of humor. He bought tickets for the whole class to see the movie Harold and Maude, a ground-breaking film in those days. He had a simple and direct approach to talking with students. He always seemed comfortable in a place where white people (including teachers) were the minority—unlike the wider world outside the campus.
He was bald and the students called him Kojak, which was the name of the bald, tough detective star (played by Telly Savalas) of the TV crime drama which aired on CBS from 1973 to 1978.
I think you could have called Artie tough as well; not bad guy tough but honest and direct.
There have been several warnings from the FDA and others for several years (going back to at least 2014) against using tianeptine. It’s used as an antidepressant in other countries, but “FDA is warning consumers not to purchase or use any Neptune’s Fix products, or any other product with tianeptine — a potentially dangerous substance that is not FDA-approved for any medical use but is illegally sold with claims to improve brain function and treat anxiety, depression, pain, opioid use disorder and other conditions.”
Tianeptine has been called other names including Neptune’s Fix, Zaza, Coaxil, Stablon, Tianna Red, and others.
It reportedly has been banned in several states. Southern Iowa Mental Health Center published an educational web page in 2022 indicating that a review between 2000 and 2017 found a sharp untick in tianeptine-related poisoning calls during that time period.
The web page also pointed out that “The study specifically noted that while the drug was implicated in just five poisoning calls back in 2014, that figure rose to 38 in 2015, 83 by 2016, and 81 by 2017. And most of those calls involved relatively young people, between the ages of 21 and 40.”
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