The influenza pandemic of 1918-19 killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world, more than died in the battles of World War I. In the United States, the hardest-hit city was Philadelphia, where the spread of the disease was spurred by what was meant to be a joyous event: a parade.

In today’s edition of things to diagnose your friends with.

Thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) refers to a collection of signs and symptoms resulting from neurovascular compression at the thoracic outlet. The word neurovascular denotes the structures -- both nerve (neuro) and artery/vein (vascular) -- that might be compromised.

The thoracic outlet is an anatomical region between the neck and the shoulder where key blood vessels and nerves travel en route to supply the upper extremity. Compression or abnormal pressure of structures in the thoracic outlet can be due to soft tissue (such as muscle or ligament) or bone (such as a normal rib, an extra rib or the collarbone) anomalies.

Strains of Mycobacterium leprae—the main bacterium behind leprosy*—are hypermutating and becoming extremely drug resistant. Researchers made the alarming discovery in a survey of 154 M. leprae genomes collected from 25 countries. The survey, published recently in Nature Communications, offers a rare genetic glimpse of the ancient, yet cryptic, bacterium, which still manages to cause 200,000 new cases worldwide each year.

The night that Stephen Paddock opened fire on thousands of people at a Las Vegas country music concert, nearby Sunrise Hospital received more than 200 penetrating gunshot wound victims. Dr. Kevin Menes was the attending in charge of the ED that night, and thanks to his experience supporting a local SWAT team, he’d thought ahead about how he might mobilize his department in the event of a mass casualty incident.

source: HN

This is a story very much of our times: development and deployment of better devices/sensors (in this case an iRhythm Zio) leads to collection of much larger data sets than have been available previously. Apply state of the art deep learning techniques trained on those data sets, and you get a system that outperforms human experts.

Also: https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/projects/ecg/

It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s your metabolism. Also, the complicated ethics of trying experimental methods on trauma victims.

HHowever, it is one thing to cool an anesthetized patient before a carefully planned, thoroughly controlled cardiac arrest and quite another to attempt to freeze and revive one who has technically just died.