Tootfinder

There was an older lady in the train sitting across from us who was literally opening up a bottle of cough syrup and chugging it. We were wearing masks, she was not.
Perfect timing for our visit: https://aus.social/@DenisCOVIDinfoguy/114628380231359490

Denis - The COVID info guy - (@DenisCOVIDinfoguy@aus.social)
Attached: 1 image 🇬🇧 UK: Doctors call for return of face masks after new COVID strain reaches UK. In the UK, cases of the new COVID variant NB.1.8.1 have been reported. WHO is monitoring due to its rapid spread and possible resistance to prior infection or vaccination. Source: https://archive.md/DTVHw @auscovid19@a.gup.pe

Immunometabolism at the Crossroads of Infection: Mechanistic and Systems-Level Perspectives from Host and Pathogen
Sunayana Malla, Nabia Shahreen, Rajib Saha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02236

Immunometabolism at the Crossroads of Infection: Mechanistic and Systems-Level Perspectives from Host and Pathogen
The emerging field of immunometabolism has underscored the central role of metabolic pathways in orchestrating immune cell function. Far from being passive background processes, metabolic activities actively regulate key immune responses. Fundamental pathways such as glycolysis, the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation critically shape the behavior of immune cells, influencing macrophage polarization, T cell activation, and dendritic cell function. In this review, we sy…

Source Detection in Hypergraph Epidemic Dynamics using a Higher-Order Dynamic Message Passing Algorithm
Qiao Ke, Naoki Masuda, Zhen Jin, Chuang Liu, Xiu-Xiu Zhan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02523

Source Detection in Hypergraph Epidemic Dynamics using a Higher-Order Dynamic Message Passing Algorithm
Source detection is crucial for capturing the dynamics of real-world infectious diseases and informing effective containment strategies. Most existing approaches to source detection focus on conventional pairwise networks, whereas recent efforts on both mathematical modeling and analysis of contact data suggest that higher-order (e.g., group) interactions among individuals may both account for a large fraction of infection events and change our understanding of how epidemic spreading proceeds i…

The Dynamic Role of Aerosol and Exudate Transport in the Diffusion of Lung Infection in Respiratory Infectious Diseases (taking SARS-CoV-2 as an example): A Hypothesis Model
Shi Qiru
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24057

The Dynamic Role of Aerosol and Exudate Transport in the Diffusion of Lung Infection in Respiratory Infectious Diseases (taking SARS-CoV-2 as an example): A Hypothesis Model
This paper proposes a hypothetical model for the dual role of respiratory aerosols and inflammatory exudates in the dynamics and progression of SARS-CoV-2 lung infection. Starting from a new paradigm in infectious disease transmission, we reflect on the often-overlooked role of physical transmission media within the host individual. The hypothesis posits that tiny aerosols (including those inhaled externally and those self-generated and re-inhaled by the host) play a crucial role in the initial…

Infection dynamics for fluctuating infection or removal rates regarding the number of infected and susceptible individuals
Seong Jun Park, M. Y. Choi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22134

Infection dynamics for fluctuating infection or removal rates regarding the number of infected and susceptible individuals
In general, the rates of infection and removal (whether through recovery or death) are nonlinear functions of the number of infected and susceptible individuals. One of the simplest models for the spread of infectious diseases is the SIR model, which categorizes individuals as susceptible, infectious, recovered or deceased. In this model, the infection rate, governing the transition from susceptible to infected individuals, is given by a linear function of both susceptible and infected populati…

"There was a recent 2024 study that showed us that individuals who survive an acute COVID-19 infection (...) on average will lose somewhere in the neighbourhood of two to six IQ points per infection."
"although your immune system can take on [a COVID] infection, you want to avoid testing it as much as possible because your body is sustaining damage with each infection that it survives."
Seriously, wear a mask 😷 .

Beyond long COVID — how reinfections could be causing silent long-term organ damage | CBC Radio
Scientific evidence is painting an unsettling picture: COVID infections, even if mild or asymptomatic, may be causing long-term cellular and organ damage, as well as increasing your risk of developing long COVID.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12228 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

A nonstandard numerical scheme for a novel SECIR integro-differential equation-based model allowing nonexponentially distributed stay times
Ordinary differential equations (ODE) are a popular tool to model the spread of infectious diseases, yet they implicitly assume an exponential distribution to describe the flow from one infection state to another. However, scientific experience yields more plausible distributions where the likelihood of disease progression changes accordingly with the duration spent in a particular state of the disease. Furthermore, transmission dynamics depend heavily on the infectiousness of individuals. The …

Under the Hood of BlotchyQuasar: DLL-Based RAT Campaigns Against Latin America
Alessio Di Santo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22323 https://

Under the Hood of BlotchyQuasar: DLL-Based RAT Campaigns Against Latin America
A sophisticated malspam campaign was recently uncovered targeting Latin American countries, with a particular focus on Brazil. This operation utilizes a highly deceptive phishing email to trick users into executing a malicious MSI file, initiating a multi-stage infection. The core of the attack leverages DLL side-loading, where a legitimate executable from Valve Corporation is used to load a trojanized DLL, thereby bypassing standard security defenses. Once active, the malware, a variant of Q…

Often disrupting a single link in the infection chain can prevent malware from landing on a system. This is, of course, the Kill Chain concept. You can kill two links in the Katz Stealer chain by blocking msbuild.exe and cmstp.exe, neither of which are used by most people.
#cybersecurity
From: @…

Good article summarizing a lot of things relevant to continued COVID'19 caution:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/beyond-long-covid-1.7485888
Key points:
COVID'19 weakens the immune system:
"""
So it's not just about infecting you and causing respiratory illness and fever and all of the things that we usually get with the viral infection. This virus also specifically causes your immune system to become weaker.
"""
It damages blood vessels:
"""
In addition to SARS-CoV-2's ability to dysregulate the immune system and suppress the immune system, the spike protein itself is very damaging to blood vessel structures as well as red blood cells and platelets themselves.
"""
The folk idea that infections make our immune system stronger and stronger like a muscle just isn't true (or at least, doesn't apply to COVID'19 because of how, unlike most other viruses, it damages the immune system):
"""
For the longest time in the field of immunology, there was the sort of adage that your immune system needs to be tested every now and again to stay strong. That's an old-fashioned idea.
The more new-fashioned and evidence-based idea is that, although your immune system can take on [a COVID] infection, you want to avoid testing it as much as possible because your body is sustaining damage with each infection that it survives.
"""

BLUE: Bi-layer Heterogeneous Graph Fusion Network for Avian Influenza Forecasting
Jing Du, Haley Stone, Yang Yang, Ashna Desai, Hao Xue, Andreas Z\"ufle, Chandini Raina MacIntyre, Flora D. Salim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22692

BLUE: Bi-layer Heterogeneous Graph Fusion Network for Avian Influenza Forecasting
Accurate forecasting of avian influenza outbreaks within wild bird populations requires models that account for complex, multi-scale transmission patterns driven by various factors. Spatio-temporal GNN-based models have recently gained traction for infection forecasting due to their ability to capture relations and flow between spatial regions, but most existing frameworks rely solely on spatial connections and their connections. This overlooks valuable genetic information at the case level, su…

Alas, too late for members of the current United States mis-administration.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/21/world-first-gonorrhoea-vaccine-rollout-england

Antibody Consumption-Driven Dynamic Competition: A Systems Hypothesis for the Transition from Acute Immune Response to Post-Infection Sequelae
Shi Qiru
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06413

Antibody Consumption-Driven Dynamic Competition: A Systems Hypothesis for the Transition from Acute Immune Response to Post-Infection Sequelae
The mechanisms underlying the formation of post-infection sequelae are complex and remain controversial. This hypothesis integrates Bystryn's antibody feedback phenomenon and Imbiakha's immune cost theory, proposing for the first time a "Consumption-Driven Dynamic Competition of Antibody Clones" mechanism. This mechanism posits that the immune system may regulate the proliferation and differentiation of corresponding B cell clones by sensing and responding to the consumption rate of specific an…

new book about medicine history, "droplets" theory etc
"Science writer Carl Zimmer’s latest book is a brilliant history of medicine that takes us from Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of the 19th century to present day. Along the way, it offers an anthropological study of medical culture — a culture capable of ignoring science when it wants to. ...
"If COVID-19 spread in droplets, then it was worthwhile to keep people two metres apart, to put up plexiglas barriers around checkout stands, and make supermarket aisles one-way. Sanitizing countertops could break the chain of infection.
"But if COVID-19 was airborne, all those measures were pointless."
Bit of an exaggeration in that part of the article. The 2m distance does put you outside the densest clouds of exhaled breath, and sanitising countertops helps against other diseases. But yeah. A lot of effort wrongly expended due to the prevailing myth.
#CovidIsAirborne #books #history

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.01076 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qbi…

Duration of Transients in Outbreaks: When can Infectiousness be Estimated?
We investigate sub-leading orders of the classic SEIR-model using contact matrices from modeling of the Omicron and Delta variants of COVID-19 in Denmark. The goal of this is to illustrate when the growth rate, and by extension the infection transmission potential (basic or initial reproduction number), can be estimated in a new outbreak, e.g. after introduction of a new variant of a virus. In particular, we look at the time scale on which this happens in a realistic outbreak to guide future da…

Causal effects on non-terminal event time with application to antibiotic usage and future resistance
Tamir Zehavi, Uri Obolski, Michal Chowers, Daniel Nevo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09624

Causal effects on non-terminal event time with application to antibiotic usage and future resistance
Comparing future antibiotic resistance levels resulting from different antibiotic treatments is challenging because some patients may survive only under one of the antibiotic treatments. We embed this problem within a semi-competing risks approach to study the causal effect on resistant infection, treated as a non-terminal event time. We argue that existing principal stratification estimands for such problems exclude patients for whom a causal effect is well-defined and is of clinical interest.…

Paragon spyware activity found on more journalists’ devices https://therecord.media/paragon-graphite-spyware-journalists-apple-devices-citizen-lab

Comparing methods for handling missing data in electronic health records for dynamic risk prediction of central-line associated bloodstream infection
Shan Gao, Elena Albu, Pieter Stijnen, Frank Rademakers, Veerle Cossey, Yves Debaveye, Christel Janssens, Ben Van Calster, Laure Wynants
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06707

Comparing methods for handling missing data in electronic health records for dynamic risk prediction of central-line associated bloodstream infection
Electronic health records (EHR) often contain varying levels of missing data. This study compared different imputation strategies to identify the most suitable approach for predicting central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) in the presence of competing risks using EHR data. We analyzed 30862 catheter episodes at University Hospitals Leuven (2012-2013) to predict 7-day CLABSI risk using a landmark cause-specific supermodel, accounting for competing risks of hospital discharge and …

HR-VILAGE-3K3M: A Human Respiratory Viral Immunization Longitudinal Gene Expression Dataset for Systems Immunity
Xuejun Sun, Yiran Song, Xiaochen Zhou, Ruilie Cai, Yu Zhang, Xinyi Li, Rui Peng, Jialiu Xie, Yuanyuan Yan, Muyao Tang, Prem Lakshmanane, Baiming Zou, James S. Hagood, Raymond J. Pickles, Didong Li, Fei Zou, Xiaojing Zheng
https://

HR-VILAGE-3K3M: A Human Respiratory Viral Immunization Longitudinal Gene Expression Dataset for Systems Immunity
Respiratory viral infections pose a global health burden, yet the cellular immune responses driving protection or pathology remain unclear. Natural infection cohorts often lack pre-exposure baseline data and structured temporal sampling. In contrast, inoculation and vaccination trials generate insightful longitudinal transcriptomic data. However, the scattering of these datasets across platforms, along with inconsistent metadata and preprocessing procedure, hinders AI-driven discovery. To addre…

Replaced article(s) found for cond-mat.other. https://arxiv.org/list/cond-mat.other/new
[1/1]:
Unveiling Optimal Diffusion for Infection Control in Brownian Particle Systems

Identifying Heart Attack Risk in Vulnerable Population: A Machine Learning Approach
Subhagata Chattopadhyay, Amit K Chattopadhyay
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21139

Identifying Heart Attack Risk in Vulnerable Population: A Machine Learning Approach
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased the incidence of post-infection cardiovascular events, particularly myocardial infarction, in individuals over 40. While the underlying mechanisms remain elusive, this study employs a hybrid machine learning approach to analyze epidemiological data in assessing 13 key heart attack risk factors and their susceptibility. Based on a unique dataset that combines demographic, biochemical, ECG, and thallium stress-tests, this study categorizes distinc…

Julia Doubleday on the gamble that covid would be harmless to children
"It’s worth noting that at the time Kulldorff and the rest of the GBD crew were proclaiming COVID’s harmlessness to kids, they couldn’t possibly have had enough information to determine the veracity of their own claims. Viruses like the chickenpox, EBV, HIV, HPV, and HSV often present with mild initial infections but may cause major damage years later. We now know COVID can as well.
"For so-called experts to run with an assumption that an initially mild-presenting acute infection would be long-term harmless was just that; an assumption. They were willing to gamble the health of a generation of children on a guess in order to go “back to normal” because that’s what the oligarchy clamored for. Because it costs money to shut the world economy down. Because people who mattered were angry. Because children aren’t people who matter."
(GBD = Great Barrington Declaration, a bit of 2020 propaganda including the unfounded supposition that everyone who caught covid would be immune forever after)
Overall another excellent pointy article!
#children #covid #LongCovid #CovidIsntOver #GreatBarringtonDeclaration #misinformation