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At first I thought this was a followup to another story about an anaphylactic reaction during an airplane flight last week. No, it’s a totally separate incident.

One patient had an expired epi-pen. The other had never had anaphylaxis before.

Both planes had bottles of epinephrine and a syringe, not an auto-injector. Fortunately there were doctors on both flights who knew how to figure out the dosage, properly fill and deliver a shot.

In the second incident, the patient who was experiencing anaphylaxis for the first time is a doctor, but…have you ever tried loading a syringe and injecting yourself while your throat’s rapidly closing up until you can’t breathe? There’s a reason they make auto-injectors!

It could be worse: the same site has an article about another in-flight reaction a month ago, where staff couldn’t get the emergency kit open for 10 minutes! This time it was a pair of nurses who measured and administered the shot.

This…seems to be more common than I thought it was.

And putting an emergency kit on the plane without training your flight crew how to use it is just ridiculous.

(Reminders to self: 1. Check epi-pen expiration date. 2. Make sure it’s easy to find in my carry-on next time I travel.)

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One of many cool facts brought up in Phil Plait’s new book, Under Alien Skies is that Martian sunsets are blue!

On Earth, nitrogen scatters light randomly, with bluer colors scattering more than redder colors, so the ambient sky is blue, but when you’re looking toward the sun at a shallow angle (like sunrise or sunset), most of the blue light is scattered into the next timezone and you see red and orange.

On Mars, tiny dust particles of iron oxides (rusty dust?) reflect yellow-orange light, making the daytime sky mostly a butterscotch color…but the particles that can stay aloft in the thin atmosphere are about the size of the wavelength of blue light, so they scatter blue light forward instead of randomly. So at the shallow angles of sunset and sunrise, the sky in the direction of the sun has more blue light than the yellows that are scattered in other directions.

Essentially the same process, but reversed because of the different content of the atmosphere!

Update: I’ve finished the book, and it’s well worth reading! Here’s a link to my review!

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Food companies are adding sesame flour to foods that didn’t have sesame so they can “comply” with new labeling requirements by always labeling “contains sesame” instead of instead of adding it to their existing cross-contamination protocols.

Meaning people with sesame allergy are suddenly finding that foods they used to be able to eat are now hazardous.

This is like a skydiving outfit deciding to stop maintaining their parachutes and disavow responsibility in their waiver instead of complying with a requirement to maintain their parachutes a little better than they were doing before.

Actually it’s worse than that. It’s like actively damaging some of the parachutes, and adding fine print saying that people who want well-maintained parachutes shouldn’t fly with them. And not mentioning it to repeat customers outside of that fine print.

You wouldn’t add wheat to a dish just to avoid having to guarantee it was gluten-free. Or add lead to your water so you don’t have to worry about keeping environmental contamination out. Or…

Ugh, those sound way too probable. People can be awful sometimes, and business has a tendency to remove ethics from decision making.

Update: Malicious compliance is a good term for it.

Not the first time

And apparently this wasn’t the first time companies have done this crap, either. After the 2016 labeling law went into effect, some companies added peanut flour to foods that didn’t have it. Not enough to impact the baking or texture or flavor…but enough to trigger an allergic reaction.

Disturbingly, I missed that previous round. I say disturbingly because I actually am allergic to peanuts, so I’m lucky I didn’t end up in the ER from something that used to be safe. I can only think of two explanations for why I didn’t notice:

By 2016, I was doing most of my grocery shopping at some of the slightly crunchier stores, and buying snacks from smaller brands that were either less likely to take that shortcut, or already had foods I was allergic to by the time I took my first look at the ingredients panel.

2016 was also the year the Epi-Pen price-gouging scandal boiled over.

Corporations behaving badly

Pharma giant Mylan had already gained a virtual monopoly on epinephrine auto-injectors. After FARE spent years lobbying for states to require epinephrine to be stocked in schools for emergencies, Mylan raised the price of the auto-injector drastically (a factor of 5 or 6), to the point where many people who needed them couldn’t afford it anymore.

Whether FARE was used itself, or a co-conspirator who used its members, I lost a lot of trust in them and stopped following their newsletters as closely. That was also the last year I participated in FARE’s Walk for Food Allergy fundraiser, and I only did that after they stopped accepting money from Mylan.

(Interesting note: The Intercept article mentions that Mylan deliberately set out to stop selling single Epi-Pens in the early 2010s and only sell the two-packs in order to justify charging more. I was already carrying two-pack at my allergist’s recommendation, which turned out to be highly fortunate the time in 2006 or so when I was hit by anaphylaxis and messed up the first injection.)

Expanded from a thread on Wandering.shop

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Twitter Blue is what happens when you start treating a tool as a status symbol, so you throw the tools away and start selling gold-plated hammers made out of thin plastic.

As anticipated, they’re getting rid of “legacy” verification in favor of charging people $8/month for the privilege of having a blue checkmark next to their name.

Not that verification was perfect before, but most of the complaints I heard prior to the enmuskification were “wait, that person got verified but this person didn’t?”…essentially treating it as a status symbol, indicating who’s worthy of being verified, rather than one tool in the toolbox to indicate that the account really does belong to who it says it does.