This week, Dr. Klotman’s weekly video update is a conversation with Dr. Gabriel Loor from BCM’s Lung Transplant Program. COVID gets a mere passing mention.

The BCM lung transplantation program has recently completed its 100th transplant. Most of those transplants were performed for people with end-stage lung disease stemming from Cystic Fibrosis, Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease, and Primary Pulmonary Hypertension. As therapeutics for Cystic Fibrosis and Primary Pulmonary Hypertension have improved in recent years, more of transplants have gone to folks with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

During the height of the COVID apocalypse, some 15 people received lung transplants at BCM and did well, Dr. Loor says. Considering that we lost 1 million people to COVID, lung transplantation for COVID doesn’t seem a viable approach for folks with that disease.

In other COVID news this week:

  • The medical community now has a better working definition of Long COVID, and it may serve as a basis for developing a better understanding of that condition and its management.
  • The condition known as MIS-C (Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children) that can accompany COVID in kids seems to arise from antibodies that patients can develop to COVID that also target the individual him/herself. Those antibodies attack brain, heart, kidney, and other tissues. This phenomenon of autoimmunity triggered by infection has precedents in medicine.
  • Wastewater levels of COVID have continued to rise, and this week are about 1/3 the level that they were during the height of the Omicron wave. That doesn’t bode well, I fear.
  • COVID activity has been increasing in 84 countries in a wave that is atypical for respiratory viruses which usually increase during the fall and winter and recede during the warmer months
  • More Olympians have come down with COVID, but I haven’t heard of hospitalizations or deaths. Hopefully, there won’t be any.
  • COVID in the USA has fallen to the 10th leading cause of death. During the worst of the COVID pandemic, it was the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. In 2023, COVID had fallen to fourth place.
  • My FB friend and fellow retired clinical colleague, Deborah Crow, just posted this Lancet article link on the lives saved in Europe as a result of COVID vaccines.
  • The new Influenza and COVID vaccines will be available at the end of August or first week in September depending on the vagaries of distribution.

I think all of us older folk need to wear our masks and take the new vaccines as soon as they become available. I myself would rather have a vaccination and then, at worst, a mild URI for 10-14 days than ECMO (Extra-Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation) or a lung transplant!

By: llcPosted on