Kashif Pirzada, MD
22.6K posts
@KashPrime
Emergency Physician, fighter of misfortune and disease; Love history/politics/coding/tech/AI. 🇨🇦/acc
WHO is aware of and supporting a public health event involving a cruise vessel sailing in the Atlantic Ocean. To date, one case of hantavirus infection has been laboratory confirmed, and there are five additional suspected cases. Of the six affected individuals, three have died and one is currently in intensive care in South Africa. Detailed investigations are ongoing, including further laboratory testing, and epidemiological investigations. Medical care and support are being provided to passengers and crew. Sequencing of the virus is also ongoing. Hantavirus infections are typically linked to environmental exposure (exposure to infected rodents’ urine or faeces). While rare, hantavirus may spread between people, and can lead to severe respiratory illness and requires careful patient monitoring, support and response. WHO is facilitating coordination between Member States and the Ship’s operators for medical evacuation of two symptomatic passengers, as well as full public health risk assessment and support to the remaining passengers on board. WHO is grateful for the rapid actions and coordination. We have informed our National Focal Points according to the International Health Regulations and a Disease Outbreak News for the public will be issued.
Went to Disney a couple of years ago with the kids. Was struck by the adults mesmerized by the place, almost like they were on a secular Hajj of some sort. Took weeks of research to figure out how to game the convoluted ride booking systems, in a place made too busy and too expensive by people who should be doing better things with their money and lives. We won't be going back anytime soon.
For the most devoted fans, Disney has engineered an ecosystem of financial entanglement that goes far deeper than park tickets or merchandise, which keeps the magic—and the debt—perpetually compounding. In 2023, Ashley, a freshman at Quinnipiac University, in Connecticut, had $15,000 in her bank account. Excited by her newfound freedom as a college student, she decided to start going on solo trips. Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida, seemed like an obvious choice. She went during her winter break. Then she returned, six times, in two years. Soon enough, her account balance had dwindled to just five dollars. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many adults who have accumulated Disney debt seem to be chasing a feeling from their childhoods. One woman, who has been to Disney World more than a hundred times, said that visiting the parks takes her back to a time when she had fewer worries: “It’s the nostalgic feeling of what brought you joy when you were little and you didn’t have the stressors of adult life.” Read more about the Disney adults putting themselves in debt for the pursuit of magic: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/_JqtFg
Three deaths. Multiple suspected cases on a cruise ship. WHO confirms this is a hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius sailing from Argentina to Cape Verde. Right now, we do not know which hantavirus species is involved. We only know it is a hantavirus. Why that matters: Most hantaviruses spread from rodents to humans - not from person to person. But there is one exception: Andes virus, found in Argentina and Chile (where the cruise ship has sailed 😬) Andes virus is unique because it can spread person-to-person in close contact (like a cruise ship) It can progress rapidly from flu-like symptoms to respiratory failure and it carries a ≈36–40% mortality rate. Argentina IS within the endemic region for Andes virus. That does NOT mean this is Andes virus. It simply means it must be ruled out. Cruise ships create prolonged close contact among international travelers. If this were Andes virus, contact tracing becomes significantly more complex — especially with passengers dispersing across countries before symptoms develop (incubation can be up to 6 weeks). Early symptoms look like: Fever Headache Muscle aches GI upset Then, 4–10 days later in severe cases: Cough Shortness of breath Pulmonary edema Until the viral species is confirmed, public health officials must assume the highest-risk scenario while coordinating internationally. We know it is a hantavirus. We do not yet know if it is Andes virus. That distinction changes everything. researchgate.net/publication/23…
My leader @ImranKhanPTI sits in jail with his health in jeopardy. His imprisonment weighs on us every day. But I know him well enough to say this: He would want Pakistan's young people to keep building, to take on the world. Especially in AI. Especially now, without losing sight of the political struggle, which we will not abandon. This thread is for them 🧵 — Forced to stay away from my country gave me two benefits: More time and more passion. I chose not to waste either. This is a personal account: It started with my need to transcribe my long speeches, some over thirty minutes, in mixed English and Urdu on YouTube (which gave a Hindi/Sanskrit transcript). The platforms available would do a bad job with the mix. So, I asked my coaches — ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini and I concluded to do it myself, locally, with Whisper’s large, medium & small models and other AI tools. This was completed in Dec ‘25 For the sake of open source and transparency, I am publishing it on GitHub. github.com/DrArifAlvi/you… In January ’26, I began building the Dr Arif Alvi AI Archive. An attempt to bring together everything I had said, written, read, and recorded across decades, and make it searchable, synthesizable, MINE. I built it alone. No team. No budget. Just time, curiosity, and persistence. It runs entirely on my enhanced laptop. My data never leaves it. My AI agents ingest my writings/articles; thousands of books read and summarised; millions of words of archival material; my thousands of speeches on YouTube press conferences; thousands of talk show appearances since 2000 and clips on YouTube. All scraped from the net via APIs— indexed, and alive inside my local RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) system that answers back. My 50,000+ tweets are searchable faster than X's own tools. Not just by keyword but semantically. None of it leaves my computer or enters the public domain, remains private. — The local LLMs answer questions, draft research briefs, synthesize across all data. When I need to reach beyond my own archive, they augment from public LLMs — ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, others. I use the archive every day, updating it regularly. It has changed how I think and work. — Following are the layers of the stack — what I built is one-of-one. But what I built it from is available to every-one: ▶️ Ollama / Llama / Phi / Qwen — local LLMs running entirely on-device ▶️ Whisper — bilingual English-Urdu speech transcription ▶️ ChromaDB — vector memory across 70,000+ chunks ▶️ Sentence Transformers — semantic search across tweets, speeches, and archives ▶️ Streamlit — dashboard with dual modes: semantic search and AI research ▶️ Six LLM interfaces (ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot) for python scripts and for augmentation of local output ▶️ OpenClaw and GitHub — for code management ▶️VS Code — for scripts and code writing None of them are mine. The COMPOSITION is mine. — I should tell you what it took to get here. I started learning Python basics from online courses. I am not a programmer, but I reviewed and iterated over a million lines of scripts —learning, correcting, improving, understanding—just enough to keep going. I had launched Pakistan's Presidential Initiative on Artificial Intelligence in 2019. I thought I understood AI but I took advanced courses anyway. There is always more to learn, and humility about ignorance is not a weakness. It is the only honest starting point. — There are tens of thousands of students, researchers, operators, lawyers, and doctors across Pakistan and the world, quietly trying to dabble in AI right now. To them I would say: software writing is mostly done by machines today. You do not need to become a programmer. You need to understand enough to read, direct, correct and employ tools — like a symphony conductor, with an AI baton. More than anything, pick a project. Something real, something yours.🔑 Scripts fill the architecture. Concrete fills the blueprint. GET TO WORK And do not move slowly. AI tools and agentic systems are changing every single day. What was remarkable yesterday is ordinary today. Sometimes the gap is hours, not months. The people who stay ahead are not waiting to fully understand it before they begin. THEY ARE ALREADY BUILDING. — Pakistan cannot afford to fall behind in this. Not out of nostalgia for what Pakistan was, but out of economic and strategic urgency for what it must become — because our talented, hungry people can build anything when given the tools and the leadership. This is for them. START
@levelsio Which sensor you are using? Would you recommend it? P.S. Totally got the same dilemma
Being consulted for "anxiety" for a child with a chaotic family, chaotic neighborhood, chaotic social situation, awful friends, and an uncaring system.
Nader leftists gave us Bush and subsequently Justices Roberts & Alito, and therefore the historical foundation of our present state of affairs.
Harvard just released a study showing AI outperformed human doctors in an emergency room setting. The study is based on 76 emergency room cases in a Boston hospital. OpenAI's "o1-preview" went up against two human doctors described as "expert attending physicians." AI correctly diagnosed in 67.1% of the cases. The individual scores for the two human doctors were 55.3% and 50.0%. AI proved especially adept at diagnosing rare diseases and complex cases. I see this as a positive step into the future. Working together, AI will make doctors so much more competent and effective.
