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Record W2937715114

A touch of flu?: Hold the painkillers

2014· article· en· W2937715114 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Debora MacKenzie

Bibliographic record

VenueThe New Scientist · 2014
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicHepatitis B Virus Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFlu seasonMedicineBird fluPopulationAspirinVirusVirologyEnvironmental healthInternal medicineInfluenza A virus subtype H5N1
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

With the flu season under way across Europe and North America, millions will be taking flu remedies, which commonly include painkillers. The general medical advice in the UK and the US is to take painkillers such as paracetamol (acetaminophen) or aspirin. But although painkillers can make people feel better they also lower fever, which can make the virus worse. The first analysis of the effect of this on the population shows that painkillers taken at current levels to treat fevers could cause 2000 flu deaths each year in the US alone. David Earn at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada says that some studies have shown that lowering fever may prolong viral infections and increase the amount of virus they can pass on to others. To find out what impact this might have on a flu epidemic, Earn and his colleagues turned to a 1982 study which showed that ferrets, a common animal model for human flu, produced more seasonal flu virus if their fevers were lowered either with painkillers or by having their fur shaved off.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.015
Threshold uncertainty score0.052

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0030.003
Scholarly communication0.0030.005
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0050.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0150.004

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.271
Teacher spread0.253 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2014
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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