Health on Big Muddy

Scientists invent a fake disease, AI picks it up, other scientists cite it

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 18:27:00 -0400

A somewhat disturbing bit of reporting from Nature tells the story of bixonimania, a fake eye disease invented by Swedish medical researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström and her team. She seeded the idea for the fake disease in a series of ridiculous, joke-filled blog posts and preprints in mid-2024.

Because AI can be overly credulous with its sourcing (how often do Google’s AI answers confident cite random Reddit posts for the bulk of an answer?), the disease got picked up as an “emerging term” by the leading chatbots. The preprints even got cited a handful of times in real publications, which is further evidence that scientists don’t read the papers they cite (I guess the modern equivalent of copying citations from other papers is having AI dredge the literature for you).

I can see AI agents being exploited by those pushing dubious medical diagnoses to flood the Internet and preprint servers with articles aimed at convincing LLMs of the validity of their positions. That is if the agents aren’t too busy spinning of websites to defame those who incur their wrath.

One important fact about for-profit plasma donation

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:51:00 -0400

For-profit plasma donation is in the news today in Canada. Two people recently died after giving plasma at Grifols for-profit plasma clinics in Winnipeg, Manitoba, although Health Canada has yet to find a link between the plasma collections and the deaths. Today, it was reported that a Grifols clinic in Calgary, Alberta was found non-compliant during an inspection in December 2025:

The inspection found the Calgary centre didn’t accurately assess whether donors were suitable, didn’t collect blood according to its Health Canada authorization, didn’t thoroughly investigate errors and accidents, and didn’t carry out sufficient corrective and preventative actions.

This is obviously a problem for for-profit plasma collection in Canada, where the practice is already controversial. Paid plasma collection is illegal in Canada’s three largest provinces: Ontario, British Colombia, and Quebec, though Ontario allows a few for-profit clinics to operate through an agreement with Canadian Blood Services, Canada’s independent blood authority. British Colombia and Quebec together make up over 35% of Canada’s population; including Ontario, it’s nearly 80%. Besides Ontario, for-profit clinics exist in some other smaller provinces.

Vocal advocacy exists against paid plasma collection, leading to municipal resolutions against the practice in Ontario, even as clinics open. This advocacy is often premised on the fear that paid plasma will undermine voluntary donations. To my mind, the central fact in the for-profit plasma collection debate is that only a handful of countries are self-sufficient in plasma collection, and all of them allow for paid plasma collection. They are: the United States, Germany, Czechia, Austria, and Hungary (Egypt may have also recently joined the list). While other countries, like Canada, may have achieved self-sufficiency for plasma for direct infusion, no other country can meet its own needs for plasma-derived medical products. The world relies on a small number of self-sufficient countries, primarily the United States, to meet the demand for plasma products.

Properly the work of federal public health agencies

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:38:00 -0400

One of the reasons I started this blog was to have a place to put down posts and articles that have lodged themselves in my brain. The wind-down announcement of the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-led COVID-19 data tracking collaboration, is one such article.

But the work itself—compiling, cleaning, standardizing, and making sense of COVID-19 data from 56 individual states and territories—is properly the work of federal public health agencies. Not only because these efforts are a governmental responsibility—which they are—but because federal teams have access to far more comprehensive data than we do, and can mandate compliance with at least some standards and requirements.

After one year of work, the COVID Tracking Project decided to quite collecting data on COVID-19 in the United States, because they recognized that the work of collecting a comparable, national-level dataset was the responsibility of federal government agencies.

As someone who co-led the COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group, which curated COVID-19 data for Canada until the end of 2023, I think about this article a lot. It’s a good read, and it speaks to how essential open data was to filling in the gaps in the national and international understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Changes in acetaminophen use after the White House Tylenol briefing

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:17:00 -0400

Back in September 2025, US President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. held a White House briefing linking Tylenol (acetaminophen, or paracetamol to Europeans) use in pregnancy to autism. A new study in The Lancet looks at what happened to acetaminophen prescriptions during emergency room encounters for pregnant females aged 15–44. They used data from a large database covering over 1,633 hospitals and 37,000 clinics.

Here is panel A from the figure in the study, with the vertical dashed line marking the date of the White House briefing (September 22, 2025) and the other dashed lined showing the expected prescribing rates (compared to the observed ones).

Regulatory uncertainty threatens biotech innovation

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:32:00 -0500

Another post from the Clinical Trials Abundance blog, this time by Ruxandra Teslo, on how the recent refusal-to-file by the US FDA for Moderna’s new mRNA influenza vaccine increases regulatory uncertainty and threatens innovation across the entire biotechnology sector. The decision reportedly came after the country’s top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, overruled career staff to quash Moderna’s application. This is just one more blow against mRNA vaccine technology to come from Health and Human services, the US federal health agency led by the world’s most prominent antivaxxer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

US Medicaid data gets DOGE'd

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 10:29:00 -0500

The US Health and Human Services DOGE team (I guess DOGE still exists in some form) just released a new aggregated, provider-level Medicaid claims database covering January 2018 through December 2024. With this dataset, you can track the monthly claims for each procedure (by HCPCS Code) and provider over time.

Even if the framing around this dataset’s release is partisan—tied to allegations of Medicaid fraud in Minnesota—it is a genuine advance in transparency for the US’s third largest spending program. No doubt this accomplishment required a lot of work on the backend to harmonize countless fragmented datasets into one tidy schema. These data were difficult to access before, and now they are free for anyone to use. Journalists, policy researchers, and companies working in the US healthcare sector will benefit the most, but every taxpayer benefits from added transparency about where their tax dollars go.

I would say there is the potential for these data to be misused to spark witch hunts, but this is more or less the stated purpose for this data release. Per Elon Musk: “Medicaid data has been open sourced, so the level of fraud is easy to identify.” If you go on Twitter, you will find several people have already plugged in the dataset to Claude Code and trumpeted their ASCII tables of providers flagged for potential fraud. Inevitably, some of these providers targeted by public scrutiny for their unusual billing patterns will have perfectly innocent explanations. But if ProPublica is excited about the release of this new dataset, then so am I.

The case for sharing clinical trial data

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:39:00 -0500

Saloni Dattani of the excellent Works in Progress magazine (and formerly of Our World in Data) launched a new Substack today called The Clinical Trials Abundance blog. The first post is on the case for sharing clinical trial data. We have been gradually moving toward mandatory reporting of clinical trial results (though enforcement is another question), but sharing data would be one step further. Even though clinical trials rely on the trust (and often money) of the public, it can be very difficult to gain access to the raw results, even if journal article authors claim they are “available upon request”. A norm of clinical trial data sharing would not only increase the confidence in published results but also aid future drug development, reduce expensive redundancy, and improve meta-analyses (which are often forced to rely on heterogeneous summary measures).