Discussed in this episode:
- A randomized controlled trial shows the cheap, widely-available diabetes drug Metformin significantly reduces (by 41%) the likelihood of long covid in unvaccinated people who get infected: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(23)00299-2/fulltext
(Vaccinated and boosted people still did considerably better than unvaccinated people who received Metformin. Vaccinated people didn’t receive enough added benefit from Metformin to achieve statistical significance in a trial of this size). - UK researchers deliberately (!) infected volunteers with COVID to study how much virus they emit, by what routes, and when: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(23)00101-5/fulltext
(The results confirm that home rapid tests are very good at detecting whether someone is infectious at the moment they’re tested–only 2% of the live virus detected in the study was collected before tests started turning positive.) - A study shows mouse neurons infected with COVID in a laboratory can fuse together, a possible explanation for symptoms like “brain fog” in people with Long Covid: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg2248
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.