Steve Saklad
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saklad.name
Steve Saklad
@saklad.name
320 followers 310 following 950 posts
Clin Prof Emeritus at UT Austin, Col of Pharm, Div of PTherapy & Trans Sci, based in San Antonio.

PharmD, BCPP, AAPP, clin care, CNS disorders & treatment, consultant for clin care & research, tech, space, equality, diversity, climate, & civility.
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saklad.name
The past 3 years are the hottest in weather history, 2025 effectively tied 2023 in second place. You’ll have to squint your eyes to see the difference between 2023 and 2025. The 2025 temperature is only 0.02°F warmer than 2023. weather.com/news/climate...
Global Temperatures Compared To The 1901-2000 Average (NOAA)
December 12, 2025 at 5:30 PM
saklad.name
Here are the modeled effects of delaying Hep B vaccinations from <https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.24.25340907v1> cited by SciAm above. The alt text contains the actual text from the Results section of the abstract.
Results All delayed vaccination scenarios resulted in more infections, worse health outcomes, and higher costs than the current universal birth dose recommendation. Under perfect adherence, delaying HepB vaccination by 2 months for infants of HBsAg-negative parents led to an additional 90 acute infections, 75 chronic infections, 29 HBV-related deaths, with $16.4 million in added costs for infants born during one year. Delaying to 12 years resulted in an additional 190 acute infections, 50 deaths, and nearly $30 million in added costs. Delaying HepB vaccination to 12 years for infants of both HBsAg-negative and HBsAg-unknown parents resulted in an additional 2,351 acute infections, 744 deaths, and $368 million in excess costs. Imperfect adherence to the vaccination schedule amplified all negative outcomes substantially. Incorporating pre-vaccination serologic screening for delayed schedules markedly increased total costs.
December 2, 2025 at 11:27 PM
saklad.name
Plenty of protesters in San Antonio! #NoKings
No Kings protest in San Antonio, Texas. Many are wearing costumes and hand-made signs against tyranny.
October 18, 2025 at 10:14 PM
saklad.name
Ecological overshoots and social foundation undershoots revisited in doughnut diagram update. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Current global status of shortfall and overshoot in the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries. Values shown are for 2022. Social wedges (inner ring) show the status of humanity relative to minimum social standards and ecological wedges (outer ring) show Earth-system status relative to planetary boundaries. Red wedges show a shortfall below the social foundation or an overshoot beyond the ecological ceiling. The grey wedge indicates missing data. The centre of the plot represents total human deprivation (for the social indicators) and the pre-industrial Holocene baseline (for the ecological indicators). Values are proportional to the length of each wedge, which leads to a quadratic scaling of wedge area that may lead some readers to perceive small changes as more significant than they are. To address this limitation, we provide Fig. 2 with a bar-chart representation that avoids this quadratic scaling issue. Wedges with a faded edge extend beyond the chart area. A maximum of two indicators are included in each social or ecological dimension. Ideally, there would be no red wedges below the social foundation or above the ecological ceiling. See Tables 1 and 2 for details on all of the social and ecological indicators, including their respective boundaries. Adapted from ref. 2, CC BY 4.0.
October 7, 2025 at 4:51 PM
saklad.name
As the newly rebuilt ACIP meeting sets the new vaccine rules, here is a graph to help interpret the results of their decisions. #Medsky
Graph of Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT) vs Basic Reproduction Number (Ro) for different infectious diseases
September 18, 2025 at 1:56 PM
saklad.name
August 19, 2025 at 4:46 AM
saklad.name
OpenTable’s restaurant reservations in Washington, DC have dropped 30% since President Trump announced his takeover.
Restaurant reservations have plummeted since President Trump announced D.C. takeover. Online reservations at restaurants in the nation's capital dropped by more than 30% just two days after Trump announced he would take emergency control of police, according to data from OpenTable.
August 19, 2025 at 4:26 AM
saklad.name
EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF FASCISM POWERFUL AND CONTINUING NATIONALISM DISDAIN FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IDENTIFICATION OF ENEMIES AS A UNIFYING CAUSE SUPREMACY OF THE MILITARY RAMPANT SEXISM CONTROLLED MASS MEDIA OBSESSION WITH NATIONAL SECURITY RELIGION AND GOVERNMENT INTERTWINED CORPORATE POWER PROTECTED LABOR POWER SUPPRESSED DISDAIN FOR INTELLECTUALS & THE ARTS OBSESSION WITH CRIME & PUNISHMENT RAMPANT CRONYISM & CORRUPTION FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS
August 12, 2025 at 3:18 AM
saklad.name
A new version of ChatGTP just dropped today. I asked it to compare all of the available medically-focused AIs for accuracy and references. #Medsky
Table of Medical AIs benchmark performance and referencing.
August 7, 2025 at 6:05 PM
saklad.name
New AI behavioral models to predict changes in health from wearables. #Medsky arxiv.org/pdf/2507.001...
An overview of our approach to solving a wide variety of health detection tasks. We use the Apple Heart and Movement Study to develop a foundation model for irregularly sampled behavioral time series data. We systematically optimize tokenizers and architectures for our dataset to build our final model, and we find that it excels in behavior-driven tasks and provides complementary information to an existing PPG foundation model.
July 12, 2025 at 5:02 PM
saklad.name
Keep up to date with a review of measles just published in NEJM. #Medsky www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
Features of measles include Koplik spots on the buccal mucosa (Panel A); rash on the trunk, spreading to the face, head, arms, and legs (Panel B); and conjunctivitis (Panel C). Day 0 denotes the day the measles rash appears; Day −4 is the probable start of infectiousness, Day 4 is the probable end of infectiousness, and Day −23 is the earliest possible exposure day (Panel D). CD150+ lymphocytes are T and B memory lymphocytes targeted by measles vaccine. 3 Cs denotes cough, coryza, and conjunctivitis, and MeV measles virus. Images in Panels A, B, and C were provided by Du Tuan Quy, M.D., with the approval of Le Nguyen Thanh Nhan, M.D., Ph.D., Children’s Hospital 1, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
June 30, 2025 at 8:30 PM
saklad.name
The Senate Budget bill isn’t final, and has larger negative impacts on those less well-off, but based on the House version from ITEP:

• Top 1% of Americans receive $121 billion in tax cuts 2026 alone.
• Middle 20% receives $56 billion (< half of top) in tax cuts that year.

itep.org/analysis-of-...
Quintile distribution of House tax cut proposals.
June 30, 2025 at 2:06 PM
saklad.name
June 24, 2025 at 4:46 AM
saklad.name
Climate change has large negative impacts on mental health. #Medsky www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...
June 3, 2025 at 8:12 PM
saklad.name
Is it OK for AI to write science papers? Nature surveyed 5,000 researchers and found contrasting views on when it’s acceptable to involve AI and what needs to be disclosed. #Science www.nature.com/articles/d41...
OPINIONS ABOUT USING AI TO DRAFT DIFFERENT SECTIONS OF A PAPER Nature's survey asked people to consider the following scenario: "Dr Bloggs uses an Al tool to write a section of a research paper, then edits the results. They don't disclose that they used Al." Respondents showed most concern about using Al for the results section.
May 28, 2025 at 8:15 PM
saklad.name
The sweeping budget reconciliation bill has with a target of $880 billion in federal spending reductions. Medicaid accounts for 93% of mandatory spending authority, so it is at the center of cost-containment efforts. #Medsky www.hmpgloballearningnetwork.com/site/frmc/bl...
Logo for Medicaid & CHIP
May 28, 2025 at 4:34 PM
saklad.name
Just found a scorpion. I used my usual remedy: take a piece of clear plastic packing tape about 3–4 times the length of the scorpion, press it down on the scorpion, lift it up and the scorpion comes with it, fold the tape over the scorpion, and you are done.
May 26, 2025 at 2:04 AM
saklad.name
Do not ask me for life advice. You will end up with a new dog.
May 1, 2025 at 3:38 PM
saklad.name
April 26, 2025 at 4:04 PM
saklad.name
The CONSORT 2025 Statement is out, with substantive changes. #Medsky jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...?
Flow diagram of the progress through the phases of a randomized trial of 2 groups (ie, enrollment, intervention allocation, follow-up, and data analysis).
April 15, 2025 at 12:22 AM
saklad.name
Vaccines are the most cost-effective and life saving health invention. If you are not sure if you need a booster, ask your pharmacist. Often no appointment is necessary and covered by most insurance. #Medsky
Graph of the introduction of polio vaccine and the reported case rate by year.
April 7, 2025 at 3:06 PM
saklad.name
There really are no words…
April 6, 2025 at 7:36 PM
saklad.name
Protest sign that “All in All You’re Just Another Prick With No Wall”
April 6, 2025 at 5:01 PM
saklad.name
Hey hey RFK,
How many has your
Stupidity killed today
Hands Off Day poster, “Childhood vaccination causes adulthood”
April 6, 2025 at 4:25 AM
saklad.name
The age-specific dementia prevalence rates have declined
by ~2/3rds in the US from 1984 to 2024. The rate of decline is 2.5–3.0%/year across 3 large nationally representative surveys with no slowdown at the end of the 40 years. #Medsky watermark.silverchair.com/jama_stallar...
Age-specific prevalence rates for 6 birth cohorts extracted from data in panel A (not shown in BlueSky) after interpolation of 1984 to 2024 using age-specific relative rates of decline in effect during that period. The prevalence rates were determined in 2 steps. First, prevalence data were generated for 1989, 1994, and 1999 by interpolating data from panel A between 1984 and 2004; the same was done for 2009, 2014, and 2019 by interpolating between 2004 and 2024. Second, the data for the 6 birth cohorts were then extracted from the diagonals of the data table (age by calendar year) generated in the first step.
March 27, 2025 at 9:21 PM