Social distancing makes a soul thirsty– and as the Journal of the American Medical Association reports, that has had consequences…
Alcohol consumption has substantially increased during the COVID-19 pandemic… We examined national changes in waiting list registration and liver transplantation for ALD and the association with alcohol sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesized that waiting list registrations and deceased donor liver transplants (DDLTs) for alcoholic hepatitis (AH), which can develop after a short period of alcohol misuse, would disproportionately rise…
This cross-sectional study found that waiting list registrations and DDLTs for AH increased significantly during COVID-19, exceeding the volumes forecasted by pre–COVID-19 trends by more than 50%, whereas trends for AC and non-ALD remained unchanged. While we cannot confirm causality, this disproportionate increase in association with increasing alcohol sales may indicate a relationship with known increases in alcohol misuse during COVID-19. Since less than 6% of patients with severe AH are listed for transplantation, increasing waiting list volume during COVID-19 represents a small fraction of the increase in AH, a preventable disease with 6-month mortality up to 70%.
Pandemic drinking is up– way up. So, it turns out, is serious liver disease: “Association of COVID-19 With New Waiting List Registrations and Liver Transplantation for Alcoholic Hepatitis in the United States.”
And lest we think think that waning COVID-19 pressure will be the end of all of this, a warning: “The Coming Age of Climate Trauma.”
[Image above: source]
* Steven Wright
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As we muse on moderation, we might recall that it was on this date in 2012 that Charles Darwin received about 4,000 write-in votes in the election in Georgia’s 10th Congressional District. Republican Paul Broun, an M.D. who was running unopposed for re-election, had given (the September before) a campaign speech at the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet in which he said “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.”
In response, radio talk show host Neil Boortz and University of Georgia plant biology professor Jim Leebens-Mack spearheaded a campaign to run the English naturalist and evolutionary theorist against Broun, a young earth creationist. They had no expectation of unseating him (and indeed, Broun carried his district handily) but hoped to draw attention to these comments from the scientific community and to have Broun removed from his post on the House Science Committee– at which they also failed.
