Roe v Wade: the catalyst
Roe v Wade: the catalyst
Resources and support post Roe v Wade's overturning, mRNA tech's application to treating heart disease and vaccines killing more people than mass shootings?
Overturn of Roe v. Wade Catalyzes Abortion Bans
On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The decision follows a May 2 leak of the majority opinion that indicated the intentions of the court. But now that the decision is official, states have been granted full autonomy in restricting or banning abortion. Any federal protections for abortion are now over.
Many states will now move to further restrict or completely ban abortion. 13 states have trigger laws designed to ban abortion immediately after Roe v. Wade is overturned. These trigger laws can now pass undeterred. In Kentucky and Louisiana, these trigger laws went into immediate effect after the decision, with abortion totally banned and all abortion providers shuttered. The bans in both states do not provide any exceptions for rape or incest. Other trigger law states have procedural steps, but will ban abortion in the coming days. A full list of these states is linked here, and a broader accounting of abortion status in all 50 states is linked here.
Ignoring all the legal and social implications of the Supreme Court decision, depriving women of access to abortion has established disastrous consequences on public health. Many women are likely to seek out illegal abortions in unsafe conditions, putting themselves at risk for septic infections and other complications (read more). The negative health consequences of depriving abortion extend beyond just the danger of the abortion itself and involves the reasons why women choose to have an abortion. The children of women who were denied abortions are more likely to lag behind in developmental milestones while the next children of women born after an abortion are less likely to live in poverty (source). Over time, the net effect of increased financial hardship, restricted ability to attain higher education, and poorer overall healthcare will have profound economic effects on the American populace that will reflect itself on overall public health.
We at Unmasking Medicine supports access to abortion care, as well as all healthcare. To that end, we hope to help our readers gain that access. Two useful websites for finding abortion providers are linked below. A list of organizations that fund abortions or support reproductive justice is also linked.
Resources:
Abortion Finder (abortionfinder.org)
I need an abortion (ineedana.com)
List of abortion organizations
Using mRNA to treat heart disease
After the success of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, researchers have been asking: what other diseases can be treated or prevented with mRNA delivery technology? According to researchers at the University Research Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, heart attacks are one.
What the researchers are trying to accomplish here is to get mRNA in heart cells after a heart attack to instruct cells to initiate cellular repair processes. The researchers are tying several combinations of different mRNAs and trying to figure out what works best. So far they have been able to deliver mRNA into mice hearts. The delivery method is pretty similar to COVID-19 vaccines, both use lipid nanoparticles, which are small drops of fat, that package the mRNA.
The next step is to determine what mRNA, how much mRNA, and where all does that mRNA go? See, a major challenge that they will face is the fact that lipid nanoparticles go into liver cells too often. This happens because the liver metabolizes lipids nanoparticles and therefore the mRNA tends to accumulate there. This makes sense because lipids are organic molecules found naturally in nearly all lifeforms. Lipid metabolism by the liver is actually extremely important for our general health and wellness and when it fails you could get Gaucher disease or Tay-Sachs disease. That’s why it could be extremely problematic if the liver cells started diverting resources to express the cellular repair mRNA meant for cardiac cells.
However, it could also be harmless since the mRNA is, after all, giving a cell repair signal.
Overall though, this is an interesting study and could potentially address one of the biggest causes of death in current times, cardiac disease. This work also goes to show how developments in one field of biotech can be applied to another to potentially solve problems that the field faces.
Featured Fake News
This is completely inaccurate.
In 2021 there were 692 deaths related to mass shootings in the United states. So far in the first half of 2022 there have been close to 300 deaths related to mass shootings.
Throughout the entire history of COVID vaccinations, there are only 9 cases of people dying from the vaccine and all of those are from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine which has already been limited in the US and is only allowed in people over 18 who can’t get the other vaccines. Furthermore, those 9 cases were extremely rare and associated with previously undiagnosed medical conditions and predispositions to certain reactions.
Most importantly, vaccination has directly or indirectly saved millions of lives in these past 2 years. Do you know how many lives have been saved by mass shooters in the same 2 year time frame? 0, if that wasn’t clear already. Or perhaps close to -1000.
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