Questions about Emanuel Goldman, PhD

[Shannon]

Hi all-

A librarian where I work has sent out an email from a listserv in which she participates. Another librarian In that listserv presented an opinion piece published in The Lancet by Emanuel Goldman. In this opinion piece he states that the REALM Study is overly cautious in its recommendations and that an hour or so is plenty of time for the virus to be “Dead”.  

In a brief search of PubMed and ResearchGate I discovered he is not a virologist, but a bacteriologist and not a well published one at that. However, my colleagues may consider changing their policies in light of his opinion. I am a bit concerned.

What are your thoughts?

Thank you,

Shannon

[allmo...@gmail.com]

Hi Shannon,

I looked up the Goldman article it's an option article and from July -- not something I would place a lot of stock into.

I did a search in LitCovid (which curates articles from PubMed) for "fomites" and sorted by recency: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coronavirus/docsum?text=fomites&&sort=date%20desc&page=1 -- unfortunately LitCovid doesn't let you filter by study type but you can click through to PubMed to find studies that are a higher level of evidence. 

Mike

[Grey Wolfe]

Hi Mike-

Thank you for the link and I appreciate your thoughts.

Cheers,

Shannon

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "Western Massachusetts Health Information Consortium" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/wmhic/A3OwAtqcqI4/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to wmhic+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/wmhic/0e15823b-b26d-44fb-87ed-7e3c797251een%40googlegroups.com.

--

Shannon Compton, PhD

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  Maya Angelou

“Until we get equality in education, we won't have an equal society.” — Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice of the Nonconformist Hall of Fame

[Nancy Little]

Hi Shannon,

I'm not familiar with him or the article but my first thought is that your colleagues are considering changing policies based on one opinion piece by someone who is not an expert in the field of virology? This worries me. When we teach students to evaluate sources, one of the criteria is authority. I tell students to go the "extra mile" and research the authors. One would assume that we are doing this ourselves when we are considering policies for the library. That we are consulting best practices, and making informed decisions based on evidence. That we would be consulting the authorities in our field to help guide us in establishing policies, not basing our decisions based on the fact that we like what one person wrote in an opinion piece? Isn't that what's known as confirmation bias?

Good luck, Shannon. I hope you can convince them to consult as many authoritative sources as possible in making policy decisions. I think it's better to err on the side of caution as far as this virus is concerned.

Nancy Little

On Monday, September 28, 2020 at 11:40:56 AM UTC-4 Shannon wrote:

[Grey Wolfe]

Hi Nancy-

Yes, agreed. I have no idea why she did not do her own research on the author. I guess it was because another librarian sent the information out in a listserv? I did research on him and also shared Mike's thoughts. Hopefully between what I found and his thoughts as well as yours our supervisor will not change anything.

Cheers,

Shannon

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "Western Massachusetts Health Information Consortium" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/wmhic/A3OwAtqcqI4/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to wmhic+un...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/wmhic/46799014-cfca-4179-b0e4-696784d6ffaen%40googlegroups.com.