Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, so we’ve got a bunch of content for the ladies out there. Let’s start with the statement Sima Bahous (the Executive Director of UN Women) made:

❝This year, the sixty-seventh session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67) will consider as its priority theme “Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls”.

This is an unprecedented opportunity for the Commission to develop a definitive agenda for progress towards women’s full and equal participation and representation in STEM. Its implementation will require bold, coordinated, multi-stakeholder action.❞

Read Her Full Statement Here!

Here at 10almonds, we are just one newsletter, and maybe we can’t change the world (…yet), but we’re all for this!

We’re certainly all in favour of education in the digital age, and more of our subscribers are women and girls than not (highest of fives from your writer today, also a woman—and I do bring most of the sciency content).

Medical News Today asks “Why Are Women Less Likely To Survive Cardiac Arrest Than Men?”

You can read the full article here, but the short version is:

• People (bystanders and EMS professionals alike!) are less likely to intervene to give CPR when the patient is a woman (we appreciate that “your hands on an unknown woman’s chest” is a social taboo, but there’s a time and a place!)
• People trained to give CPR (volunteers or professionals!) are often less confident about how to do so with female anatomy—training is almost entirely on “male” dummies.

A quick take-away from this is: to give effective CPR, you need to be giving two-inch compressions!

On a side note, do you want to learn how to correctly do chest compressions on female anatomy? This short (1:55) video could save a woman’s life!

As a science-based health and productivity newsletter, we make no apologies if occasional issues sometimes have a slant to women’s health! Heaven help us, the bias in science at large is certainly the opposite:

The list of examples is far too long for us to include here, but two that spring immediately to mind are:

• PCOS (Polycystic ovary syndrome), which affects nearly 1 in 5 women, can lead to infertility, never mind the inconvenience of irregular bleeding, chronic pain, and diabetes (amongst other things), and… nobody knows what causes it, or what to do about it.
• Endometriosis (the lining of the womb starts growing in other places), meanwhile, affects around 1 in 10 women. It causes chronic pain and fatigue, and again, nobody knows what causes it or how to cure it.

Maybe if women in STEM weren’t on the receiving end of rampant systemic misogyny, we’d have more women in science, and some answers by now!

❗️NOT-SO-FUN FACT:

Women make up only 28% of the workforce in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and men vastly outnumber women majoring in most STEM fields in college. The gender gaps are particularly high in some of the fastest-growing and highest-paid jobs of the future, like computer science and engineering.

Source: AAUW

The US census suggests change is happening, but is a very long way from equality!

WHAT OUR SUBSCRIBERS SAY:

❝Women are slowly gaining more of a place in academia, and slowly making more of a difference when they get there, and start doing research that reflects ourselves. But I still think that it’s a struggle to get there, and it’s a struggle to be heard and be respected.

It’s a matter of pride, it’s a matter of proving yourself, being in STEM, and [women in STEM] still report being extremely disrespected, not taken seriously all, despite being very very good.

It’s worth noting as well, that we’ve had women in STEM for a while and there are so many things we appreciate nowadays that they were a part of, but they were never given credit for—it’s still a problem today and something we need to more actively fight.❞

Isabella F. Lima, Occupational Psychologist

Are you a woman in STEM, and have a story to tell? We’d love to hear it! Just reply to this email 🙂

Antibiotics: Useful Even Less Often Than Previously Believed (And Still Just As Dangerous)

You probably already know that antibiotics shouldn’t be taken unless absolutely necessary. Not only does taking antibiotics frivolously increase antibiotic resistance (which is bad, and kills people), but also…

It’s entirely possible for the antibiotics to not only not help, but instead wipe out your gut’s “good bacteria” that were keeping other things in check.

Those “other things” can include fungi like Candida albicans.

Candida, which we all have in us to some degree, feeds on sugar (including the sugar formed from breaking down alcohol, by the way) and refined carbs. Then it grows, and puts its roots through your intestinal walls, linking with your neural system. Then it makes you crave the very things that will feed it and allow it to put bigger holes in your intestinal walls.

Don’t believe us? Read: Candida albicans-Induced Epithelial Damage Mediates Translocation through Intestinal Barriers

(That’s scientist-speak for “Candida puts holes in your intestines, and stuff can then go through those holes”)

And as for how that comes about, it’s like we said:

See also: Candida albicans as a commensal and opportunistic pathogen in the intestine

That’s not all…

And that’s just C. albicans, never mind things like C. diff. that can just outright kill you easily.

We don’t have room to go into everything here, but you might like to check out:

Four Ways Antibiotics Can Kill You

It gets worse (now comes the new news)

So, what are antibiotics good for? Surely, for clearing up chesty coughs, lower respiratory tract infections, right? It’s certainly one of the two things that antibiotics are most well-known for being good at and often necessary for (the other being preventing/treating sepsis, for example in serious and messy wounds).

But wait…

A large, nationwide (US) observational study of people who sought treatment in primary or urgent care settings for lower respiratory tract infections found…

(drumroll please)

…the use of antibiotics provided no measurable impact on the severity or duration of coughs even if a bacterial infection was present.

Read for yourself:

Antibiotics Not Associated with Shorter Duration or Reduced Severity of Acute Lower Respiratory Tract Infection

And in the words of the lead author of that study,

❝Lower respiratory tract infections tend to have the potential to be more dangerous, since about 3% to 5% of these patients have pneumonia. But not everyone has easy access at an initial visit to an X-ray, which may be the reason clinicians still give antibiotics without any other evidence of a bacterial infection.❞

~ Dr. Daniel Merenstein

So, what’s to be done about this? On a large scale, Dr. Merenstein recommends:

❝Serious cough symptoms and how to treat them properly needs to be studied more, perhaps in a randomized clinical trial as this study was observational and there haven’t been any randomized trials looking at this issue since about 2012.❞

~ Dr. Daniel Merenstein

This does remind us that, while not a RCT, there is a good ongoing observational study that everyone with a smartphone can participate in:

Dr. Peter Small’s medical AI: “The Cough Doctor”

In the meantime, he advises that when COVID and SARS have been ruled out, then “basic symptom-relieving medications plus time brings a resolution to most people’s infections”.

You can read a lot more detail here:

Antibiotics aren’t effective for most lower tract respiratory infections

In summary…

Sometimes, antibiotics really are a necessary and life-saving medication. But most of the time they’re not, and given their great potential for harm, they may be best simultaneously viewed as the very dangerous threat they also are, and used only when those “heavy guns” are truly what’s required.

Take care!