My girlfriend died from human metapneumovirus at 30 years young. She had a weakened immune system from lymphangiomatosis, so something like metapneumovirus, which is a mild illness for most people, was a death sentence for her. I hope this fund is successful so nobody else ever has to go through what she did.
As someone who still masks (KN95) in all indoor settings where unmasked people are present, I am all for this. Very much looking forward to seeing where it leads.
No its correct, having 2 kids and rate of sickness went through the roof, same for my wife.
We also had 10+ covids to indicate how much it changes, mostly imported by kids from creche (we hit the 'right' timing with them and covid waves). What do you expect when they shared pacifiers and put fingers in mouths all the time. Or suddenly sneezing gunk all over my face when holding them.
Before kids, I was usually sick 1x a year for few days, or had 1 proper flu week and that was it, my wife even less. No it didn't visibly improve our immunity, had covid last autumn and it felt almost like for the first time, sans loss of smell and taste.
Being sick ~20 days per year was the norm for me before remote work (and using N95 masks after it ended). Some people are lucky, others are not. (well, "luck" actually encompasses many factors such as population density, presence/lack of children, mandatory office presence, proper infection countermeasures in public places (air filtering, aeration), and I assume sufficient sleep or not (the only time I did not get sick as often without masking was when I managed to sleep 8 hours a day for a few months))
My son is susceptible to these type of infections and has asthma. He missed 17 days of school last year. Even if not fatal these types of infections are miserable and have an impact on those who get them and their caretakers.
I was really disappointed that air cleaning didn’t take off after Covid. Super disappointing to see society just collectively decide to not learn any lessons.
Even if there were no mortality or productivity benefits, you’d think cutting down on cold and flu would be sufficient motivation on its own. Especially in schools and other high risk places.
I'd be interested to see more concerted research into contagious/self-replicable vaccines that are self-replicating and spreadable to a wider swath of people. That seems like a step forward in public health prevention for seasonal illnesses that we have well-engineered and safe vaccines for.
I understand the bar for deployment would need to be high to ensure that side effects are even rare compared to typical voluntary vaccinations.
> We surveyed attendees ahead of the symposium. One of our questions was: if this doesn’t happen in the next ~10 years, what will the primary reason be? The number one reason cited was lack of funding, followed by technical feasibility. Why hasn’t this field attracted sufficient funding, especially given the enormous societal burden?
Isn't a projected problem with technical feasibility an explanation for lack of funding?
I am so tremendously excited to see this, I've had quite a few friends become permanently disabled from long covid and even have some lingering symptoms myself from my last infection and so anything to improve access and uptake of air cleaning technologies and new preventatives is amazing.
> Why haven’t we already seen the same kind of transformation with respiratory viruses?
Because it’s a lot easier to control the supply of a material that has to be actively transported into people’s houses for them to use? I struggle to take them seriously when I didn’t see this basic and fundamental difference even mentioned.
There are already people dying of malnutrition, preventable disease, etc. in the third world. Half a billion dollars could do a lot of good there, instead of going towards a pipe dream to make sure people never have to miss work for the flu again.
While I think it’s a noble idea I think much more could be achieved with much smaller amounts of money. Actually zero. Regulate sugar, introduce a HIGH sugar tax. Introduce higher nicotine and alcohol tax. Introduce stricter environmental controls for poisonous materials and water and air pollution.
All these things cost essentially zero to implement, they even bring in money and all of them are credible ways to significantly reduce health problems world wide.
But eh, I’m not part of a lobbying organisation, so what do I know.
Noble goal, but tell a bunch of scientists and startups that you've got a grand vision and $500 million in cash to burn, and they're always going to tell you a story about how it could be possible if you give them that money. And your sycophantic AI you use to research and vet will also always tell you there's a chance, if that's what you seem to be wanting.
It's important to build on solid foundations, rather than on faulty assumptions. My experience is the standard medical approach to lung problems is basically wrong.
There was a submission ~6 years ago about using ethanol to sanitize people's lungs as a treatment for COVID-19. One of the comments shared a college story about how they were coerced into treating their sniffles with a spoon and vodka: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22745834
In early 2020 I started advocating using the classic herbal treatment for lung problems: apple brandy inhaled from a charred oak keg. The theory is simply that the ethanol is an antiseptic, and the apple and oak flavoring compounds stimulate the lungs to repair themselves.
I found a manufacturer and started selling little 3L kegs. My first customer asked, "can I try it?" I warned that the ethanol burns before you get used to it. I was impressed that he was able to fill his lungs with apple brandy fumes without coughing the first time. After a moment of held breath he darted off. When he came back 1 or 2 minutes later he said, "I'll take one".
He was a big guy. His problem was getting winded between his car and the store. That he could walk for one or two minutes on lungs filled with apple brandy fumes, when he couldn't normally walk without getting winded while breathing normally, was incredible.
2 hours later he called back. The husband of the woman he'd been the driver for that day was ~70 year old husband and coughing himself to death with a case of the COPD. He'd quit smoking ~20 years before, but his lungs never recovered.
Both of these men's lung conditions rapidly improved after they started inhaling apple brandy fumes. After he started huffing on apple brandy 4x/day, the COPD fellow's coughs went away, and his skin went from 'gray' to 'pink'. The other fellow caught the COVID-19 in June or July that year. I heard his lung capacity score was fantastic, the virus was just hitting his kidneys. He survived his hospitalization.
The modern tool that facilitates the inhalation of apple brandy is a nebulizer.
Different story: in 2021/2022 I was emailed by a woman who'd found my youtube video. In 2023 she came out to Arizona to visit, then to stay permanently. She always assumed that her lung problems were related to the asbestos she'd inhaled on 9/11. But since she's started using the apple brandy barrel, she's only had to use her inhaler once in the past 3 years: when she got a lung full of hairspray in the gym's bathroom.
As the submission in the link above indicated at the start of COVID-19, treatment with inhaled ethanol is a reasonable initial treatment for respiratory problems.
> Why haven’t we already seen the same kind of transformation with respiratory viruses?
My favorite conspiracy-adjacent theory is that pharmaceutical companies don’t have any intention to give up the multi-billion dollar market of cold and respiratory infections palliatives.
Even if there is no ill intent, there are just no market or capitalistic incentives, because a one-shot solution for these pathogens is not going to create a market as rich as the previous one.
To me this is the perfect representation of why believing the market is a positive force is wrong. If not for external pressure, in this case the market clearly signals that it’s best for us all to keep getting colds.
Not from those companies, to be sure. That's not even a conspiracy-adjacent idea, a decent product manager will point out that a new company would be "counter positioned" to the existing palliative companies - for the palliative companies to compete, they'd have to undercut their own product success. (In most cases, they don't, which is one major way disruption happens).
That has nothing to do with "the market". The market would start more new healthcare companies, and they'd be doing things like this blog post. The issue we have in many parts of the market is regulatory capture - a few companies have convinced government to make regulations that increase the cost of starting a competitor. Healthcare is definitely one of those places!
Sure, a freer market would probably have problems some or even most of those regulations prevent. And at the same time, we've created a problem. I've heard it suggested that government should always shoulder the marginal cost of regulations they create, because that's the only way you avoid a couple of players preventing new entrants.
No idea of whether those people ar competent, or if it's a PR stunt. Good luck to them. I've joked often enough that "a vaccine for common cold" would have changed my life.
Also, I'm:
- happy that they don't claim the breakthrough will come from AI or Blockchain, for once
- a bit surprised that they got founding by both openAi and Anthropic (so of course they'll try to solve a few things with ai and Blockchain, but,who knows.) Aren't those companies loosing vast amount of money at the moment ? What are they doing philanthropy with ? Just borrowing ? Or are investors for their Series XYZ usually ok with the owner using the money to fund pet projects (even if here, the "pet project" is a good idea, and potentially a good customer/ ?
Maybe they can send some of this money to the Wuhan Institive of Virology to research respiratory viruses in bats and some to Raph Baric at UNC for vaccine development. What could go wrong?
The tricky part is that the benefit is invisible. If it works, nothing happens: people just get sick less often. That is a hard thing to sell to building owners and employers unless the evidence and standards are really solid
It seems like implementing HEPA filters in every classrooms has the biggest effect. The kids are spreading disease, infecting their parents, who then infect their coworkers.
Nice to see they mention UV, too. Aerolamp[0] is down to ~$500. If it were $100, it'd be easy to get into offices, too. Heck, if I worked in person, I'd buy a $100 one as an employee.
> So, to get closer to elimination, we also need a way to reduce the virions circulating in high density environments. During COVID the world experimented with various interventions like social distancing and personal protective equipment. But to reduce transmission durably for a large number of common respiratory viruses that are perennially circulating, we need solutions that are convenient and minimally disruptive.
We think the most promising category of products that accomplish these goals are those that remove pathogens from the air, particularly in high-density environments like offices, schools, and public transit. We’ll call these air cleaning technologies (ACTs) like air filtration and far-UVC antimicrobial light.
Sounds like a pretty big challenge to me... Ok, during Covid I read that airplane-style air conditioning with nozzles above each seat and used air pumped out at ground level was pretty good in making sure "your" air didn't get mixed up with your neighbor's (masks were still mandatory however on the few flights I took during that period). But how are you going to do the same in a packed subway train in, let's say, Tokyo or New York, at rush hour? That air conditioning unit would probably have to be as heavy as the train itself, and to the passengers it would feel like a hairdryer (on cold setting) blasting at them permanently from above...
People can wear masks in confined spaces. It doesn't preclude the benefits of filtering the air and using Far UVC. Defense in depth. But also there are lots of spaces where filtration and UVC can really work wonders.
the premise is wildly disengenious in conflating the pureification of water supplys, and air.
a simple set of facts is that humans now represent the largest mass and population of large animals ever to exist.
this population inhabits many habitats , both natural and constructed.
this population has huge numbers of indivuals who have compromised imune systems.
and last, but worst is that humans now constitute a biological niche, and a primary
law of biology is the "all niches will be filled"
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 48.5 ms ] threadThis seems completely unbelievable to me. Totally outside of my personal, professional, and family experience.
We also had 10+ covids to indicate how much it changes, mostly imported by kids from creche (we hit the 'right' timing with them and covid waves). What do you expect when they shared pacifiers and put fingers in mouths all the time. Or suddenly sneezing gunk all over my face when holding them.
Before kids, I was usually sick 1x a year for few days, or had 1 proper flu week and that was it, my wife even less. No it didn't visibly improve our immunity, had covid last autumn and it felt almost like for the first time, sans loss of smell and taste.
Even if there were no mortality or productivity benefits, you’d think cutting down on cold and flu would be sufficient motivation on its own. Especially in schools and other high risk places.
Kudos to these people.
I understand the bar for deployment would need to be high to ensure that side effects are even rare compared to typical voluntary vaccinations.
Isn't a projected problem with technical feasibility an explanation for lack of funding?
Because it’s a lot easier to control the supply of a material that has to be actively transported into people’s houses for them to use? I struggle to take them seriously when I didn’t see this basic and fundamental difference even mentioned.
NASA spent something like $300B in today's money on the Apollo program, and Artemis has exceeded $90B already.
I'm much more keen on never getting sick than prepping for Mars.
Never getting sick is an enabler to reaching the goal. And the goal is..?
I assume the kind of uv used must be fatal, but is there a chance that a tiny percentage makes it?
There was a submission ~6 years ago about using ethanol to sanitize people's lungs as a treatment for COVID-19. One of the comments shared a college story about how they were coerced into treating their sniffles with a spoon and vodka: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22745834
In early 2020 I started advocating using the classic herbal treatment for lung problems: apple brandy inhaled from a charred oak keg. The theory is simply that the ethanol is an antiseptic, and the apple and oak flavoring compounds stimulate the lungs to repair themselves.
I found a manufacturer and started selling little 3L kegs. My first customer asked, "can I try it?" I warned that the ethanol burns before you get used to it. I was impressed that he was able to fill his lungs with apple brandy fumes without coughing the first time. After a moment of held breath he darted off. When he came back 1 or 2 minutes later he said, "I'll take one".
He was a big guy. His problem was getting winded between his car and the store. That he could walk for one or two minutes on lungs filled with apple brandy fumes, when he couldn't normally walk without getting winded while breathing normally, was incredible.
2 hours later he called back. The husband of the woman he'd been the driver for that day was ~70 year old husband and coughing himself to death with a case of the COPD. He'd quit smoking ~20 years before, but his lungs never recovered.
Both of these men's lung conditions rapidly improved after they started inhaling apple brandy fumes. After he started huffing on apple brandy 4x/day, the COPD fellow's coughs went away, and his skin went from 'gray' to 'pink'. The other fellow caught the COVID-19 in June or July that year. I heard his lung capacity score was fantastic, the virus was just hitting his kidneys. He survived his hospitalization.
The modern tool that facilitates the inhalation of apple brandy is a nebulizer.
Different story: in 2021/2022 I was emailed by a woman who'd found my youtube video. In 2023 she came out to Arizona to visit, then to stay permanently. She always assumed that her lung problems were related to the asbestos she'd inhaled on 9/11. But since she's started using the apple brandy barrel, she's only had to use her inhaler once in the past 3 years: when she got a lung full of hairspray in the gym's bathroom.
As the submission in the link above indicated at the start of COVID-19, treatment with inhaled ethanol is a reasonable initial treatment for respiratory problems.
My favorite conspiracy-adjacent theory is that pharmaceutical companies don’t have any intention to give up the multi-billion dollar market of cold and respiratory infections palliatives. Even if there is no ill intent, there are just no market or capitalistic incentives, because a one-shot solution for these pathogens is not going to create a market as rich as the previous one.
To me this is the perfect representation of why believing the market is a positive force is wrong. If not for external pressure, in this case the market clearly signals that it’s best for us all to keep getting colds.
That has nothing to do with "the market". The market would start more new healthcare companies, and they'd be doing things like this blog post. The issue we have in many parts of the market is regulatory capture - a few companies have convinced government to make regulations that increase the cost of starting a competitor. Healthcare is definitely one of those places!
Sure, a freer market would probably have problems some or even most of those regulations prevent. And at the same time, we've created a problem. I've heard it suggested that government should always shoulder the marginal cost of regulations they create, because that's the only way you avoid a couple of players preventing new entrants.
Also, I'm:
- happy that they don't claim the breakthrough will come from AI or Blockchain, for once
- a bit surprised that they got founding by both openAi and Anthropic (so of course they'll try to solve a few things with ai and Blockchain, but,who knows.) Aren't those companies loosing vast amount of money at the moment ? What are they doing philanthropy with ? Just borrowing ? Or are investors for their Series XYZ usually ok with the owner using the money to fund pet projects (even if here, the "pet project" is a good idea, and potentially a good customer/ ?
Nice to see they mention UV, too. Aerolamp[0] is down to ~$500. If it were $100, it'd be easy to get into offices, too. Heck, if I worked in person, I'd buy a $100 one as an employee.
[0] https://aerolamp.net/pages/about-aerolamp
We think the most promising category of products that accomplish these goals are those that remove pathogens from the air, particularly in high-density environments like offices, schools, and public transit. We’ll call these air cleaning technologies (ACTs) like air filtration and far-UVC antimicrobial light.
Sounds like a pretty big challenge to me... Ok, during Covid I read that airplane-style air conditioning with nozzles above each seat and used air pumped out at ground level was pretty good in making sure "your" air didn't get mixed up with your neighbor's (masks were still mandatory however on the few flights I took during that period). But how are you going to do the same in a packed subway train in, let's say, Tokyo or New York, at rush hour? That air conditioning unit would probably have to be as heavy as the train itself, and to the passengers it would feel like a hairdryer (on cold setting) blasting at them permanently from above...