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The Hawaii Department of Health has demanded the Navy immediately halt operations at a Navy fuel storage facility after a leak led to contaminated drinking water - forcing 700 people from their homes and sickening families.

The Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility is located 100 feet above the Red Hill aquifer - which supplies drinking water to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and other areas of Hawaii.

The fuel storage facility was built during World War II and can store up to 250 million gallons of fuel, according to the Navy.

Testing revealed petroleum hydrocarbons and vapors in the water, the Navy said Friday.

On Sunday, US Pacific Fleet Deputy Commander Rear Adm. Blake Converse confirmed a petroleum leak was the cause.

Navy officials informed the Department of Health Tuesday morning of their intent to contest the suspension order, according to Hawaii Department of Health spokesperson Katie Arita-Chang.

The Department of Health and Navy are negotiating the terms of a continuance, Arita-Chang said.

A sickened mom said her family made multiple ER visits

The military has offered alternative housing for all service members and civilian employees living near the base. As of Sunday, Converse said the military was covering hotel room costs for more than 700 people.

The Navy said it had shut down its Red Hill water well on November 28 after families living on base reported symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headaches and skin-related concerns.

But some families are demanding more action and accountability. During a town hall with Navy officials on Sunday, residents described an array of symptoms.

"I'm here to ask why you weren't a wingman to protect my 13-month-old son when I was bathing him, when I was giving him a sippy cup full of water from my faucet, when he has been throwing up for days on end," said one woman, who didn't give her name.

"I'm here to ask why you weren't my wingman as my husband and I have had mysterious serious symptoms such as sore throats, burning in my stomach, profuse, unusual sweating, headaches unable to be mitigated, requiring multiple ER visits for additional medications, vomiting, diarrhea, skin irritation," the woman asked the Navy officials.

On Monday, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro visited the fuel storage facility and said the Navy is getting closer to determining the root cause of the water contamination.

"There is an ongoing investigation that is led by US Pacific Fleet into the cause of the incident," Del Toro said.

"Once that investigation is complete, we will review those findings and adjust our operating procedures as necessary."

'Getting it right is more important than doing it fast'

The first priority is to take care of those affected by the water contamination, Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday said.

"That includes medical care. That includes food and includes water," Gilday said Monday.

The Navy hopes to restore water service to residents soon, but "the key point here is that getting it right is more important than doing it fast," Gilday said.

"What we don't want to do is to move people back into their homes to restore service prematurely before we have the utmost confidence in that system, so that we're not going through this again."

Health officials: The Navy should remove fuel from the underground storage

State health officials don't want just a halt in operations at the fuel storage facility. According to Gov. David Ige, the health department's order also calls for the Navy to:

Install a drinking water treatment system at the Red Hill well, which was shut down November 28 after residents reported symptoms

Submit a work plan to assess system integrity

Defuel the Red Hill underground storage tanks within 30 days of corrective action

"Hawai'i's wellbeing and the safety of our residents, including military families, must come first. We cannot have national security without ensuring public health and safety," the governor tweeted.

"There are still important questions that need to be answered and the Order will help get there."

The Honolulu Board of Water Supply is encouraging the Navy to remove fuel from the Red Hill storage facility, BWS manager and chief engineer Ernest Lau told CNN.

Lau suspended operation of the Halawa Shaft on Thursday. The shaft is Oahu's largest water source serving Honolulu residents and pulls from the same aquifer as the Navy's Red Hill well.

Lau said he won't resume operation at Halawa until the fuel is removed from Red Hill.

Honolulu is now relying on its other wells to maintain water service to its customers, which Lau said isn't posing a huge problem during the current wet season. But the system could become strained during the summer months.

A history of fuel leaks

Records show a history of fuel leaks plaguing Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in the past decade, with the most recent leak occurring 11 days before the Navy announced it had discovered contamination in the Red Hill well.

Another incident in May involved the release of more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel from a pipeline inside the storage facility, according to the Navy.

"An investigation determined that operator error caused the release of 1,618 gallons of jet fuel (JP-5) from a pipeline inside the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility (RHBFSF) on May 6, 2021," the Navy said. "The release was not from the fuel tanks."

In October, the Hawaii Department of Health cited the Navy for violations related to operation and maintenance of the facility, records show. The fines and violations resulted from a routine inspection from September 28, 2020, through October 9, 2020, according to the health department.

The Notice of Violation and Order (NOVO) consisted of five counts with a total penalty amounting to $325,182, the Hawaii Department of Health said in a news release.

The Hawaii Department of Health said in a news release that the five counts were:

Failure to operate and maintain ongoing corrosion protection to metal components of the portion of the Navy's tank and piping that contain regulated substances and are in contact with the ground

Failure to perform line tightness testing of repaired piping before return to service

Failure to perform an annual liquid tightness test on spill prevention equipment to prevent releases to the environment

Failure to perform an adequate visual walkthrough inspection of hydrant pits

Failure to maintain adequate release detection for two double-walled underground product recovery storage tanks

In January 2014, during the refueling of a tank, the Navy identified a fuel release estimated at up to 27,000 gallons of JP-8 jet fuel, according to the Hawaii DOH.

"U.S. Navy subsequently drained the tank and collected samples from existing monitoring wells. Results taken in and around Tank 5 indicated increases of hydrocarbons in soil vapor and groundwater," the health department said.

At the time, the agency said the drinking water was in compliance with federal and state "concentrations for drinking water both before and after the January 2014 release."

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Hawaii health officials order Navy to clean up contaminated drinking water after families are forced out of their homes | CNN

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The Hawaii Department of Health has demanded the Navy immediately halt operations at a Navy fuel storage facility after a leak led to contaminated drinking water - forcing 700 people from their homes and sickening families.

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Ace #14 - exposure to a natural environment will reduce psychological stress

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Ace #14 - exposure to a natural environment will reduce psychological stress

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real christmas trees are better for your mental health - cnn

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Real Christmas trees are better for your mental health than artificial ones, experts say

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Nothing artificial can compete with the benefits a living tree can bring to a home and the scents it emits, according to experts.

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. - The number of Americans fully vaccinated against COVID-19 reached 200 million Wednesday amid a dispiriting holiday-season spike in cases and hospitalizations that has hit even New England, one of the most highly inoculated corners of the country.

New cases in the U.S. climbed from an average of nearly 95,000 a day on Nov. 22 to almost 119,000 a day this week, and hospitalizations are up 25% from a month ago. The increases are due almost entirely to the delta variant, though the omicron mutation has been detected in about 20 states and is sure to spread even more.

Deaths are running close to 1,600 a day on average, back up to where they were in October. And the overall U.S. death toll less than two years into the crisis could hit another heartbreaking milestone, 800,000, in a matter of days.

The situation is not as dire as last year's holiday-season surge, before the public had access to COVID-19 vaccines, but the 60% of the U.S. population that is fully vaccinated has not been enough to prevent hot spots.

The cold weather, Thanksgiving gatherings and a big rebound in holiday travel are all believed to be playing a role, along with public weariness with pandemic restrictions.

Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights at Georgetown University, likened the virus to a wildfire.

"You can clear a forest of the shrubbery. But if you leave some shrubs and trees standing, the fire will find them," Gostin said. "The virus will find you. It is searching for hosts that are not immune. The fact that you live in New England or New York doesn't insulate you."

Demand for the vaccine - with recent approval of boosters for all adults and shots for elementary school children - has been high amid the surge and the emergence of the omicron variant, whose dangers are still not fully understood. On Wednesday, Pfizer said that the initial two shots of its vaccine appear significantly less effective against omicron but that a booster dose may offer important protection.

Nearly 48 million people have received a booster, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. White House officials noted the U.S. administered 12.5 million shots last week, the highest weekly total since May.

"And that's critical progress as we head into the winter and confront the new omicron variant," White House coronavirus adviser Jeffrey Zients said.

At the same time, some states, notably in highly vaccinated New England, but also in the Midwest, are grappling with some of the worst surges since the start of the pandemic. Hospitals are filling up and reacting by canceling non-urgent surgeries or taking other crisis measures, while states are strongly promoting boosters.

Despite one of the highest vaccination levels in the country - over 74% of the population fully vaccinated - Vermont is coping with its biggest surge yet. In the last week, new cases per day are up 54%, and the number of people in the hospital with COVID-19 has climbed 18%.

The virus is preying on those who haven't gotten their shots: As of Tuesday, 90% of the COVID-19 patients in intensive care were unvaccinated.

"Obviously, it's not where we want to be," Gov. Phil Scott said Tuesday, calling the situation "extremely frustrating."

More than 400 people were in the hospital with COVID-19 in New Hampshire at the start of the week, breaking the record set last winter.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu directed hospitals to set up COVID-19 "surge centers" using space normally reserved for such things as outpatient care.

"Every day for the next several weeks, we're likely to see a new high in COVID hospitalizations in New Hampshire," said Steve Ahnen, president of the New Hampshire Hospital Association. "With over 1,000 new cases a day, that number's not going to do anything but continue to go up."

Maine likewise is struggling with record-breaking COVID-19 hospitalizations. Gov. Janet Mills on Wednesday activated as many as 75 members of the National Guard to help out.

"The vast majority of patients in our hospitals are unvaccinated. That's especially true of critical care patients," said Andy Mueller, CEO of MaineHealth, the state's biggest health network. "It requires a tremendous amount of our resources to provide care."

Rhode Island's largest hospital system, Lifespan, said staffing shortages are at never-before-seen crisis levels, while Kent Hospital said it is near capacity and is considering delaying non-urgent procedures.

Dr. Paari Gopalakrishnan, Kent's interim president and chief operating officer, said the spike is probably due to "people letting their guards down" during the holidays, and flu season could complicate things further.

New Hampshire plans to hold a "booster blitz" on Saturday at 15 locations. Most appointments were booked.

In Berlin, Vermont, Mike Labounty got his booster Tuesday.

"I have friends that are in their 20s that are getting sick and friends that are 60 that are getting sick," he said. "The thing you see on Facebook and stuff like that is, 'I just want this to be over. I'm very sick,' so I'm just trying to avoid that."

Elsewhere around the country, Indiana has seen COVID-19 hospital admissions double in the last month and is approaching levels not seen since this time a year ago, before vaccines were widely available.

The number of people in intensive care in Minnesota has reached the highest level yet during the pandemic, with 98% of ICU beds occupied. Teams of military medics have been sent into Michigan and New Mexico.

___

Associated Press writers Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; Patrick Whittle in Portland, Maine; and Wilson Ring and Lisa Rathke in Montpelier, Vermont, contributed to this report. Tareen reported from Chicago.

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Sophia Tareen And Jennifer Mcdermott, Associated Press

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COVID cases spike even as US hits 200M vaccine milestone

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. - The number of Americans fully vaccinated against COVID-19 reached 200 million Wednesday amid a dispiriting holiday-season spike in cases and hospitalizations that has hit even New England, one of the most highly inoculated corners of the country. New cases in the U.S.

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Jessie Davis #10~Marijuana may make sleep worse, especially for regular users, study finds

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Jessie Davis #10~Marijuana may make sleep worse, especially for regular users, study finds

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https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/06/health/marijuana-sleep-problems-study-wellness/index.html

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Marijuana may make sleep worse, especially for regular users, study finds

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Many people turn to marijuana to help them sleep, but emerging research is questioning that assumption.

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Jessie Davis #9~The Pandemic Has Your Blood Pressure Rising? You’re Not Alone.

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Jessie Davis #9~The Pandemic Has Your Blood Pressure Rising? You’re Not Alone.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/health/covid-blood-pressure.html

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Average blood pressure readings increased as the coronavirus spread, new research suggests. The finding portends medical repercussions far beyond Covid-19.

Health workers checking blood pressure readings before administering coronavirus vaccines in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in July. Credit... Chaideer Mahyuddin/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Last year was a tough one. Americans grappled with a global pandemic, the loss of loved ones, lockdowns that splintered social networks, stress, unemployment and depression.

It is probably no surprise that the nation's blood pressure shot up.

On Monday, scientists reported that blood pressure measurements of nearly a half-million adults showed a significant rise last year, compared with the previous year.

These measurements describe the pressure of blood against the walls of the arteries. Over time, increased pressure can damage the heart, the brain, blood vessels, kidneys and eyes. Sexual function can also be affected.

"These are very important data that are not surprising, but are shocking," said Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, president of the American Heart Association, who was not involved in the study.

"Even small changes in average blood pressure in the population," he added, "can have a huge impact on the number of strokes, heart failure events and heart attacks that we're likely to be seeing in the coming months."

The study, published as a research letter in the journal Circulation, is a stark reminder that even in the midst of a pandemic that has claimed more than 785,000 American lives and disrupted access to health care, chronic health conditions must still be managed.

Almost half of all American adults have hypertension, or high blood pressure, a chronic condition referred to as a "silent killer" because it can have life-threatening consequences, though it produces few symptoms.

Hypertension may also put people at greater risk for severe disease if they are infected with the coronavirus. (The evidence for that link is mixed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

The new study, by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic and Quest Diagnostics, examined data from hundreds of thousands of employees and family members in wellness programs that tracked blood pressure and other health indicators, like weight. The participants, from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, included people who had elevated blood pressure and normal blood pressure at the start of the study.

"We observed that people weren't exercising as much during the pandemic, weren't getting regular care, were drinking more and sleeping less," said Dr. Luke Laffin, the lead author, a preventive cardiologist who is co-director of the Center for Blood Pressure Disorders at the Cleveland Clinic. "We wanted to know, was their blood pressure changing during the pandemic?"

The researchers found that blood pressure readings changed little from 2019 to the first three months of 2020, but increased significantly from April 2020 through December 2020, compared with the same period in 2019.

Blood pressure is measured in units of millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) and consists of two numbers. The first number refers to systolic pressure as the heart contracts, and the second number refers to diastolic pressure as the heart rests between beats. Normal blood pressure is said to be 120/80 mm Hg or less, although there is decades-long dispute about the optimal levels.

The new study found that the average monthly change from April 2020 to December 2020, compared with the previous year, was 1.10 mm Hg to 2.50 mm Hg for systolic blood pressure, and 0.14 to 0.53 for diastolic blood pressure.

The increases held true for both men and women, and in all age groups. Larger increases in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure were seen in women.

The average age of the study participants was just over 45, and slightly more than half were women. But critics said the failure to include information on the race and the ethnicity of participants was a significant weakness in the study, as hypertension is much more prevalent among Black Americans than among white or Hispanic Americans.

Black people have also been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Dr. Laffin said information on race and ethnicity was available only for 6 percent of the study participants, so an analysis would not be meaningful.

But there is a big difference between Black Americans and white and Hispanic Americans when it comes to hypertension, said Dr. Kim Williams, a cardiologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and an author of the national blood pressure guidelines that were issued in 2017.

The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to Know

Card 1 of 4

"The hypertensive state has been epidemic in the African-American population for decades," he said. "Our therapies have improved and our attempt at calling it out have improved, yet the gap is widening. And we know the pandemic has hit different cultures and different aspects of society in different ways."

The causes of an overall increase in blood pressure are not clear, Dr. Laffin and his colleagues said. The reasons may include an increase in alcohol consumption, a decline in exercise, rising stress, a drop in doctors' visits and less adherence to a medication regimen.

The researchers dismissed a possible effect of weight gain, known to raise blood pressure, saying that the men in the study had lost weight and that the women had not gained more weight than usual.

But other experts pointed out that average figures for weight gain might mask gains in segments of the population.

"It is probably multifactorial," said Dr. Lloyd-Jones, referring to the overall rise in blood pressure. "But I think a critical piece is that we know so many people lost contact with the health care system, and lost control of blood pressure and diabetes."

Americans must pay greater attention to overall health and the management of underlying medical conditions despite the pandemic, Dr. Laffin said, adding that the penalty for not doing so might outlast the coronavirus itself.

"There are also public health consequences from not seeing your doctor regularly, making poor dietary choices and not exercising," he said. "If we think about the long-term implications, that's potentially more profound."

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The Pandemic Has Your Blood Pressure Rising? You're Not Alone.

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Average blood pressure readings increased as the coronavirus spread, new research suggests. The finding portends medical repercussions far beyond Covid-19. Last year was a tough one. Americans grappled with a global pandemic, the loss of loved ones, lockdowns that splintered social networks, stress, unemployment and depression.

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Jessie Davis #8~Pfizer Says COVID Booster Offers Protection Against Omicron

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Jessie Davis #8~Pfizer Says COVID Booster Offers Protection Against Omicron

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https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2021-12-08/pfizer-says-covid-booster-offers-protection-against-omicron

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By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer

Pfizer said Wednesday that a booster dose of its COVID-19 vaccine may protect against the new omicron variant even though the initial two doses appear significantly less effective.

Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said lab tests showed a booster dose increased by 25-fold the level of so-called neutralizing antibodies against omicron.

Pfizer announced the preliminary laboratory data in a press release and it hasn't yet undergone scientific review. The companies already are working to create an omicron-specific vaccine in case it's needed.

Scientists have speculated that the high jump in antibodies that comes with a third dose of COVID-19 vaccines might be enough to counter any decrease in effectiveness.

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Antibody levels predict how well a vaccine may prevent infection with the coronavirus but they are just one layer of the immune system's defenses. Pfizer said two doses of the vaccine may still induce protection against severe disease.

"Although two doses of the vaccine may still offer protection against severe disease caused by the Omicron strain, it's clear from these preliminary data that protection is maximized with a third dose of our vaccine," Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Pfizer Says COVID Booster Offers Protection Against Omicron

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By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Pfizer said Wednesday that a booster dose of its COVID-19 vaccine may protect against the new omicron variant even though the initial two doses appear significantly less effective. Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said lab tests showed a booster dose increased by 25-fold the level of so-called neutralizing antibodies against omicron.

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Jessie Davis #7~Researchers boost human mental function with brain stimulation

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Jessie Davis #7~Researchers boost human mental function with brain stimulation

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211101141757.htm

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In a pilot human study, researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital show it is possible to improve specific human brain functions related to self-control and mental flexibility by merging artificial intelligence with targeted electrical brain stimulation.

Alik Widge, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and member of the Medical Discovery Team on Addiction at the U of M Medical School, is the senior author of the research published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. The findings come from a human study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston among 12 patients undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy -- a procedure that places hundreds of tiny electrodes throughout the brain to record its activity and identify where seizures originate.

In this study, Widge collaborated with Massachusetts General Hospital's Sydney Cash, MD, PhD, an expert in epilepsy research; and Darin Dougherty, MD, an expert in clinical brain stimulation. Together, they identified a brain region -- the internal capsule -- that improved patients' mental function when stimulated with small amounts of electrical energy. That part of the brain is responsible for cognitive control -- the process of shifting from one thought pattern or behavior to another, which is impaired in most mental illnesses.

"An example might include a person with depression who just can't get out of a 'stuck' negative thought. Because it is so central to mental illness, finding a way to improve it could be a powerful new way to treat those illnesses," Widge said.

The team developed algorithms, so that after stimulation, they could track patients' cognitive control abilities, both from their actions and directly from their brain activity. The controller method provided boosts of stimulation whenever the patients were doing worse on a laboratory test of cognitive control.

"This system can read brain activity, 'decode' from that when a patient is having difficulty, and apply a small burst of electrical stimulation to the brain to boost them past that difficulty," Widge said. "The analogy I often use is an electric bike. When someone's pedaling but having difficulty, the bike senses it and augments it. We've made the equivalent of that for human mental function."

The study is the first to show that:

A specific human mental function linked to mental illness can be reliably enhanced using precisely targeted electrical stimulation;

There are specific sub-parts of the internal capsule brain structure that are particularly effective for cognitive enhancement; and

A closed-loop algorithm used as a controller was twice as effective than stimulating at random times.

Some of the patients had significant anxiety in addition to their epilepsy. When given the cognitive-enhancing stimulation, they reported that their anxiety got better, because they were more able to shift their thoughts away from their distress and focus on what they wanted. Widge says that this suggests this method could be used to treat patients with severe and medication-resistant anxiety, depression or other disorders.

"This could be a totally new approach in treating mental illness. Instead of trying to suppress symptoms, we could give patients a tool that lets them take control of their own minds," Widge said. "We could put them back in the driver's seat and let them feel a new sense of agency."

The research team is now preparing for clinical trials. Because the target for improving cognitive control is already approved by the Food and Drug Administration for deep brain stimulation, Widge says this research can be done with existing tools and devices -- once a trial is formally approved -- and the translation of this care to current medical practice could be rapid.

"The wonderful thing about these findings is that we are now in a position to conduct clinical trials to further demonstrate effectiveness and then hopefully move to helping treatment-resistant patients who are in desperate need for additional interventions to treat their illnesses," Dougherty said.

This work was supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-14-2-0045 issued by the Army Research Organization (ARO) contracting office in support of DARPA's SUBNETS Program, the National Institutes of Health, Ellison Foundation, Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, MGH Executive Council on Research, OneMind Institute and the MnDRIVE and Medical Discovery Team on Addiction initiatives at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

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mental health research; today's healthcare; birth defects; diseases and conditions; depression; brain-computer interfaces; intelligence; mental health

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Researchers boost human mental function with brain stimulation: Study indicates this method could be a new approach to treating a variety of severe mental illnesses

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In a pilot human study, researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital show it is possible to improve specific human brain functions related to self-control and mental flexibility by merging artificial intelligence with targeted electrical brain stimulation.

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Jessie Davis #6~The NIH director on why Americans aren't getting healthier, despite medical advances

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Jessie Davis #6~The NIH director on why Americans aren't getting healthier, despite medical advances

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https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/07/1061940326/the-nih-director-on-why-americans-arent-getting-healthier-despite-medical-advanc

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It's Dr. Francis Collins' last few weeks as director of the National Institutes of Health after 12 years, serving under three presidents.

Collins made his name doing the kind of biomedical research NIH is famous for, especially running The Human Genome Project, which fully sequenced the human genetic code. The focus on biomedicine and cures has helped him grow the agency's budget to over $40 billion a year and win allies in both political parties.

Still, in a broad sense, Americans' health hasn't improved much in those 12 years, especially compared with people in peer countries, and some have argued the agency hasn't done enough to try to turn these trends around. One recently retired NIH division director has quipped that one way to increase funding for this line of research would be if "out of every $100, $1 would be put into the 'Hey, how come nobody's healthy?' fund."

In a wide-ranging conversation, Collins answers NPR's questions as to why - for all the taxpayer dollars going to NIH research - there haven't been more gains when it comes to Americans' overall health. He also talks about how tribalism in American culture has fueled vaccine hesitancy, and he advises his successor on how to persevere on research of politically charged topics - like guns and obesity and maternal health - even if powerful lobbies might want that research not to get done.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Selena Simmons-Duffin: After you announced you'd be stepping down from the director role, you that one of your "chief regrets" was the persistence of vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic. How are you thinking about the role NIH could play in understanding this problem?
Francis Collins: I do think we need to understand better how - in the current climate - people make decisions. I don't think I anticipated the degree to which the tribalism of our current society would actually interfere with abilities to size up medical information and make the kinds of decisions that were going to help people.
So you mentioned the idea of investing more in the behavioral research side of things. Do you think that should happen?
To have now 60 million people still holding off of taking advantage of lifesaving vaccines is pretty unexpected. It does make me, at least, realize, "Boy, there are things about human behavior that I don't think we had invested enough into understanding." We basically have seen the accurate medical information overtaken, all too often, by the inaccurate conspiracies and false information on social media. It's a whole other world out there. We used to think that if knowledge was made available from credible sources, it would win the day. That's not happening now.
Looking at how America has fared in the pandemic more broadly, it really is astoundingly bad. The cases and deaths are just so high. CDC Director Robert Redfield, when he was leaving, told NPR he thought the baseline poor health of Americans had something to do with how powerfully the pandemic has hit America. What do you think about the toll of the pandemic, even as it's clearly not over? Let's step back from the pandemic. In your 12 years as director, the NIH has worked on developing cures and getting them from the lab to patients faster, and the agency's budget has grown. But, in that time, Americans haven't, on a broader scale, gotten healthier. They're sicker than people in other countries across the board, all races and incomes. When you were sworn in in 2009, Does it bother you that there haven't been more gains? And what role should NIH play in understanding these trends and trying to turn them around? life expectancy was 78.4 years, and it's been essentially stuck there.
We're having serious conversations right now about whether this ought to be a special initiative at NIH to put more research into health communications and how best to frame those [messages] so that they reach people who may otherwise be influenced by information that's simply not based on evidence. Because I don't think you could look at the current circumstance now and say it's gone very well.

It's a terrible toll. We've lost almost 800,000 lives. In 2020, before we had vaccines, there was not a really good strategy to protect people other than social distancing and mask-wearing, which were important, but certainly not guarantees of safety. And yes, it is the case that the people who got hit hardest, oftentimes, were people with underlying medical conditions.

But in 2021, we should have been better off. We had vaccines that were safe, that were available for free to all Americans. The ability to get immunized really went up very steeply in March and April, and yet it all kind of petered out by about May or June. The [vaccine] resistant group of 60 million people remains, for the most part, still resistant. Unfortunately, now, with delta having come along as a very contagious variant and with omicron now appearing, which may also be a real threat, we have missed the chance to put ourselves in a much better place.

Well, sure, it does bother me. In many ways, the 28 years I have been at NIH have just been an amazing ride of discoveries upon discoveries. But you're right, we haven't seen that translate necessarily into advances.
I'm curious, since this report came out when you were director, if it made an impact at the agency and whether there's been any progress on those recommendations or was there a decision not to pursue those ideas?
Let's be clear, there are some things that have happened that are pretty exciting. Cancer deaths are dropping every year by 1 or 2%. When you add that up over 20 years, cancer deaths are down by almost 25% from where they were at the turn of the century. And that's a consequence of all the hard work that's gone into developing therapeutics based on genomics, as well as immunotherapy that's made a big dent in an otherwise terrible disease.

But we've lost ground in other areas, and a lot of them are a function of the fact that we don't have a very healthy lifestyle in our nation. Particularly with obesity and diabetes, those risk factors have been getting worse instead of better. We haven't, apparently, come up with strategies to turn that around.
You've served under both Democratic and Republican administrations. One thing you've talked about in interviews is the culture wars. What role do you think NIH has to play in terms of developing trust and trying to get past some of that tribalism that you talked about before?
On top of that, the other main reason for seeing a drop in life expectancy - other than obesity and COVID - is the opioid crisis. We at NIH are working as fast and as hard as we can to address that by trying to both identify better ways to prevent and treat drug addiction, but also to come up with treatments for chronic pain that are not addictive, because those 25 million people who suffer from chronic pain every day deserve something better than a drug that is going to be harmful.

In all of these instances, as a research enterprise - because that's our mandate - it feels like we're making great progress. But the implementation of those findings runs up against a whole lot of obstacles, in terms of the way in which our society operates, in terms of the fact that our health care system is clearly full of disparities, full of racial inequities. We're not - at NIH - able to reach out and fix that, but we can sure shine a bright light on it and we can try to come up with pilot interventions to see what would help.

A 300-page report called Shorter Lives, Poorer Health came out in 2013 - it was requested and financed by NIH and conducted by a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine panel. It documented some of the things you just talked about, in terms of how Americans' health falls short compared with people in other countries. And it is filled with recommendations for further research, many specifically for NIH, including looking to how other countries are achieving better health outcomes than the U.S.

I do remember that report and there have been a lot of other reports along the lines since then that have tried to point to things that other countries may be doing better than we are. One of the things I've tried to do is to provide additional strength and resources to our Office of Disease Prevention, because that's a lot of what we're talking about here. One of the knocks against the National Institutes of Health is that we often seem to be the National Institutes of Disease - that a lot of the focus has been on people who are already diagnosed with some kind of health condition. And yet what we really want to do is to extend health span, not just life span, and that means really putting more research efforts into prevention.
Some of the reasons why Americans tend to be less healthy than people in other countries can get political pretty quickly - like healthy environments and gun injuries and drug overdoses and maternal health. But the research is important. Do you have any guidance or thoughts for your successor on how to support the kind of research that's not as universally embraced on both sides of the aisle?
One of the things that I'm excited about in that regard is the All of Us study, which is in the process of enrolling a million Americans, following them prospectively, many of them currently healthy. They share their electronic health records, they have blood samples taken that measure all kinds of things, including their complete genome sequences; they answer all kinds of questionnaires, they walk around with various kinds of wearable sensors. That's going to be a database that gives us information about exactly what's happened to the health of our nation and what could we do about it.

I think medical research should never be partisan. It should never get caught up in culture wars or tribal disagreements. But in our current society, it's hard to think of anything that hasn't at least been touched by those attitudes.
You are leaving this post. Where do you imagine the agency might go next? I know you're still going to be doing your work on Type 2 diabetes - you'll still be a part of it. So what do you see in NIH's future?
My goal as NIH director over these 12 years, serving three presidents, was to always try to keep medical research in a place that everybody could look at objectively and not consider it to be tainted in some way by political spin. I've made friends in Congress in both parties and both houses, in a way that I think has really helped the view of medical research to remain above the fray. And many of the strongest supporters for medical research over these 12 years have been in the Republican Party.

This is not something that people can really disagree about. You want to find answers to medical problems that are threatening yourself or your family or your community or your constituents. So I don't have a hard job in terms of explaining the mission or why we work so hard at what we do.

But I do have to sometimes worry that for whatever reason, politics will creep into this. And certainly with COVID, politics has crept into the space of misinformation in a fashion that has not helped with vaccine hesitancy. Frankly, I think it's pretty shameful if political figures trying to score points or draw attention to themselves put forward information about COVID that's demonstrably false.

I think the guidance is - you have to look at all the reasons why people are not having a full life experience of health and figure out what we, as the largest supporter of medical research in the world, should be doing to try to understand and change those circumstances. A lot of this falls into the category of health disparities. It is shameful that your likelihood of having a certain life span depends heavily on the ZIP code where you were born, and that is a reflection of all of the inequities that exist in our society in terms of environmental exposures, socioeconomics, social determinants of health, et cetera.

We are ramping up that effort right now, especially not just to observe the situation or, as some cynics have said, admire the situation. We actually want to try pilot interventions to see if some of those things can be changed. But that's about as far as we can go. Again, if there's a major societal illness right now of tribalism and overpolarization and hyperpartisanship about every issue, probably the NIH is not well-positioned all by ourselves to fix that. We have an urgent need, I think, across society, to recognize that we may have lost something here - our anchor to a shared sense of vision and a shared sense of agreement about what is truth.

I think it is in a remarkably positive place right now as far as what we are called to do, which is to make discoveries, to learn about how life works and then apply that in a way that will lead to answers for diseases that currently don't have them. I think of NIH as not just the National Institutes of Health, but the National Institutes of Hope, and we are able now to provide hope for lots of situations that previously couldn't have really been confident in that. Look what's happened in terms of gene therapies - we're curing sickle cell disease now, something I thought would never happen in my lifetime, with gene therapies. Look at what we're able to do with cancer immunotherapy, saving people who have stage IV disease, in certain circumstances, by activating the immune system. And of course, in infectious diseases - not only have we now got mRNA vaccines for the terrible COVID-19 situation, we can apply those to lots of other infections as well.

So, anybody listening to this who's thinking maybe of moving into a career in biomedical research, this is the golden era and we need all the talent and the vision that we can possibly recruit into our midst because it's going to be a grand adventure in the coming decades.

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The NIH director on why Americans aren't getting healthier, despite medical advances

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It's Dr. Francis Collins' last few weeks as director of the National Institutes of Health after 12 years, serving under three presidents. Collins made his name doing the kind of biomedical research NIH is famous for, especially running The Human Genome Project, which fully sequenced the human genetic code.

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A new Cleveland Clinic-led study has identified sildenafil -- an FDA-approved therapy for erectile dysfunction (Viagra) and pulmonary hypertension (Ravatio) -- as a promising drug candidate to help prevent and treat Alzheimer's disease.

According to findings published in Nature Aging, the research team, led by Feixiong Cheng, Ph.D., of Cleveland Clinic's Genomic Medicine Institute, used computational methodology to screen and validate FDA-approved drugs as potential therapies for Alzheimer's disease. Through a large-scale analysis of a database of more than 7 million patients, they determined that sildenafil is associated with 69% reduced incidence of Alzheimer's disease, indicating the need for follow-up clinical trial testing of the drug's efficacy in patients with the disease.

"Recent studies show that the interplay between amyloid and tau is a greater contributor to Alzheimer's than either by itself," said Dr. Cheng. "Therefore, we hypothesized that drugs targeting the molecular network intersection of amyloid and tau endophenotypes should have the greatest potential for success."

Without the development of effective new treatments, Alzheimer's disease is set to impact 13.8 million Americans by 2050, underscoring the need for rapid development of prevention and treatment strategies. Drug repurposing -- use of an existing drug for new therapeutic purposes -- offers a practical alternative to the costly and time-consuming traditional drug discovery process.

"This paper is an example of a growing area of research in precision medicine where big data is key to connecting the dots between existing drugs and a complex disease like Alzheimer's,"said Jean Yuan, M.D., Ph.D., program director of Translational Bioinformatics and Drug Development at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funded this research. "This is one of many efforts we are supporting to find existing drugs or available safe compounds for other conditions that would be good candidates for Alzheimer's disease clinical trials."

Dr. Cheng's team has found that understanding subtypes (endophenotypes) of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease may help to reveal common underlying mechanisms and lead to discovery of actionable targets for drug repurposing.

The buildup of beta amyloid and tau proteins in the brain leads to amyloid plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles -- two hallmarks of Alzheimer's-related brain changes. The amount and location of these proteins in the brain may help define endophenotypes. However, no FDA-approved, anti-amyloid or anti-tau small molecule Alzheimer's treatments currently exist, with many clinical trials for such treatments having failed in the past decade.

"Recent studies show that the interplay between amyloid and tau is a greater contributor to Alzheimer's than either by itself," said Dr. Cheng. "Therefore, we hypothesized that drugs targeting the molecular network intersection of amyloid and tau endophenotypes should have the greatest potential for success."

Using a large gene-mapping network, researchers integrated genetic and other biologic data to determine which of over 1,600 FDA-approved drugs could be an effective treatment for Alzheimer's disease. They pinpointed drugs that target both amyloid and tau as having higher scores compared to drugs that target just one or the other. "Sildenafil, which has been shown to significantly improve cognition and memory in preclinical models, presented as the best drug candidate," said Dr. Cheng.

The research team utilized a large database of claims data of more than 7 million people in the U.S. to examine the relationship between sildenafil and Alzheimer's disease outcomes by comparing sildenafil users to non-users. The analysis included patients using comparator drugs that either were in an active Alzheimer's clinical trial (losartan or metformin) or were not yet reported as relevant to the disease (diltiazem or glimepiride).

They found that sildenafil users were 69% less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than non-sildenafil users after 6 years of follow-up. Specifically, sildenafil had a 55% reduced risk of the disease compared to losartan, 63% compared to metformin, 65% compared to diltiazem and 64% compared to glimepiride.

"Notably, we found that sildenafil use reduced the likelihood of Alzheimer's in individuals with coronary artery disease, hypertension and type 2 diabetes, all of which are comorbidities significantly associated with risk of the disease, as well as in those without," added Dr. Cheng.

To further explore sildenafil's effect on Alzheimer's disease, the researchers developed an Alzheimer's patient-derived brain cell model using stem cells. In the model, they found that sildenafil increased brain cell growth and decreased hyperphosphorylation of tau proteins (a hallmark which leads to neurofibrillary tangles), offering biological insights into how sildenafil may influence disease-related brain changes.

"Because our findings only establish an association between sildenafil use and reduced incidence of Alzheimer's disease, we are now planning a mechanistic trial and a phase II randomized clinical trial to test causality and confirm sildenafil's clinical benefits for Alzheimer's patients," said Dr. Cheng. "We also foresee our approach being applied to other neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to accelerate the drug discovery process."

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alzheimer's research; healthy aging; diseases and conditions; pharmacology; alzheimer's; dementia; disorders and syndromes; caregiving

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Researchers identify sildenafil as candidate drug for Alzheimer's disease: Findings show a 69% reduced likelihood of developing the disease

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A new study has identified sildenafil -- an FDA-approved therapy for erectile dysfunction (Viagra) and pulmonary hypertension (Ravatio) -- as a promising drug candidate to help prevent and treat Alzheimer's disease. Researchers determined that sildenafil is associated with 69% reduced incidence of Alzheimer's.

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Many people experience forgetfulness as they age, but it's often difficult to tell if these memory issues are a normal part of aging or a sign of something more serious. A new study finds that a simple, self-administered test developed by researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, College of Medicine and College of Public Health can identify the early, subtle signs of dementia sooner than the most commonly used office-based standard cognitive test.

This earlier detection by the Self-Administered Gerocognitive Examination (SAGE test) is critical to effective treatment, especially as new therapeutics for dementia and Alzheimer's disease are being developed and approved.

"New disease modifying therapies are available and others are currently being evaluated in clinical trials, and we know that the earlier cognitive impairment is detected, the more treatment choices a patient has and the better the treatments work," said Dr. Douglas Scharre, director of the Division of Cognitive Neurology at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center and lead author of the study published in the journal Alzheimer's Research & Therapy.

While the test does not definitively diagnose problems like Alzheimer's, it allows doctors to get a baseline of their patients' cognitive functioning, and repeat testing allows them to follow their memory and thinking abilities over time. "Often primary care physicians may not recognize subtle cognitive deficits during routine office visits," Scharre said.

The eight-year study followed 665 consecutive patients in Ohio State's Center for Cognitive and Memory Disorders. Researchers found that the SAGE test accurately identified patients with mild cognitive impairment who eventually progressed to a dementia diagnosis at least six months earlier than the most commonly used testing method called the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE).

Among the 164 patients with baseline mild cognitive impairment, 70 patients converted to dementia. This is a 43% conversion rate over three to four years which is similar to rates from other academic center-based studies, Scharre said. The distribution of dementia diagnoses included 70% Alzheimer's disease dementia, 7% Lewy body dementia, and 9% pure or mixed vascular dementia.

The test can be taken anywhere whenever there are cognitive concerns. It takes only about 10-15 minutes to complete, and the four interchangeable forms are designed to reduce learning effects from recurrent testing over time. The cognitive domains tested with the 11-item test include orientation, language, calculations, memory, abstraction, executive function, and constructional abilities. The MMSE does not test abstractions or executive function abilities.

"Any time you or your family member notices a change in your brain function or personality you should take this test," Scharre said. "If that person takes the test every six months and their score drops two or three points over a year and a half, that is a significant difference, and their doctor can use that information to get a jump on identifying the causes of the cognitive loss and to make treatment decisions."

Scharre has worked closely with BrainTest Inc SEZC to develop a scientifically validated digital version of the SAGE test called BrainTest that can be taken anywhere on a tablet or touch screen computer. This digital version will also be integrated with the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center's electronic medical records system to better facilitate self-testing, storing and reviewing results for patients and their health care providers.

"Based on cognitive score changes, clinicians and families may decide it is time to act on safety and supervision needs. This might include, for example, medication oversight, financial assistance, driving limitations, setting up durable Powers of Attorney and other legal arrangements/trusts, change in living arrangements, and enhanced caregiving support," Scharre said.

More than 6 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, and those numbers are expected to rise to more than 13 million by 2050. Deaths from Alzheimer's and other dementias have increased 16% during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

Further information on test: https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/brain-spine-neuro/memory-disorders/sage

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alzheimer's research; healthy aging; today's healthcare; diseases and conditions; dementia; alzheimer's; intelligence; disorders and syndromes

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Self-administered cognition test predicts early signs of dementia sooner

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Many people experience forgetfulness as they age, but it's often difficult to tell if these memory issues are a normal part of aging or a sign of something more serious. A new study finds that a simple, self-administered test can identify the early, subtle signs of dementia sooner than the most commonly used office-based standard cognitive test.

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New Covid Pills Offer Hope as Omicron Looms

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Merck and Pfizer will soon debut prescription pills to treat Covid-19. And more drugs are on the way.

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Ace #13 - coping with stress during finals

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Ace #13 - coping with stress during finals

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Finals week can be a stressful time for students, worsened by inadequate coping techniques and pressure from both internal and external sources.

Jennifer Graham-Engeland, associate professor of Biobehavioral Health and the Director of the Stress & Health Lab, is currently researching the "effects of psychological stress and stress responses on physical health," according to her research mission.

"There are many ways in which stress can manifest [and] impair health and well-being," Graham-Engeland said via email. "A common phenomenon is negative mood (anxiety, sadness, anger), which when prolonged by rumination can lead to exacerbated physiological stress responses."

Graham-Engeland recommended "moments of mindfulness" to help reduce stress in which the students removes themselves from a stressful situation and allows themselves some time to breathe. She provided an example of turning off a cell phone or computer.

The library provides opportunities for students to give their brain a break from studying with a variety of games and art activities. There are activity stations all throughout the Pattee and Paterno library, however, they are primarily located on the first floor of Paterno where coffee, hot chocolate and snacks are provided as well.

Megan Gilpin, the outreach coordinator for the library, said she provides games such as Connect Four, Operation, Jenga, puzzles and a Wii. She also said she sets up coloring for students, a mindfulness activity she called "art therapy."

"[The students] come in looking all stressed out," Gilpin said, "and when they leave they're very thankful and you can tell that they're happier. I think it makes a difference that [the students] feel like somebody cared enough to give them a break and a snack."

These activities are available Saturday through Monday before finals week.

"Another common response to stress is to get less sleep and exercise," Graham-Engeland said. "Sleep and exercise can promote more adaptive emotional and physiological responses to stress, making them a priority in busy times is a great idea when possible."

Troy Steiner, a professor of Introduction to Wellbeing and Positive Psychology, agreed with Graham-Engeland and explained the findings of a new paper which incentivized eight hours of sleep by rewarded bonus points to the students who completed the task.

Steiner said these students performed, on average, four points higher on their final exams than those who did not sleep at least eight hours per night.

He recommended students honestly evaluate how much sleep they have been getting when deciding whether or not to stay up late studying for an exam or go to sleep.

"There is a breaking point," Steiner said, "and everybody is a little bit different, which is why everyone recommends eight hours, but there is a little variation."

Steiner mentioned another, lesser known technique, which has recently been proven to reduce stress as well.

"There have been studies looking at the benefits of taking vitamin supplements and their effects on stress, as well as probiotics," Steiner said.

The studies showed that participants who received a vitamin supplement compared to those who received a placebo experienced less stress over one month. In another study, participants with a diagnosed stress disorder were targeted and they too experienced fewer stress symptoms.

In Steiner's class, they discuss stress as it presents in different aspects of larger psychological concepts.

"We talk about the ramifications of stress and coping mechanisms in general," Steiner said.

As a professor aware of the lasting negative impacts stress can have on students, Steiner follows a method of teaching he believes more professors should abide by.

"We as instructors shouldn't be teaching students to pass a test," Steiner said, "we should be teaching them the information and then build the test to examine whether or not they learn what we think is the most pertinent information."

To combat this, Steiner said he assigns a final project during finals week instead of an exam. For the project, he presents the students with multiple options for their final project; one of the choices is to create their own project.

He has found that the students who choose their own project typically put the most work into the project because they are genuinely interested in the class.

"[This] could be stressful," Steiner said, "but it's a positive type of stress because it's a challenge that they enjoy."

Around finals week, Steiner said he typically sees an increase in negative stress.

"I think the biggest stress I've noticed it that these finals are all coming at the exact same time."

Steiner said there have been students that have come to him and explained the pressure and stress they were feeling around finals time.

"There is a big difference between the students who are describing these struggles because they want to impress or meet the standards of their parents and that's always a little hard to listen to because here they're young adults and they're still trying to please their parents and part of college is learning to ... become autonomous."

Steiner said he believes the students who are more autonomous generally perform better academically and, most importantly, are happier.

"They want to improve themselves for their own sake, not to meet some external standard," Steiner said.

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A look at the psychological impacts of stress during finals week

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Finals week can be a stressful time for students, worsened by inadequate coping techniques and pressure from both internal and external sources. Jennifer Graham-Engeland, associate professor of Biobehavioral Health and the Director of the Stress & Health Lab, is currently researching the "effects of psychological stress and stress responses on physical health," according to her research mission.

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Ace #12 - pandemic seems to have made peoples quality of sleep worse

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Ace #12 - pandemic seems to have made peoples quality of sleep worse

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In the Nurses' Health Study that followed 71,617 women for a decade, those who slept eight hours a night had the lowest risk of developing heart disease. But in another study that followed 84,794 nurses for up to 24 years, those who slept nine or more hours a night were twice as likely to develop Parkinson's disease as those who averaged six hours or less.

Still, many more people, both lay and professional, worry more about too little sleep than an excess of shut-eye, and with good reason. Sleep-deprived people have more accidents and are more likely to fall asleep at inappropriate times, like at a play or concert or, most seriously, while driving.

Drowsy driving slows reaction time as much as drunken driving does. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, fatigue results in 100,000 auto crashes and 1,550 automotive deaths a year in the United States. Several automakers, including Subaru, Audi, Mercedes and Volvo, now offer drowsiness detection systems that monitor a car's movements, such as lane deviations, and alert sleepy drivers to take a break.

Sleep deprivation was a factor in some of the biggest environmental disasters in recent decades, including the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, the 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl and the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

Although you might expect the opposite, several studies have shown that short sleepers tend to weigh more than those who sleep for longer periods, even though people expend more calories while awake than asleep. A study of 990 working adults in rural Iowa found that the less sleep they got on weeknights, the higher their body mass index tended to be.

A Canadian study of 240 children who ranged in age from 8 to 17 showed it was not helpful to try to make up for short weeknights by sleeping longer on the weekend. Fluctuating hours of sleep can affect appetite-regulating hormones in ways that prompt people to eat when they're not hungry and eat past the point of satiation. The Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study found that short sleepers had low levels of the appetite-suppressing hormone leptin, and higher levels of the hormone ghrelin, which signals people to eat more.

Furthermore, an attempt to make up for lost sleep on the weekend has been associated with eating in the absence of hunger or in response to fatigue, as well as being unduly tempted by the sight or smell of food. I can attest to a common tendency to eat more - especially snacks of questionable nutritional value - when staying up past what should have been a reasonable bedtime.

Experts offer a variety of tips for getting a better night's sleep. Among them:

Avoid all sources of caffeine in the late afternoon and evening, as well as a big heavy meal close to bedtime.

Practice good sleep hygiene. Go to bed and get up at about the same time each day.

Do not use alcohol to help you unwind. Try a warm bath or meditation.

Reading before bed is great, as long as it's not on a computer or tablet that emits sleep-inhibiting light.

If outside light impedes sleep, install light-blocking shades or curtains or use a sleep mask. If noise is a problem, use earplugs or a white-noise machine.

Consider cognitive behavioral therapy, which challenges underlying thoughts or behaviors that may be keeping you up at night.

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In the Nurses' Health Study that followed 71,617 women for a decade, those who slept eight hours a night had the lowest risk of developing heart disease. But in another study that followed 84,794 nurses for up to 24 years, those who slept nine or more hours a night were twice as likely to develop Parkinson's disease as those who averaged six hours or less.

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The same way you guard against COVID-19 caused by any other variant: Get vaccinated if you haven't yet, get a booster if you're eligible and step up other precautions you may have relaxed, like wearing a mask and avoiding crowds.

WHO says measures used against delta should work for omicron

For all the attention omicron is getting, the overwhelming cause of infections and deaths in many places remains the extra-contagious delta variant.

As omicron looms, U.S. is still battling the delta wave

"Delta is the real risk right now. Omicron is an uncertain threat," Dr. Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, told The Associated Press. Regardless of the coronavirus type, Collins said "we do know what to do."

It will take a few weeks to learn key aspects about this latest variant, including whether it's more contagious, causes more severe illness or evades immunity -- and if so, how by much.

Mysteries of omicron variant could take weeks to untangle

In the meantime, "what we need to do is add more layers of protection," says Dr. Julie Vaishampayan of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. That's especially important with holiday travel and gatherings around the corner.

A booster shot is one of those layers. The added dose triggers a big jump in virus-fighting antibodies. Even if the antibodies don't prove quite as effective against omicron as they are against other variants, simply having more of them might compensate -- in addition to bolstering protection against delta.

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In addition to masking, avoiding crowds and improving ventilation, testing is another protective step. That's recommended for anyone who has COVID-19 symptoms or was potentially exposed to the virus. But it also could help ensure safety before holiday gatherings, even if everyone attending has been vaccinated, Vaishampayan says.

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How can I protect myself from the new omicron variant?

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The same way you guard against COVID-19 caused by any other variant: Get vaccinated if you haven't yet, get a booster if you're eligible and step up other precautions you may have relaxed, like wearing a mask and avoiding crowds.

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Ace #10 - vegetable oil causing inflammation

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Ace #10 - vegetable oil causing inflammation

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Linoleic Acid, Vegetable Oils & Inflammation

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Should we listen to warnings that linoleic acid (LA) promotes inflammation and that Americans would be healthier if they restricted their intake of LA (i.e., vegetable oils)? A recently published systematic review of 15 clinical trials failed to find ...

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Lock downs no longer a realistic option in US - Cheyenne M #10

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Lock downs no longer a realistic option in US - Cheyenne M #10

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https://news3lv.com/news/nation-world/lockdowns-no-longer-a-realistic-option-in-us-public-health-experts-say

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covid-19 vaccination in the united states

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Lockdowns no longer a 'realistic' option in US, public health experts say

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The White House and public health officials are scrambling to formulate a response to the emergence of a dangerous new COVID-19 variant, but they have downplayed the prospect of reverting to the kind of harsh restrictions seen early in the pandemic as the evolution of the virus threatens to derail the nation’s pursuit of a return to normalcy.

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Millions suffering from diet related diseases - Cheyenne M #9

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Millions suffering from diet related diseases - Cheyenne M #9

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/healthy-eating-obesity-diabetes-heart-diseases/2021/11/30/3b4e2cfc-51fe-11ec-9267-17ae3bde2f26_story.html

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I recently tuned in to a congressional hearing on nutrition, hoping to pick up pointers on delivering effective healthy eating messages. Readers sometimes perceive my potentially lifesaving suggestions as an impingement on their right to eat what they want.

I can't determine what they eat. But if I can convince them to put down the chips and pick up the carrots, they just might thank me later.

Here's what I'm up against, however: When it comes to conveying the magnitude of human suffering caused by diet-related diseases, there appears to be no number large enough to provoke the national body politic into action.

The experts who testified Nov. 2 before the Senate Agriculture subcommittee on food and nutrition were calling for an overhaul of the nation's food system. Produce more foods that promote health, not disease, they urged. And make those foods affordable and accessible for everybody. Big numbers were used to help them make the case - the kind of numbers you would think might make all of us pay attention.

Americans who suffer from diet-related conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity are 12 times more likely to die after a covid infection, said Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

That sobering statistic came weeks before it was announced that omicron, a new coronavirus variant, is out there causing concern. Had it been delivered this week, might there have been a renewed sense of urgency for us to get our health acts together?

More than 100 million Americans - nearly half of all adults - suffer from diabetes or prediabetes, Mozaffarian told lawmakers at the hearing. And about 122 million have cardiovascular disease, which kills roughly 840,000 people each year.

"In short, more Americans are sick or suffer from major medical conditions than are healthy, and much of this is related to diet-related illness," Mozaffarian said.

Big numbers, but sadly not new numbers.

We're a big, rich country, riddled with disease, trying to appear strong - and we've been that way for some time.

And if you're a Black person, those numbers mean you likely will have an even worse outcome.

Angela Odoms-Young, associate professor and director of Food and Nutrition Education in Communities Program at Cornell University, noted that 49.6 percent of Black adults are considered overweight if not obese. Black people are also 60 percent more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than White people.

And in 2020, the year covid-19 hit the United States, African Americans were disproportionately impacted by the virus, many due to those same underlying diseases of obesity and diabetes. In total, Black people experienced a 2.9 year decrease in life expectancy causing the Black-White life expectancy gap to widen from 3.6 to 5 years. In a single year.

Five years of life is a big number.

Those two experts, along with many others, have been going around for years sounding the alarm, watching the suffering get worse and worse and the numbers grow larger and larger.

After the hearings, I asked Mozaffarian why the response to such a national catastrophe has been so muted. Legislation had been introduced in 1969 to establish a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health that would to put an end to hunger in America and to improve the nutritional well-being of its people. A little more than 40 years later, first lady Michelle Obama launched an initiative to get kids to move and eat healthier foods, and it was criticized despite rising rates of obesity among children.

Now we have the Biden administration's "Build Back Better" legislation, which would funnel billions of dollars into enhancing the supply chain for the existing food system. But that's nothing close to the overhaul that this food-poisoned nation requires.

Mozaffarian said he sometimes finds the slow pace of progress "deeply frustrating, dismaying, keeps me up at night and drives me crazy." Still, he manages to keep his research and his messaging sharp.

"If we just talk about health consequences and people dying, somehow most people just shrug," he said, "but when you add in economic costs, you get more people paying attention."

He pointed me to a recent analysis from the Rockefeller Foundation on "The True Cost of Food" that said the nation spends $1.1 trillion on food, and loses another $1.1 trillion in health-care spending and lost productivity attributable to diet-related diseases.

"This is not a path for balanced government budgets, thriving U.S. businesses, or a competitive national economy," he said. "And if you talk about the environmental consequences of unsustainable food production, you get another fraction."

And while Black and other people of color are disproportionately impacted by many of these diseases, Mozaffarian noted that millions of White people are also dying from diet-related illnesses, covid-19 and the combination of the two. "Let the people in the red states know that they would also benefit from more accessible and affordable healthy foods," he said.

After all, not everyone has that access.

"For many Americans, systemic and structural disadvantage moves good health out of their reach," Odoms-Young said. "A common saying in public health is that your 'Zip code matters more than your genetic code.' You can't blame somebody for choosing potato chips over an apple if there are no apples."

An overhauled national food system would break down historic barriers rooted in racism and exploitation of the poor, she said. Food deserts and food swamps would be eliminated. There would be equity in city planning, investments made in locally controlled supply chains - urban farms to markets and restaurants, all with an eye toward promoting the economic health of a community as well as the physical and mental health of its residents.

But maybe a bigger number is needed to get our attention.

Mission: Readiness, a nonpartisan organization of nearly 800 retired U.S. generals, admirals, and other military leaders, found that poor nutrition has made millions of young people ineligible to serve in the military - and the top medical reason is obesity.

So, millions with diabetes. Millions with cardiovascular disease. And millions unable to defend the nation if necessary.

Those are big numbers that add up to a nation facing an incalculable cost.

To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/milloy.

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Perspective | Millions are suffering from diet-related diseases. What number will make us pay attention?

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I recently tuned in to a congressional hearing on nutrition, hoping to pick up pointers on delivering effective healthy eating messages. Readers sometimes perceive my potentially lifesaving suggestions as an impingement on their right to eat what they want. I can't determine what they eat.

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Haley #10 - New Online COVID-19 Mortality Risk Calculator Could Help Determine Who Should Get Vaccines First

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Haley #10 - New Online COVID-19 Mortality Risk Calculator Could Help Determine Who Should Get Vaccines First

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https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2020/new-online-covid-19-mortality-risk-calculator-could-help-determine-who-should-get-vaccines-first

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Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

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Calculator generates mortality risk estimates for individuals and communities based on sociodemographic info and medical history

A new online calculator for estimating individual and community-level risk of dying from COVID-19 has been developed by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The researchers who developed the calculator expect it to be useful to public health authorities for assessing mortality risks in different communities, and for prioritizing certain groups for vaccination as COVID-19 vaccines become available.

The algorithm underlying the calculator uses information from existing large studies to estimate risk of COVID-19 mortality for individuals based on age, gender, sociodemographic factors and a variety of different health conditions. The risk estimates apply to individuals in the general population who are currently uninfected, and captures factors associated with both risk of future infection and complications after infection.

"Our calculator represents a more quantitative approach and should complement other proposed qualitative guidelines, such as those by the National Academy of Sciences and Medicine, for determining individual and community risks and allocating vaccines," says study senior author Nilanjan Chatterjee, PhD, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the departments of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Bloomberg School.

The new risk calculator is presented in a paper that appears in the journal Nature Medicine.

The researchers also collaborated with PolicyMap, Inc. to develop interactive maps for viewing numbers and the proportion of individuals at various levels of risks across U.S. cities, counties and states. These maps will allow local policymakers to plan for vaccination, shielding high-risk individuals, and other targeted intervention efforts.

COVID-19, the pandemic infectious disease that has swept the world over the past ten months, afflicting nearly 70 million people and killing more than 1.5 million worldwide, can affect different people in starkly different ways. Children and young adults may suffer very mild disease or no symptoms at all, whereas the elderly have infection mortality rates of at least several percent. There are also clear ethnic and racial differences-Black and Latinx patients in the U.S., for example, have died of COVID-19 infections at much higher rates than white patients-as well as differences linked to preexisting medical conditions such as diabetes.

"Although we have long known about factors associated with greater mortality, there has been limited effort to incorporate these factors into prevention strategies and forecasting models," Chatterjee says.

He and his team developed their risk model using several COVID-19-related datasets, including from a large U.K.-based study and state-level death rates published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and then validated the model for predicting community-level mortality rates using recent deaths across U.S. cities and counties.

The calculator based on the model is available online for public health officials and interested individuals alike. It enables a user to determine individual risk based on factors such as age, sex, race/ethnicity, and medical history and can be used to define risk for a group, such as for a particular community, corporation, or university, based on the mix of relevant factors that define the group.

In their paper, Chatterjee and colleagues used their calculator to describe the risk distribution for the whole U.S. population, showing, for example, that only about four percent of the population at high risk-defined as five times greater risk than the U.S. average-is expected to contribute close to 50 percent of the total deaths. The researchers also showed that population-level risk varies considerably from city to city and county to county. "For example, the percentage of the adult population exceeding the fivefold risk threshold varies from 0.4 percent in Layton, Utah, to 10.7 percent in Detroit, Michigan," Chatterjee says.

The calculator allows users to calculate mortality risk of individuals by combining information on individual-level factors with community-level pandemic dynamics, as available from a large variety of forecasting models. Thus, when a big wave of infections hits a population, the risk estimates for individuals will rise in that community. Currently, the tool is updated on a weekly basis to incorporate information on state-level pandemic dynamics.

Chatterjee and his colleagues expect that their calculator will be useful in setting priorities for allocating early COVID-19 vaccines and other scarce preventive resources such as N95 masks. Proposed guidelines from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine put frontline medical workers in the top-priority category to maximize societal benefits and minimize the chance that they will infect others, but most other priority categories are based broadly on estimated risks for infection and disease severity and, for example, give higher priority to the elderly and to people with conditions such as diabetes.

"People may understand broadly that with a preexisting condition such as obesity or diabetes, for example, they are at higher risk, but with our calculator they should be able to understand their risk in a way that takes multiple factors into account," Chatterjee says.

"Assessment of Individual- and Community-level Risks for COVID-19 Mortality in the US and Implications for Vaccine Distribution" was written by Jin Jin, Neha Agarwala Prosenjit Kundu, Benjamin Harvey, Yuqi Zhang, Eliza Wallace, and Nilanjan Chatterjee.

Funding for the research came from the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship endowment.

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Media contacts: Carly Kempler at ckemple2@jhu.edu and Barbara Benham at bbenham1@jhu.edu.

For more information on the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, visit our COVID-19 Expert Insights site.

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New Online COVID-19 Mortality Risk Calculator Could Help Determine Who Should Get Vaccines First | Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

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A new online calculator for estimating individual and community-level risk of dying from COVID-19 has been developed by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The researchers who developed the calculator expect it to be useful to public health authorities for assessing mortality risks in different communities, and for prioritizing certain groups for vaccination as COVID-19 vaccines become available.

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Haley #9 - NGOs scramble to dampen COVID-19's impact on people living with HIV

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Haley #9 - NGOs scramble to dampen COVID-19's impact on people living with HIV

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https://news.trust.org/item/20211018093741-zd72z/

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HIV professionals battling to maintain services during the coronavirus pandemic have been adopting innovative methods - from mailing out prescriptions to scaling up self-testing and video consultations

* Global HIV/AIDS fight 'knocked off track' by COVID-19

* Testing rates fall, treatment targets missed

* Experts say creative solutions help avert bigger setback

By Benjamin Ryan and Kim Harrisberg

NEW YORK/PIETERMARITZBURG, South Africa, Oct 18 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - South African domestic worker Mabuyi Dlamini always dreaded the bumpy, day-long minibus journey she had to make each month to pick up her HIV medication from the nearest clinic in KwaZulu-Natal province.

So when a mobile medical service carrying nurses, counsellors and supplies of antiretroviral drugs began visiting her district two years ago, she was relieved. During COVID-19 lockdowns that made travel impossible, it became a lifeline.

"It has saved me time, money and my health," said Dlamini, 46, as she waited in line with farm workers next to the blue minivan on a dirt road bordered by thick, green sugarcane crops.

HIV professionals battling to maintain services during the coronavirus pandemic have been adopting similarly innovative methods - from mailing out prescriptions to scaling up self-testing and video consultations.

Their creative approach appears to have helped buck forecasts for a plunge in global HIV treatment rates, though international organisations say the coronavirus has still dealt a blow to the global fight against HIV.

But even before COVID-19, a target set by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) for 73% of HIV-positive people to be on antiretroviral drugs and have a fully suppressed virus was missed.

And there were an estimated 1.5 million new infections and 680,000 AIDS-related deaths in 2020, far higher than the UNAIDS goal to limit both to 500,000 per year.

"COVID has knocked us further off track," said Peter Sands, executive director of the Global Fund, a Geneva-based multilateral organisation that invests some $4 billion per year to fight tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS.

"It's going to be incredibly difficult to get fully back on track on HIV until we have got on top of COVID," he added in a Sept. 22 video conference.

Last year, HIV testing fell 22% in the more than 100 low- and middle-income countries where the organisation invests. At the same time, there was an 11% drop in the number of people reached by HIV prevention programmes.

Sub-Saharan Africa continued to bear the brunt of new transmissions and deaths, according to UNAIDS.

'RESILIENCE'

But there have been bright spots, said Carolyn Amole, senior director of HIV at the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

"Although COVID brought some disruptions to HIV services, particularly in testing and prevention, the global HIV response again demonstrated its resilience," she said.

"We must come together now as a global community to ensure that the gains made in the past two decades are maintained, and that we reach more people with lifesaving HIV prevention and treatment."

Even as COVID-19 strained health services and made access more difficult, the Global Fund said it recorded a 8.8% year-on-year increase last year, to 21.9 million, in the number of people receiving HIV treatment in the nations where it grants resources.

An estimated 37.7 million people are living with HIV worldwide, some 84% of whom have been diagnosed. Some 27.5 million people are receiving the antiretroviral treatment that can increase the lifespan of someone with HIV to near normal.

In South Africa, where approximately 19% of people aged 15 to 49 have HIV, healthcare workers said efforts to piggyback off existing innovations, such as the minibus clinic, have helped them tackle obstacles caused by COVID-19.

The nonprofit Health Systems Trust (HST) in KwaZulu-Natal utilised new and old HIV treatment innovations, including prescribing 12-month allotments of antiretrovirals and delivering them via public lockers to keep people medicated.

These innovations alongside community case management helped roll out testing and treatment - so much so that the number of people treated by the nonprofit actually increased by 3% since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We have recovered lost patients through these innovative solutions," said Joslyn Walker, a KwaZulu-Natal-based programme manager at HST, which piloted the mobile clinic.

'ABSURD MISERY'

In Thailand's capital, HIV clinics have managed to keep the vast majority of people on treatment thanks to swift innovations, said Nittiya Phanuphak, executive director of the Institute of HIV Research and Innovation in Bangkok.

"Nurses adapted themselves quite quickly in trying to design several ways to maintain (antiretroviral treatment)," Phanuphak told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, saying changes had included mailing prescriptions and providing video consultations.

Nevertheless, testing rates in Bangkok's major sexual health clinics have fallen up to 70% during the COVID-19 pandemic, she added.

In Brazil, which has been hard-hit by COVID-19, a rise in poverty is making it harder for HIV-positive people to stay on treatment, said Adriana Bertini of the Barong Institute, a Sao Paulo-based sexual and reproductive health nonprofit.

"We're seeing an absurd misery, to the point where a person cannot go to the doctor because he doesn't have the money to take a bus," she said. "Health has become a luxury, an almost unattainable thing."

To address such hardships, the charity is working with Sao Paulo's health department to offer an antiretroviral delivery service. So far, 200 people have received their medication through the service, with another 600 on a waiting list.

"With this system, we manage to bring them back to treatment, identify how vulnerable they are and offer any other assistance they might need," Bertini said.

(Reporting by Kim Harrisberg in Pietermaritzburg, Benjamin Ryan in New York and Jennifer Ann Thomas in Sao Paulo; Writing by Benjamin Ryan; Additional Reporting by Nanchanok Wongsamuth; Editing by Rachel Savage and Helen Popper. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)
Related Stories: Time is running out, says UN, as HIV targets missed Scrapping gay sex bans key to fighting HIV, says UNAIDS ambassador Global HIV response found to neglect gay and bisexual men, trans women
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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NGOs scramble to dampen COVID-19 impact on people living with HIV

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Global HIV/AIDS fight 'knocked off track' by COVID-19 * Testing rates fall, treatment targets missed * Experts say creative solutions help avert bigger setback By Benjamin Ryan and Kim Harrisberg NEW YORK/PIETERMARITZBURG, South Africa, Oct 18 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - South African domestic worker Mabuyi Dlamini always dreaded the bumpy, day-long minibus journey she had to make each month to pick up her HIV medication from the nearest clinic in KwaZulu-Natal province.

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Haley #8 - COVID-19 experts answer questions about Omicron

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Haley #8 - COVID-19 experts answer questions about Omicron

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https://www.geekwire.com/2021/covid-19-experts-answer-questions-about-the-omicron-variant-and-where-it-may-have-come-from/

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University of Washington researcher Pavitra Roychoudhury (left) and Fred Hutch emeritus director Larry Corey. (UW and Fred Hutch Photos)

There's not a lot known about the new COVID-19 variant Omicron, but what scientists see so far has them on alert.

The variant has dozens of mutations - some suggesting that it might spread quickly and weaken protection from vaccines and natural immunity. It is taking hold in a region in South Africa that includes Johannesburg, as cases rise, and it has been found in specimens from Europe as early as Nov. 19.

Scientists are scrambling to learn more about the variant. How well will vaccines work against Omicron? Do the mutations carry a bite in the real world, or not? Is it capable of outcompeting Delta?

In the next weeks and months, answers to such questions will become clear. And Seattle researchers will have a key role in answering them.

"The scientific community has really pulled together from the first posting of this variant," said Fred Hutch physician-scientist Larry Corey. Researchers in South Africa and Botswana released variant sequences swiftly, shortly before the World Health Organization designated it a "variant of concern" last week and dubbed it "Omicron."

Corey leads the COVID-19 Prevention Network, a research consortium that coordinated clinical trials for several COVID-19 vaccines and that will be investigating Omicron. He and his colleagues have partnerships with the South African Medical Research Council and other groups in the country assessing Omicron, originating in decades of collaborative research on HIV vaccines.

Fred Hutch researchers such as Jesse Bloom and Trevor Bedford have also taken the lead in analyzing the variant's sequences and beginning to assess its potential danger. Bedford, for instance, co-developed the open-source platform Nextstrain, which creates real-time views of virus "family trees."

GeekWire spoke with Corey and with Pavitra Roychoudhury, who coordinates vaccine variant testing efforts at the University of Washington School of Medicine's virology lab, which processes a large proportion of the state's COVID-19 tests.

We asked why scientists are so concerned about Omicron, how they plan to assess the variant, and how they will know when it has reached Washington state. Corey also has an idea about where it came from.
Why are scientists concerned about Omicron?
Omicron carries a large number of mutations found in other variants, as well as new ones. Some of the mutations are associated with reduced responsiveness to vaccination or immunity from natural infection, and they may also render monoclonal antibody therapy less effective. In addition, the variant has some of the same mutations that seem to have made Delta highly infectious, said Corey. "This is a human derived variant that is totally novel," he added.

But whether the virus is as nasty as it seems to be from its sequence will need to first be tested in the lab. "We have to confirm those issues functionally," he said.

Scientists are also concerned about how the virus is acting in human populations. The Johannesburg area where the variant is increasing had a large outbreak of the Delta variant about five months ago, said Corey.

"It's already known that many people who have picked up Omicron have had Delta infection before, because they have a registry to confirm COVID cases. So, we know it can break through Delta," and apparently overcome natural immunity, said Corey. "That's not 100% yet, but the data are highly suggestive."

Corey and other virologists note that they are only starting to learn about the variant. It's still unclear to scientists how all the mutations might interact - sometimes different mutations can even cancel each other out.

"At the end of the day, you have to think about all the mutations together and how that impacts the virus," said Roychoudhury. "I think it just remains to be seen what the actual impact is going to be."
What kind of lab experiments will scientists be doing to assess omicron?
In key lab experiments, researchers will investigate how well antibodies from vaccinated individuals neutralize the virus. They will be testing whole live virus and components of the virus, such as the "spike" protein, the portion of the virus targeted by many vaccines, said Corey. Answers from these lab experiments should provide scientists with a good idea of how vaccines will work against the variant. But more definitive data will require data on human populations.
How long will the lab experiments take, when will we know more?
"Many labs are starting to work on this and hopefully, the data that will come out will be very consistent and tell us exactly what's going on," said Corey. "In my opinion, it's going to take ten days to two weeks to get anything that really is an accurate read."
What types of data will be collected in human populations in South Africa?
"Working with the South Africans, who are measuring the outbreak of the disease there, is important," said Corey. The country is about 30% vaccinated, mainly with Pfizer/BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson shots, enabling comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. Researchers can collect data such as hospitalization rates and disease severity in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, said Corey. "All this kind of information is needed on the ground for us to understand just what the extent of this outbreak will be."

Omicron (in red) has a high number of mutations in a region of the 'spike' protein (S1) compared to other variants. (Nextstrain Plot)

Will Omicron make it to Washington state?
Roychoudhury says there is a good chance there are already cases in the state. "And if that is the case, we will eventually catch it [with our testing]," she added. "It's already reached a number of European countries and so we think that it's just a matter of time, based on what we've seen of the other variants and how long it took for us to detect them here. There's been a lot of travel over the last several months." It is unclear, however, if the variant has the capacity to outcompete Delta, the current dominant strain in the U.S. and much of the world.
How are UW researchers looking for the variant in Washington?
The UW lab performs a large proportion of the state's COVID-19 testing, lately averaging about 10,000 PCR tests per day (PCR tests are the more accurate molecular tests that generally take overnight for a result). The lab also samples positive samples randomly for variant type using whole-genome sequencing. Washington state has one of the highest rates of variant testing of any state, testing about 11% of COVID-19 positive samples since the start of this year, said Roychoudhury.
How could UW testing data help answer questions about Omicron?
Broad testing for variants can help researchers understand questions such as how fast a variant is spreading and the links between infection and hospitalization and vaccination, said Roychoudhury. "Is it more transmissible? Is it causing more severe disease?" she said. "And is it evading current vaccines and making vaccinated people sick? And then is it taking vaccinated people into the hospital?"

"They are heroes, for being so open and helping us."

How did Omicron emerge?
Nobody knows for sure how Omicron arose. But Corey has a hypothesis.

One way new viral strains can arise is by incubating within an immunosuppressed individual long term. That gives the virus time to evolve, perhaps adapting to infect cells more efficiently or to better evade the immune response.

Corey wrote about evidence for this route of COVID-19 virus evolution in a recent publication with Fred Hutch's Bedford and other colleagues. "Unfortunately, that's likely what happened here," said Corey.

"It probably came from an immunosuppressed person with longstanding COVID that developed this, and was then transmitted within families, then within communities," he said. "And then we had maybe a couple other transmissions as it adapted a little bit. That's how these strains arrive."

Corey added that the rise of the new variant "illustrates the importance of global vaccination policy." Not only is vaccine supply limited in some countries, vaccine hesitancy in South Africa and other areas also impedes vaccine uptake, said Corey.
How do the HIV epidemic and COVID-19 pandemic intersect?
Corey notes that untreated HIV-positive individuals have the potential to incubate COVID-19 virus long term. "The most common immunosuppressed person in Sub-Saharan Africa is the untreated person with HIV infection. So, you have two intersecting epidemics," said Corey. "Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of HIV untreated people in the world. So, we need to improve how we handle HIV, especially treatment, as well as involving COVID vaccination strategy with HIV identification and treatment strategy."
What are your colleagues in South Africa saying about the world's response to Omicron? Some countries have implemented travel bans.
"They want to make sure that flights into the country are not stopped because they need the scientific equipment and the supplies to do the research work," Corey said. "And so we have to not treat them as pariahs either." Though buying time before variants spread can help countries prepare, Corey favors increased testing at airports and other measures to detect and contain COVID-19 positive travelers over blanket travel bans.

Added Corey: "They are heroes, for being so open and helping us."
Is it possible vaccine companies may need to reformulate their shots?
Corey oversaw record-time clinical trials for Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and other vaccines, so he knows how to move rapidly. If vaccines need to be reformulated to combat Omicron or another new variant in the future, how long would that take? "We will do it as quickly as humanly possible," he said.

But until more data is collected, scientists will not know how well current vaccines will protect against Omicron, how widely the variant will spread, how infectious it will be, and other key questions.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on Monday urged unvaccinated people to get their shot and strengthened its recommendations for COVID-19 boosters. Previously, adults under 50 not living in long-term care were advised that they "may" get a booster - now the agency recommends that all adults "should" get one.

Added Corey: "I can honestly say boosting is a very good strategy. You want all the antibody you can have."

Join us on December 7th at 11:00 AM PST for a moderated discussion on how to improve the patient experience through standardizing data exchange. Leaders from Opala, an emerging leader in health data, and Premera Blue Cross Blue Shield will discuss barriers and the solutions being created in the health data space. Register today!

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COVID-19 experts answer questions about Omicron - and where the variant may have come from

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There's not a lot known about the new COVID-19 variant Omicron, but what scientists see so far has them on alert. The variant has dozens of mutations - some suggesting that it might spread quickly and weaken protection from vaccines and natural immunity.

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Sam H. #10 Morning exposure to deep red light improves declining eyesight

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Sam H. #10 Morning exposure to deep red light improves declining eyesight

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Just three minutes of exposure to deep red light once a week, when delivered in the morning, can significantly improve declining eyesight, finds a pioneering new study.

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Just three minutes of exposure to deep red light once a week, when delivered in the morning, can significantly improve declining eyesight, finds a pioneering new study by UCL researchers.

Published in Scientific Reports, the study builds on the team's previous work*, which showed daily three-minute exposure to longwave deep red light 'switched on' energy producing mitochondria cells in the human retina, helping boost naturally declining vision.

For this latest study, scientists wanted to establish what effect a single three-minute exposure would have, while also using much lower energy levels than their previous studies. Furthermore, building on separate UCL research in flies** that found mitochondria display 'shifting workloads' depending on the time of day, the team compared morning exposure to afternoon exposure.

In summary, researchers found there was, on average, a 17% improvement in participants' colour contrast vision when exposed to three minutes of 670 nanometre (long wavelength) deep red light in the morning and the effects of this single exposure lasted for at least a week. However, when the same test was conducted in the afternoon, no improvement was seen.

Scientists say the benefits of deep red light, highlighted by the findings, mark a breakthrough for eye health and should lead to affordable home-based eye therapies, helping the millions of people globally with naturally declining vision.

Lead author, Professor Glen Jeffery (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology), said: "We demonstrate that one single exposure to long wave deep red light in the morning can significantly improve declining vision, which is a major health and wellbeing issue, affecting millions of people globally.

"This simple intervention applied at the population level would significantly impact on quality of life as people age and would likely result in reduced social costs that arise from problems associated with reduced vision."
Naturally declining vision and mitochondria
In humans around 40 years old, cells in the eye's retina begin to age, and the pace of this ageing is caused, in part, when the cell's mitochondria, whose role is to produce energy (known as ATP) and boost cell function, also start to decline.

Mitochondrial density is greatest in the retina's photoreceptor cells, which have high energy demands. As a result, the retina ages faster than other organs, with a 70% ATP reduction over life, causing a significant decline in photoreceptor function as they lack the energy to perform their normal role.

In studying the effects of deep red light in humans, researchers built on their previous findings in mice, bumblebees and fruit flies, which all found significant improvements in the function of the retina's photoreceptors when their eyes were exposed to 670 nanometre (long wavelength) deep red light.

"Mitochondria have specific sensitivities to long wavelength light influencing their performance: longer wavelengths spanning 650 to 900nm improve mitochondrial performance to increase energy production," said Professor Jeffery.
Morning and afternoon studies
The retina's photoreceptor population is formed of cones, which mediate colour vision, and rods, which adapt vision in low/dim light. This study focused on cones*** and observed colour contrast sensitivity, along the protan axis (measuring red-green contrast) and the tritan axis (blue-yellow).

All the participants were aged between 34 and 70, had no ocular disease, completed a questionnaire regarding eye health prior to testing, and had normal colour vision (cone function). This was assessed using a 'Chroma Test': identifying coloured letters that had very low contrast and appeared increasingly blurred, a process called colour contrast.

Using a provided LED device all 20 participants (13 female and 7 male) were exposed to three minutes of 670nm deep red light in the morning between 8am and 9am. Their colour vision was then tested again three hours post exposure and 10 of the participants were also tested one week post exposure.

On average there was a 'significant' 17% improvement in colour vision, which lasted a week in tested participants; in some older participants there was a 20% improvement, also lasting a week.

A few months on from the first test (ensuring any positive effects of the deep red light had been 'washed out') six (three female, three male) of the 20 participants, carried out the same test in the afternoon, between 12pm to 1pm. When participants then had their colour vision tested again, it showed zero improvement.

Professor Jeffery said: "Using a simple LED device once a week, recharges the energy system that has declined in the retina cells, rather like re-charging a battery.

"And morning exposure is absolutely key to achieving improvements in declining vision: as we have previously seen in flies, mitochondria have shifting work patterns and do not respond in the same way to light in the afternoon -- this study confirms this."

For this study the light energy emitted by the LED torch was just 8mW/cm2, rather than 40mW/cm2, which they had previously used. This has the effect of dimming the light but does not affect the wavelength. While both energy levels are perfectly safe for the human eye, reducing the energy further is an additional benefit.
Home-based affordable eye therapies
With a paucity of affordable deep red-light eye-therapies available, Professor Jeffery has been working for no commercial gain with Planet Lighting UK, a small company in Wales and others, with the aim of producing 670nm infra-red eye ware at an affordable cost, in contrast to some other LED devices designed to improve vision available in the US for over $20,000.

"The technology is simple and very safe; the energy delivered by 670nm long wave light is not that much greater than that found in natural environmental light," Professor Jeffery said.

"Given its simplicity, I am confident an easy-to-use device can be made available at an affordable cost to the general public.

"In the near future, a once a week three-minute exposure to deep red light could be done while making a coffee, or on the commute listening to a podcast, and such a simple addition could transform eye care and vision around the world."
Study limitations
Despite the clarity of the results, researchers say some of the data are "noisy." While positive effects are clear for individuals following 670nm exposure, the magnitude of improvements can vary markedly between those of similar ages. Therefore, some caution is needed in interpretating the data. It is possible that there are other variables between individuals that influence the degree of improvement that the researchers have not identified so far and would require a larger sample size.

This research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and Sight Research UK.

To help meet the costs of this research and future research, Professor Glen Jeffery's Lab at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology receives donations via UCL's Give Now platform.

*Declining eyesight improved by looking at deep red light & Journals of Gerontology

** 'A day in the life of mitochondria reveals shifting workloads' in Scientific Reports

***Only cones not rods were tested in this study; similar previous research identified a comparable effect on cones and rods, satisfying the team any effect on cones could be translated to rods.

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eye care; vitamin d; medical devices; healthy aging; perception; tinnitus; brain injury; sleep disorders

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Morning exposure to deep red light improves declining eyesight

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Just three minutes of exposure to deep red light once a week, when delivered in the morning, can significantly improve declining eyesight, finds a pioneering new study by UCL researchers. Published in Scientific Reports, the study builds on the team's previous work*, which showed daily three-minute exposure to longwave deep red light 'switched on' energy producing mitochondria cells in the human retina, helping boost naturally declining vision.

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 Sam H. #9 An mRNA vaccine against tick bites

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 Sam H. #9 An mRNA vaccine against tick bites

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An anti-tick mRNA vaccine shows promise in guinea pigs, causing early detachment and reduced transmission of Lyme disease–causing pathogens.

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An anti-tick mRNA vaccine shows promise in guinea pigs, causing early detachment and reduced transmission of Lyme disease-causing pathogens.

Black-legged ticks transmit many pathogens, including Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease, a condition that can lead to long-term health problems.

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An anti-tick mRNA vaccine shows promise in guinea pigs, causing early detachment and reduced transmission of Lyme disease-causing pathogens. Black-legged ticks transmit many pathogens, including Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease, a condition that can lead to long-term health problems.

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Hidden fungal networks cover the world—and soon they’ll be mapped-Chenelle M #11

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Hidden fungal networks cover the world—and soon they’ll be mapped-Chenelle M #11

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Hidden fungal networks cover the world—and soon they’ll be mapped

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In a first, the nonprofit SPUN will map global fungal networks, which support ecosystems and make for excellent carbon sinks.

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Isaac #11 Premature birth rates are higher in expectant mothers with STIs 

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Isaac #11 Premature birth rates are higher in expectant mothers with STIs 

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Expectant mothers with STIs more likely to give birth prematurely, study finds

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Having chlamydia, gonorrhea or syphilis has been associated with a higher risk of giving birth too early, according to a new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

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Isaac #10 Can fruit fly research increase the lifespan of cancer patients? 

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Isaac #10 Can fruit fly research increase the lifespan of cancer patients? 

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The experience of a fruit fly dying from cancer may seem worlds away from that of a human with a life-threatening tumor, yet University of California, Berkeley, researchers are finding commonalities between the two that could lead to ways to prolong the lives of cancer patients.

Fruit fly research is already pointing to a new anti-cancer strategy distinct from the conventional goal of destroying the tumor or cancerous cells. Instead, the research suggests, launching an attack against the destructive chemicals the cancer is throwing off could increase survival rates and improve patients' health.

"It's a really complementary way of thinking about therapy," said David Bilder, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology. "You're trying to help the host deal with the effects of the tumor, rather than killing the tumor itself."

Jung Kim, a postdoctoral fellow in Bilder's lab, recently discovered that tumors in fruit flies release a chemical that compromises the barrier between the bloodstream and the brain, letting the two environments mix -- a recipe for disaster in numerous diseases, including infection, trauma and even obesity. In collaboration with the labs of UC Berkeley professors David Raulet and Kaoru Saijo, Kim and Bilder subsequently demonstrated that tumors in mice that release the same chemical, a cytokine called interleukin-6 (IL-6), also make the blood-brain barrier leaky.

More importantly, they were able to extend the lifespan of both fruit flies and mice with malignant tumors by blocking the effect of the cytokine on the barrier.

"The IL-6 cytokine is known to cause inflammation. What's new here is that this tumor-induced inflammation is actually causing the blood-brain barrier to open. If we interfere with that opening process but leave the tumor alone, then the host can live significantly longer and healthier with the same tumor burden," Bilder said.

IL-6 plays other important roles in the body, so to benefit cancer patients, scientists would have to find a drug that blocks its action at the blood-brain barrier without altering its effects elsewhere. But such a drug could potentially extend the life span and health span of human cancer patients, he said.

Six years ago, Bilder's team found that tumors in fruit flies also release a substance that blocks the effects of insulin, providing a potential explanation for the tissue wasting called cachexia that kills one-fifth of all cancer patients. That work is now being explored by numerous labs around the world.

One advantage of helping the host fend off a tumor's effects on tissues far from the tumor site is that it could potentially reduce or even eliminate the need for toxic drugs typically used to subdue tumors. Such drugs also harm the patient, killing healthy cells as well as cancerous cells.

Beyond these side effects, targeting tumor cells "also selects for resistance in the tumor, because the tumor has genetic variability -- a drug-resistant clone arises that will then cause cancer recurrence," he said. "But if you could target the host cells, they have a stable genome and are not going to gain resistance to these drugs. That's our goal: to understand the ways that the tumor is affecting the host and attack the host side of the tumor-host dialogue."

Bilder and his colleagues published their work on IL-6 disruption of the blood-brain barrier last week in the journal Developmental Cell, and he authored a review of the impact that fruit fly research has had on understanding tumor-host interactions that was published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer. Their cachexia work appeared in 2015 in Developmental Cell.
What actually kills cancer patients?
According to Bilder, scientists still are uncertain what causes death in many cancer patients. Cancer of the liver, for example, clearly destroys the function of an organ essential for life. However, other organs, like the skin or the ovaries, are less critical, yet people die from cancer in these sites, too, sometimes very quickly. And though cancers often metastasize to other organs -- multiple organ failure is one of the main causes of cancer death listed by doctors -- Bilder questions if that's the whole story.

"Many human cancers are metastatic, but that doesn't change the basic question: Why does the cancer kill?" he said. "If your tumor metastasized to the lung, are you dying because of lung failure or are you dying from something else?"

For that reason, he works with non-metastatic tumors implanted in fruit flies and mice and looks for systemic effects, not merely the effects on the tumor-containing organ itself.

One systemic effect of cancer is cachexia, the inability to maintain weight, which leads to wasting of muscle even when the patient is receiving intravenous nutrition. While Bilder discovered one possible reason for this -- cancers release a chemical that prevents insulin from storing energy in the body -- other scientists have found additional substances released by cancers that may also be responsible for tissue wasting.

Like cachexia, breaches in the blood-brain barrier may be another long-distance effect of tumors. In the new study, the researchers found that blocking the activity of IL-6 at the blood-brain barrier increased the lifespan of flies with cancer by 45%. Laboratory mice must be euthanized before they suffer and die from experimental cancer, but the team found that after 21 days, 75% of cancer-carrying mice treated with an IL-6 receptor blocker were alive, versus only 25% of untreated mice with cancer.

"It's not just the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier that's killing the animals," Bilder said. "Flies can live for three or four weeks with a leaky blood-brain barrier, whereas, if they have a tumor, they die almost immediately when the barrier is compromised. So, we think that the tumor is causing something else to happen. Maybe it's putting something in circulation that then gets through the broken barrier, though it could also be something going the other way, from the brain into the blood."

Bilder has found additional cancer-produced chemicals in flies that he's linked to edema -- bloating from excess fluid retention -- and excess blood clotting, which leads to blocked veins. Both conditions frequently accompany cancer. Other researchers have found tumor-produced fly chemicals linked to anorexia -- the loss of appetite -- and to immune disfunction, which also are symptoms of many cancers.

Bilder said that studying cancer in fruit flies offers several advantages over cancer models in other animals, such as mice and rats. For one thing, researchers can follow flies right up to the moment of death, in order to determine what actually causes mortality. Ethical concerns prevent researchers from allowing vertebrates to suffer, so research animals are euthanized before they die naturally, preventing a full understanding of the ultimate cause of death. For these animals, tumor size is used as a proxy to assess an animal's chance of survival.

"We're incredibly excited about the potential to look directly at survival and life span," he said. "We think that this is a real blind spot that hasn't allowed scientists to address questions about how the tumor is actually killing outside of its local growth. That's not to say that tumor size is misleading, but fruit flies give us a complementary way of looking at what cancer is doing."

And while most cancer studies in rodents involve just a few dozen animals, fruit fly experiments can involve many hundreds of individuals, which improves the statistical significance of the results. Fruit flies also reproduce quickly and have short natural life spans, allowing quicker studies.

Bilder acknowledges that fruit flies and humans are only distantly related, but in the past, these flies -- Drosophila melanogaster -- have played a key role in understanding tumor growth factors and oncogenes. Fruit flies now could also be key in understanding cancer's systemic effects.

"Not only can flies get tumors that resemble human tumors, which we described 20 years ago, but we're now seeing that the host response has remarkable similarities in cachexia, coagulopathies, immune response, cytokine production, all of these things," he said. "I think it (the tumor-host response in fruit flies) is a superrich area. Our hope is to bring attention to the field and attract other people to work in it, both from the fly perspective and from the cancer biology and clinician perspective."

Co-authors of the new paper include UC Berkeley postdoc Hsiu-Chun Chuang, graduate student Natalie Wolf and former doctoral student Christopher Nicolai.The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (GM090150, GM130388, AI113041, HD092093).

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brain tumor; cancer; lung cancer; colon cancer; mice; animals; biology; veterinary medicine

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Can fruit fly research help improve survival of cancer patients? New anti-cancer strategy -- blocking chemicals produced by tumors -- could boost life span, health span

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Scientists don't really know what kills many cancer patients, but fruit fly research could provide answers. By following flies with tumors up to the point of death, researchers have discovered chemicals produced by tumors that shorten life span apart from the damage done locally to critical organs.

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Isaac #9 Identification and prevention of obesity by blocking genes that cause obesity 

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Isaac #9 Identification and prevention of obesity by blocking genes that cause obesity 

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Promising news in the effort to develop drugs to treat obesity: University of Virginia scientists have identified 14 genes that can cause and three that can prevent weight gain. The findings pave the way for treatments to combat a health problem that affects more than 40% of American adults.

"We know of hundreds of gene variants that are more likely to show up in individuals suffering obesity and other diseases. But 'more likely to show up' does not mean causing the disease. This uncertainty is a major barrier to exploit the power of population genomics to identify targets to treat or cure obesity. To overcome this barrier, we developed an automated pipeline to simultaneously test hundreds of genes for a causal role in obesity. Our first round of experiments uncovered more than a dozen genes that cause and three genes that prevent obesity," said Eyleen O'Rourke of UVA's College of Arts & Sciences, the School of Medicine's Department of Cell Biology and the Robert M. Berne Cardiovascular Research Center. "We anticipate that our approach and the new genes we uncovered will accelerate the development of treatments to reduce the burden of obesity."
OBESITY AND OUR GENES
O'Rourke's new research helps shed light on the complex intersections of obesity, diet and our DNA. Obesity has become an epidemic, driven in large part by high-calorie diets laden with sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Increasingly sedentary lifestyles play a big part as well. But our genes play an important role too, regulating fat storage and affecting how well our bodies burn food as fuel. So if we can identify the genes that convert excessive food into fat, we could seek to inactivate them with drugs and uncouple excessive eating from obesity.

Genomicists have identified hundreds of genes associated with obesity -- meaning the genes are more or less prevalent in people who are obese than in people with healthy weight. The challenge is determining which genes play causal roles by directly promoting or helping prevent weight gain. To sort wheat from chaff, O'Rourke and her team turned to humble worms known as C. elegans. These tiny worms like to live in rotting vegetation and enjoy feasting on microbes. However, they share more than 70% of our genes, and, like people, they become obese if they are fed excessive amounts of sugar.

The worms have produced great benefits for science. They've been used to decipher how common drugs, including the antidepressant Prozac and the glucose-stabilizing metformin, work. Even more impressively, in the last 20 years three Nobel prizes were awarded for the discovery of cellular processes first observed in worms but then found to be critical to diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration. They've also been fundamental to the development of therapeutics based on RNA technology.

In new work just published in the scientific journal PLOS Genetics, O'Rourke and her collaborators used the worms to screen 293 genes associated with obesity in people, with the goal of defining which of the genes were actually causing or preventing obesity. They did this by developing a worm model of obesity, feeding some a regular diet and some a high-fructose diet.

This obesity model, coupled to automation and supervised machine learning-assisted testing, allowed them to identify 14 genes that cause obesity and three that help prevent it. Enticingly, they found that blocking the action of the three genes that prevented the worms from becoming obese also led to them living longer and having better neuro-locomotory function. Those are exactly the type of benefits drug developers would hope to obtain from anti-obesity medicines.

More work needs to be done, of course. But the researchers say the indicators are encouraging. For example, blocking the effect of one of the genes in lab mice prevented weight gain, improved insulin sensitivity and lowered blood sugar levels. These results (plus the fact that the genes under study were chosen because they were associated with obesity in humans) bode well that the results will hold true in people as well, the researchers say.

"Anti-obesity therapies are urgently needed to reduce the burden of obesity in patients and the healthcare system," O'Rourke said. "Our combination of human genomics with causality tests in model animals promises yielding anti-obesity targets more likely to succeed in clinical trials because of their anticipated increased efficacy and reduced side effects."

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obesity; diet and weight loss; genes; fitness; staying healthy; nutrition; diseases and conditions; medical topics

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Scientists discover 14 genes that cause obesity: Findings could decouple overeating from harmful health effects

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Promising news in the effort to develop drugs to treat obesity: University of Virginia scientists have identified 14 genes that can cause and three that can prevent weight gain. The findings pave the way for treatments to combat a health problem that affects more than 40% of American adults.

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Isaac #8 Important questions in regards to the omicron variant

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Isaac #8 Important questions in regards to the omicron variant

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3 important questions about the Omicron variant

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The variant has caught the attention of public health researchers across the world largely because of its unusual set of mutations.

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Isaac #7 Covid long haul patients with complications 

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Isaac #7 Covid long haul patients with complications 

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Before she became sick with a coronavirus infection in January, Semhar Fisseha was a healthy, active 39-year-old.

She took walks every day and planned summer vacations with her nine-year-old daughter. Now, even activities that many people take for granted can come at a big cost.

"I woke up with a deep fatigue," she says in an audio diary one October morning.

"I had a four-activity day yesterday - I showered, I bathed my daughter, I went for a walk, and I washed the dishes."

Fisseha also experiences chest pain and a racing heart.

"My heart rate has been pretty up and down," she says in another audio diary. "It's gone up to 120s, 130s without any real activity."

Fisseha is a senior administrator at Weill Cornell Medicine. Some days, she wakes up feeling optimistic, like she will be able to cross a lot off her to-do list: Shower, work a full work day, prepare lunch and dinner for her daughter.

But she can become drained just from talking during work meetings, forcing her to rethink her plans.

The deep fatigue Fisseha experiences is one of the most frequently reported long-term effects of COVID-19. It's known as "post-exertional malaise," a worsening of symptoms such as pain or fatigue after physical or mental exertion.

"I was active and social and to go from that to basically being homebound and having to calculate the energy that I have for just the basic activities that I took for granted before - how do you wrap your mind around that?" she said.

The National Institutes of Health refers to these long-term effects as " post-acute sequelae of Sars-CoV-2 infection", or PASC.

One study found more than 200 symptoms associated with long COVID, many of which affect multiple organs or systems within the body. Some patients experience issues with their autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for breathing, digestion and blood pressure. Some have developed mast cell activation syndrome, a condition that results in increased risk of anaphylaxis. Many also report brain fog, trouble with their memory and concentration.

Johns Hopkins assembles a crack team

Patients who have long COVID are desperate for answers that doctors might not have.

"It's really important that we recognize and admit that we do not have all the answers," says pulmonologist Dr. Ann Parker, co-founder and co-director of Johns Hopkins Post-Acute COVID Team ( JH PACT).

"[With] medicine, it's very rewarding to be able to point to a specific test and make a diagnosis and put it all together in a nice package with a tidy bow. But a lot of things in medicine are messy, and this is one of them."

No one really knows how common long COVID really is, but it isn't rare.

A study published in JAMA Network Open found that about 30% of participants across multiple age ranges reported persistent symptoms more than six months after their COVID-19 infections. The American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation estimates that between three and 14 million people in the United States could experience persistent symptoms.

Other, more conservative estimates based on data from more than 1 million people in the UK, put prevalence of long COVID at around 5%. That would equate to a little over 2 million Americans.

For some people, long COVID is temporary, and those symptoms can fade after a few months. For others like Fisseha, long COVID feels like a new reality.

"What complicates things is there's no straight kind of cookie-cutter way to approach treatment," says Dr. Alba Azola, who is co-director of the JH PACT program.

"There's certainly patterns emerging in terms of clinical presentation, but every patient is different."

Because there is no singular approach to treatment, Johns Hopkins has brought together all sorts of specialists as part of JH PACT. This includes physical therapists and rehab specialists like Dr. Azola, as well as neuropsychologists and pulmonologists.

One of their approaches is simply time.

Doctors typically spend between 13 and 24 minutes with their patients. At JH PACT, Dr. Parker and other physicians spend at least an hour to cover as much as possible, from past illnesses and conditions to family medical history. That can be a lot to remember.

"Sometimes it's helpful [if] they keep a diary or keep notes, which a lot of our patients do," Dr. Parker said. "Both through their initial illness and then throughout their recovery."

The more information patients can share with her, the more she can focus on their most limiting symptoms.

"For some folks, it can feel like there's a mountain ahead of them, a mountain of various symptoms and challenges in their recovery. So I hope that it's helpful to sort of break that down so each piece is more addressable in turn, instead of trying to conquer everything at once," Dr. Parker said.

What patients can learn from chronic fatigue syndrome

There is still a long way to go in figuring out what long COVID is and how it affects people's bodies, let alone predicting how long it could be until symptoms go away, if they ever do.

Alison Sbrana knows better than most people what that "if" means.

She has myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). It's a disease with a lot of symptoms that overlap with long COVID.

Sbrana knows what it's like to cope with getting sick and never recovering. It is part of the reason she is a board member of Body Politic, a health justice organization that runs a support group for people with long COVID.

Sometimes, people join the group and ask, "How long do I have to live like this?" Sbrana doesn't have that answer - nobody does - so, instead, she tells them: "This might be a new normal for you and you need to figure out how to build a fulfilling life with how your body and your brain is right now."

She acknowledges it might be difficult at first.

"On the other hand, you need to hold space always for hope that there might be a new treatment or protocol that helps improve your functioning."

One thing that might help is disability accommodations.

"In this time, they very likely have a disability and would qualify for accommodations at work or school. They might qualify for the disability benefits that they have through work or Social Security," Sbrana said.

But there are barriers to getting those disability benefits. Many long COVID patients never received a positive COVID test because they were in short supply at the beginning of the pandemic. Still others are having trouble proving they have long COVID because their blood work is clean and other tests look normal.

"There is this presumption that perhaps it's just depression or anxiety, or perhaps it's the pandemic or the state of the world, but people know when there's something wrong with them," says Jaime Seltzer, director of scientific and medical outreach at #MEAction, which advocates for people with ME/CFS.

She says there are lessons doctors and researchers can learn from people like herself.

"People with chronic complex disease have been living with this for decades. Researchers have been studying this for decades," Seltzer says. "We definitely need to make use of the path that we've beaten down over time and start basing our hypotheses off of what we've seen in these diseases with other labels."

For some people, long COVID won't go away any time soon, but the hope always remains.

Fisseha has spent the last nine months addressing each piece of her disease, and lately, she's been having more good days in between the bad ones. She is no longer stuck inside her third-floor walkup in Brooklyn. And she has learnt to appreciate the little wins along the way.

"I celebrate being able to go get the mail. I can even walk to the corner of my block and walk back," Fisseha said. "Being able to walk for 10 minutes for me is a big deal."

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For patients with long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome may offer a guiding star

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Before she became sick with a coronavirus infection in January, Semhar Fisseha was a healthy, active 39-year-old. She took walks every day and planned summer vacations with her nine-year-old daughter. Now, even activities that many people take for granted can come at a big cost.

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Isaac #6 New covid variant poses a high risk for global health 

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Isaac #6 New covid variant poses a high risk for global health 

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The World Health Organization is warning that the new omicron variant of the coronavirus poses a "very high" global risk because of the possibility that it spreads more easily and might resist vaccines and immunity in people who were infected with previous strains.

In a technical brief issued Sunday, the WHO warned its 194 member states that the new variant's numerous mutations "may confer immune escape potential and possibly transmissibility advantage," and as a result "the likelihood of potential further spread of omicron at the global level is high."

It says that the risk to vulnerable populations - especially in countries with low vaccination rates - could be "substantial."

However, it cautions that there's still considerable uncertainty about the virus, including how easily it spreads, how dangerous it is, whether it can evade vaccines and immunity, how it responds to diagnostic tests and therapeutics, and even its specific symptoms.

"The vaccines were designed, basically, to keep people out of hospital, and they've stood up and they've done that very well," Dr. Margaret Harris, a public health doctor and WHO spokesperson, told NPR's Morning Edition on Monday. "So we really need to know whether this particular version is going to change that picture."

The omicron variant was first reported last week in South Africa, where infections attributed to the new strain have risen sharply in recent days. Since then, it has been found in more than a dozen countries, including Botswana, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Israel, Australia and Hong Kong.

So far, there have been no reported deaths linked to the omicron variant. Meanwhile, many countries including the U.S. have reimposedsome travel restrictions in an effort to stem the spread of the new variant.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has yet to announce any omicron cases in the U.S., though the White House chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that he believes it's inevitable at some point.

In response to omicron, the CDC on Monday strengthened and simplified its advice on who should get a COVID-19 vaccine booster.

"Everyone ages 18 and older should get a booster shot either when they are 6 months after their initial Pfizer or Moderna series or 2 months after their initial J&J vaccine," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in an statement.

This replaces guidance that said people ages 18 and older but younger than 50 may receive a booster and others in certain at-risk categories or 50 and older should get a booster.

The WHO on Sunday warned of possible "future surges of COVID-19, which could have severe consequences, depending on a number of factors including where surges may take place."

The brief advises nations to enhance surveillance and sequencing efforts and accelerate COVID-19 vaccination coverage. It also advises renewed social distancing restrictions and contact tracing.

"In anticipation of increased COVID-19 caseloads and associated pressure on the health system, ensure mitigation plans are in place to maintain essential health services and necessary health care resources are in place to respond to potential surges," it advises.

Speaking on Monday, the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: "Global health security is too important to be left to chance, or goodwill, or shifting geopolitical currents, or the vested interests of companies and shareholders."

"Omicron demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics," he said, noting that the new variant's emergence shows how "perilous and precarious" the current situation is.

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The World Health Organization warns of very high risk posed by the omicron variant

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The World Health Organization is warning that the new omicron variant of the coronavirus poses a "very high" global risk because of the possibility that it spreads more easily and might resist vaccines and immunity in people who were infected with previous strains.

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Isaac #5 Mass vaccination is the best way to fight off covid, states Bidon

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Isaac #5 Mass vaccination is the best way to fight off covid, states Bidon

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President Biden said Monday that while travel restrictions imposed on travelers from several southern African nations would slow the entry of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, "it cannot prevent it."

"Sooner or later, we're going to see cases," he said in an address to the American people.

Biden added: "This variant is a cause for concern - not a cause for panic."

He reiterated his plea for American to get vaccinated as a way to protect themselves against COVID.

"The best protection against this variant or any of the variants out there is getting fully vaccinated and getting a booster shot," he said.

Biden said scientists didn't think that extra measures would be needed to fight the new variant, but added his administration was working with vaccine manufacturers to develop vaccines or boosters against omicron if needed.

The president's remarks come the same day his administration's new travel restrictions in response to the omicron variant went into effect.

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Biden says omicron variant is cause for concern but not panic

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President Biden said Monday that while travel restrictions imposed on travelers from several southern African nations would slow the entry of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, "it cannot prevent it." "Sooner or later, we're going to see cases," he said in an address to the American people.

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Isaac #4 Japan closes down borders to stop new covid variant

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Isaac #4 Japan closes down borders to stop new covid variant

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Japan, which has been very cautious throughout the pandemic, is again barring all nonresident foreigners. There is an economic and human cost.

The Sensoji temple in Tokyo, which has typically been a top destination for foreign tourists. Credit... Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

TOKYO - With the emergence of the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus late last week, countries across the globe rushed to close their borders to travelers from southern Africa, even in the absence of scientific information about whether such measures were necessary or likely to be effective in stopping the virus's spread.

Japan has gone further than most other countries so far, announcing on Monday that the world's third-largest economy would be closed off to travelers from everywhere.

It is a familiar tactic for Japan. The country has barred tourists since early in the pandemic, even as most of the rest of the world started to travel again. And it had only tentatively opened this month to business travelers and students, despite recording the highest vaccination rate among the world's large wealthy democracies and after seeing its coronavirus caseloads plunge by 99 percent since August.

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"It's best to be extra cautious when dealing with the risk of a mysterious virus," Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan said as he reversed a recent move to reopen the country's borders to short-term business travelers and international students. Credit Credit... Philip Fong/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Now, as the doors slam shut again, Japan provides a sobering case study of the human and economic cost of those closed borders. Over the many months that Japan has been isolated, thousands of life plans have been suspended, leaving couples, students, academic researchers and workers in limbo.

Ayano Hirose has not been able to see her fiancé in person for the past 19 months, since he left Japan for his native Indonesia, just two weeks after her parents blessed their marriage plans.

As Japan has remained closed to most outsiders, Ms. Hirose and her fiancé, Dery Nanda Prayoga, saw no clear path to a reunion. Indonesia had started allowing some visitors, but the logistical challenges were steep. So the couple has made do with multiple daily video calls. When they run out of things to talk about, they play billiards on Facebook Messenger or watch Japanese variety shows together online.

"We don't want to suffer in pain at the thought of not being able to reunite in the near future," said Ms. Hirose, 21, who has written letters to the foreign and justice ministries asking for an exemption to allow Mr. Dery to come to Japan. "So we will think positively and continue to hold out hope."

As the United States, Britain and most of Europe reopened over the summer and autumn to vaccinated travelers, Japan and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region opened their borders only a crack, even after achieving some of the world's highest vaccination rates. Now, with the emergence of the Omicron variant, Japan, along with Australia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Indonesia and South Korea, is quickly battening down again.

China, which has barred international tourists since the start of the pandemic, is so far still issuing visas for work or diplomatic purposes, although limited flight options and lengthy quarantines have deterred travelers. Taiwan has prohibited nearly all nonresidents from entering since early in the pandemic. Australia, which only recently started allowing citizens and visa holders to travel abroad, said on Monday that it would delay a relaxation of its border restrictions. Sri Lanka, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand have all barred travelers from southern Africa, where the variant was first reported.

Although the true threat of the new variant is not yet clear, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan told reporters on Monday that he had decided to revoke the relaxations for business travelers and international students in order to "avoid the worst-case scenario."

The government's decision to close again reflects its desire to preserve its successes battling the virus and to prevent the kind of strain on the health care system that it experienced over the summer during an outbreak of the Delta variant.

Japan is recording only about 150 coronavirus cases a day, and before the emergence of the Omicron variant, business leaders had been calling for a more aggressive reopening.

"At the beginning of the pandemic, Japan did what most countries around the world did - we thought we needed proper border controls," Yoshihisa Masaki, director of communications at Keidanren, Japan's largest business lobbying group, said in an interview earlier this month.

But as cases diminished, he said, the continuation of firm border restrictions threatened to stymie economic progress. "It will be like Japan being left behind in the Edo Period," Mr. Masaki said, referring to Japan's isolationist era between the 17th and mid-19th centuries.

Japan had already lagged countries in Southeast Asia, where the economies are dependent on tourism revenues and governments tiptoed out in front in the push to reopen. Thailand had recently reopened to tourists from 63 countries, and Cambodia had just started to welcome vaccinated visitors with minimal restrictions. Other countries, like Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, were allowing tourists from certain countries to arrive in restricted areas.

Wealthier Asian countries like Japan resisted the pressure to reopen. With the exception of its decision to hold the Summer Olympics, Japan has been cautious throughout the pandemic. It was early to shut its borders and close schools. It rolled out its vaccination campaign only after conducting its own clinical trials. And dining and drinking hours remained restricted in many prefectures until September.

Foreign companies could not bring in executives or other employees to replace those who were moving back home or to another international posting, said Michael Mroczek, a lawyer in Tokyo who is president of the European Business Council.

In a statement on Monday, the council said business travelers or new employees should be allowed to enter provided they follow strict testing and quarantine measures.

"Trust should be put in Japan's success on the vaccination front," the council said. "And Japan and its people are now firmly in a position to reap the economic rewards."

Business leaders said they wanted science to guide future decisions. "Those of us who live and work in Japan appreciate that the government's policies so far have substantially limited the impact of the pandemic here," said Christopher LaFleur, former American ambassador to Malaysia and special adviser to the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan.

But, he said, "I think we really need to look to the science over the coming days" to see whether a complete border shutdown is justified.

Students, too, have been thrown into uncertainty. An estimated 140,000 or more have been accepted to universities or language schools in Japan and have been waiting months to enter the country to begin their courses of study.

Carla Dittmer, 19, had hoped to move from Hanstedt, a town south of Hamburg, Germany, to Japan over the summer to study Japanese. Instead, she has been waking up every morning at 1 to join an online language class in Tokyo.

"I do feel anxious and, frankly speaking, desperate sometimes, because I have no idea when I would be able to enter Japan and if I will be able to keep up with my studies," Ms. Dittmer said. "I can understand the need of caution, but I hope that Japan will solve that matter with immigration precautions such as tests and quarantine rather than its walls-up policy."

The border closures have economically flattened many regions and industries that rely on foreign tourism.

When Japan announced its reopening to business travelers and international students earlier this month, Tatsumasa Sakai, 70, the fifth-generation owner of a shop that sells ukiyo-e, or woodblock prints, in Asakusa, a popular tourist destination in Tokyo, hoped that the move was a first step toward further reopening.

"Since the case numbers were going down, I thought that we could have more tourists and Asakusa could inch toward coming back to life again," he said. "I guess this time, the government is just taking precautionary measures, but it is still very disappointing."

Mr. Dery and Ms. Hirose also face a long wait. Mr. Dery, who met Ms. Hirose when they were both working at an automotive parts maker, returned to Indonesia in April 2020 after his Japanese work visa expired. Three months before he departed, he proposed to Ms. Hirose during an outing to the DisneySea amusement park near Tokyo.

Ms. Hirose had booked a flight to Jakarta for that May so that the couple could marry, but by then, the borders were closed in Indonesia.

"Our marriage plan fell apart," Mr. Dery, 26, said by telephone from Jakarta. "There's no clarity on how long the pandemic would last."

Just last week, Mr. Dery secured a passport and was hoping to fly to Japan in February or March.

Upon hearing of Japan's renewed border closures, he said he was not surprised. "I was hopeful," he said. "But suddenly the border is about to close again."

"I don't know what else to do," he added. "This pandemic seems endless."

Reporting was contributed by Hisako Ueno and Makiko Inoue in Tokyo; Dera Menra Sijabat in Jakarta, Indonesia; Richard C. Paddock in Bangkok; John Yoon in Seoul; Raymond Zhong in Taipei, Taiwan; and Yan Zhuang in Sydney, Australia.

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As World Shuts Borders to Stop Omicron, Japan Offers a Cautionary Tale

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Japan, which has been very cautious throughout the pandemic, is again barring all nonresident foreigners. There is an economic and human cost. TOKYO - With the emergence of the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus late last week, countries across the globe rushed to close their borders to travelers from southern Africa, even in the absence of scientific information about whether such measures were necessary or likely to be effective in stopping the virus's spread.

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Isaac #3 Pfizer plans on administering booster shots for 16 & 17 year olds 

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Isaac #3 Pfizer plans on administering booster shots for 16 & 17 year olds 

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Coronavirus: Covid News: Pfizer to Seek Approval for Boosters for 16- and 17-Year-Olds (Published 2021)

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President Biden cautioned against panic because of the Omicron variant, as scientists said they needed weeks to understand its true threat.

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A new range of oral antivirals by Pfizer and Merck will make it possible to prevent severe cases and ease extreme pressure on hospitals, according to the experts

Pfizer's lab in Freiburg, Germany makes an antiviral drug against Covid-19. HANDOUT (AFP)

Pharmaceutical companies have raced to produce medication and vaccines to counter the coronavirus pandemic, but until recently only vaccines have shown success in protecting large numbers of people. In the summer of 2020, hopes were pinned on drugs like hydroxychloroquine, until trials eventually showed that it was largely ineffective against the disease, and then remdesivir, which was only able to reduce the length of hospitalization of some patients from 15 to 11 days.

Vaccines have since shown great success where their uptake has been high, as developed countries undertook their biggest inoculation campaigns in history to protect citizens. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved, but the limitations are evident: poor countries have hardly received any doses, and even in rich countries significant portions of the population reject vaccines. In immunocompromised patients, vaccines fail to elicit the desired immune response.

As the world prepares to end the second year of the pandemic, the spotlight is once again on medication as an alternative to fight Covid-19. Two antiviral drugs, made by the pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Merck (which operates as Merck Sharp and Dohme or MSD outside the US and Canada), are now entering the market. Both are being touted as easy to administer and effective in combating the disease.

"The fact that the Pfizer and MSD drugs are orally administered is a substantial innovation, because it makes them much easier to use. They slow the progression of the disease at the beginning, when the patient is not yet in a serious condition, and this usually occurs outside a hospital setting," explained Juan Pablo Horcajada, head of the infectious disease unit at Barcelona's Hospital Del Mar, and general coordinator of Covid-19 at the hospital.

Pfizer has announced that its antiviral drug, marketed under the brand name Paxlovid, reduces hospitalizations and deaths by 89%, according to its own data. The course of treatment consists of 30 pills to be taken over five days. Ten of these pills contain ritonavir, an old antiviral once used against HIV. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced on November 19 that it has begun analyzing Pfizer's data with the aim of "starting this review to support national authorities who may decide on its early use for Covid-19, for example in emergency use settings, prior to marketing authorisation." The treatment now awaits a definitive authorization.

The EMA also gave advice on the use of molnupiravir (marketed as Lagevrio), another antiviral drug developed by MSD with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics. That treatment consists of 40 pills to be taken over five days, and it halved the number of cases requiring hospitalization and deaths, according to data provided by both companies.

They slow the progression of the disease at the beginning, when the patient is not yet in a serious condition, and this usually occurs outside a hospital setting

Juan Pablo Horcajada, Hospital del Mar, Barcelona

"These two drugs come to fill an important niche as until now we had nothing. There are patients diagnosed in primary care who do not meet the criteria for hospitalization, but who are at risk of the disease subsequently progressing to very severe forms and even death. It was particularly frustrating for us," explained Santiago Moreno, head of infectious diseases at Madrid's Ramón y Cajal Hospital. Experts are convinced that the oral administration will help these treatments to reach more people more quickly, as the first five days of symptoms are key. In this way, the two new treatments have a great advantage over other recently developed drugs.

Another category of treatment known as monoclonal antibodies have also demonstrated some success. One is AstraZeneca's Evusheld, which the pharmaceutical company claims has an efficacy rate of 88%, and which the EMA has been evaluating since October 14. The other is Ronapreve, developed by Regeneron and Roche, which has already received EMA authorization and which helps to treat patients already hospitalized in a serious condition and who lack their own defenses against the coronavirus. "These antibodies are proteins artificially designed to attack a very specific part of the virus and nothing else, which makes them enormously safe, as well as effective," said Horcajada.

Jesús Sierra, a spokesman for the Spanish Society of Hospital Pharmacy, points out that monoclonal antibodies "are also very important and effective if they are applied in the first five days, but they have two caveats." The first is that they have to be administered intravenously in the hospital, and secondly that "they are drugs that replace the antibodies that a vaccinated person has. Therefore, they have been tested in the unvaccinated population over 50 years of age. And this population group is very small in Spain."

In total, the EMA has authorized, is evaluating or has informed member states about more than a dozen treatments against coronavirus. In addition to antivirals and monoclonal antibodies, there are immunosuppressants such as dexamethasone or tocilizumab. "What these drugs do is contain the body's immune reaction when it is excessive. From a certain moment, which occurs between the fifth and seventh day of the infection, the problem that puts the patient's life at risk is the excessive reaction of their immune system, and these drugs try to put a stop to that," explained Horcajada.

The United States has already made agreements with Pfizer and Merck to purchase millions of these new treatments for its citizens, in behavior reminiscent of the Donald Trump's administration's hoarding of remdesivir. The US has now acquired 10 million courses of Pfizer's Paxlovid, with a price tag of $5.3 billion (€4.7 billion), and another 3.1 million courses of Merck's Lagevrio for around $2.2 billion (€2 billion).

The final stages of development of both drugs have been accompanied by unprecedented announcements from the pharmaceutical giants. Merck said in October it will allow its new drug to be produced as a generic in the 105 lowest-income countries on the planet, and Pfizer made the same announcement for its antiviral last week. None of the major vaccines currently on the market are allowed to be produced as generics.

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New Covid-19 treatments strengthen medicine's fight against the pandemic

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A new range of oral antivirals by Pfizer and Merck will make it possible to prevent severe cases and ease extreme pressure on hospitals, according to the experts Pharmaceutical companies have raced to produce medication and vaccines to counter the coronavirus pandemic, but until recently only vaccines have shown success in protecting large numbers of people.

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - A daily brisk walk or bike ride may reduce an older person's risk of Alzheimer's disease, according to new research. Researchers have found that physical activity dampens inflammation in the brain, protecting against mental decline.

Lead author Dr. Kaitlin Casaletto from the University of California-San Francisco and her team note that few people will disagree that an active lifestyle is good for overall health. However, it's been unclear how physical activity improves brain health, until now. Researchers believe the benefits may come about through decreased immune cell activation.

Dementia affects over six million people in the United States, with estimates showing that figure may rise dramatically by 2050. The number of people with the condition is steadily increasing because of increasing lifespans across the world. Within the next three decades, more than 150 million may develop the disease, researchers say.

With no cure in sight, lifestyle changes that can help ward off cognitive decline are vital.

An overactive brain may trigger dementia?

Dr. Casaletto's says microglia, the brain's immune cells, work by clearing out debris and foreign invaders from the brain. However, too much activity can lead to inflammation, damaged neurons, and disruptions in brain signaling. Previous studies show exercise helps reduce abnormal activation in animals, but that link wasn't as clear in humans.

The study found exercise had the greatest benefits for those with worse disease pathology. Researchers tracked 167 older adults to examine the relationship between physical activity and microglia activation.

The team used data from the Rush Memory and Aging project, which enrolls volunteers without dementia who agree to organ donation. The participants spanned the spectrum of cognitive aging. They wore activity monitors 24 hours a day for up to 10 days straight before annual cognitive exams. The researchers also measured microglia activation and Alzheimer's disease pathology in postmortem brain tissue analyses.

" Greater physical activity was linked to lower microglial activation," Dr Casaletto says in a statement to SWNS. "This was particularly in the inferior temporal gyrus - a brain region hit hardest by Alzheimer's. Physical activity had a more pronounced effect on inflammation in people with more severe Alzheimer's pathology."

Next, the team plans to examine if exercise interventions can alter microglia activation in AD patients.

"Physical activity relates to better cognitive aging and reduced risk of neurodegenerative disease," the study authors write in the journal . "Yet the cellular and molecular pathways linking behavior-to-brain in humans are unknown."

"We objectively monitored physical activity (accelerometer-based actigraphy) and cognitive performances in life, and quantified microglial activation and synaptic markers in brain tissue at death in older adults," the researchers continue. "These are the first data supporting microglial activation as a physiological pathway by which physical activity relates to brain heath in humans. Though more interventional work is needed, we suggest that physical activity may be a modifiable behavior leveraged to reduce pro-inflammatory microglial states in humans."

For healthy adults, doctors recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week.
South West News Service writer Mark Waghorn contributed to this report.

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Taking a daily power walk reduces risk of Alzheimer's, mental decline

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - A daily brisk walk or bike ride may reduce an older person's risk of Alzheimer's disease, according to new research. Researchers have found that physical activity dampens inflammation in the brain, protecting against mental decline.

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The COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in demand for disposable plastics that has resulted in more than 25,000 tons of litter flowing into the world's oceans, scientists in the United States and China reported on Monday.

The researchers estimated the amount of plastic waste generated by different countries, calculated how much was ferried to the sea by major rivers, and used computer models to simulate its journey through the global ocean. They found that the pandemic spawned more than 8 million tons of plastic debris from hospitals, personal protective equipment, and online shopping, and most of the waste that reaches the ocean will wind up in beaches and coastal sediments.

"This poses a long-lasting problem for the ocean environment," the team, which included researchers from Nanjing University and the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We call for better medical waste management in pandemic epicenters, especially in developing countries."

The emergence of COVID-19 represents the most severe pandemic yet to occur in an era of plastics and disposable items, noted João Canning Clode, a marine ecologist at Portugal's Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, who has written about the potential ways that the COVID-19 pandemic could exacerbate marine pollution.

As cases climbed, reaching 212 million people worldwide by August 23, 2021, so did the amount of medical waste that contained plastic. This included COVID-19 testing kits and personal protective equipment such as face masks, gloves, and face shields. Single-use items such as plastic cutlery were also used to minimize the risk of spreading the novel coronavirus, particularly before vaccines became available, Canning Clode told Popular Science in an email.

Meanwhile, people turned to online shopping at an "unprecedented speed," the researchers wrote. The material used to package these orders became another source of excess plastic.

Not all of this plastic is processed properly or recycled, and some of the mismanaged waste will eventually find its way to rivers and the ocean. According to one estimate, about 1.56 billion face masks entered the seas in 2020. All this debris poses a number of threats to marine animals, which may eat or become entangled within the plastic.

To find out how much plastic waste has been created because of COVID-19, the researchers considered a variety of data sources, such as statistics on population, mask production, and COVID-19 infections, tests, and hospitalizations, as well as financial reports from Amazon, Walmart, and other top e-commerce companies.
[Related: How long will we keep wearing masks?]
As of late August 2021, they estimated, 193 countries had generated about 8.4 million tons of pandemic-related plastic waste. Hospitals contributed an estimated 87.4 percent of the trash, while personal protective equipment used by the general public accounted for 7.6 percent, and online shopping and COVID-19 test kits contributed, respectively, only 4.7 percent and 0.3 percent.

A whopping 47.6 percent of confirmed COVID-19 cases have occurred in the Americas, followed by 31.22 percent in Asia and 17.26 percent in Europe. However, the continent that contributed the most plastic waste was Asia (an estimated 46 percent), followed by Europe (24 percent) and North and South America (22 percent).

While online shopping-and, on the bright side, mask wearing-were more prevalent in Asian countries, the study authors note that flawed existing systems for dealing with medical trash likely accounted for most of the gap. "The biggest sources of excess waste were hospitals in areas already struggling with waste management before the pandemic; they just weren't set up to handle a situation where you have more waste," Amina Schartup, an assistant professor at Scripps Oceanography, said in a statement.

The team next investigated how much of this excess plastic would enter and be carried out to sea by 369 major rivers and their watersheds, based on the speed and other characteristics of the rivers. They calculated that about 25,900 tons of plastic would reach the oceans, representing around 1.5 percent of the total plastic waste discharged by rivers worldwide. The top debris contributors were the Shatt al Arab, Indus, Yangtze River, and Ganges Brahmaputra in Asia, followed by the Danube in Europe, and the Amur in Asia, highlighting hotspots that will require "special attention in plastic waste management," the researchers wrote.

Finally, the team used a computer model to simulate how this litter will move through the oceans, taking into account how seawater circulates and how several different kinds of plastic might become fragmented or otherwise altered during their travels. They found that most of the plastic waste will land on beaches and seabeds within three years. However, the Arctic Ocean will likely become a dead-end for some of it.

"The Arctic ecosystem is considered to be particularly vulnerable due to the harsh environment and high sensitivity to climate change, which makes the potential ecological impact of exposure to the projected accumulated Arctic plastics of special concern," the researchers concluded.

While several highly effective COVID-19 vaccines are available in the United States and abroad, the pandemic isn't quashed yet. By the end of 2021, the researchers estimate, a total of 11 million tons of excess plastic will have been generated, and rivers will have carried 34,000 tons of this waste to the sea.

It's worth remembering, of course, that the excess waste generated because of the pandemic makes up just a small fraction of a much larger plastic problem. "The ongoing assembly of trash, plastics and debris in the ocean is severely affecting marine life, and today marine litter is considered as one of the most relevant pollution problems the planet is experiencing," Canning Clode said.

To quash plastic waste, the researchers say, it will be important to improve plastic waste collection, treatment, and recycling technology; develop more eco-friendly alternatives; and raise awareness among the general public about the environmental impacts of personal protective equipment and other plastic products.

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Humans created an extra 8 million tons of plastic waste during the pandemic

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The COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in demand for disposable plastics that has resulted in more than 25,000 tons of litter flowing into the world's oceans, scientists in the United States and China reported on Monday.

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AJI # 9 Some people have a gene that could make COVID far more deadly

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AJI # 9 Some people have a gene that could make COVID far more deadly

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Some people have a gene that could make COVID far more deadly

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Vaccination mandates prove successful, Moderna tries for patents without NIH credit, Trump-era travel bans are lifted, and more COVID-19 news from this week.

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There’s a second case of monkeypox in the US this year—but don’t freak out

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A person who had just returned from an international trip was diagnosed in Maryland and is now recovering in isolation with mild symptoms.

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AJI #7-  Baby teeth may one day help identify kids at risk for mental disorders later in life

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AJI #7-  Baby teeth may one day help identify kids at risk for mental disorders later in life

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211110104603.htm

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Cameron #6 - Could SSRI antidepressants be beneficial against COVID? 

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Cameron #6 - Could SSRI antidepressants be beneficial against COVID? 

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Evidence is growing that a common antidepressant may reduce the severity of symptoms and mortality following SARS-CoV-2 infection.

In an observational study, patients taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were 8% less likely to die from COVID-19.

Those taking fluoxetine or fluvoxamine were 26% less likely to die.

Phase 3 clinical trials are necessary to see whether researchers can replicate these observations on a large scale.

In the hunt for COVID-19 treatments, several drugs have shown promise. Currently, the two oral antivirals, Molnupiravir, from Merck, and , from Pfizer, are being hailed by many as the answer to the pandemic. However, there are still some questions about their efficacy and safety, so the search for safe, effective treatments continues.
Now, an observational study has shown that some of the most common prescription antidepressants may reduce both the severity of COVID-19 and mortality from the disease.
Researchers from the University of California and Stanford University School of Medicine carried out a retrospective cohort study of 83,584 people with a COVID-19 diagnosis. They discovered that individuals taking SSRIs had a lower relative risk of death than those who were not.

In the United States, 13.2% of adults (17.7% of women) take SSRIs. The group of drugs includes:

This study adds to evidence from previous research into the effects of SSRIs. Three clinical trials, one published only , found that fluvoxamine use had links to a reduced risk of clinical deterioration following SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Dr. William Schaffner, Professor of Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, commented on the study: "I would call it very provocative. It is a large ecological study that builds on previous information suggesting that this class [of drugs] may actually have a role in treating [SARS-CoV-2] infections."

Of those surveyed in the study, which appears in JAMA Network Open, 3,401 were taking SSRIs. The researchers matched participants for sociodemographic characteristics, medical comorbidities, and medication indication with 6,802 controls who were not taking SSRIs.
The SSRI group had a relative reduction (RR) in mortality of 8% when compared with the control group. The decline was greatest in those taking fluoxetine (RR of 28%) and those taking fluvoxamine or fluoxetine (26%). Other SSRIs did not show as great an effect.

"These results confirm and expand on prior findings from observational, preclinical, and clinical studies suggesting that certain SSRI antidepressants [...] could be beneficial against COVID-19."

- Dr. Nicolas Hoertel, M.D., M.PH., Ph.D., writing in an accompanying editorial.

One advantage of SSRIs over newer treatments, such as the antivirals scientists are developing, is that they have been in widespread use for many years and the side effects are well known.

"Familiarity, a certain comfort level, is a great advantage. Even though the vaccines have been used in millions of people, one of the first things a vaccine skeptic will say is they are brand new; they were created too rapidly. When we started using dexamethasone, no one objected to the drug we'd been using for years," Dr. Schaffner said.

But he cautioned: "These studies have come out just as new antivirals have been produced. Is the effect of SSRIs sufficiently large to compete with these antiviral drugs? Or is the actual benefit going to be so small that it is unlikely to have major clinical benefit?"

Dr. Hoertel states: "Effective treatments of COVID-19 [...] are urgently needed to reduce COVID-19-related mortality and morbidity."

So, could SSRIs be another weapon in the armory against COVID-19?

While these results are encouraging, the authors stress the need for "large, randomized clinical trials [...] to clarify the effect of SSRIs generally, or more specifically, of fluoxetine and fluvoxamine, on the severity of COVID-19 outcomes."

Dr. Schaffner echoed their caution in advocating SSRIs as a treatment: "The authors are meticulous in saying before we reach that conclusion, we need a large clinical trial or a series of clinical trials, depending on the stage of COVID-19 [...] that we are trying to address."

However, Dr. Hoertel says that successful phase 3 clinical trials could "enrich the current therapeutic arsenal with an inexpensive, well-tolerated, and easily administered medication in the global fight against COVID-19."

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COVID-19: Common antidepressant reduces death risk by 26%

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Evidence is growing that a common antidepressant may reduce the severity of symptoms and mortality following SARS-CoV-2 infection. In an observational study, patients taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were 8% less likely to die from COVID-19. Those taking fluoxetine or fluvoxamine were 26% less likely to die.

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Cameron #5- New cell discovered and shown to regulate heart rate 

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Cameron #5- New cell discovered and shown to regulate heart rate 

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Researchers at the University of Notre Dame discovered a new type of cell in the heart that may help regulate heart rate, and could be an important key in understanding certain types of congenital heart defects and other diseases that involve the heart.

The cells, which were termed nexus glia, resemble critical glial cells called astrocytes in the brain, according to research completed in the lab of Cody Smith, the Elizabeth and Michael Gallagher Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. When the newly identified cells were removed, the heart rate increased, and when they were deprived of a key gene that drives their glial development, the heart beat irregularly. The research was published recently in PLOS Biology.

"For me the definition of great science is something that you discover that opens up even more questions, and this, I think, is the definition of that," said Smith, who is also affiliated with the University's Center for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine. "It's a discovery that now we have 100 questions we didn't even know existed, so we're following up on them to explore this path that has never been studied before."

And while there is not a definitive connection between the discovery and congenital heart defects, these cardiac nexus glia cells are located in the outflow tract of the heart, the same place where many congenital heart defects are found. The outflow tract is a structure that forms during development and contributes to a pathway connecting the ventricles to the arteries leaving the heart. The research team discovered the cells first in zebrafish hearts, then confirmed their existence in both mouse and human hearts.

Astrocytes were previously thought to reside only in the central nervous system -- the brain and the spinal cord. Researchers in the Smith lab had wondered why organs that are supplied with nerves by the peripheral nervous system, which include all the remaining nerves in the body, did not appear to have astrocyte-like glial cells. They play an important role in building and maintaining neural circuits in the brain. Why would they not also exist elsewhere?

Nina Kikel-Coury, first author of the paper and a recent graduate of Smith's lab, said she searched for astrocyte-like glial cells in the heart because of the gap in knowledge, and because glial cells have been found in multiple organs, including the pancreas, spleen, lungs and intestines. However, their function is not always clear.

"I thought that if we could find a new cellular piece to the cardiovascular puzzle, it could be foundational for future work," she said.

Kikel-Coury was particularly interested in how these cells factored into a group of medical conditions called dysautonomia, which result from faults in the autonomic nervous system. She has one of the conditions, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which causes lightheadedness, fainting and a rapid increase in heart rate.

While POTS could potentially be linked to the new cell discovered in the fundamental research outlined in the study, it is too soon to tell, Smith said.

"We don't completely know the function of these cells, but the concept that if you get rid of them, heart rates increase, could link it to certain disease cases," Smith said. "I think these glial cells could play a pretty important role in regulating the heart.

"This is another example of how studying basic neurobiology can lead to the understanding of many different disorders," Smith said. "I'm excited about the future."

In addition to Smith and Kikel-Coury, other authors on the study include Notre Dame researchers Kevin Vaughan, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences; Pinar Zorlutuna, the Sheehan Family Collegiate Professor of Engineering; Jacob P. Brandt; Isabel A. Correia; Michael R. O'Dea; Dana F. DeSantis; Gulberk Ozcebe; and Felicity Sterling.

The research was funded by the University of Notre Dame, the Elizabeth and Michael Gallagher Family, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

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heart disease; diseases and conditions; stroke prevention; birth defects; biology; developmental biology; new species; biotechnology

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New cell discovered and shown to regulate heart rate

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Researchers at the University of Notre Dame discovered a new type of cell in the heart that may help regulate heart rate, and could be an important key in understanding certain types of congenital heart defects and other diseases that involve the heart.

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Coffee & tea could lower risk of dementia - Katie #10

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Coffee & tea could lower risk of dementia - Katie #10

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Coffee and tea could lower your risk of dementia

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A survey of 365,682 adults in the United Kingdom suggests a moderate amount of coffee or tea may lower the risk of stroke or dementia.

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https://apple.news/ATozZDS0IRd6evJ-sgloTyw

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Antibiotic-resistance infections could be a new 'hidden pandemic,' UK warns - CNBC

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One in five people in the U.K. with a bloodstream infection in 2020 had an antibiotic-resistant one, according to the U.K Health Security Agency.

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/16/tea-coffee-may-be-linked-lower-risk-stroke-dementia-study

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Drinking coffee or tea may be linked with a lower risk of stroke and dementia, according to the largest study of its kind.

Strokes cause 10% of deaths globally, while dementia is one of the world's biggest health challenges - 130 million are expected to be living with it by 2050.

In the research, 365,000 people aged between 50 and 74 were followed for more than a decade. At the start the participants, who were involved in the UK Biobank study, self-reported how much coffee and tea they drank. Over the research period, 5,079 of them developed dementia and 10,053 went on to have at least one stroke.

Researchers found that people who drank two to three cups of coffee or three to five cups of tea a day, or a combination of four to six cups of coffee and tea, had the lowest risk of stroke or dementia.

Those who drank two to three cups of coffee and two to three cups of tea daily had a 32% lower risk of stroke. These people had a 28% lower risk of dementia compared with those who did not drink tea or coffee.

The research, by Yuan Zhang and colleagues from Tianjin Medical University, China, suggests drinking coffee alone or in combination with tea is also linked with lower risk of post-stroke dementia.

Writing in the journal Plos Medicine, the authors said: "Our findings suggested that moderate consumption of coffee and tea separately or in combination were associated with lower risk of stroke and dementia."

However, the scientists cautioned that the UK Biobank reflects a relatively healthy sample relative to the general population, which could restrict the ability to generalise these associations. While it is possible that coffee and tea may be protective against stroke, dementia and post-stroke dementia, the researchers say causality cannot be concluded from the associations.

Prof Tara Spires-Jones, the UK Dementia Research Institute programme lead and deputy director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the research, described it as "interesting" and "robustly conducted", but stressed that more work needed to be done to fully understand the potential biological links between tea and coffee and stroke and dementia risk.

Prof Kevin McConway, an emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, also not involved in the study, said it showed associations between stroke and dementia risk did not increase or decrease uniformly with tea and coffee drinking.

"Instead, what generally happened is that the risk of stroke or dementia was lower in people who drank reasonably small amounts of coffee or tea compared to those who drank none at all, but that after a certain level of consumption, the risk started to increase again until it became higher than the risk to people who drank none.

"Once the coffee consumption got up to seven or eight cups a day, the stroke risk was greater than for people who drank no coffee, and quite a lot higher than for those who drank two or three cups a day."

Dr Rosa Sancho, the head of research at Alzheimer's Research UK, said: "For most of us, our risk of dementia depends on the complex interaction of our age, genetics and lifestyle. Understanding which aspects of our lifestyle have the greatest effect on our brain health is key to empowering people to make informed decisions about their lives."

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Tea and coffee may be linked to lower risk of stroke and dementia - study

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Drinking coffee or tea may be linked with a lower risk of stroke and dementia, according to the largest study of its kind. Strokes cause 10% of deaths globally, while dementia is one of the world's biggest health challenges - 130 million are expected to be living with it by 2050.

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https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/psychedelic-therapy

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Tea & Coffee Lower Risk of Stroke & Dementia ? -Sydney #10 

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Tea & Coffee Lower Risk of Stroke & Dementia ? -Sydney #10 

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https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/health/coffee-and-tea-benefits-stroke-dementia-wellness/index.html

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your morning cups of coffee and tea could be associated with lower risk of stroke and dementia - cnn

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Your morning cups of coffee and tea could be associated with lower risk of stroke and dementia

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The cup of coffee or tea you reach for in the morning -- OK, maybe it's a few -- may be associated with a lower risk for stroke and dementia, according to a new study.

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Aspirin prescription for prevention- risk outweighs reward for the elderly-Sydney N #9

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Aspirin prescription for prevention- risk outweighs reward for the elderly-Sydney N #9

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https://www.popsci.com/science/aspirin-heart-attack-prevention/

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Aspirin has long been prescribed to prevent heart attacks. Now experts say it shouldn’t.

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Adults aged 60 and older should not start on aspirin to prevent the onset of heart disease, according to new recommendations.

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Government approved Covid Pill UK -Sydney #8

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Government approved Covid Pill UK -Sydney #8

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https://www.popsci.com/health/covid-19-merck-pill/

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This time a year ago, the US was heading into its first COVID winter with dimming spirits. Even as the pandemic slogs on, with 59 percent of the country fully vaccinated we're now in a much better position. Developments large and small, from a potential treatment for COVID in the form of a pill to national policy changes on employer-enforced vaccination, will all help make next year even brighter.

Britain becomes first country to approve COVID-19 antiviral pill

On Thursday, Britain approved the COVID-19 antiviral pill, molnupiravir, jointly developed by American Merck and Ridgeback Pharmaceuticals. The UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) recommends the pill, branded Lagevrio in the UK, for those with mild to moderate COVID-19, and for those with at least one risk factor for developing severe illness such as heart disease, obesity, and asthma. US advisers will convene this month to vote on whether to greenlight the pill. This approval comes just after detection of a coronavirus subvariant in the country, which now comprises more than 10 percent of COVID-19 cases there.

Molnupiravir works by inserting errors to SARS-CoV-2's genetic code, which then prevents it from replicating and causing COVID-19 symptoms. Merck reported that in a Phase 3 study, the pill reduced risk of hospitalization or death by about 50 percent compared to a placebo, and that the pill sabotages the most common coronavirus variants. The regimen entails taking the pill twice daily for five days.

Biden administration sets January 4 as deadline for employer compliance

On Thursday the US Labor Department announced January 4 as the deadline for many employers to either guarantee employee vaccination or require weekly COVID-19 testing, plus the use of a face covering in the workplace. This vaccine directive applies to businesses with 100 or more employees, and will affect more than 84 million workers. Under this policy, employers aren't required to provide or pay for tests. Businesses that don't stick to these rules risk penalties of up to $13,600 per violation.

Pfizer vaccine approved for kids age 5-11 while Moderna needs further review

This week, an advisory panel from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) unanimously recommended Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 5 to 11. That means some 28 million children are newly eligible for vaccination.

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needs more time to review Moderna's vaccine for children aged 12 to 17. The FDA is particularly focused on assessing teens' risk of developing myocarditis, or swelling of the heart. Review may continue into the new year. Back in June, Moderna applied to expand the vaccine's emergency authorization to this age group after a study showed 100 percent effectiveness among teens.

There's a slightly more transmissible Delta subvariant in the US

Called AY.4.2, this coronavirus subvariant has reared up in Rhode Island, Nevada, Maryland, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Washington, Florida, California, and the District of Columbia. Health authorities assure that current vaccines effectively fight AY.4.2, and while it may spread more quickly, there's no evidence that it causes more severe illness. The World Health Organization has not yet clocked it as a variant under investigation or variant of concern. However, its appearance reinforces the need to get vaccinated.

Wild white-tailed deer spreading SARS-CoV-2 and hunting season

Wild deer can contract SARS-CoV-2 both from each other and humans, according to a new study of deer in Iowa. The study, which examined the lymph nodes of roadkill and hunted deer, found that 80 percent of animals sampled between April 2020 and January 2021 were infected. Researchers took most of their samples in September-the beginning of Iowa's hunting season. Authors believe that the increased human-deer interaction during this period helped spread infection among the animals. For now, however, there is no evidence that humans can receive the virus from deer.

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The first government-approved COVID-19 pill is hitting the UK

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This time a year ago, the US was heading into its first COVID winter with dimming spirits. Even as the pandemic slogs on, with 59 percent of the country fully vaccinated we're now in a much better position.

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Humans Created an Extra 8 million tons of plastic during the pandemic -Sydney #7

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Humans Created an Extra 8 million tons of plastic during the pandemic -Sydney #7

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https://www.popsci.com/environment/covid-plastic-waste-ocean/

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The COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in demand for disposable plastics that has resulted in more than 25,000 tons of litter flowing into the world's oceans, scientists in the United States and China reported on Monday.

The researchers estimated the amount of plastic waste generated by different countries, calculated how much was ferried to the sea by major rivers, and used computer models to simulate its journey through the global ocean. They found that the pandemic spawned more than 8 million tons of plastic debris from hospitals, personal protective equipment, and online shopping, and most of the waste that reaches the ocean will wind up in beaches and coastal sediments.

"This poses a long-lasting problem for the ocean environment," the team, which included researchers from Nanjing University and the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We call for better medical waste management in pandemic epicenters, especially in developing countries."

The emergence of COVID-19 represents the most severe pandemic yet to occur in an era of plastics and disposable items, noted João Canning Clode, a marine ecologist at Portugal's Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, who has written about the potential ways that the COVID-19 pandemic could exacerbate marine pollution.

As cases climbed, reaching 212 million people worldwide by August 23, 2021, so did the amount of medical waste that contained plastic. This included COVID-19 testing kits and personal protective equipment such as face masks, gloves, and face shields. Single-use items such as plastic cutlery were also used to minimize the risk of spreading the novel coronavirus, particularly before vaccines became available, Canning Clode told Popular Science in an email.

Meanwhile, people turned to online shopping at an "unprecedented speed," the researchers wrote. The material used to package these orders became another source of excess plastic.

Not all of this plastic is processed properly or recycled, and some of the mismanaged waste will eventually find its way to rivers and the ocean. According to one estimate, about 1.56 billion face masks entered the seas in 2020. All this debris poses a number of threats to marine animals, which may eat or become entangled within the plastic.

To find out how much plastic waste has been created because of COVID-19, the researchers considered a variety of data sources, such as statistics on population, mask production, and COVID-19 infections, tests, and hospitalizations, as well as financial reports from Amazon, Walmart, and other top e-commerce companies.
[Related: How long will we keep wearing masks?]
As of late August 2021, they estimated, 193 countries had generated about 8.4 million tons of pandemic-related plastic waste. Hospitals contributed an estimated 87.4 percent of the trash, while personal protective equipment used by the general public accounted for 7.6 percent, and online shopping and COVID-19 test kits contributed, respectively, only 4.7 percent and 0.3 percent.

A whopping 47.6 percent of confirmed COVID-19 cases have occurred in the Americas, followed by 31.22 percent in Asia and 17.26 percent in Europe. However, the continent that contributed the most plastic waste was Asia (an estimated 46 percent), followed by Europe (24 percent) and North and South America (22 percent).

While online shopping-and, on the bright side, mask wearing-were more prevalent in Asian countries, the study authors note that flawed existing systems for dealing with medical trash likely accounted for most of the gap. "The biggest sources of excess waste were hospitals in areas already struggling with waste management before the pandemic; they just weren't set up to handle a situation where you have more waste," Amina Schartup, an assistant professor at Scripps Oceanography, said in a statement.

The team next investigated how much of this excess plastic would enter and be carried out to sea by 369 major rivers and their watersheds, based on the speed and other characteristics of the rivers. They calculated that about 25,900 tons of plastic would reach the oceans, representing around 1.5 percent of the total plastic waste discharged by rivers worldwide. The top debris contributors were the Shatt al Arab, Indus, Yangtze River, and Ganges Brahmaputra in Asia, followed by the Danube in Europe, and the Amur in Asia, highlighting hotspots that will require "special attention in plastic waste management," the researchers wrote.

Finally, the team used a computer model to simulate how this litter will move through the oceans, taking into account how seawater circulates and how several different kinds of plastic might become fragmented or otherwise altered during their travels. They found that most of the plastic waste will land on beaches and seabeds within three years. However, the Arctic Ocean will likely become a dead-end for some of it.

"The Arctic ecosystem is considered to be particularly vulnerable due to the harsh environment and high sensitivity to climate change, which makes the potential ecological impact of exposure to the projected accumulated Arctic plastics of special concern," the researchers concluded.

While several highly effective COVID-19 vaccines are available in the United States and abroad, the pandemic isn't quashed yet. By the end of 2021, the researchers estimate, a total of 11 million tons of excess plastic will have been generated, and rivers will have carried 34,000 tons of this waste to the sea.

It's worth remembering, of course, that the excess waste generated because of the pandemic makes up just a small fraction of a much larger plastic problem. "The ongoing assembly of trash, plastics and debris in the ocean is severely affecting marine life, and today marine litter is considered as one of the most relevant pollution problems the planet is experiencing," Canning Clode said.

To quash plastic waste, the researchers say, it will be important to improve plastic waste collection, treatment, and recycling technology; develop more eco-friendly alternatives; and raise awareness among the general public about the environmental impacts of personal protective equipment and other plastic products.

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Humans created an extra 8 million tons of plastic waste during the pandemic

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The COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in demand for disposable plastics that has resulted in more than 25,000 tons of litter flowing into the world's oceans, scientists in the United States and China reported on Monday.

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How do you Track a Salmonella Outbreak?-Sydney Negrete #6

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How do you Track a Salmonella Outbreak?-Sydney Negrete #6

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https://www.popsci.com/health/salmonella-outbreak-tracking/

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This story originally featured on ProPublica. It's part of their investigative series Unchecked: America's Broken Food Safety System.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story news l etter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Last month, ProPublica published an investigation documenting the failures in the U.S. food safety system that allowed the spread of a type of salmonella known as multidrug-resistant infantis. The bacteria has sickened tens of thousands of people, but outdated government policies and pushback from trade groups have left federal agencies with little power to stop infantis from spreading through the poultry industry.

Our reporting relied on public records requests and dozens of interviews, the bread and butter of journalism. But I also made use of a type of data ProPublica has never before tapped into: publicly available genomic sequencing data.

Before I became a data journalist, I was a doctoral student in electrical engineering. Most of my research was in bioinformatics-the analysis and interpretation of genetic data-and for seven years, culturing bacteria, purifying nucleic acids and writing code to analyze sequencing data were my bread and butter.

So when my ProPublica colleagues Michael Grabell and Bernice Yeung approached me with questions about genomic sequencing data, I was all ears. They explained that they were digging into a salmonella outbreak investigation that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had closed in 2019, albeit with a warning that "illnesses could continue because this salmonella strain appears to be widespread in the chicken industry."

Health officials hadn't said anything to consumers about the outbreak since then. Bernice and Michael wanted to know if there was a way to track the strain to see if the outbreak was still going on. If the ultimate goal of foodborne illness investigations is to identify and address the source of an outbreak, why had the CDC closed this investigation without finding the cause and while people were still getting sick?

Several experts explained the investigation hadn't found clear links to any particular product, brand or food processing plant. But they also mentioned something that would turn out to provide a crucial map for tracking the outbreak's path. The federal government was compiling data about foodborne illnesses through a system called the Pathogen Detection project. It's run by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, or NCBI, part of the National Institutes of Health, and it integrates data about bacterial pathogens taken from samples of food, the environment and human patients. The NCBI analyzes data in real time, and the results are monitored by public health agencies, including the CDC and food safety regulators.

We thought we could use the same information to figure out whether multidrug-resistant salmonella infantis is still out there-and if so, why.

The infantis chronicles

So Michael and Bernice started poking around the NCBI database. It was, as promised, a bonanza of bacterial detail. After talking to sources and digging into the scientific literature, they found a unique identifier code that yielded a "cluster" of more than 8,000 salmonella infantis samples, including nearly all of the 300 samples that were designated as part of the outbreak. But some terms were hard for them to decipher, like "phylogenetic trees" or "single-nucleotide polymorphisms."

Turns out, these are attributes derived from genomic sequencing data, the type of data I worked with during my doctoral studies. Though my background isn't specifically in bacterial genetics (much less this particular strain of salmonella), I knew enough to let me start digging into these details.

From reviewing the NCBI database's documentation, reading academic papers and talking to scientists, I learned that samples are assigned to the cluster based on genetic similarity. But if this is true, what could the other bacterial samples in the cluster-about 7,700 samples that weren't officially documented as part of the outbreak-tell us about infantis? Was it possible that the outbreak never ended, and remained just as rampant as before the CDC closed its investigation? Or maybe this outbreak was challenging the very definition of what an outbreak has always been thought to be?

The NCBI data alone wouldn't tell us. The database is stripped of key details, like the poultry plant where a salmonella sample was taken or when and where a patient got sick, a shortcoming that industry scientists and consumer advocates have complained about. This is where public records proved vital. Michael and Bernice, along with Mollie Simon on our research team, filed dozens of public records requests with the CDC, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state public health agencies that had worked on the infantis outbreak. Through those requests, we obtained records from the USDA's microbiological sampling program that revealed how often different types of salmonella were being found at which poultry plants. We also obtained epidemiological information about patients who had been part of the outbreak, including the date they'd been tested for salmonella, details about their illness and recent food consumption. The records didn't include patients' names, of course, but we could match both of the datasets we'd obtained to the sequencing data available on the NCBI database.

The USDA sampling data also allowed ProPublica to create an online tool that consumers could use to check the salmonella records of the plants that process their chicken and turkey.

As we pored over the data and public records, we learned about how the CDC has analyzed DNA to connect food poisoning cases. From the 1990s to just around the time of the infantis outbreak, investigators used a technique called pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, or PFGE.

The difference between PFGE and sequencing data was crucial to this outbreak and our investigation.

PFGE is dead. Long live WGS.

When a patient shows up at the hospital with symptoms of foodborne illness, a stool or urine sample may be taken. Then, DNA from bacteria found in the sample can be extracted in a lab.

A DNA sequence can be thought of as a huge compound word spelled with only four possible molecular "letters," or nucleotide bases. PFGE uses a special protein to cut up DNA into smaller sections-imagine breaking up a giant compound word into chunks of words. Then, an electric field is applied, and the segments of cut-up DNA will rearrange based on their weight, resulting in a visible barcode-like pattern.

Scientists can compare PFGE patterns to make informed guesses about how closely related pathogens are to one another. The more similar their PFGE patterns, the more similar their underlying DNA must have been. For years, including the time covered by the infantis investigation, PFGE patterns were used to define outbreak strains.

But in the early 2000s, new technology called next-generation sequencing made it possible to relatively quickly get a readout of the full sequence of nucleotide bases in a DNA sample, a process called whole-genome sequencing, or WGS. Individuals are distinguished by the tiniest differences in the genes we share, but that is beyond the abilities of PFGE. Whole-genome sequencing, though, can reveal the unique "spellings" of our DNA that differentiate you from me-or one strain of a pathogen from another.

Genetic changes occur by evolution, but also by chance.

Sequencing data is the backbone of the NCBI Pathogen Detection project. NCBI groups genetically similar samples into clusters and then compares each sequence, nucleotide base by nucleotide base, to the other sequences in the cluster.

For each cluster of samples, NCBI also creates a phylogenetic tree, an evolutionary biologist's version of your Aunt Sue's hand-drawn family tree. This models how a group of organisms might be related to possible common ancestors and to one another.

But phylogenetic trees that are drawn based on hypothetical common ancestors, like NCBI's, are interpreted differently than known family trees. Genetic changes occur by evolution, but also by chance. In the case of humans, millions of unrelated strangers might have a particular gene that gives rise to a particular disease, but that's different from knowing that I inherited that gene directly from my parents. It's largely the same for bacteria like salmonella.

So I wondered: What could the tree for this infantis cluster tell us about how closely related the outbreak samples were to the thousands of more recent food and patient samples in the same cluster?

No silver bullet

To find out, I freed up 100 gigabytes on my work laptop and asked my editors for 50 euros. The hard-drive space was for comparing approximately 32 million pairs of samples from the NCBI data, and the euros were for phylogenetic visualization software created by researchers in Germany.

By comparing the bacteria samples found in USDA tests to the outbreak samples, I found that more than twice a day this year, on average, the agency has been finding drug-resistant infantis in chickens destined for supermarkets and restaurants that's genetically similar to the outbreak strain. We also confirmed that the CDC is still receiving reports of infantis infections-as recently as last week.

This finding highlights the power of WGS databases like NCBI's to help investigators draw connections between human illness and foods they may have eaten. Thanks to WGS, public health officials have discovered that certain foods, like raw flour and peaches, were vectors for outbreaks of foodborne illnesses, even though they had rarely been linked to a particular bug. Sequencing data has even helped solve cases that had long gone cold, like a sprinkling of food poisoning cases linked to ice cream that were finally connected after half a decade.

But WGS is no silver bullet. Even a seemingly "perfect" DNA match in NCBI cannot conclusively identify the specific culprit behind a foodborne illness. Bacteria accumulate changes in DNA relatively rapidly and have an annoying habit of swapping genes like Pokémon cards. Bacterial samples might share the same set of genes and mutations because they came from the same source, or they might have acquired them independently under completely different circumstances. So a genetic match between a food and human sample must be corroborated with epidemiological proof to make sure it fits in the outbreak timeline and matches a theorized source of the outbreak.

What we've been looking at is indicative of a bug that's so deeply entrenched in the poultry supply chain that it's hard to figure out where it came from.

I'd hoped that visualizing the outbreak samples on a phylogenetic tree would reveal insights about the more recent infantis samples versus the ones collected during the outbreak. Perhaps there would be patterns in the tree showing that newer samples shared more genetic similarities than the outbreak samples did. Or that certain outbreak samples had spawned mini-outbreaks of their own. Instead, the visualization software showed that, evolutionarily speaking, the outbreak samples were all over the place: They couldn't be tracked back to one particular source.

The lack of obvious patterns in the tree that could be tied to geography, time or food product supported the CDC's theory that infantis contamination was likely originating not at particular slaughterhouses or processing plants, but rather upstream in the poultry supply chain, perhaps in feed or breeding flocks. (The two major breeding companies, Aviagen and Cobb-Vantress, the latter a subsidiary of Tyson Foods, declined to comment.) Comparing the DNA sequences yielded no further clues-the number of genetic differences between two samples from during the outbreak was, on average, about the same as that between an outbreak isolate and a more recent multidrug-resistant infantis isolate. To put it simply: The infantis samples before, during and after the outbreak were, in the end, all pretty similar.

We shared our findings with numerous experts, including former and current CDC researchers and food safety scientists. They agreed that our analysis indicated something very different from the traditional foodborne illness outbreak that can be traced back to a definitive single source. What we've been looking at, they said, is indicative of a bug that's so deeply entrenched in the poultry supply chain that it's hard to figure out where it came from.

A new landscape of bacterial foodborne illness

The closure of the infantis investigation without any conclusions about the outbreak's origins is, it appears, a harbinger. Similarities in genetic data are linking seemingly unrelated cases of people getting sick in different states and consuming different products. At a USDA meeting on salmonella last year, Robert Tauxe, director of the CDC's Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases, described a "new landscape" of foodborne illnesses revealed by WGS: strains that cause recurring outbreaks, that were newly emerging and that persist in a population from year to year.

The very definition of what constitutes an outbreak is in question, experts told us.

Scientists are beginning to answer that question with sequencing data and are piecing together how bacteria are taking advantage of our interconnected food supply chains. A 2015 study on salmonella in fish products destined for sushi in restaurants and grocery stores identified certain countries in the global tuna supply chain where salmonella contamination is more likely to occur.

"Public health agencies," wrote the authors, "could use this information to determine most effective intervention points to minimize or eliminate outbreak risk."

Up to now, the USDA hasn't fully used the information at its disposal to prevent the most dangerous strains of salmonella from spreading in our food supply.

It's possible that will change, though. Last month, after years of public pressure (and weeks of inquiries from ProPublica), the USDA's top food safety official, Sandra Eskin, said the agency was rethinking its approach to salmonella. The agency will set up pilot projects and hold meetings to develop a new plan, but its announcement was short on specifics.

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How do you track a salmonella outbreak? A data journalist followed the DNA trail to slaughterhouses.

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This story originally featured on ProPublica . It's part of their investigative series Unchecked: America's Broken Food Safety System . ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story news l etter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

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Higher gas & heating prices will hurt low-income families this winter - Katie #9

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Higher gas & heating prices will hurt low-income families this winter - Katie #9

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opinion: higher gas prices and heating costs will hurt low-income families the most this winter - cnn

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Opinion: Higher gas prices and heating costs will hurt low-income families the most this winter

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Rapidly increasing demand for energy is continuing to outpace supply as the economy recovers from the pandemic, and energy prices for home heating - as well as gasoline for transportation - are going up across the board.

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Fabiola #10 Global HIV viral suppression rates too low among children and adolescents

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Fabiola #10 Global HIV viral suppression rates too low among children and adolescents

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Globally, less than two thirds of children living with HIV who are taking treatment are 'virally suppressed', according to new research from UNSW Sydney's Kirby Institute and the global IeDEA consortium, published today in The Lancet HIV.

Viral suppression for HIV means that treatments are working effectively to protect health and prevent the transmission of HIV to others. UNAIDS has set a target of achieving 95% viral suppression among all people living with HIV on treatment by 2030.

"We estimate viral suppression one, two and three years after people start taking antiviral treatment, so that we can understand how well the treatments are working overtime," said Professor Matthew Law from the Kirby Institute. "The data among adults on treatment in our studies show that after accounting for people being lost to care, viral suppression was achieved in an estimated 79% of adults at 1 year, and 65% at 3 years. However, viral suppression is poorer among children at an estimated 64% at 1 year and 59% at 3 years."

Dr Azar Kariminia from the Kirby Institute, who is senior author on the study, says children and adolescents face unique barriers to achieving viral suppression. "It can be challenging for them to take treatment regularly, and children rely on caregivers who are often having to manage their own medical needs. There are also a range of factors that stem from stigma and discrimination, including a fear of disclosing the child's HIV status."

This study is part of a major research collaboration called IeDEA, the International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS, which draws together HIV epidemiological data and expertise across seven regions: North America; the Caribbean and Central and South America; Central, East, Southern and Western Africa; and the Asia-Pacific. The Kirby Institute co-leads IeDEA Asia-Pacific with the Foundation for AIDS Research's (amfAR) TREAT Asia program. IeDEA is funded by the United States National Institutes of Health.

For this study, the researchers analysed data from 21,594 children/adolescents and 255,662 adults from 148 sites in 31 countries, who initiated treatment between 2010 and 2019.

Dr Annette Sohn, from amfAR's TREAT Asia program, is Co Principal Investigator for IeDEA Asia-Pacific (along with Professor Matthew Law from the Kirby Institute). She says that "while there has been substantial progress in the global response to HIV, the needs of children and adolescents often fall behind those of adults. Our efforts must extend beyond ensuring access to paediatric medicines to address the social and developmental challenges they face in growing up with HIV if we are to achieve the WHO targets by 2030."
The need for global scale up of viral load testing
Viral load testing is essential to find out whether HIV treatments are working effectively. It is recommended by WHO at six and 12 months following the initiation of treatment, and then every 12 months thereafter.

While viral load testing is common in high-income countries, scaling up accessible viral load testing in resource-limited settings remains a challenge.

Funded through the Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's Centre for Health Security, the Kirby Institute and the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research (PNGIMR) are partnering with the PNG government and a consortium of partners are implementing a program called 'ACT-UP PNG' which will scale up HIV viral load testing in two provinces where HIV rates are very high.

"Our work is ensuring that infants and children are afforded the same access to testing and treatment as other people with HIV," says Dr Janet Gare from the PNGIMR and a Co-Principal Investigator on ACTUP-PNG.

Rather than providing viral load testing in faraway laboratories, ACT-UP PNG provides same-day molecular point-of-care testing and return of results in HIV clinics.

"This brings HIV viral load testing closer to patients, which currently includes children aged 10 and older, and adolescents," says Dr Gare. "However, we are also pioneering the implementation of a diagnostic platform that will allow the same access to timely HIV viral load testing and results for infants 6-8 weeks of age, and children up to 9 years, who are currently unable to be included in point-of-care methods.

Scientia Associate Professor Angela Kelly-Hanku, who holds joint appointments with the Kirby Institute and PNGIMR, says that leveraging these technologies will make it easier to test for viral suppression in infants and children.

"We cannot end AIDS without addressing the inequalities that exist between paediatric and adult HIV programs. Projects like ACT-UP make a real difference and bring us closer to achieving the UNAIDS targets."

Journal Reference:

Win Min Han, Matthew G Law, Matthias Egger, Kara Wools-Kaloustian, Richard Moore, Catherine McGowan, Nagalingesawaran Kumarasamy, Sophie Desmonde, Andrew Edmonds, Mary-Ann Davies, Constantin Yiannoutsos, Keri N Althoff, Claudia P Cortes, Thahira Jamal Mohamed, Antoine Jaquet, Kathryn Anastos, Jonathan Euvrard, Barbara Castelnuovo, Kate Salters, Lara Esteves Coelho, Didier K Ekouevi, Brian Eley, Lameck Diero, Elizabeth Zaniewski, Nathan Ford, Annette H Sohn, Azar Kariminia. Global estimates of viral suppression in children and adolescents and adults on antiretroviral therapy adjusted for missing viral load measurements: a multiregional, retrospective cohort study in 31 countries. The Lancet HIV, 2021; 8 (12): e766 DOI: 10.1016/S2352-3018(21)00265-4

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hiv and aids; infectious diseases; viruses; std; virology; extreme survival; biotechnology; biology

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Global HIV viral suppression rates too low among children and adolescents

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Globally, less than two thirds of children living with HIV who are taking treatment are 'virally suppressed', according to new research from UNSW Sydney's Kirby Institute and the global IeDEA consortium, published today in The Lancet HIV. Viral suppression for HIV means that treatments are working effectively to protect health and prevent the transmission of HIV to others.

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New COVID variant found in France: Reason for panic or not quite yet? -Nate Tamarra #14

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New COVID variant found in France: Reason for panic or not quite yet? -Nate Tamarra #14

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https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/new-covid-variant-found-in-france-reason-for-panic-or-not-quite-yet-684878

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New COVID variant found in France: Reason for panic or not quite yet?

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The spike protein of the variant known as B.1.640 has some unprecedented mutations.

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An extra 8 million tons of plastic waste during the pandemic Chenelle M  #10

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An extra 8 million tons of plastic waste during the pandemic Chenelle M  #10

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The COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in demand for disposable plastics that has resulted in more than 25,000 tons of litter flowing into the world's oceans, scientists in the United States and China reported on Monday.

The researchers estimated the amount of plastic waste generated by different countries, calculated how much was ferried to the sea by major rivers, and used computer models to simulate its journey through the global ocean. They found that the pandemic spawned more than 8 million tons of plastic debris from hospitals, personal protective equipment, and online shopping, and most of the waste that reaches the ocean will wind up in beaches and coastal sediments.

"This poses a long-lasting problem for the ocean environment," the team, which included researchers from Nanjing University and the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We call for better medical waste management in pandemic epicenters, especially in developing countries."

The emergence of COVID-19 represents the most severe pandemic yet to occur in an era of plastics and disposable items, noted João Canning Clode, a marine ecologist at Portugal's Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, who has written about the potential ways that the COVID-19 pandemic could exacerbate marine pollution.

As cases climbed, reaching 212 million people worldwide by August 23, 2021, so did the amount of medical waste that contained plastic. This included COVID-19 testing kits and personal protective equipment such as face masks, gloves, and face shields. Single-use items such as plastic cutlery were also used to minimize the risk of spreading the novel coronavirus, particularly before vaccines became available, Canning Clode told Popular Science in an email.

Meanwhile, people turned to online shopping at an "unprecedented speed," the researchers wrote. The material used to package these orders became another source of excess plastic.

Not all of this plastic is processed properly or recycled, and some of the mismanaged waste will eventually find its way to rivers and the ocean. According to one estimate, about 1.56 billion face masks entered the seas in 2020. All this debris poses a number of threats to marine animals, which may eat or become entangled within the plastic.

To find out how much plastic waste has been created because of COVID-19, the researchers considered a variety of data sources, such as statistics on population, mask production, and COVID-19 infections, tests, and hospitalizations, as well as financial reports from Amazon, Walmart, and other top e-commerce companies.
[Related: How long will we keep wearing masks?]
As of late August 2021, they estimated, 193 countries had generated about 8.4 million tons of pandemic-related plastic waste. Hospitals contributed an estimated 87.4 percent of the trash, while personal protective equipment used by the general public accounted for 7.6 percent, and online shopping and COVID-19 test kits contributed, respectively, only 4.7 percent and 0.3 percent.

A whopping 47.6 percent of confirmed COVID-19 cases have occurred in the Americas, followed by 31.22 percent in Asia and 17.26 percent in Europe. However, the continent that contributed the most plastic waste was Asia (an estimated 46 percent), followed by Europe (24 percent) and North and South America (22 percent).

While online shopping-and, on the bright side, mask wearing-were more prevalent in Asian countries, the study authors note that flawed existing systems for dealing with medical trash likely accounted for most of the gap. "The biggest sources of excess waste were hospitals in areas already struggling with waste management before the pandemic; they just weren't set up to handle a situation where you have more waste," Amina Schartup, an assistant professor at Scripps Oceanography, said in a statement.

The team next investigated how much of this excess plastic would enter and be carried out to sea by 369 major rivers and their watersheds, based on the speed and other characteristics of the rivers. They calculated that about 25,900 tons of plastic would reach the oceans, representing around 1.5 percent of the total plastic waste discharged by rivers worldwide. The top debris contributors were the Shatt al Arab, Indus, Yangtze River, and Ganges Brahmaputra in Asia, followed by the Danube in Europe, and the Amur in Asia, highlighting hotspots that will require "special attention in plastic waste management," the researchers wrote.

Finally, the team used a computer model to simulate how this litter will move through the oceans, taking into account how seawater circulates and how several different kinds of plastic might become fragmented or otherwise altered during their travels. They found that most of the plastic waste will land on beaches and seabeds within three years. However, the Arctic Ocean will likely become a dead-end for some of it.

"The Arctic ecosystem is considered to be particularly vulnerable due to the harsh environment and high sensitivity to climate change, which makes the potential ecological impact of exposure to the projected accumulated Arctic plastics of special concern," the researchers concluded.

While several highly effective COVID-19 vaccines are available in the United States and abroad, the pandemic isn't quashed yet. By the end of 2021, the researchers estimate, a total of 11 million tons of excess plastic will have been generated, and rivers will have carried 34,000 tons of this waste to the sea.

It's worth remembering, of course, that the excess waste generated because of the pandemic makes up just a small fraction of a much larger plastic problem. "The ongoing assembly of trash, plastics and debris in the ocean is severely affecting marine life, and today marine litter is considered as one of the most relevant pollution problems the planet is experiencing," Canning Clode said.

To quash plastic waste, the researchers say, it will be important to improve plastic waste collection, treatment, and recycling technology; develop more eco-friendly alternatives; and raise awareness among the general public about the environmental impacts of personal protective equipment and other plastic products.

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Humans created an extra 8 million tons of plastic waste during the pandemic

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The COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in demand for disposable plastics that has resulted in more than 25,000 tons of litter flowing into the world's oceans, scientists in the United States and China reported on Monday.

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Bristol Shields #11 What Fauci sees coming for the pandemic this winter

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Bristol Shields #11 What Fauci sees coming for the pandemic this winter

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What Dr. Fauci sees coming for the pandemic this winter

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The country’s top infectious disease doctor says he is looking for “a level of control” over COVID-19 such that it is less disruptive to society — and he again stressed the importance of vaccination.

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Bristol Shields #10 republican politicians endorse invermectin

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Bristol Shields #10 republican politicians endorse invermectin

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When state senators in South Carolina held two hearings in September about COVID treatments, they got an earful on the benefits of ivermectin - which many of the lawmakers lauded along the way, sharing experiences of their own loved ones.

The demands for access to the drug were loud and insistent, despite the fact that federal regulators had just issued a strong warning against using the drug to treat COVID-19.

One member of the public, Pressley Stutts III, reminded the panel that his father, a prominent GOP leader in the state, had died from COVID just a month before. He believed ivermectin could have helped. But doctors at the hospital wouldn't even discuss it.

"I went every bit as far as I could without getting myself thrown in jail trying to save my father's life," he told the panel, as lawmakers offered their condolences.

"What is going on here?" he asked, with the passion in his voice growing. "My dad's dead!"

The pleas to public officials have been building. And now they're beginning to act, largely to satisfy their conservative constituents.

Ivermectin is a generic drug that has been used for decades to treat river blindness, scabies and even head lice. Veterinarians also use it, in different formulations and dosages, to treat animals for parasites like worms.

After the pandemic began, scientists did launch some clinical trials to see if ivermectin could help as a treatment for COVID. Some of those are still ongoing. But mainstream medicine won't currently touch it as a COVID treatment, citing the poor quality of the studies to date, and two notorious "preprint" studies that were later taken off the Internet because of inaccurate and flawed data.

On Aug. 26, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially advised clinicians not to use ivermectin, saying there is insufficient evidence of benefit, and pointing out that unauthorized use had already led to accidental poisonings. Vaccination, the CDC reiterated, is still the best way to avoid serious illness and death from the coronavirus.
Trading ire and insults over ivermectin
But many Americans remain convinced that ivermectin could be beneficial, and some politicians appear to be listening to them, rather than the current scientific consensus.

"If we have medications out here that are working - or seem to be working - I think it's absolutely horrible that we're not trying them," said Republican state Sen. Tom Corbin as he questioned doctors who had also come to the statehouse to push back against the ivermectin frenzy.

The doctors challenged the implied insult that they weren't following best practices: "Any implication that any of us would do anything to withhold effective treatments from our patients is really insulting to our profession," said Dr. Annie Andrews, a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina who has been taking care of COVID patients throughout the pandemic.

But instead of listening to the medical consensus, politicians in states like South Carolina are taking their cues from doctors on the fringe. In their hearing, state senators patched in a call from Dr. Pierre Kory.

Last year, Kory started a nonprofit called the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which promotes ivermectin. He says he's not making any money off of prescribing the drug, though the nonprofit does solicit donations and has not yet filed required financial documents with the IRS.

Korry acknowledges his medical opinions have landed him on "an island."

Dr. Kory first testified about ivermectin to a U.S. Senate committee last December. That video went viral. And even though it was taken down from YouTube, his Senate testimony prompted patients across the country to speak up and ask for ivermectin when they fell ill.

By late August, outpatient prescriptions had jumped 24-fold. Calls to poison control hotlines had tripled, mostly related to people taking ivermectin formulations meant for livestock.
Pro-ivermectin doctor says he's been pushed to the medical margins
Dr. Kory says he has effectively lost two jobs over his views on ivermectin. At his current hospital in Wisconsin, where he runs the ICU two weeks a month, managers called him to a meeting in September, where he was informed he could no longer prescribe ivermectin. He'd been giving it to "every patient with COVID," he says.

"After the pharma-geddon that was unleashed, yeah, they shut it down," he told the South Carolina lawmakers. "And I will tell you that many hospitals across the country had already shut it down months ago."

Framing the ivermectin fight as a battle against faceless federal agencies and big pharmaceutical corporations appealed to Americans who were already suspicious of the science behind the pandemic and the approved COVID vaccines.

Kory suggests success stories with COVID treatments in other parts of the world have been suppressed in an effort to promote the vaccine.

However, in an interview with NPR, Kory said he regrets the flashpoint he's helped ignite.

"I feel really bad for the patients, and I feel really bad for the doctors," he told NPR. "Both of them - both the patients and doctors - are trapped."

Patients are still demanding the treatment, but even doctors sympathetic to their wishes are being told by their health systems not to try it.
Ivermectin interventions become conservative rallying cry
Now conservatives in elected office are sensing political payoff if they step in to help patients access the drug. State legislatures, including those in Tennessee and Alaska are debating various ways to increase access to ivermectin - with proposals such as shielding doctors from repercussions for prescribing it, or forcing pharmacists to fill questionable prescriptions.

The Montana State News Bureau reported that the state's Republican attorney general dispatched a state trooper to a hospital in Helena where a politically-connected patient was dying from COVID. Her family was asking for ivermectin.

In a statement, St. Peter's Hospital said that doctors and nurses were "harassed and threatened by three public officials."

"These officials have no medical training or experience, yet they were insisting our providers give treatments for COVID-19 that are not authorized, clinically approved, or within the guidelines established by the FDA and the CDC," the statement added.

On Oct. 14, the Republican attorney general in Nebraska addressed the controversy, issuing a nearly 50-page legal opinion which argues that doctors who consider the "off label" use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID are still acting within the parameters of their state medical license, as long as they obtain appropriate consent.

Some patients have filed lawsuits to obtain ivermectin, with mixed success. A patient in Illinois was denied. But other hospitals, including one in Ohio, have been forced to administer the drug against the objections of their physicians.

Even as they gain powerful political supporters, some ivermectin fans say they're now avoiding the health care system - because they've lost faith in it.

Lesa Berry of Richmond, Virginia, had a friend who died earlier this year of COVID. The doctors refused to use ivermectin, despite requests from Berry and the patient's daughter.

They know better now, she says.

"My first attempt would have been to keep her out of the hospital," Berry says. "Because right now when you go to the hospital, they only give you what's on the CDC protocol."

Now, Berry and her husband have purchased their own supply of ivermectin, which they keep at home.
This story is a partnership with NPR, Kaiser Health News and Nashville Public Radio.

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As constituents clamor for ivermectin, Republican politicians embrace their cause

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When state senators in South Carolina held two hearings in September about COVID treatments, they got an earful on the benefits of ivermectin - which many of the lawmakers lauded along the way, sharing experiences of their own loved ones.

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Bristol Shields #9 Coronavirus infection found in Iowa deer

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Bristol Shields #9 Coronavirus infection found in Iowa deer

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The analysis by Penn State and Iowa researchers strongly indicates that deer are getting the virus from humans, worrying experts about a deep wild reservoir for the virus.

Deer in Winterset, Iowa, in 2019. Credit... Joe Raedle/Getty Images

A new study of hundreds of white-tailed deer infected with the coronavirus in Iowa has found that the animals probably are contracting the virus from humans, and then rapidly spreading it among one another, according to researchers.

Up to 80 percent of deer sampled from April 2020 through January 2021 in the state were infected, the study indicated.

Scientists said the findings pose worrisome implications for the spread of the coronavirus, although they were not able to identify how the deer might have contracted the virus from humans. There is no evidence that deer have passed the virus back to humans.

Researchers and outside experts characterized the study's findings as a troubling development in the course of the pandemic. Widespread infection among North America's most ubiquitous game species could make eradicating the pathogen even more difficult, especially if they became a reservoir for mutations that eventually spilled back over to humans.

The study has not been published in a peer-reviewed science journal yet, but its authors at Penn State University and wildlife officials in Iowa found the results so disturbing that they are alerting deer hunters and others who handle deer to take precautions to avoid transmission.

Earlier this year, a multistate survey of white-tailed deer by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service turned up antibodies for the virus among less than half the deer in four states, but that study confirmed exposure, not infection. (Antibodies could mean the deer fought off infection.)

This new analysis - conducted by examining the lymph nodes of samples from roadkill and from those felled by hunters - showed active infections, the researchers said. The veterinary microbiologists who led the Penn State study, Suresh Kuchipudi and Vivek Kapur, said they were not prepared to find such widespread infection.

"It was effectively showing up in all parts of the state," said Dr. Kuchipudi. "We were dumbfounded."

Evidence of transmission from people, the scientists said, was found in the genomic sequencing of the samples collected over months that reflected the virus lineages circulating among humans.

"There is no reason to believe that the same thing isn't happening in other states where deer are present," Dr. Kapur said.

Previous studies have hinted at such a possibility because a number of other animals are susceptible to infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 in humans. They include ferrets and primates that have been intentionally infected in lab experiments, zoo animals that caught the virus from their handlers and captive mink that were sickened after being exposed to the pathogen by farm workers.

In the case of mink, the coronavirus has already demonstrated an ability to sicken animals infected by humans, and last year, Denmark slaughtered its entire population of 17 million farmed mink after scientists discovered they could pass the virus back to people. The virus, they found, had also picked up mutations along the way, but officials said none were especially worrisome.

If the virus were to become endemic in wild animals like deer, it could evolve over time to become more virulent and then infect people with a new strain capable of evading the current crop of vaccines.

The findings were verified on Tuesday by federal scientists at the National Veterinary Services Laboratories, according to a spokesperson.

Scientists unaffiliated with the study who reviewed the findings said they were stunned, but not entirely surprised.

"If deer can transmit the virus to humans, it's a game changer," said Tony Goldberg, a veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the evolution of infectious diseases as they jump between animals and people. "To have a wildlife species become a reservoir after transmission from humans is very rare and unlucky, as if we needed more bad luck."

The Penn State researchers have been working with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, which already conducts surveillance on chronic wasting disease, a fatal neurological illness among white-tailed deer. The first positive test results showed up in September 2020 - in two deer at different ends of the state. Between late November and early January, as the pandemic was surging in humans across Iowa, 80 percent of the deer specimens tested positive for the virus.

By then, the researchers had tested only 300 of the 5,000 lymph nodes available to them; but the evidence was overwhelming.

Such a high rate of infection, Dr. Kuchipudi said, was effectively 50 times greater than its prevalence among Iowa's human residents during the peak of the pandemic.

What they found as they probed deeper was even more astounding. Using tests to decode the genomic makeup of each viral sample, they found similar patterns between the emergence of mutations and variants in the state's deer population and those infecting people. Researchers said that offered stronger proof of human-to-deer transmission as well as evidence that deer were then spreading the virus to one another at a rapid clip. Mapping the location of each sample also suggested that the infections were occurring simultaneously across the state as hunting season ramped up. The study's authors say it is unclear whether the deer were sickened by the infection.

How the virus passes from people to deer, however, is not entirely clear. Rachel Ruden, Iowa's state wildlife veterinarian and an author of the study, said there were plenty of opportunities for transmission given that 445,000 deer roam the state.

The virus can spread when people feed deer in their backyard, through sewage discharges or maybe when an animal licks a splotch of chewing tobacco left behind by an infected hunter. "Perhaps it doesn't take much of a loading dose to get deer infected," she said. "But either way, all of this is a striking example that we're all in this pandemic together."

The study raises a multitude of questions that scientists will be keen to examine, including whether other wild animals can also carry the virus, particularly rodents like mice that live in even closer proximity to people. The more species capable of carrying the virus, the greater the chances it can evolve in ways that threaten human health.

Such a scenario is not at all far-fetched. Even if the exact origins of SARS-CoV-2 remain a subject of debate, many scientists are inclined to believe the virus was a product of natural transmission from animals, most likely bats. There is no shortage of unpleasant pathogens that toggle between humans and animals, among them yellow fever, West Nile virus and strains of seasonal influenza that can infect birds and pigs.

Despite their concerns that the country's 38 million white-tailed deer could become a lasting reservoir for the coronavirus, experts say such a scenario does not mean all hope is lost in the battle to conquer the pandemic.

A dangerous mutation that one day finds its way from deer to people could be tackled with a booster shot - not unlike how vaccines for the seasonal flu are developed each year. A coronavirus vaccine for deer is also a possibility - scientists have already created them for zoo animals - but the practicality of inoculating millions of free-roaming ungulates would be daunting, to say the least.

In the meantime, several states have advised deer hunters to take precautions when dealing with white-tailed deer: wear rubber gloves and perhaps a mask when field dressing and processing; sanitize hands and instruments after dressing; and bag carcass remains before disposing in trash. Health officials say eating cooked venison carries little risk as long as it reaches an internal temperature of 165°F.

Barbara Han, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who has been studying the spillover capacity of SARS-CoV-2 in various mammals, said the findings reinforced the need for a more robust system of surveillance that can quickly detect the transmission of pathogens from animals to people.

The pandemic has already prompted better coordination among laboratories across the United States, but she said she hoped the latest findings might turbocharge efforts to create a national, federally funded surveillance network for so-called zoonotic diseases. Despite a global death toll that has surpassed five million, Dr. Han and other experts say Covid-19 could have been far deadlier, a possibility underscored by viruses like Ebola.

"We can't keep playing whack-a-mole with these zoonotic diseases because it's just too costly, both financially and from a human losses standpoint," she said. "We have got to do better."

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Widespread Coronavirus Infection Found in Iowa Deer, New Study Says

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The analysis by Penn State and Iowa researchers strongly indicates that deer are getting the virus from humans, worrying experts about a deep wild reservoir for the virus. A new study of hundreds of white-tailed deer infected with the coronavirus in Iowa has found that the animals probably are contracting the virus from humans, and then rapidly spreading it among one another, according to researchers.

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Onions cause Salmonella outbreak in 37 states - Allison Ireland #10

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Onions cause Salmonella outbreak in 37 states - Allison Ireland #10

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Fresh red, white, and yellow onions have been linked to a salmonella outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The outbreak has spread though at least 37 states, sickened at least 652 people, and hospitalized 129 people. The onions were imported from Chihuahua, Mexico and distributed by produce wholesaler ProSource Inc. ProSource has volunteered to recall onions imported during its most recent imports between July 1 and August 27, despite the FDA not issuing a formal recall.

Reports of salmonella poisoning began in early August, and peaked later that month. It can take three to four weeks to determine if a sick person has been affected by an outbreak, so rates could be much higher than what's been reported so far. Most of the reported cases have come from Texas and Oklahoma.
[Related: 'Fugitive dust' seems to have caused last summer's salmonella outbreak from peaches.]
Salmonella is a type of bacteria that causes salmonella poisoning, or salmonellosis. Symptoms typically include fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach cramps, which can begin anywhere between six hours and a week after consuming a product contaminated by the bacteria. It takes most people four to seven days to recover without treatment.

Onions can last up to three months in storage, so tainted onions may still be at large in storerooms, produce bins, or refrigerators. So, if your pantry contains any onions from Chihuahua or imported by ProSource, or of indeterminable origin, toss them out right away and disinfect any surfaces the onions may have touched.

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A salmonella outbreak has hit 37 states, and onions are to blame

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Fresh red, white, and yellow onions have been linked to a salmonella outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The outbreak has spread though at least 37 states, sickened at least 652 people, and hospitalized 129 people. The onions were imported from Chihuahua, Mexico and distributed by produce wholesaler ProSource Inc.

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Haley #7 - CDC director signs off on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11

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Haley #7 - CDC director signs off on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/covid-vaccines-latest-updates

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CDC director signs off on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11

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The U.S. is prepared to roll out doses to kids as soon as tomorrow.

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Haley #6 - 5 pandemic tech innovations that will change travel forever

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Haley #6 - 5 pandemic tech innovations that will change travel forever

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/5-pandemic-tech-innovations-that-will-change-travel-forever

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5 pandemic tech innovations that will change travel forever

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These digital innovations will make your next trip safer and more efficient. But will they invade your privacy?

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New city homeless plan &  suspends plastic bag ban Cheyenne M #9 

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New city homeless plan &  suspends plastic bag ban Cheyenne M #9 

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https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/anchorage/2021/11/02/anchorage-assembly-approves-new-city-homelessness-plan-lifts-ban-on-plastic-bags/

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After weeks of Anchorage Assembly meetings fraught with acrimony, outbursts from attendees and a power struggle with the mayor, the panel returned to business as usual Monday - voting to suspend the city's plastic bag ban, and approving board appointments and a resolution outlining the city's homelessness policy, among other actions.

Assembly members unanimously voted in favor of the resolution on homelessness, which is a compromise between the Assembly and administration of Mayor Dave Bronson. The resolution outlines an agreed-upon "exit strategy" from using Sullivan Arena as a mass care homeless shelter and is the result of a monthslong negotiation process after clashes over a previous Bronson proposal for a 450-person temporary shelter in East Anchorage.

City business during the Assembly's regular meeting last week was unexpectedly derailed by a continued heated debate over a public health measure requiring mask wearing in indoor public spaces. That meeting was continued to a special meeting last week, but with a lengthy agenda, the Assembly didn't finish its business and held the second special meeting on Monday.

Plastic bag ban suspended until Jan. 1

In a 7-3 vote on Monday, Assembly members approved an ordinance that temporarily lifts a citywide ban on plastic shopping bags, suspending the ban until Jan. 1. Assembly members Felix Rivera, Meg Zaletel and Kameron Perez-Verdia voted against the suspension while Assembly member Austin Quinn-Davidson did not attend the meeting.

Mayor Bronson in September had requested the ban be suspended until May 1, 2022, after the city's previous suspension on the ban ended. Bronson, who was present during the meeting, did not speak to advocate for a longer suspension.

The Assembly had originally suspended the city's ban on plastic bags during the beginning of the pandemic, when people feared the coronavirus could spread on surfaces such as reusable shopping totes and paper bags were in short supply.

Member Crystal Kennedy said retailers and other businesses are still facing supply shortages, including for paper bags and toilet paper.

"This just allows some flexibility," Kennedy said. "I don't think anybody's going to go out and buy a whole bunch of plastic bags so that they can start giving them out. I think vendors will use what they have in stock."

City moves ahead with new homelessness strategy

The city's homelessness plan was drafted during a facilitated negotiation process between three Assembly representatives and three representatives from Bronson's administration.

Before the negotiation process, the Assembly and Bronson administration bitterly sparred over how best to approach the city's burgeoning homelessness issue. A majority of Assembly members preferred to have several smaller shelters spread across the city, while the administration wanted to concentrate services and shelter in one large facility.

Now, the resolution outlines a strategy to handle the city's homelessness issues using a "scattered site" model that would ideally accommodate the city's homeless population and bring the need for an emergency mass care facility - currently at Sullivan Arena - to an end.

It does not specify where any shelter or service will be located.

Instead, it details five types of housing and facilities: a shelter and navigation center for single adults, a "special population facility" also with a navigation center, a medical convalescence facility, substance misuse treatment with housing and workforce and permanent supportive housing units.

"That is one of probably the most proud pieces for me in this resolution, is that it contains a housing component. Without housing, there is no solution to homelessness," said Assembly member Zaletel, chair of the committee on housing and homelessness and a sponsor of the resolution.

Two of Bronson's representatives in negotiations have resigned over the last month - Craig Campbell, former director of policy and programs, and Dr. John Morris, former homeless coordinator. Only Larry Baker, Bronson's senior policy adviser, remains.

During discussion on the resolution, Baker said that Joe Gerace, current appointed Anchorage Health Department director, will take one of the spots on the negotiation team.

Baker called the resolution a unified effort between the Assembly and administration and said it is a policy statement the administration will honor as it moves forward and adds new members to the negotiating team.

"This is just the beginning," Baker said. "... This is the policy. What will follow is appropriations items and other issues that will come before this body."

The resolution on homelessness passed with two amendments - one adding language that ties the need for mass care to the pandemic, and another that removed language specifying five sites the team has reviewed for a homeless shelter. That information was instead included in a memorandum because a site has not yet been chosen.

The city has seen a recent shakeup of Anchorage's homeless management team. Two other Bronson administration officials working on homelessness issues have resigned or been fired.

Shawn Hays, the city's mass care branch chief, was fired the same day the Daily News published the account of a man whose daughter found him at the Sullivan Arena shelter in a severely ill and incapacitated state. Bob Doehl, director of development services who had previously overseen the Sullivan Arena shelter, also resigned.

Appointment confirmations

The Assembly unanimously appointed three people to the Anchorage Community Development Authority board of directors: Travis Frisk, Mike Mills and Adam Trombley.

The Assembly postponed the confirmation vote for Stacia Green's appointment to the board to Nov. 9. City code requires that seat be filled by someone with a background in banking and finance, Assembly Vice Chair Chris Constant said. It's not clear how Green's experience meets that requirement, he said.

"I've heard from a number of members of the public that this individual is very qualified to serve at ACDA, and so I believe there isn't a problem, but we have to do the work to figure out if this is the right fit for the actual seat that's available," Constant said.

The Assembly finished all items on its agenda except for a measure that would change how executive appointments are made in city departments. That will be carried over to the Assembly's next meeting on Nov. 9

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Anchorage Assembly approves new city homelessness plan, suspends ban on plastic bags

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After weeks of Anchorage Assembly meetings fraught with acrimony, outbursts from attendees and a power struggle with the mayor, the panel returned to business as usual Monday - voting to suspend the city's plastic bag ban, and approving board appointments and a resolution outlining the city's homelessness policy, among other actions.

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US gives final clearance to COVID-19 shots for kids 5 to 11  Nate Tamarra #13

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US gives final clearance to COVID-19 shots for kids 5 to 11  Nate Tamarra #13

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https://apnews.com/article/covid-vaccine-kids-five-to-eleven-science-health-032f7ed4fa60a3c0e08ba418446cfe2b

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An influential advisory panel voted Tuesday that all children ages 5 to 11 should get Pfizer's pediatric COVID-19 shots, putting the U.S. on the brink of a major expansion of vaccinations - and a final decision is expected within hours.

The Food and Drug Administration already has OK'd kid-size doses - just a third of the amount given to teens and adults - as safe and effective for the younger age group.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention formally recommends who should receive FDA-cleared vaccines, and its advisers decided Pfizer's shots should be opened to all 28 million children ages 5 to 11.

If the CDC's director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, signs off, it will mark the first opportunity for Americans under 12 to get the powerful protection of any COVID-19 vaccine.

Shots into little arms could begin this week, as Pfizer already is packing and shipping the first orders, millions of doses, to states and pharmacies to be ready.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP's earlier story follows below.

Should all school-age kids get Pfizer's pediatric COVID-19 vaccine? That's the question before an influential government advisory panel Tuesday.

The Food and Drug Administration has authorized emergency use of kid-size doses for children ages 5 to 11. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also must sign off before widespread vaccinations begin in that age group.

CDC's advisers are weighing who will get the most benefit as they deliberate whether to recommend the shots for up to 28 million more children, or perhaps only for those most vulnerable to serious illness. Their recommendation goes to the CDC's director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, for the final say.

"Today is a monumental day in the course of this pandemic," Walensky told the advisory panel Tuesday.

She said while the risk of severe disease and death is lower in young children than adults, it is real - and that COVID-19 has had a profound social, mental health and educational impact on youngsters, including widening disparities in learning.

"There are children in the second grade who have never experienced a normal school year," Walensky said. "Pediatric vaccination has the power to help us change all of that."

Shots into little arms could begin this week, as Pfizer already is packing and shipping the first orders, millions of doses, to states and pharmacies to be ready.

Doctors who've cared for hospitalized youngsters hope parents embrace Pfizer's kid shots, saying they're safe and far better than gambling that a child will escape a coronavirus infection.

"I've seen plenty of children in this age group that have been seriously ill," said Dr. Matthew Linam, an infectious disease specialist at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. "The risk of significant infection is still very real in this population."

There have been more than 8,300 hospitalizations of kids ages 5 to 11, about a third requiring intensive care, according to government data. The CDC has recorded at least 94 deaths in that age group.

And while the U.S. has seen a recent downturn in COVID-19 cases, experts are worried about another uptick with holiday travel and as winter sends more activity indoors where it's easier for the coronavirus to spread.

Pfizer's kid shots contain a third of the vaccine dose that's already been used to vaccinate millions of people 12 and older. The 5- to 11-year-olds will receive two shots, three weeks apart, the same schedule as everyone else -- but a smaller amount in each shot, using a smaller needle.

A study of 2,268 youngsters found the kid-size vaccine is nearly 91% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 -- based on 16 diagnoses among kids given dummy shots compared to just three who got the real vaccination.

The FDA examined more children, a total of 3,100 who were vaccinated, in concluding the shots are safe. The younger children experienced similar or fewer reactions -- such as sore arms, fever or achiness -- than teens or young adults get after larger doses.

That study wasn't large enough to detect any extremely rare side effects, such as the heart inflammation that occasionally occurs after the second full-strength dose, mostly in young men and teen boys. The FDA ultimately decided the benefits from vaccination outweigh the potential that younger kids getting a smaller dose also might experience that rare risk.

The FDA's decision came after its own advisers struggled with whether every young child needed a vaccine -- a key question in Tuesday's deliberations, too. Youngsters hospitalized with COVID-19 are more likely to have high-risk conditions such as obesity or diabetes -- but otherwise healthy children can get seriously ill, too.

And many pediatricians and parents have clamored for protection for youngsters so they can resume normal childhood activities without risking their own health -- or the fear of bringing the virus home to a more vulnerable family member.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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centers for disease control and prevention

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US advisers urge COVID shot for kids 5-11, final OK due soon

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An influential advisory panel voted Tuesday that all children ages 5 to 11 should get Pfizer's pediatric COVID-19 shots, putting the U.S. on the brink of a major expansion of vaccinations - and a final decision is expected within hours.

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A subvariant of Delta, that could be slightly more transmissible, is now on the rise. While the difference appears marginal for now, which means it's likely no more dangerous than the original Delta variant, the new subvariety may offer lessons about the virus's evolution.

AY.4.2 now accounts for just over 10 percent of COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom, and has been detected in at least 36 countries and 9 states-labs in the District of Columbia, Rhode Island, Nevada, Maryland, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Washington, Florida, and California have detected traces of the subvariant. AY.4.2 is one of 45 documented sublineages derived from Delta, but this is the first that seems to have some notable advantage over its progenitor. It differs from Delta in that it has two additional mutations on its spike proteins, the part of the virus's structure that allows it to infiltrate cells-early data suggest that it's 10 to 15 percent more transmissible than regular old Delta.

But how the mutations yield higher transmission rates is unclear. Ravi Gupta, a Cambridge University clinical microbiologist, told Financial Times that individual mutations affect the shape and behaviour of the virus in a way that scientists do not yet fully understand-"We don't really know how Delta itself is achieving such high infectivity."

Although AY.4.2 cases are rising faster than those of other variants, it has not been classified as a "variant under investigation" or a "variant of concern" by the World Health Organization-though that could change if case numbers start to pick up.
[Related: Which COVID-19 booster should I get?]
While many experts don't believe AY.4.2 is going to disrupt the course of the pandemic too much-at least, not in the way Delta did-some experts warn that we should underestimate the new subtype. It "needs to be monitored and, so far as possible, carefully controlled," immunologist at Imperial College London, Danny Altmann, told . "Because delta has now been the dominant mutant in several regions for some six months and not been displaced by any other variants, the hope has been that delta perhaps represented [the] peak mutation performance achievable by the virus," he added. "AY.4 may be starting to raise doubts about this assertion."

According to , the U.S. sequencing network shows that AY.4.2 accounts for a mere fraction of a percent of cases-and is not igniting outbreaks. Two British scientists wrote in The Conversation that the strain has "failed to take hold" of other European countries, "dropping off the radar in Germany and Ireland."
The emergence of more transmissible lineages of SARS-CoV-2 re-up the importance of vaccinations. "What the delta variant does, and what AY.4.2 will do, is simply find the people who are unvaccinated faster," David Matthews, a virologist at the University of Bristol, told . "So if you're unvaccinated, the length of time it will take before this virus finds you is shortened every time the virus gets faster at spreading."

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There's a new Delta variant. Here's why you shouldn't panic.

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A subvariant of Delta, that could be slightly more transmissible, is now on the rise. While the difference appears marginal for now, which means it's likely no more dangerous than the original Delta variant, the new subvariety may offer lessons about the virus's evolution.

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Lauren Campbell #10 - Bee venom therapy for health conditions

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Lauren Campbell #10 - Bee venom therapy for health conditions

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https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/bee-venom

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We include products we think are useful for our readers. If you buy through links on this page, we may earn a small commission. Here's our process.

As the name implies, bee venom is an ingredient derived from bees. It's used as a natural treatment for a variety of ailments.

Its proponents claim that it offers a wide range of medicinal properties, ranging from reducing inflammation to treating chronic illnesses. However, research in some of these areas is either lacking or conflicting.

This article reviews the uses, benefits, and side effects of bee venom.

Bee venom is a colorless, acidic liquid. Bees excrete it through their stingers into a target when they feel threatened.

It contains both anti-inflammatory and inflammatory compounds, including enzymes, sugars, minerals, and amino acids ().

Melittin - a compound that consists of 26 amino acids - comprises about 50% of the dry weight of the venom and has been shown to have antiviral, antibacterial, and anticancer effects in some studies (, ).

That said, it's primarily responsible for the pain associated with bee stings ().

Bee venom also contains the peptides apamin and adolapin. Although they act as toxins, they have been shown to possess anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties.

As you can see, the substances in bee venom have been associated with both positive and negative health effects.

Importantly, while research shows that some compounds in the venom may have beneficial properties, the isolated effects of each component are unknown, as many components have not been well studied ().

How is it used?

Apitherapy is an alternative medicine practice that uses bee products - including their venom - to treat and prevent illnesses, pain, and more ().

Although bee venom has recently experienced a surge in popularity, bee-venom therapy has been used in traditional medicine practices for thousands of years ().

The venom is used in a number of ways and available in many forms. For example, it's added to products like extracts, supplements, moisturizers, and serums.

You can purchase bee-venom products, such as moisturizers, lotions, and lozenges, online or in specialty stores.

Meanwhile, bee-venom injections can be administered by healthcare professionals.

Lastly, bee venom is used in live bee acupuncture or bee-sting therapy - a treatment method in which live bees are placed on your skin and a sting is induced (, , ).

Summary
Some substances in bee venom, including melittin and apamin, may have medicinal properties. Bee-venom therapy has been used for thousands of years as a natural treatment for a variety of conditions.

While not all of the purported benefits of bee venom are backed by science, research has shown that it has several powerful medicinal properties.

Has anti-inflammatory properties

One of the most well-documented benefits of bee venom is its powerful anti-inflammatory effects. Many of its components have been shown to reduce inflammation, particularly melittin - its main component.

Although melittin can cause itching, pain, and inflammation when delivered in high doses, it has potent anti-inflammatory effects when used in small amounts ().

May reduce arthritis-related symptoms

The anti-inflammatory effects of bee venom have been shown to especially benefit those with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a painful inflammatory condition that affects your joints.

An 8-week study in 120 people with RA found that bee-venom acupuncture, which employed 5-15 bee stings every other day, provided symptom relief effects that were similar to those of traditional RA medications like Methotrexate and Celecoxib ().

Another study in 100 people with RA showed that combining bee-sting therapy with traditional medications like Methotrexate, Sulfasalazine, and Meloxicam was more effective at reducing pain and joint swelling than treatment with the traditional medication alone ().

Though promising, more high-quality studies are needed to confirm these effects ().

May benefit skin health

Multiple skincare companies have started adding bee venom to products like serums and moisturizers. This ingredient may promote skin health in several ways, including by reducing inflammation, providing antibacterial effects, and reducing wrinkles.

A 12-week study in 22 women demonstrated that applying a facial serum containing bee venom twice daily significantly reduced wrinkle depth and total wrinkle count, compared with the placebo ().

Another 6-week study found that 77% of participants with mild to moderate acne who used a serum containing purified bee venom twice daily experienced an improvement in acne, compared with the placebo ().

What's more, test-tube studies have shown that the venom has powerful antibacterial and anti-inflammatory effects against the acne-causing bacteria Propionibacterium acnes (, ).

May benefit immune health

Bee venom has been shown to have beneficial effects on immune cells that mediate allergic and inflammatory responses.

Additionally, venom immunotherapy, in which bee venom is administered by a healthcare professional by injection - is used to treat people with severe allergies to bee stings.

Research has shown that this treatment is safe and effective and can reduce the future risk of serious reactions to bee stings. In fact, it's recommended as a first-line treatment for those who are allergic to the venom ().

Other potential benefits

Though research is limited, bee venom may benefit the following conditions.

Neurological diseases. Some research suggests that bee-venom therapy may help reduce symptoms related to neurological diseases, including Parkinson's disease, though human studies are limited ().

Pain. One study showed that bee-venom acupuncture, along with traditional medication, significantly reduced pain and improved functional status in 54 patients with chronic lower back pain, compared with the placebo group ().

May fight Lyme disease. Some research suggests that bee venom and isolated melittin may have antimicrobial effects against Borrelia burgdorferi, which is the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. However, more research is needed ().

Although these potential benefits are promising, more research is needed to confirm them.

Summary
Bee venom has powerful anti-inflammatory properties and may benefit the health of your skin and immune system. It may also improve certain medical conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and chronic pain.

While bee venom has been shown to offer several potential benefits, it's important to note that studies supporting these benefits are limited. In fact, most available research has been conducted on animals or in test tubes.

Thus, it's unclear how effective bee-venom therapy is as an alternative medicine treatment, as well as whether it's any more effective than traditional treatments for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, chronic pain, or autoimmune diseases.

Certain methods of bee-venom therapy, including acupuncture, can lead to side effects, such as pain, swelling, and redness.

Additionally, bee-venom therapy can cause serious side effects or even death in highly allergic individuals by causing anaphylaxis, a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction that can make it hard to breathe ().

Other serious adverse effects related to this therapy have also been documented, including hyperventilation, fatigue, appetite loss, extreme pain, increased bleeding risk, and vomiting ().

Of particular note, a review of 145 studies on the side effects of bee-venom therapy found that an average of 29% of people experienced adverse effects - ranging from mild to severe - after treatment ().

In addition, the review found that compared with a saline injection, bee-venom acupuncture increased the occurrence of adverse side effects by a whopping 261% ().

Based on the available research, it's safe to say that adverse reactions - ranging from mild to potentially fatal - are common when using bee venom. For this reason, you should exercise extreme caution when using these products or treatments.

Bee-venom therapy and acupuncture should only be administered by a qualified healthcare professional.

Summary
Bee venom can cause side effects, ranging from mild to life threatening. Bee-venom therapy should only be administered by medical professionals.

Bee venom is a natural product that has risen in popularity due to its variety of potential health benefits.

It has been shown to have anti-inflammatory properties, may benefit skin health, and can possibly help treat symptoms related to various health conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and chronic pain.

However, using bee-venom products or undergoing bee-venom therapy may cause serious side effects, so be sure to practice caution and consult a trained medical professional for advice before trying it out.

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Bee Venom: Uses, Benefits, and Side Effects

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We include products we think are useful for our readers. If you buy through links on this page, we may earn a small commission. Here's our process. As the name implies, bee venom is an ingredient derived from bees. It's used as a natural treatment for a variety of ailments.

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Some female elephants are evolving with no tusks - Katie #8

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Some female elephants are evolving with no tusks - Katie #8

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some female elephants are losing their tusks as a response to poaching

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Some elephants are evolving to have no tusks as a response to brutal poaching

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While an elephant's tusks are among its defining features and tools for living, But an increasing proportion of female elephants in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park have been born without them -- an evolutionary response to poaching, some scientists say.

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This Flu Season is Different: Here's How to Prepare-Chenelle M #8

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This Flu Season is Different: Here's How to Prepare-Chenelle M #8

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Wearable technology to better understand health conditions Cheyenne M #8

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Wearable technology to better understand health conditions Cheyenne M #8

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https://www.news-medical.net/news/20211026/Wearable-technology-helps-researchers-to-better-understand-the-underlying-health-conditions.aspx

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Wearable technology such as the Apple Watch is allowing researchers to recruit a more diverse group of participants to health and wellness studies, helping them better understand the underlying health conditions they could only dream about glimpsing at before, according to a new three-year landmark observational University of Michigan study.

Published in The Lancet Digital Health, the study looked at data from nearly 7,000 participants who wore their Apple Watch on almost 90% of the study days for an average of 15.5 hours a day. Overall, 1.1 million blood pressure and more than 200 million heart rate measurements were collected through study devices.

The paper examines the first 90 days of the study, describing blood pressure, heart rate and activity data collected with the Apple Watch or iPhone and blood pressure measurements collected with the Omron wireless blood pressure cuff.

Participants 65 and older had significantly lower resting and walking heart rates, and women had resting heart rates on average 3 beats per minute higher than men. When stratified by self-declared race, Black participants had the highest heart rates and white participants the lowest. Activity levels also varied by race and ethnicity and by the presence of certain clinical conditions.

Together, these differences demonstrate that patient-specific context is an important consideration when clinicians interpret wearable and home blood pressure data, said study co-investigator Jessica Golbus of U-M Health's Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, noting that 10% of participants had diabetes, a third had hypertension and more than a quarter of participants reported depression.

As a cardiologist who takes care of patients dealing with heart failure, it's important that more than 200 patients in our study have heart failure. Understanding what their baseline information looks like is going to be really informative and allow us to start with more accurate estimates of patients' activity levels in daily life."

Jessica Golbus, U-M Health's Division of Cardiovascular Medicine

Golbus said that one of the biggest successes of the study so far was their ability to recruit from groups that have largely been underrepresented or unrepresented in digital health research. For example, 18% of the nearly 7,000 participants were 65 or older, 17 percent were Black and 17% were Asian.

Researchers also note that unlike other studies, this paper includes 90 days of data provided by the MIPACT study, but also offers a more representative sample of participants' long- term experiences.

For the study, participants were recruited through phone calls, social media, in clinic recruitment and community events. They were asked to complete baseline surveys, donate a blood sample, wear the Apple Watch 12 hours a day and complete breathing and blood pressure checks twice a day during the first phase of the study.

From a technology standpoint, the study revealed a significant discrepancy in activity levels as measured by the watch and phone, with the latter underestimating step counts.

"I think what this means is that not all mobile device signals are created equal and that, in the future, interpretation of these signals will require knowledge of the device from which these signals were collected," Golbus said.

Summary data across participants is available in a web-based research tool developed by the study investigators.

"With this tool, researchers and participants can choose certain clinical and demographic criteria-age, body mass index, sex-and see not only how many participants fall into that cohort but their average resting heart rate, blood pressure and other activity data," said Nicole Eyrich, clinical research project manager for the MIPACT study. "It provides more context in the form of normative data for researchers."

The study, which aims to enroll a diverse set of participants across a range of ages, races, ethnicities and underlying health conditions, is led by Sachin Kheterpal, associate dean for research information technology and professor of anesthesiology and launched in 2018 as a collaboration with Apple.

Golbus said the ultimate results of the study will be important clinically for physicians.

"Pretty frequently, I get asked by my patients what their wearable device data means, and it's really challenging to understand its implications for their long-term health," she said.

She says that the three-year follow-up period will be most informative as they seek to contextualize the data signals from the Apple Watch with information from participants' electronic medical records and survey data. The data may also provide the unexpected ability to examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We have data on participants both before and after the onset of the pandemic, so we really have the capability to evaluate how physiologic parameters changed over the course of the pandemic both as a result of illness but also due the global impact the pandemic has had on all of our lifestyles," Golbus said.

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Wearable technology helps researchers to better understand the underlying health conditions

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Wearable technology such as the Apple Watch is allowing researchers to recruit a more diverse group of participants to health and wellness studies, helping them better understand the underlying health conditions they could only dream about glimpsing at before, according to a new three-year landmark observational University of Michigan study.

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Sam H. #8 Could viral infections in teenagers lead to MS in adulthood?

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Sam H. #8 Could viral infections in teenagers lead to MS in adulthood?

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New research suggests that infections in teenage years may raise the risk of getting an MS diagnosis as an adult. jacoblund/Getty Images

Multiple sclerosis triggers may occur years before symptom onset and diagnosis.

Serious infections in people's teenage years may increase their risk of an MS diagnosis later in life.

Infection plays a significant role regardless of genetic risk.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an unpredictable disease of the central nervous system (CNS) that affects the brain and spinal cord. According to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, there were almost 1 million adults living with MS in the United States in 2017, which is more than twice the reported number in 1975.

The initial symptoms of MS are often vision-related - such as double vision, blurred vision, red-green color distortion - but the disease can affect almost any part of the body, depending on which parts of the CNS are damaged.

In addition to issues with vision, common symptoms include problems with:

balance and muscle weakness

memory and thinking

emotion

sensations of numbness, prickling, or "pins and needles"

There is currently no cure for MS, but several different treatments and therapies exist to manage the symptoms and reduce how often the symptoms return.

A combination of environmental and genetic factors seems to be responsible for MS, but the exact cause of the disease is unknown.

Scientists believe that it is an autoimmune disease. In people with MS, the immune system mistakenly attacks the myelin coating of the CNS.

Myelin protects the nerves and helps messages travel between the brain and the rest of the body. When the protective coating becomes damaged, it can slow, alter, or stop these messages.

The health record data for several million people born in Sweden between 1970 and 1994 suggest that a number of serious infections in adolescence may be risk factors for MS diagnosis in later years.

The research, which features in , found that events that cause inflammation of the CNS can increase the risk of MS diagnosis.

Glandular fever, which occurs due to the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and is also known as infectious mononucleosis (IM), showed the greatest association with MS diagnosis.

Tim Coetzee, Ph.D., who is chief advocacy, services and research officer at the National MS Society and was not involved with the study, told Medical News Today, "The data [...] add to the growing body of knowledge about the potential of EBV being a potential viral trigger for MS."

The study also found an increased risk associated with other types of infection and head trauma in the teenage years.

The lead author of the study is Prof. Scott Montgomery, clinical epidemiologist and director of the Clinical Epidemiology group at Örebro University and Örebro University hospital in Sweden. He told MNT that one of the main problems with researching risk factors of the disease is that they "may occur many years before MS is diagnosed, as the disease has an extended period of development before it is sufficiently symptomatic for a diagnosis."

A second study, which appears in , adds to the growing interest in whether viral infections in a person's teenage years can trigger MS at an older age.

For this study, which involved nearly 2.5 million people in Sweden, the researchers looked at data on hospital-diagnosed IM in children aged up to 10 years and adolescents aged 11-19 years. They then compared this information against MS diagnoses later in life. To understand the impact of family life - an environmental factor - and genetics, the team included siblings in the study.

Prof. Montgomery explains, "If one sibling develops glandular fever and goes on to develop MS, while the other does not develop glandular fever and does not develop MS, that would suggest that it is the glandular fever rather than any genetic predisposition that led to the MS."

During the study period, 5,867 people received a diagnosis of MS from the age of 20 years. Overall, children and teenagers with hospital-diagnosed IM had a higher risk, but teenagers showed the greatest risk of subsequent MS diagnosis.

According to Prof. Montgomery, the take-home message of the study is that "infectious mononucleosis during ages 11-15 years was often associated with an MS diagnosis over age 30 years [...]. The realization that adolescence is such an important time of susceptibility also focuses our work."

Dr. Coetzee told MNT:

"Understanding the risk factors and triggers for MS is of vital importance to the MS community. These studies highlight the importance of carefully exploring whether viral infections like EBV and other glandular fevers put someone at greater risk for developing MS."

He explained, "We need studies like this one to pinpoint the factors that contribute to the risk of MS so that we can develop strategies to prevent the onset of MS."

The study was limited by the exclusion of IM diagnosis in primary care and outpatient settings, meaning that it included only the most severe infections. Similarly, the authors noted that it was not possible to identify the symptomatic onset of MS before its diagnosis.

In response to a question about the next steps for the research, Prof. Montgomery said, "We now recognize that adolescence appears to represent a period of heightened susceptibility to exposures that may result in MS." The research team is now "working to better characterize the environmental exposures related to MS risk [...], investigating whether the various risks are additive or if some modify the outcome of others."

The effect of severe infection on the future health of children and teenagers is of growing importance in light of the in the levels of the SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating in teenagers. Could this lead to a wave in MS cases in the future?

Dr. Coetzee believes that it is too early to say. He said, "At this point, it would be premature to speculate about whether someone is at higher risk of MS [...] - we don't have enough information about the long-term effects of SARS-COV-2 infection on individuals to make conclusions about an individual's risk of developing MS due to a SARS-COV-2 infection."

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MS in adulthood linked to viral infections in teenage years

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Multiple sclerosis triggers may occur years before symptom onset and diagnosis. Serious infections in people's teenage years may increase their risk of an MS diagnosis later in life. Infection plays a significant role regardless of genetic risk. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an unpredictable disease of the central nervous system (CNS) that affects the brain and spinal cord.

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Climate change: Greenhouse gas build-up reached new high in 2020- Nate Tamarra #12

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Climate change: Greenhouse gas build-up reached new high in 2020- Nate Tamarra #12

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https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59016075

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The build-up of warming gases in the atmosphere rose to record levels in 2020 despite the pandemic, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

The amounts of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide rose by more than the annual average in the past 10 years.

The WMO says this will drive up temperatures in excess of the goals of the Paris agreement.

They worry that our warmer world is, in turn, boosting emissions from natural sources.

The news comes as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was "touch and go" whether the upcoming COP26 global climate conference will secure the agreements needed to help tackle climate change.

"It is going to be very, very tough this summit. I am very worried because it might go wrong and we might not get the agreements that we need and it is touch and go, it is very, very difficult, but I think it can be done," he said on Monday.

The restrictions imposed around the world during the Covid pandemic saw an overall decline in emissions of CO2 of 5.6%.

So why hasn't that fall been echoed in atmospheric concentrations - which are the subject of this latest data from the WMO?

There are a number of factors involved.

Around half of emissions from human activity are taken up by trees, lands and oceans. But the absorbing ability of these sinks can vary hugely, depending on temperatures, rainfall and other factors.

Another issue is that over the past decade, emissions of CO2 have increased progressively.

So even though carbon output was down last year, the increase in the level in the atmosphere was still bigger than the average between 2011-2020.

According to the WMO's annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, CO2 reached 413.2 parts per million in the atmosphere in 2020 and is now 149% of the pre-industrial level.

This is bad news for containing the rise in Earth's temperature.

The COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow in November is seen as crucial if climate change is to be brought under control. Almost 200 countries are being asked for their plans to cut emissions, and it could lead to major changes to our everyday lives.

"At the current rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, we will see a temperature increase by the end of this century far in excess of the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5 to 2C above pre-industrial levels," said WMO Secretary-General Prof Petteri Taalas. "We are way off track."

"This is more than just a chemical formula and figures on a graph. It has major negative repercussions for our daily lives and well-being, for the state of our planet and for the future of our children and grandchildren," said Prof Taalas.

The authors say the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago, when temperatures were 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than it is today.

One of the big concerns for researchers is that the ongoing rise in temperatures may actually cause a rise in warming gases from natural sources.

Scientists are concerned that this is already happening with methane.

Although it has a shorter lifespan than CO2, methane is far more potent as a warming chemical.

Around 60% of the CH4 that ends up in the atmosphere comes from human sources such as agriculture, fossil fuels, landfills and biomass burning.

The other 40% comes from the activities of microbes in natural sources such as wetlands.

Last year's rise was the biggest increase since global methane levels started rising again in 2007.

The majority of it was from natural sources.

"If you increase the amount of precipitation in the areas of the wetlands, and if you increase the temperature, then these methane producing bacteria, produce more methane," said Dr Oksana Tarasova from the WMO.

"So this will only increase in the future because the temperature is going to rise. It's a big concern," she told BBC News.

Scientists describe these vicious cycles as feedback loops. They are also being observed in the Amazon where researchers earlier this year reported that parts of the rainforest were now emitting more CO2 than they were absorbing.

"The higher the temperature, the less the precipitation, the more stress goes into the trees," said Dr Tarasova.

"So, trees have increased mortality, they stop taking up CO2. In addition to our own emissions, we will have emissions from our forests."

The WMO is also concerned about the rise in nitrous oxide, which comes from human activities such as the use of nitrogen fertiliser but also from natural sources.

It has also risen by more than the average over the last ten years.

With just days left before world leaders gather in Glasgow for COP26, the news on the level of warming gases in the atmosphere is stark.

"Greenhouse gas measurements are like skidding into a car crash. The disaster gets closer and closer but you can't stop it," said Prof Euan Nisbet from Royal Holloway, University of London.

"You can clearly see the crash ahead, and all you can do is howl."

Follow Matt on Twitter.

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Climate change: Greenhouse gas build-up reached new high in 2020

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Despite the pandemic, atmospheric levels of CO2 and methane once more broke records last year.

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F.D.A. Panel Recommends Covid Shots for Children 5 to 11- Nate Tamarra #11

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F.D.A. Panel Recommends Covid Shots for Children 5 to 11- Nate Tamarra #11

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/us/fda-pfizer-covid-vaccine-kids.html

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Covid-19 was "the eighth-highest killer of kids in this age group over the past year," said a C.D.C. official in favor of broader authorization.

Children would start getting their shots at a time when coronavirus cases are dropping sharply. Credit... Ariana Drehsler/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

WASHINGTON - An expert committee advising the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday recommended that regulators authorize Pfizer-BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds, bringing about 28 million children a major step closer to becoming eligible for shots.

If the F.D.A. follows the panel's advice in the coming days, as is expected, the Biden administration will have expanded vaccine access to all but the youngest Americans, while providing booster shots for many as well.

Biden administration officials see the pediatric dose as crucial to keeping schools open and restoring a sense of normalcy to family and work life as the pandemic hurtles toward the end of its second year. The administration wants to be seen as doing everything possible to combat the virus and build upon positive trends, as the Delta variant ebbs and the daily drumbeat of infections and deaths fades.

Younger children would start getting their shots at a time when coronavirus cases are dropping sharply. But public demand for a pediatric vaccine has been high, and some panel members said that even though young children are less likely to get severely ill from Covid-19, parents and doctors alike are anxious to protect them.

Dr. Jay Portnoy, a medical director at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., said he had seen critically ill children in the intensive care unit and "terrified" parents. "I'm looking forward to being able to actually do something to prevent that," he said.

The vote was 17-0 in favor, with one abstention. Federal regulators and scientists made a strong push, arguing that 8,300 children between 5 and 11 had been hospitalized with Covid-19 and nearly 100 had died over the course of the pandemic.

Covid-19 is "the eighth-highest killer of kids in this age group over the past year," said Dr. Amanda Cohn, a top C.D.C. vaccine official. "Use of this vaccine will prevent deaths, will prevent I.C.U. admissions and will prevent significant long-term adverse outcomes in children."

Data from Pfizer showed that the vaccine had a 90.7 percent efficacy rate in preventing symptomatic Covid-19 in a clinical trial of 5- to 11-year-olds. Still, many advisory committee members expressed concern about limited safety data, turning repeatedly to the risk of myocarditis, a rare condition involving inflammation of the heart muscle, in young vaccine recipients. Myocarditis and pericarditis, inflammation of the lining around the heart, have been tied to the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, particularly in younger men.

The Pfizer dose for younger children would be one-third of the strength given to people 12 and older, with two shots given three weeks apart. Experts have said that could diminish the risk of the heart-related side effects.

If F.D.A. regulators follow the committee's advice, as they typically do, an authorization could come within days. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's own panel of outside experts is scheduled to meet Tuesday and Wednesday, and is also expected to endorse a pediatric dose. The C.D.C., which sets vaccine policy, would likely then quickly recommend the rollout of shots.

During a long debate before the vote, some committee members questioned whether every child in the age group really needed the vaccine or whether it should be limited to those at high risk of severe Covid-19 - an easily identifiable group, with underlying conditions such as obesity or other risk factors.

Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, the president and chief executive of Meharry Medical College, said that since many children between 5 and 11 may already have some immunity after contracting the virus, the need to vaccinate broadly in the age group might be less urgent.

"It just seems to me that in some ways we're vaccinating children to protect the adults, and it should be the other way around," he said. "I do believe that children at highest risk do need to be vaccinated. But vaccinating all of the children to achieve that just seems a bit much for me."

Dr. Hildreth also bemoaned the fact that Pfizer's pediatric trial included few children from minority groups, who are particularly at risk of bad outcomes from Covid-19.

While some committee members said they wished to recommend the vaccine for a more narrow group of children, they were asked to decide simply whether the benefits of a pediatric shot outweigh the risks. "We decided to go for it with a lot of heavy conscience," said Dr. Eric Rubin, an infectious diseases expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Paul Offit, a panel member who heads the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said it was "nerve-racking" to make public health decisions affecting millions of children based on studies involving just a few thousand participants.

But he said: "The question is, when do you know enough? And I think we certainly know that there are many children between 5 and 11 years of age who are susceptible to this disease who could very well be sick and or hospitalized, or die from it."

Dr. Peter Marks, who heads the agency's division that oversees vaccine approvals, told the committee that nearly two million in that age group have been infected, and that a third of those hospitalized have needed intensive care.

Committee members said they hoped a pediatric dose would not only keep elementary schoolers out of the hospital, but would reduce transmission of the virus and cases of long Covid.

Dr. Fiona Havers, a viral disease specialist at the C.D.C., told the panel that more than 2,000 schools had been forced to close, affecting more than a million students, between early August and October because of outbreaks.

Children have higher levels than adults of the neutralizing antibodies that are essential for preventing infection, she said, but are at least as likely as adults to be infected, she said. She said there appear to be many more cases of child infection than are publicly recorded.

Covid-19 hospitalization rates in the 5 to 11 age group are three times as high for Black, Hispanic and Native American children as for white children, Dr. Havers added.

The C.D.C. also presented blood test data indicating that 42 percent of young children had coronavirus antibodies, eliciting questions about whether many had been infected with no symptoms and developed natural immunity. Dr. Havers cautioned that the children tested were already under clinical care and may not represent the general population.

It is unclear how many parents would quickly vaccinate their elementary schoolers if given the chance. Polling has showed that roughly a third are eager to do so right away, while a third prefer to wait. Since federal regulators cleared Pfizer shots for adolescents ages 12 to 15 in May, 46 percent have been fully vaccinated, compared with about 69 percent of adults.

Many panel members said the data on safety and efficacy was compelling enough for government to offer shots and give parents a choice.

What to Know About Covid-19 Booster Shots

The F.D.A. has authorized booster shots for millions of recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. Pfizer and Moderna recipients who are eligible for a booster include people 65 and older, and younger adults at high risk of severe Covid-19 because of medical conditions or where they work. Eligible Pfizer and Moderna recipients can get a booster at least six months after their second dose. All Johnson & Johnson recipients will be eligible for a second shot at least two months after the first.

Yes. The F.D.A. has updated its authorizations to allow medical providers to boost people with a different vaccine than the one they initially received, a strategy known as "mix and match." Whether you received Moderna, Johnson & Johnson or Pfizer-BioNTech, you may receive a booster of any other vaccine. Regulators have not recommended any one vaccine over another as a booster. They have also remained silent on whether it is preferable to stick with the same vaccine when possible.

The C.D.C. has said the conditions that qualify a person for a booster shot include: hypertension and heart disease; diabetes or obesity; cancer or blood disorders; weakened immune system; chronic lung, kidney or liver disease; dementia and certain disabilities. Pregnant women and current and former smokers are also eligible.

The F.D.A. authorized boosters for workers whose jobs put them at high risk of exposure to potentially infectious people. The C.D.C. says that group includes: emergency medical workers; education workers; food and agriculture workers; manufacturing workers; corrections workers; U.S. Postal Service workers; public transit workers; grocery store workers.

Yes. The C.D.C. says the Covid vaccine may be administered without regard to the timing of other vaccines, and many pharmacy sites are allowing people to schedule a flu shot at the same time as a booster dose.

But Dr. Michael G. Kurilla, an official at the National Institutes of Health who abstained from the vote, said the government was embracing a "one-size-fits-all" approach.

"I think for many children who have experienced Covid already, they're probably more than adequately protected. One dose may be sufficient," he said. "I think for the high-risk children, it's very different."

The vote took place in a highly charged atmosphere. As of early Tuesday, nearly 140,000 public comments had been formally submitted to the agency on the issue. By contrast, only 66 comments were submitted before the panel recommended boosters for adult recipients of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.

Over the weekend, panel members were deluged with messages in an organized email campaign urging them to vote against recommending authorization. The C.D.C. warned members of its own expert panel Tuesday afternoon that they might be targeted by a similar "misinformation campaign."

The agency said that "individuals posing as reporters may attempt to contact you and record conversations without your knowledge," and described how committee members should report threats.

Dr. Marks said that while the public had "strong feelings," the committee was only being asked whether to allow shots, not whether to mandate them.

But Dr. H. Cody Meissner, a panelist and chief of the pediatric infectious diseases division at Tufts Children's Hospital, said he feared that state-level mandates would quickly follow, before sufficient safety data could be gathered.

A. Oveta Fuller, an infectious disease expert at the University of Michigan, questioned how well the government tracks adverse side effects, asking: "Can we feel confident that should something come up, it will be detected?"

Dr. Marks and Dr. Cohn, the C.D.C. official, both said the government's safety monitoring systems would detect even rare side effects.

Pfizer officials described safety data on about 4,500 children ages 5 to 11 divided into two cohorts of roughly equal size. The first group was followed for about two months, the second for about two and a half weeks. None of the children involved in Pfizer's clinical trial developed myocarditis or pericarditis, but that was expected given the small size of the clinical trial and the rarity of those conditions.

Federal health officials have said that cases of the heart conditions tend to be mild and resolve quickly, and that younger people can also develop myocarditis from the virus itself.

Pfizer tried to reassure the panel that pharmacists and other providers would be able to handle children's shots. Pediatric doses would be in vials with orange caps instead of purple, and the vials would come in orange-colored packages in order to reduce the risk that providers would mistakenly give young children doses meant for those 12 and older, officials said.

Apoorva Mandavilli contributed reporting from New York and Carl Zimmer from New Haven, Conn.

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F.D.A. Panel Recommends Covid Shots for Children 5 to 11

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Covid-19 was "the eighth-highest killer of kids in this age group over the past year," said a C.D.C. official in favor of broader authorization. WASHINGTON - An expert committee advising the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday recommended that regulators authorize Pfizer-BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds, bringing about 28 million children a major step closer to becoming eligible for shots.

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Lauren Campbell #9- Hydrotherapy and Massage

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Lauren Campbell #9- Hydrotherapy and Massage

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https://www.amtamassage.org/publications/massage-therapy-journal/massage-and-hydrotherapy/

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In Greek mythology, Zeus is king of the gods. In ancient Greece, however, the most important and powerful deity might have been his brother, Poseidon, God of the Sea. After all, ancient Greece had a maritime economy. A nation of mariners and fishermen, it needed water to sustain both its population and its economy. The sea was its most important asset.

Thousands of years later, water remains essential-not only to wealth, but also to health. Drinking it nourishes the body. Bathing in it protects the body from disease. And as massage therapists around the world can attest, using it in massage therapy can rejuvenate and restore the body.

So impactful is water on wellness that there is a long tradition of hydrotherapy in cultures around the world.

"In Turkey, there's loads of people sitting around at the baths. And in Germany, there's a sauna in everyone's back garden," observes Rachel Fairweather, LMT, who, along with colleague Meghan Mari, LMT, serves as co-founder and co-director of Jing Advanced Massage Training in Brighton, England. "Being in water is primal. It's cleansing and it's healing."

It might also help you build client loyalty and grow your client base. Although hydrotherapy isn't as pervasive in the United States as it is in Europe, American massage therapists and massage consumers are embracing hydrotherapy-and there is plenty of room for growth.

Hydrotherapy Basics and Benefits

Brian Utting, LMT, is a longtime fan of hydrotherapy. When he began practicing and teaching massage some 40 years ago, it was a "no-brainer" to add it to his repertoire, he says.

"Hydrotherapy improves vascular, lymphatic and interstitial circulation, and affects cellular activity," explains Utting, an instructor at the Pacific Northwest School of Massage in Seattle, where students explore hydrotherapy during an annual continuing-education retreat to Oregon's Breitenbush Hot Springs. "It also has a major impact on the integumentary, nervous, digestive and muscular systems." ¹

But what is hydrotherapy, exactly? When he's teaching courses on the subject, Utting describes it as "the use of water in all its forms for the maintenance and improvement of health." That includes liquid water, water vapor and ice. In practice, however, Utting says hydrotherapy is more about temperature than it is about elements. It just so happens that water is an especially effective medium through which to transfer heat and cold.

"Water is 24 times more conductive than air," Utting says. "So you can heat the air or cool the air, but the effect won't be as dramatic."

Heat and cold offer different benefits. "Heat is very soothing and induces a relaxation response," says Marybetts Sinclair, LMT, author of Hydrotherapy for Bodyworkers. "As mammals ... we simply cannot survive unless we are warm. Thus, the application of heat satisfies our innate craving for warmth. So if I'm doing any kind of mind-body treatment, I'm going to use heat for basic relaxation; whatever kind of massage I'm doing, it's going to work better, and feel better to the client, if he or she has already started to let go of tension and stress."

A relaxed client is going to have a better outcome, both physically and mentally, while reducing the likelihood of strain and injury for client and therapist alike. "Heat also makes tissues softer and more malleable," Sinclair continues. "If I'm working on somebody's neck and shoulders, and they're really tight, it's going to be a lot easier for me to treat layers of tension if I've warmed the tissue first."

Fairweather agrees and says heat induces both psychological and physiological responses. The latter is especially apparent in clients with chronic pain. A 2020 study in the Journal of Back and Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation, for example, found that the local application of heat to trigger points reduces neck and foot pain by increasing muscle relaxation and tissue blood flow. ²

"Heat increases the viscoelasticity of fascia and reduces trigger-point firing," Fairweather says. Indeed, a 2018 study in the journal Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine confirmed that bathing in warm water induces vasodilation and increases blood flow, which delivers more oxygen and nutrients; as a result, bathers reported less fatigue, stress and pain. ³

The nervous system reacts to heat as well as the circulatory system, points out Carla Moodie, LMT, owner of Intuitive Spirit Healing Arts in Bowie, Maryland. "Heat can relax you, and when you're relaxed, your nervous system typically goes into parasympathetic mode, which is when your internal systems get to reset and recover," she says.

Cold may have the opposite effect, according to Moodie, who says cold typically activates the sympathetic nervous system, which floods the body with endorphins that can improve mood, ⁴ glycogen that can increase energy ⁵ and adrenaline that can blunt pain. ⁶

"If you've ever taken a cold shower, you know that cold has a more stimulating effect," explains Sinclair, who says the cardiovascular response to cold also is opposite. "What happens when cold is applied to a body part is a constriction of the blood vessels. This shunts blood away from the area, which in turn reduces inflammation."

That makes cold an ideal remedy for fresh soft-tissue injuries, swelling and pain, which can be treated by reducing inflammation. But cold should be used sparingly, as recent evidence suggests using too much cold, or for too long, can actually decrease blood flow too much, which slows the healing process. ⁷

"Inflammation is our friend. Anything that inhibits it is going to prolong healing," says Susan Salvo, EdD, BCTMB, LMT, author of Mosby's Pathology for Massage Professionals. "Ice is great for pain control, but you shouldn't use it for more than 10 minutes at a time or else it might interrupt the inflammatory cascade."

Increasingly, many massage therapists are using hot and cold together through a process known as contrast bathing, or contrast therapy.

"When you're hot, your blood vessels dilate. When you're cold, they contract. When you alternate between them, you're expanding your blood vessels, then squishing them. It's vascular exercise," explains Utting, who says the effect is a pumping action that increases the flow of blood and immune-critical lymph. "Lymphatic drainage is a big benefit. The lymphatic system is more swampy and passive than most people realize, so you need to help it along."

Localized vs. Immersive Treatments

Massage therapists can integrate hydrotherapy into their practices by way of either localized or immersive treatments. Unless they work in a spa environment that's already outfitted with whole-body hydrotherapy amenities, the former typically are more practical. Here are a few that promise maximal effect with minimal space, equipment and investment:

Topical heat/cold: Topical hydrotherapy treatments are probably the most accessible, according to Utting, who uses hot and cold packs in his home-based practice because they're simple and effective.

For cold, he says, practitioners can use reusable gel-filled cold packs, sometimes with a rolled-up hand towel underneath to conform to the neck. For heat, practitioners can use hot packs-the best are designed to be soaked in a hydrocollator. For those on a budget, hot water bottles also work well.

For many people, one of the simplest and best hydrotherapy practices is following a hot bath or shower with a 30-second cold rinse. "You find out just how long 30 seconds can be," Utting says.

Hot/cold stones: Fairweather and Mari say their favorite hydrotherapy technique is hot stone massage. Like towels, they remark, stones can be covered with water and heated in a hot stone warmer. The water bath ensures a moist instead of dry heat.

"Wet heat is the most beneficial heat because it penetrates deeper," Mari says.

Although basalt stones are most common, Mattie Hartley, LMT, owner of Radiant Wellness Studio in Arundel, Maine, likes to use pink Himalayan salt stones, which gently exfoliate the skin and are said to infuse it with essential minerals. For cold therapy, you can even use cold stones-polished marble stones that are cooled in ice water.

Wraps: Body wraps are another low-tech and soothing opportunity, according to Sinclair, who says wrapping warm towels around the body creates sensations of swaddling or compression. "It's like a mummy wrap or a cocoon," she says. "For some people, that can have a real anti-anxiety effect."

Instead of towels, you can use body wrap cloth, sheets or even clothing items. Mari, for example, treats carpal tunnel syndrome by turning clean cotton gym socks into cold-therapy mittens. Simply cut the toes off, cut a hole for the thumb, wet the sock, then freeze it. "It's great self-care for massage therapists, and it's also great for people who have edema during pregnancy," she says.

Ice massage: When she wants to utilize cold, Christina Suarez, LMT, often turns to ice therapy, wherein you integrate the use of ice into a massage. In order to reduce inflammation and pain, she often uses ice therapy with modalities like sports massage and deep tissue.

"I use it often for conditions like tendonitis," says Suarez, owner of Luminous Massage in Coral Gables, Florida. "It's a great way to spot-treat local inflammation-especially on the joints-in a controlled way."

Suarez uses reusable plastic CryoCups, a homemade version of which you can fashion by freezing water in a paper cup. When you peel back the paper, you can massage with the exposed ice and use the cup as a grip.

"Some people like to do ice massage with cross-fiber friction," Sinclair adds. "Cross-fiber friction can be quite painful and the ice helps numb its effect."

Foot and hand baths: Moodie is a big fan of hot foot baths. "There are a lot of pressure points in the feet, so soaking them in warm water can be really beneficial," she says. "I soak the feet in Epsom salt or magnesium flakes, then scrub the feet with a washcloth."

For a small investment (machines are inexpensive) you also can bathe hands and feet in paraffin wax. "I use paraffin wax as a warming tool," Suarez says. "For example, if a client is recovering from a broken finger or ankle surgery, I'll use paraffin to warm and soothe tight tissue before we work on mobility to regain flexibility and reduce adhesions."

Although they typically require a significant amount of space, investment and maintenance, immersive treatments aren't out of the question for therapists who want to go all-in on hydrotherapy. If your budget and space allow it-and you're willing to learn and follow appropriate sanitation protocols-you could install a small steam shower, soaking tub or sauna for the cost of a residential bathroom remodel. You could even install something like a Vichy shower. Having even just a basic "wet room" with tile flooring, a floor drain and a hand shower would allow for treatments like salt glows. According to Hartley, such investments often can be financed into manageable monthly payments and may be tax-deductible as a business expense.

If you don't want to make big investments, there are affordable alternatives. For example, Sinclair has used a modern version of the traditional Ayurvedic steam bath, or swedana. This is a special cover over a massage table that holds in steam and can create a portable steam bath that can be done with the client on the table.

"A true steam room is pricey to install. This can create a steam treatment without one," says Sinclair, who notes that the device must be cleaned thoroughly between uses.

Risks and Opportunities

Before you dip your toes in the waters of hydrotherapy-literally and figuratively-it's important to not only learn techniques, but also to learn when hydrotherapy may be contraindicated. For example, Hartley says that heat is ill-advised for people who have heat-intolerant conditions like multiple sclerosis, vascular diseases, diabetes and eczema, as well as any condition where sensing temperature accurately is impaired. Women who are pregnant or in menopause might also be heat-sensitive, according to Salvo, who says there are also cold-intolerant conditions like Raynaud's syndrome, hypothyroidism and Hashimoto's disease.

"You need to do a full medical history with each client, and you have to closely monitor the person you're working with," Sinclair says.

Even as you mind the risks, however, don't forget to celebrate the opportunities, urges Salvo, who says it's common practice to charge up to $20 for hot and cold packs, up to $30 for access to a sauna, steam room or hot tub-and up to $75 for access to a "thermal suite" that includes all three and can be rented out to one client while massaging another.

"Hydrotherapy services are add-on services," she says. "You're taking a massage client who would spend $60 for a massage, and you're getting them to spend double that by providing extra services. And oh, by the way, some clients might come to you because you offer these added services."

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Massage and Hydrotherapy | Massage Therapy Journal

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In Greek mythology, Zeus is king of the gods. In ancient Greece, however, the most important and powerful deity might have been his brother, Poseidon, God of the Sea. After all, ancient Greece had a maritime economy. A nation of mariners and fishermen, it needed water to sustain both its population and its economy.

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Some elephants are evolving to have no tusks - Katie #7

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Some elephants are evolving to have no tusks - Katie #7

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some female elephants are losing their tusks as a response to poaching

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Some elephants are evolving to have no tusks as a response to brutal poaching

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While an elephant's tusks are among its defining features and tools for living, But an increasing proportion of female elephants in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park have been born without them -- an evolutionary response to poaching, some scientists say.

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Sam L.Ch. 11- Hit the sleep 'sweet spot' to keep brain sharp

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Sam L.Ch. 11- Hit the sleep 'sweet spot' to keep brain sharp

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Like so many other good things in life, sleep is best in moderation. A multiyear study of older adults found that both short and long sleepers experienced greater cognitive decline than people who slept a moderate amount, even when the effects of early Alzheimer's disease were taken into account. The study was led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Poor sleep and Alzheimer's disease are both associated with cognitive decline, and separating out the effects of each has proven challenging. By tracking cognitive function in a large group of older adults over several years and analyzing it against levels of Alzheimer's-related proteins and measures of brain activity during sleep, the researchers generated crucial data that help untangle the complicated relationship among sleep, Alzheimer's and cognitive function. The findings could aid efforts to help keep people's minds sharp as they age.

The findings are published Oct. 20 in the journal Brain.

"It's been challenging to determine how sleep and different stages of Alzheimer's disease are related, but that's what you need to know to start designing interventions," said first author Brendan Lucey, MD, an associate professor of neurology and director of the Washington University Sleep Medicine Center. "Our study suggests that there is a middle range, or 'sweet spot,' for total sleep time where cognitive performance was stable over time. Short and long sleep times were associated with worse cognitive performance, perhaps due to insufficient sleep or poor sleep quality. An unanswered question is if we can intervene to improve sleep, such as increasing sleep time for short sleepers by an hour or so, would that have a positive effect on their cognitive performance so they no longer decline? We need more longitudinal data to answer this question."

Alzheimer's is the main cause of cognitive decline in older adults, contributing to about 70% of dementia cases. Poor sleep is a common symptom of the disease and a driving force that can accelerate the disease's progression. Studies have shown that self-reported short and long sleepers are both more likely to perform poorly on cognitive tests, but such sleep studies typically do not include assessments of Alzheimer's disease.

To tease apart the separate effects of sleep and Alzheimer's disease on cognition, Lucey and colleagues turned to volunteers who participate in Alzheimer's studies through the university's Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center. Such volunteers undergo annual clinical and cognitive assessments, and provide a blood sample to be tested for the high-risk Alzheimer's genetic variant APOE4. For this study, the participants also provided samples of cerebrospinal fluid to measure levels of Alzheimer's proteins, and each slept with a tiny electroencephalogram (EEG) monitor strapped to their foreheads for four to six nights to measure brain activity during sleep.

In total, the researchers obtained sleep and Alzheimer's data on 100 participants whose cognitive function had been monitored for an average of 4 1/2 years. Most (88) had no cognitive impairments, 11 were very mildly impaired, and one had mild cognitive impairment. The average age was 75 at the time of the sleep study.

The researchers found a U-shaped relationship between sleep and cognitive decline. Overall, cognitive scores declined for the groups that slept less than 4.5 or more than 6.5 hours per night -- as measured by EEG -- while scores stayed stable for those in the middle of the range. EEG tends to yield estimates of sleep time that are about an hour shorter than self-reported sleep time, so the findings correspond to 5.5 to 7.5 hours of self-reported sleep, Lucey said.

The U-shaped relationship held true for measures of specific sleep phases, including rapid-eye movement (REM), or dreaming, sleep; and non-REM sleep. Moreover, the relationship held even after adjusting for factors that can affect both sleep and cognition, such as age, sex, levels of Alzheimer's proteins, and the presence of APOE4.

"It was particularly interesting to see that not only those with short amounts of sleep but also those with long amounts of sleep had more cognitive decline," said co-senior author David Holtzman, MD, a professor of neurology. "It suggests that sleep quality may be key, as opposed to simply total sleep."

Each person's sleep needs are unique, and people who wake up feeling rested on short or long sleep schedules should not feel compelled to change their habits, Lucey said. But those who are not sleeping well should be aware that sleep problems often can be treated.

"I ask many of my patients, 'How's your sleep?'" said co-senior author Beau M. Ances, MD, PhD, the Daniel J. Brennan, MD, Professor of Neurology. Ances treats patients with dementia and other neurodegenerative conditions at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. "Often patients report that they're not sleeping well. Often once their sleep issues are treated, they may have improvements in cognition. Physicians who are seeing patients with cognitive complaints should ask them about their quality of sleep. This is potentially a modifiable factor."

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sleep disorder research; insomnia research; alzheimer's research; healthy aging; sleep disorders; insomnia; obstructive sleep apnea; dementia

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Hit the sleep 'sweet spot' to keep brain sharp: Too little and too much sleep linked to cognitive decline

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Like so many other good things in life, sleep is best in moderation. A multiyear study of older adults found that both short and long sleepers experienced greater cognitive decline than people who slept a moderate amount, even when the effects of early Alzheimer's disease were taken into account.

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People around the world are witnessing firsthand how climate change can wreak havoc on the planet. Steadily rising average temperatures fuel increasingly intense wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters that are now impossible to ignore. And while the world has been plunged into a deadly pandemic, scientists are sounding the alarm once more that climate change is still the greatest threat to human health in recorded history.

As recently as August-when wildfires raged in the United States, Europe, and Siberia-World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement that "the risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease."

On September 5, more than 200 medical journals released an unprecedented joint editorial that urged world leaders to act. "The science is unequivocal," they write. "A global increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse."

Despite the acute dangers posed by COVID-19, the authors of the joint op-ed write that world governments "cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions." Instead, they argue, everyone must treat climate change with the same urgency as they have COVID-19.

Here's a look at the ways that climate change can affect your health-including some less obvious but still insidious effects-and why scientists say it's not too late to avert catastrophe.

Air pollution

Climate change is caused by an increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere, mostly from fossil fuel emissions. But burning fossil fuels can also have direct consequences for human health. That's because the polluted air contains small particles that can induce stroke and heart attacks by penetrating the lungs and heart and even traveling into the bloodstream. Those particles might harm the organs directly or provoke an inflammatory response from the immune system as it tries to fight them off. Estimates suggest that air pollution causes anywhere between 3.6 million and nine million premature deaths a year.

"The numbers do vary," says Andy Haines, professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and author of the recently published book Planetary Health. "But they all agree that it's a big public health burden."

People over the age of 65 are most susceptible to the harmful effects of air pollution, but many others are at risk too, says Kari Nadeau, director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University. People who smoke or vape are at increased risk, as are children with asthma.

Air pollution also has consequences for those with allergies. Carbon dioxide increases the acidity of the air, which then pulls more pollen out from plants. For some people, this might just mean that they face annoyingly long bouts of seasonal allergies. But for others, it could be life-threatening.

"For people who already have respiratory disease, boy is that a problem," Nadeau says. When pollen gets into the respiratory pathway, the body creates mucus to get rid of it, which can then fill up and suffocate the lungs.

Even healthy people can have similar outcomes if pollen levels are especially intense. In 2016, in the Australian state of Victoria, a severe thunderstorm combined with high levels of pollen to induce what The Lancet has described as "the world's largest and most catastrophic epidemic of thunderstorm asthma." So many residents suffered asthma attacks that emergency rooms were overwhelmed-and at least 10 people died as a result.

Climate change is also causing wildfires to get worse, and wildfire smoke is especially toxic. As one recent study showed, fires can account for 25 percent of dangerous air pollution in the U.S. Nadeau explains that the smoke contains particles of everything that the fire has consumed along its path-from rubber tires to harmful chemicals. These particles are tiny and can penetrate even deeper into a person's lungs and organs. (Here's how breathing wildfire smoke affects the body.)

Extreme heat

Heat waves are deadly, but researchers at first didn't see direct links between climate change and the harmful impacts of heat waves and other extreme weather events. Haines says the evidence base has been growing. "We have now got a number of studies which has shown that we can with high confidence attribute health outcomes to climate change," he says.

Most recently, Haines points to a study published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change that attributes more than a third of heat-related deaths to climate change. As National Geographic reported at the time, the study found that the human toll was even higher in some countries with less access to air conditioning or other factors that render people more vulnerable to heat. (How climate change is making heat waves even deadlier.)

That's because the human body was not designed to cope with temperatures above 98.6°F, Nadeau says. Heat can break down muscles. The body does have some ways to deal with the heat-such as sweating. "But when it's hot outside all the time, you cannot cope with that, and your heart muscles and cells start to literally die and degrade," she says.

If you're exposed to extreme heat for too long and are unable to adequately release that heat, the stress can cause a cascade of problems throughout the body. The heart has to work harder to pump blood to the rest of the organs, while sweat leeches the body of necessary minerals such as sodium and potassium. The combination can result in heart attacks and strokes.

Dehydration from heat exposure can also cause serious damage to the kidneys, which rely on water to function properly. For people whose kidneys are already beginning to fail-particularly older adults-Nadeau says that extreme heat can be a death sentence. "This is happening more and more," she says.

Studies have also drawn links between higher temperatures and preterm birth and other pregnancy complications. It's unclear why, but Haines says that one hypothesis is that extreme heat reduces blood flow to the fetus.

Food insecurity

One of the less direct-but no less harmful-ways that climate change can affect health is by disrupting the world's supply of food.

Climate change both reduces the amount of food that's available and makes it less nutritious. According to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report, crop yields have already begun to decline as a result of rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events. Meanwhile, studies have shown that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can leech plants of zinc, iron, and protein-nutrients that humans need to survive.

Malnutrition is linked to a variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It can also increase the risk of stunting, or impaired growth, in children, which can harm cognitive function.

Climate change also imperils what we eat from the sea. Rising ocean temperatures have led many fish species to migrate toward Earth's poles in search of cooler waters. Haines says that the resulting decline of fish stocks in subtropic regions "has big implications for nutrition," because many of those coastal communities depend on fish for a substantial amount of the protein in their diets.

This effect is likely to be particularly harmful for Indigenous communities, says Tiff-Annie Kenny, a professor in the faculty of medicine at Laval University in Quebec who studies climate change and food security in the Canadian Arctic. It's much more difficult for these communities to find alternative sources of protein, she says, either because it's not there or because it's too expensive. "So what are people going to eat instead?" she asks.

Infectious diseases

As the planet gets hotter, the geographic region where ticks and mosquitoes like to live is getting wider. These animals are well-known vectors of diseases such as the Zika virus, dengue fever, and malaria. As they cross the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Nadeau says, mosquitoes and ticks bring more opportunities for these diseases to infect greater swaths of the world.

"It used to be that they stayed in those little sectors near the Equator, but now unfortunately because of the warming of northern Europe and Canada, you can find Zika in places you wouldn't have expected," Nadeau says.

In addition, climate conditions such as temperature and humidity can impact the life cycle of mosquitoes. Haines says there's particularly good evidence showing that, in some regions, climate change has altered these conditions in ways that increase the risk of mosquitos transmitting dengue.

There are also several ways in which climate change is increasing the risk of diseases that can be transmitted through water, such as cholera, typhoid fever, and parasites. Sometimes that's fairly direct, such as when people interact with dirty floodwaters. But Haines says that drought can have indirect impacts when people, say, can't wash their hands or are forced to drink from dodgier sources of freshwater.

Mental health

A common result of any climate-linked disaster is the toll on mental health. The distress caused by drastic environmental change is so significant that it has been given its own name- solastalgia.

Nadeau says that the effects on mental health have been apparent in her studies of emergency room visits arising from wildfires in the western U.S. People lose their homes, their jobs, and sometimes their loved ones, and that takes an immediate toll. "What's the fastest acute issue that develops? It's psychological," she says. Extreme weather events such as wildfires and hurricanes cause so much stress and anxiety that they can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder and even suicide in the long run.

Another common factor is that climate change causes disproportionate harm to the world's most vulnerable people. On September 2, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an analysis showing that racial and ethnic minority communities are particularly at risk. According to the report, if temperatures rise by 2°C (3.6°F), Black people are 40 percent more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in related deaths. Another 34 percent are more likely to live in areas with a rise in childhood asthma.

Further, the effects of climate change don't occur in isolation. At any given time, a community might face air pollution, food insecurity, disease, and extreme heat all at once. Kenny says that's particularly devastating in communities where the prevalence of food insecurity and poverty are already high. This situation hasn't been adequately studied, she says, because "it's difficult to capture these shocks that climate can bring."

Why there's reason for hope

In recent years, scientists and environmental activists have begun to push for more research into the myriad health effects of climate change. "One of the striking things is there's been a real dearth of funding for climate change and health," Haines says. "For that reason, some of the evidence we have is still fragmentary."

Still, hope is not lost. In the Paris Agreement, countries around the world have pledged to limit global warming to below 2°C (3.6°F)-and preferably to 1.5°C (2.7°F)-by cutting their emissions. "When you reduce those emissions, you benefit health as well as the planet," Haines says.

Meanwhile, scientists and environmental activists have put forward solutions that can help people adapt to the health effects of climate change. These include early heat warnings and dedicated cooling centers, more resilient supply chains, and freeing healthcare facilities from dependence on the electric grid.

Nadeau argues that the COVID-19 pandemic also presents an opportunity for world leaders to think bigger and more strategically. For example, the pandemic has laid bare problems with efficiency and equity that have many countries restructuring their healthcare facilities. In the process, she says, they can look for new ways to reduce waste and emissions, such as getting more hospitals using renewable energy.

"This is in our hands to do," Nadeau says. "If we don't do anything, that would be cataclysmic."

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Why climate change is still the greatest threat to human health

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Polluted air and steadily rising temperatures are linked to health effects ranging from increased heart attacks and strokes to the spread of infectious diseases and psychological trauma.

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By Alan Mozes HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, Oct. 22, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Gun violence sky-rocketed by more than 30% across the United States during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Almost 39,000 injuries and deaths nationwide involved a gun in the year starting in February 2019 - and that number shot up to more than 51,000 between March 2020 and March 2021, according to nationwide figures compiled by the non-profit group, Gun Violence Archive (GVA).

"We were not surprised that the gun violence rates were higher during the pandemic," said study leader Dr. Paddy Ssentongo. He is an assistant professor with the Center for Neural Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. "But we were surprised by the large magnitude of the increase."

And some states saw far steeper inclines than others.

While the rate of gun violence significantly increased in 28 states, it shot up by 100% in Minnesota, Michigan and New York.

"Although our study was not framed to explore the specific factors that caused the increased rate of gun violence, this pandemic has been associated with psychological distress caused by the shelter-in-place orders, increased rates of domestic violence, disruption of social networks, unemployment, and record increases in gun sales and access to guns during the pandemic," Ssentongo said.

He added that all of these factors are plausible explanations for the surge.

GVA compiled statistics for all 50 states and the District of Columbia from law enforcement filings, government records, media reports and commercially available sources. Once collected, the data were vetted by independent researchers.

The researchers found that almost 93,000 injuries and deaths (including suicides) resulted from gun-related violence between Jan. 1, 2019 and March 31, 2021.

But when broken down into pre-pandemic and pandemic periods, the team noted a consistent trend. Every two-month period between March 2020 and March 2021 saw increased gun violence when compared to similar two-month periods in the prior year.

Alaska was the exception, registering fewer incidents of gun violence during the pandemic than in the year before.

Yet a clear majority of states saw what Ssentongo's team characterized as a "significantly" higher risk for gun-related violence.

They included Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia.

But will gun violence rates drop again once the pandemic is fully in the rear-view mirror?

Ssentongo doubts it. While the pandemic may have driven up risk, the larger issue is longstanding and he suspects it is likely to persist without a major public health intervention.

"The pandemic simply worsened an already existing public health crisis," he said, adding: "The spike in gun violence in the era of COVID-19 pandemic comes as a stark reminder that we can't afford to ignore it any longer. The time is now to focus on this as a public health issue."

That thought was seconded by Bindu Kalesan, an assistant professor of medicine and community health science at Boston University.

Her take: It's essential to consider gun violence as a longstanding concern with deep roots in poverty, even if the pandemic made poverty far more widespread. In that light, Kalesan said, prevention is the only remedy.

"We try to 'fix' gun violence with laws alone," she noted. "[But] gun violence is a social disease as well, and largely homicides occur in poor communities."

That, Kalesan said, means any public health attempt to rein in gun violence must first tackle poverty. "The approach of fixing [gun violence] when there is a spike is akin to our general thinking about health: when I get sick we can take some meds and be well," she said.

That approach fails because it doesn't address the key underlying causes of that violence in the first place, such as the depression, anxiety and high crime rate that poverty gives rise to, Kalesan said. "This is the larger point."

The findings were published online Oct. 21 in the journal Scientific Reports.

SOURCES: Paddy Ssentongo, MD, MPH, PhD, assistant professor, Center for Neural Engineering, department of engineering science and mechanics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Penn.; Bindu Kalesan, PhD, MPH, director, Center for Translational Epidemiology and Comparative Effectiveness Research, and assistant professor, medicine and community health science, Boston University School of Medicine; Scientific Reports, Oct. 21, 2021, online

Copyright © 2021 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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U.S. Gun Violence Rates Jumped 30% During Pandemic

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By Alan Mozes HealthDay Reporter FRIDAY, Oct. 22, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Gun violence sky-rocketed by more than 30% across the United States during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Why Public Health Faces a Crisis Across the U.S.

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An examination of hundreds of health departments around the country shows that the nation may be less prepared for the next pandemic than it was for the current one.

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The first malaria vaccine is finally ready to roll out

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The world’s first malaria vaccine, Mosquirix, is officially getting a widespread rollout after a promising pilot study.

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Is lifting weights while pregnant safe? - Allison Ireland #8

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Is lifting weights while pregnant safe? - Allison Ireland #8

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Whether or not you've resolved to get into shape this January, Muscle Month is here to teach you a thing or two about stretching, contracting, lifting, tearing, gaining, and so much more.
Even in 2019, many of us still act like pregnancy is practically a disability. Anyone in that condition should take it easy, eat plenty of food, and generally avoid doing anything that might be even remotely construed as interfering with the body's ability to grow a human being. For decades that advice also extended to exercise in all forms. The prevailing thought was that it was better to rest than to over-exert yourself. But plenty of expectant parents want to maintain their workout regimen as much as possible when they're pregnant, and they want to do it safely.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of research to rely on-and what little there is has, in many cases, been overturned by more recent analyses. Yet there are still plenty of physicians who confidently proclaim that a pregnant person can't lift more than 15 pounds safely. "I had my first son five years ago and I have my grad degree in coaching and exercise science, and I just felt like, 'how do I know nothing about this?' If someone would have known, it would be me," says Brianna Battles, a coach and now-expert in training pregnant people. "There was no information about women's health as it pertained to pregnancy or postpartum, and for athletes in particular. I'm not going to use pink dumbbells and do yoga. It made me so upset." Today, she runs a certification program supported by the National Strength and Conditioning Association for trainers to learn how to handle pregnant clients safely.

We consulted Battles along with some other experts to figure out how you can stay active without putting a growing fetus in jeopardy.

Should I lift weights at all when I'm pregnant?

In all the meta-analyses and expert opinion papers on the topic, there are some broad strokes that everyone can agree on. One is that you probably shouldn't be getting into an intensive weight lifting regimen while pregnant if you haven't lifted before. You can certainly start to exercise and lift light weights, but you shouldn't suddenly take up competitive body building while you're literally building a body.

But let's assume you're a person who's lifted before and wants to continue. There are ways to keep going safely, and more importantly, there are good reasons to go for it.

Several review articles on the topic note that an oft-overlooked benefit of exercise during pregnancy is improved mental health. "At first I was like 'okay, I guess I won't be snatching 240 pounds any time soon,' but that's a big part of your identity," explains Quiana Welch, a Crossfitter and Olympic weightlifter who holds the American record for the snatch. "If you were top in your sport or close, and suddenly you're pregnant and you're like, 'I can't do any of this anymore,' that's hard." Welch, who is due in June, has been an athlete her whole life. So even though her first trimester was tough-she was tired all the time and barely sleeping-she stuck with exercising. Now she squeezes in some lifting whenever she feels she has the energy (which is admittedly easier than it is for most expectant parents, since she's a coach at Black Iron Gym in Sparks, Nevada), and though she doesn't push herself the same way she usually would, those workouts are essential to her mental well-being.

Even non-athletes get mental health benefits. One 2015 review of pregnancy and exercise notes that pregnancy makes those who have suffered depression more likely to experience it again, and that between 10 and 30 percent of patients get depressed during their pregnancy-more than in the postpartum period. Exercise is associated with a 67 percent reduced risk of prenatal depression.

And then there's the weight. In the official 2019 recommendations from Canada's Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the panel notes that fewer than 15 percent of patients meet the 150 weekly minutes of physical activity recommended during pregnancy. This leads to a high percentage (it varies widely) of pregnant people gaining excess weight that is then hard to lose later on, they wrote, going on to note that "Concerns over harms have not been substantiated by research and the risks of not engaging in prenatal physical activity have not been adequately emphasized." Maternal obesity rates have been rising over the past 30-odd years, and this may be driving the increase in complications like pre-eclampsia, gestational hypertension, and gestational diabetes mellitus. Physical activity during pregnancy reduces all of the odds of all of these conditions ( by 41, 39, 38 percent respectively).

Plus, many of the concerns that obstetricians used to have-that exercise would increase the risk of miscarriage or preterm birth or low birth weight-haven't been substantiated. In fact, studies suggest that strengthening muscles, especially in the back, could help reduce pain as your belly grows.

"We're not just talking about a fit pregnancy, we're talking about long term fitness and function," says Battles. "I think weight-training wise, there's just so much more benefit than there is risk. A lot of women can keep training by making modifications."

If you're pregnant and you want to keep lifting weights, you should absolutely listen to the advice of your doctors and trainers: there may be legitimate reasons you need to take it especially easy, or specific components of your usual workout routine that are genuinely unsafe. But if all you're hearing is that pregnant people should not lift weights, full stop, then you should definitely seek a second opinion.

Is there a maximum weight I can lift safely?

A few people will try to attach a specific number to how much you should be lifting while you're pregnant, but it's really about you as an individual. "It's such an arbitrary recommendation because lots of women have kids who are 30 to 40 pounds," says Battles. "There's zero evidence that lifting over any specific amount of weight is bad." But that's not to say that pregnancy is a time to hit your PRs. The goal is to stay active and healthy, not push yourself to the point of breaking. "Even if I keep trying to do things, I'm getting heavier and I'm tired," Welch says. "Be cognizant of what feels bad, because every other week it changes. Just because you feel like you can do it, that doesn't mean you should do it."

Having someone who's experienced, or ideally certified, in coaching pregnant athletes can help you determine what's safe and healthy for you. "Pregnant women should also listen to their bodies," says Michelle Motola, director of the Exercise and Pregnancy Laboratory at Western University. "If it hurts, stop the activity and do not continue, especially if weight training."

What could happen to me if I overdo it?

Even though pregnant people aren't delicate flowers, they are going through a vulnerable phase. And though preterm birth and the like don't seem tied to weight lifting, there are some key issues that obstetricians and coaches alike worry about.

One aspect is just physical damage: Any activity where you could fall or a weight could smash into your belly is inadvisable. For weightlifters, that takes most Olympic lifts off the table because they involve moving the barbell quickly and close to your body. Welch says she stopped snatching (an exercise where you move the bar from the floor to above your head) immediately, and though she could do cleans (from the floor or your knees to shoulder level) for a while because the bar doesn't stay as close to your body, she had to stop that quickly as well.

You should also take care not to strain your body in ways that weren't previously an issue. "If an athlete is doing a back squat, a lot of the times we're used to holding our breath at the top," Battles explains. "But when you're pregnant that increases intra-abdominal pressure not just on midline but also the pelvic floor." That extra pressure can lead to a pelvic organ prolapse or a diastasis recti (where the left and right abdominal muscles separate).

Training at a very high level can also interfere with fetal oxygen supply as blood gets diverted to the active muscles. Small studies of Olympic-level athletes showed they could safely train up to about 90 percent of their maximum oxygen capacity (VO2 max), but above that point and their fetuses' hearts slowed dangerously. Most amateur athletes aren't able to monitor their blood oxygen levels as they exercise, so the rule of thumb is often that you should still be able to speak-maybe not easily, but to say full sentences-while working out.

There's also some concern about the hormone relaxin, which relaxes joints to aid in the birthing process. It's historically been held up as a reason that pregnant people should be careful not to overextend their joints, as they'll be more flexible than usual. Battles hasn't experienced many problems of this sort with her clients, but as athletes they're probably tighter than the average person, which might mean their joints are less likely to grow loose enough to cause injury.

Beyond that, experts simply advise listening to your body and what it's trying to tell you. "The problem is we don't know what the effects might be on both the mother and fetus, so we err on the side of caution," Mottola says, pointing out that no ethics board would even allow the kind of randomized controlled trial that could definitively test the limits of exercise during pregnancy. Even the International Olympic Committee's in-depth analysis on exercise in pregnant elite athletes relied mostly on small studies and theoretical outcomes. It and most of the other advice out there amounts to this: do what feels good to stay active, and don't push it too hard.

How can I adapt exercises?

Though you'll probably have to eliminate Olympic lifts and pull ups and various other potentially hazardous exercises, there are plenty of lifts you can still do as long as you know how to perform the movement safely. Battles teaches her clients early on to stop holding their breath and bearing down on their pelvic floors. That often means also dropping some weight, since lifting heavier would necessitate bracing against your abdomen and pelvic floor.

For her part, Welch has continued to squat, deadlift, and overhead press during her pregnancy. "I usually give myself a certain percentage that I don't want to exceed, or I put weight on the bar and if I feel like I have to brace or really concentrate or really set up, I won't do that weight," she says. "It's about me being able to breathe throughout the repetition."

All of that may change as she progresses, but the general theory holds: do what feels good. "You can adapt and modify the range of motion, the load, the strategy, the volume of reps," Battles explains. "We don't need to eliminate, it's more about how can we make modifications."

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Is it safe to lift weights while pregnant?

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Whether or not you've resolved to get into shape this January, Muscle Month is here to teach you a thing or two about stretching, contracting, lifting, tearing, gaining, and so much more. Even in 2019, many of us still act like pregnancy is practically a disability.

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Haley #5 - Obesity may mean worse COVID symptoms 

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Haley #5 - Obesity may mean worse COVID symptoms 

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https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-10-20/even-with-mild-covid-obesity-may-mean-worse-symptoms

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By Steven Reinberg HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 20, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Obese people have a tougher time fighting COVID-19, even if they have a milder form of the virus, a new study finds.

Researchers looked at more than 500 patients who tested positive for COVID but didn't require hospitalization. Teens and adults who were overweight or obese had more symptoms, including cough and shortness of breath, than those of normal weight.

"Even when infected with similar amounts of virus, overweight and obesity are risk factors for greater severity of COVID-19 symptoms," said lead researcher Dr. Pia Pannaraj, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

"COVID-19 vaccination of all individuals, and especially those with overweight and obesity, is important to prevent severe COVID-19," she added.

Obesity can lead to more severe COVID-19 because it's tied with other conditions known to make people sicker if they catch the virus, Pannaraj said. "Individuals with obesity may have the beginnings of diabetes, heart disease or other chronic diseases before it can be detected," she added.

Losing weight may help ward off COVID-19 and make it less life-threatening should you get it, Pannaraj said. "Maintaining a healthy lifestyle with healthy eating and exercise is beneficial for many reasons," she said. "Being able to fight off infections such as COVID-19 is just one more reason."

About two-thirds of the participants in this new study were overweight or obese -- similar to U.S. and worldwide rates, the authors noted.

The researchers found that COVID severity in children under 12 was not affected by excess weight. But for teens and adults, they uncovered a different story.

The overweight or obese participants had more symptoms than normal-weight individuals (three vs. two), including more cough and shortness of breath.

Overweight or obese teens were more likely to have symptoms than normal-weight teens (67% vs. 34%) and they had longer lasting respiratory symptoms (median 7 days vs. 4 days), compared with normal-weight teens, the researchers found.

The data confirms the benefit of COVID-19 vaccines for overweight and obese teens and adults, Pannaraj's team concluded.

One expert not part of the study, Dr. Nicholas Kman, pointed out that even vaccinated patients can get a mild case of COVID-19.

"We also know that when the immune system is compromised, like in severe obesity, we don't mount as good a response to the vaccine," said Kman, an emergency medicine physician at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus.

"This is why it is important for patients with risk factors, like elderly age and obesity, to get the booster vaccine when it is their turn," he said. "The best thing an unvaccinated patient, with or without risk factors, can do is get the vaccine and then work on those healthy lifestyle changes."

Dr. David Katz is president of True Health Initiative, which promotes healthy living as the best way to prevent disease. He said that throughout the pandemic, COVID-19 has targeted select groups.

"Even before a pandemic was declared, data from China and South Korea indicated that SARS-CoV-2 was not a one-size-fits-all threat," said Katz, who wasn't involved with the study.

Advanced age and chronic conditions, including heart disease, diabetes and obesity, were associated with elevated risks of severe infection, Katz said. This pattern persisted as COVID-19 spread around the world, leading to marked differences in hospitalization and deaths among populations.

This paper expands that view of variable risk for worse outcomes to include those with milder disease, Katz said.

"It also reminds that the slow-motion pandemics of obesity and chronic illness have made the acute COVID pandemic far worse than it needed to be, both among those hospitalized, and even among those with milder disease," he said.

"These findings add to the already compelling case for defending against the threat of acute pandemics by doing far more to promote general good health, including healthy weight, for the population at large," Katz said.

SOURCES: Pia Pannaraj, MD, MPH, pediatric infectious disease specialist, Children's Hospital Los Angeles; David Katz, MD, MPH, president, True Health Initiative; Nicholas Kman, MD, emergency medicine physician, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus; Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, Oct. 20, 2021

Copyright © 2021 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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Even With Mild COVID, Obesity May Mean Worse Symptoms

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By Steven Reinberg HealthDay Reporter WEDNESDAY, Oct. 20, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Obese people have a tougher time fighting COVID-19, even if they have a milder form of the virus, a new study finds. Researchers looked at more than 500 patients who tested positive for COVID but didn't require hospitalization.

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Fabiola #9 Breath test can identify COVID-19 In critically ill patients, study finds

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Fabiola #9 Breath test can identify COVID-19 In critically ill patients, study finds

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Instead of an invasive nasal swab, researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center are exploring the use of a unique breath test for the rapid screening of patients for COVID-19.

Results from the initial study in patients, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, found the breath test is highly accurate in identifying COVID-19 infections in critically ill patients.

"The gold standard for diagnosis of COVID-19 is a PCR test that requires an uncomfortable nasal swab and time in a lab to process the sample and obtain the results," said Dr. Matthew Exline, lead researcher, director of critical care at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center University Hospital and professor of internal medicine at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. "The breathalyzer test used in our study can detect COVID-19 within seconds."

COVID-19 infection produces a distinct breath print from the interaction of oxygen, nitric oxide and ammonia in the body. The breath detector device, developed by Pelagia-Irene Gouma, researcher and professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University and Milutin Stana?evi?, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook University, can detect the breath print of COVID-19 in exhaled breath within 15 seconds.

"This novel breathalyzer technology uses nanosensors to identify and measure specific biomarkers in the breath," said Gouma. "This is the first study to demonstrate the use of a nanosensor breathalyzer system to detect a viral infection from exhaled breath prints."

The study followed 46 patients in the intensive care unit with acute respiratory failure that required mechanical ventilation. Half of the patients had an active COVID-19 infection and the remaining half didn't have COVID-19. All patients had a PCR COVID-19 test when they were admitted to the unit.

Researchers collected exhaled breath bags from the patients on day 1, 3, 7 and 10 of their inpatient stay. The breath bag samples were tested within 4 hours of sample collection in a lab. The breath print was identified in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia with 88% accuracy upon admission to the ICU.

"PCR tests often miss early COVID-19 infections and results can be positive after the infection has resolved," Exline said. "However, this noninvasive breath test technology can pick up early COVID-19 infection within 72 hours of the onset of respiratory failure, allowing us to rapidly screen patients in a single step and exclude those without COVID-19 on mechanical ventilation."

The use of breathalyzer technology to rapidly diagnose patients with respiratory infections has the potential to greatly improve the ability to rapidly screen both patients and asymptomatic people. Future studies will look at the use of this technology for less severe COVID-19 patients and will explore whether other diseases and infections could benefit from it. The research team has applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization of the breathalyzer technology.

Dr. Andrew S. Bowman, associate professor in the Department of Veterinary Preventive Medicine at The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine, contributed to this study.

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today's healthcare; wounds and healing; copd; patient education and counseling; allergy; diseases and conditions; medical devices; infectious diseases

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Breath test can identify COVID-19 In critically ill patients, study finds

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Instead of an invasive nasal swab, researchers are exploring the use of a unique breath test for the rapid screening of patients for COVID-19. Results from the initial study in patients found the breath test is highly accurate in identifying COVID-19 infections in critically ill patients.

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Haley #4 - Will the pandemic fade into an ordinary disease like the flu?

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Haley #4 - Will the pandemic fade into an ordinary disease like the flu?

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https://www.science.org/content/article/will-pandemic-fade-ordinary-disease-flu-world-watching-denmark-clues

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© 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER.

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Sam H. #7 In a First, Surgeons Attached a Pig Kidney to a Human - and It Worked

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Sam H. #7 In a First, Surgeons Attached a Pig Kidney to a Human - and It Worked

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In a First, Surgeons Attached a Pig Kidney to a Human, and It Worked (Published 2021)

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A kidney grown in a genetically altered pig functions normally, scientists reported. The procedure may open the door to a renewable source of desperately needed organs.

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Lauren Campbell #8-Mixing chemical and mineral sunscreen can make them degrade

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Lauren Campbell #8-Mixing chemical and mineral sunscreen can make them degrade

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https://www.healthline.com/health-news/mixing-chemical-and-physical-sunscreens-can-make-them-degrade#What-the-study-found

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Mixing Chemical and Physical Sunscreens Can Make Them Degrade

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A recent study published in Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences on October 14 suggests that mixing mineral and chemical sunscreens may limit the protection against UVA, and that sunscreen mixed with zinc oxide may cause toxic effects.

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Children's mental health crisis a 'national emergency'- Cheyenne M #7

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Children's mental health crisis a 'national emergency'- Cheyenne M #7

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https://abcnews.go.com/Health/childrens-mental-health-crisis-national-emergency-pediatric-groups/story?id=80668548

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There has been a "shocking" rise in urgent mental health help for kids.

Children's mental health challenges amid the COVID-19 pandemic are a "national emergency," a group of pediatricians and other experts declared Tuesday as they called on policymakers to address the crisis.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children's Hospital Association -- which collectively represent over 77,000 physicians and over 200 children's hospitals -- are sounding the alarm over a "shocking" rise in families seeking urgent mental health help for their children.

"Young people have endured so much throughout this pandemic and while much of the attention is often placed on its physical health consequences, we cannot overlook the escalating mental health crisis facing our patients," American Academy of Pediatrics President Dr. Lee Savio Beers said in a statement. "Today's declaration is an urgent call to policymakers at all levels of government -- we must treat this mental health crisis like the emergency it is."

The medical associations pointed to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found between March and October 2020, the proportion of mental health-related emergency department visits increased 24% for children ages 5 to 11 and 31% for children ages 12 to 17 when compared to 2019. There was also a 50.6% increase in suspected suicide attempt emergency department visits among girls ages 12 to 17 from Feb. 21 to March 20, 2021, compared to the same period in 2019, another CDC study found.

In the first six months of this year, children's hospitals nationwide also reported a "shocking" 45% increase in the number of self-injury and suicide cases in 5- to 17-year-olds compared to the same period in 2019, according to Children's Hospital Association President Amy Wimpey Knight.

"We are facing a significant national mental health crisis in our children and teens which requires urgent action," Wimpey Knight said in a statement.

The medical associations are calling on policymakers to help address the crisis by "increasing federal funding to ensure all families can access mental health services" and supporting "effective models of school-based mental health care," among other measures.

The spotlight comes as the U.S. Department of Education released resources Tuesday to help schools support students' mental health, social and emotional needs through the $122 billion in pandemic relief funding made available to state and local education leaders.

"Amid the pandemic, we know that our students have experienced so much. We can't unlock students' potential unless we also address the needs they bring with them to the classroom each day," U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement. "As educators, it's our responsibility to ensure that we are helping to provide students with a strong social and emotional foundation so that they also can excel academically."

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Children's mental health crisis a 'national emergency,' pediatric groups declare

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There has been a "shocking" rise in urgent mental health help for kids. Children's mental health challenges amid the COVID-19 pandemic are a "national emergency," a group of pediatricians and other experts declared Tuesday as they called on policymakers to address the crisis.

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Fabiola #7  Pesticide linked to chronic kidney disease

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Fabiola #7  Pesticide linked to chronic kidney disease

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Pesticide linked to chronic kidney disease

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A commonly available pesticide has been associated with an increased risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD).

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FDA issues new salt guidelines to reduce salt in foods-Chenelle M #7

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FDA issues new salt guidelines to reduce salt in foods-Chenelle M #7

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F.D.A. Issues Guidelines to Reduce Salt in Foods

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The new recommendations are aimed at food manufacturers and restaurants. Some experts say they don’t go far enough.

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Bristol #8 - upcoming flu season expected to be bad 

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Bristol #8 - upcoming flu season expected to be bad 

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Upcoming flu season could arrive early and hit hard, according to CDC

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After the most mild flu season on record in 2020, the virus could come back early and hit hard this year, some doctors are predicting, as they urge people to get a flu shot.

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Bristol #7 - National shortage of chemo due to pandemic 

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Bristol #7 - National shortage of chemo due to pandemic 

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Over the last few weeks, a manufacturer's shortage of one medication means some Alaska chemotherapy patients have had to postpone the lifesaving treatment.

Abraxane is a prescription drug that is used to treat certain advanced pancreatic, breast and lung cancers. A note on the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists' website explains that the shortage is due to manufacturing delays, and that there is currently insufficient supply for usual ordering.

"We've exhausted our resources, and it's a well-known national shortage," said Hertha Monroe, clinical nurse manager with the Katmai Oncology Group, a cancer clinic in Anchorage.

For some patients, there are alternative medications that can be used in place of abraxane, Monroe said. Others can't. "It's very individualized," she said.

Monroe called the supply shortage "pretty unusual," explaining that disruptions like this happen "very infrequently." She said the clinic is continuing to work with the manufacturer, Bristol Myers-Squibb, to find solutions.

Not all facilities that use the drug appear to be affected. Shirley Young, a spokesperson with the Alaska Native Medical Center, said this week that the hospital does not appear to be experiencing any sort of shortage or challenge in acquiring this medication.

"The local warehouse appears to have an adequate supply," she said.

Coleman Cutchins, state pharmacist, said Wednesday he wasn't aware of any other chemo drug shortages besides abraxane.

"We hope this resolves quickly," Monroe said. "It's so distressing for our patients, and for the providers that care for them."

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National shortage of a chemo drug is affecting some Alaska clinics, providers say

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Over the last few weeks, a manufacturer's shortage of one medication means some Alaska chemotherapy patients have had to postpone the lifesaving treatment. Abraxane is a prescription drug that is used to treat certain advanced pancreatic, breast and lung cancers.

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Scientists hail historic malaria vaccine approval — but point to challenges ahead -Nate Tamarra #10

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Scientists hail historic malaria vaccine approval — but point to challenges ahead -Nate Tamarra #10

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02755-5

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More than 130 years after the naming of the Plasmodium parasites behind malaria, the world now has its first approved vaccine against them. Many malaria researchers have celebrated the development, but others have expressed concerns over the deployment of a vaccine that has only moderate efficacy.

On 6 October, the World Health Organization (WHO) backed the vaccine - called RTS,S - and recommended its widespread use among children in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to the deadliest malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum.

"The RTS,S malaria vaccine - more than 30 years in the making - changes the course of public health history," said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press briefing announcing the endorsement.

Compared with other childhood vaccinations, RTS,S has only modest efficacy, preventing about 30% of severe malaria cases after a series of four injections in children under the age of five.

Nevertheless, one modelling study suggests that it could prevent the deaths of 23,000 children a year, if the full series of doses were given to all kids in countries with a high incidence of malaria - making a significant dent in the tremendous toll of the disease, which killed 411,000 people in 2018.

Leaders across Africa are now considering whether and how to deploy the vaccine. In Mali, for example, malaria researcher Alassane Dicko at the University of Bamako told Nature that, soon after the WHO's announcement, the nation's minister of health asked him what Mali needed to do to get the vaccine.

"I told her we need to push as a country, at the highest levels of our government, to make this vaccine available at an affordable cost as soon as possible," he says.

Three-decade effort

Researchers have been developing and testing the RTS,S vaccine - also known by its brand name, Mosquirix - since 1987, at a cost of more than US$750 million. This was funded mainly by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, and the London-based pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

Although clinical trials concluded in 2015, the WHO then recommended pilot studies to determine the feasibility and safety of this multi-dose vaccine outside a clinical trial.

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a health partnership based in Geneva, Switzerland, helped to fund the pilot programmes, which have distributed 2.3 million vaccine doses across Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. It reports that in these studies, hospitalizations from severe malaria decreased by about 30%. These results gave the WHO the confidence to recommend that four doses of the vaccine be given to children living in regions with moderate to high levels of malaria transmission.

However, Dicko says countries might achieve even greater drops in hospitalizations and deaths through tailored rollouts.

In August, he and his colleagues published results from a clinical trial finding that the RTS,S vaccine reduced childhood malaria deaths by 73% if children received three doses in the run-up to the rainy season - when malaria peaks - and another dose before the rainy season in the two subsequent years. Notably, this was done in conjunction with a method called seasonal malaria chemoprevention, in which healthy children take a monthly dose of anti-malaria drugs to help prevent the disease.

In addition to deciding how to deploy the vaccine, countries will need to determine how much it will cost to purchase and distribute it - and whether donors will help to foot the bill.

The vaccine manufacturer GSK released a statement pledging to make 15 million annual doses available at just above the cost of production. However, roughly 100 million doses will be needed annually if all children in high burden countries are to receive the shots.

Might existing measures be overshadowed?

Some researchers fear that the excitement over a vaccine will overshadow existing malaria control measures that are already often underfunded, including insecticide programmes and functional health systems.

At a potential cost of about $5 per dose, researchers suggest the vaccine rollout, including its distribution, would cost around $325 million to administer each year across ten African countries with a high incidence of malaria. They point out that in some of these countries, other malaria measures have faltered because of a lack of support.

"I respect the researchers involved with this massive effort, but the reality is that so much money has been poured into this vaccine, even when the results from studies are disappointing," says Badara Cisse, a malaria researcher at the Institute for Health Research, Epidemiological Surveillance and Training in Dakar. "I don't think a 30% effective vaccine would be acceptable for Americans."

Still, he and James Tibenderana, a Ugandan epidemiologist at the Malaria Consortium in London, say the RTS,S vaccine could be impactful in some regions. To achieve that, Tibenderana stresses the need for extensive communication campaigns, so that misinformation doesn't hamper the rollout.

"People will wonder why a 30-year-old, partially effective vaccine is suddenly being introduced during a pandemic - and targeted only at Africans," he says. "The misinformation around COVID-19 vaccines should teach us that we can't take community trust for granted."

Despite the long road ahead, he and others are grateful for the WHO's decision. "With the devastation of COVID-19, and with progress stalled on malaria control, and news of resistance to anti-malaria drugs, it's uplifting to see some positive news," he says.

Updates & Corrections

Correction 08 October 2021: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed the finding that the RTS,S vaccine could prevent the deaths of 23,000 children a year if a full series of doses were distributed to kids in countries with a high incidence of malaria. The correct attribution is a 2020 PLoS Medicine article.

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Scientists hail historic malaria vaccine approval - but point to challenges ahead

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The WHO-approved RTS,S vaccine has modest efficacy and requires a complex regimen of doses, so ample funding and clear communication will be crucial to success. The WHO-approved RTS,S vaccine has modest efficacy and requires a complex regimen of doses, so ample funding and clear communication will be crucial to success.

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Fabiola #8 Pesticide linked to chronic kidney disease

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Fabiola #8 Pesticide linked to chronic kidney disease

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Pesticide linked to chronic kidney disease

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A commonly available pesticide has been associated with an increased risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD).

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White House Slams Texas Governor’s Ban on Covid Vaccine Mandates -Nate Tamarra #9

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White House Slams Texas Governor’s Ban on Covid Vaccine Mandates -Nate Tamarra #9

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-12/white-house-slams-texas-governor-s-ban-on-covid-vaccine-mandates

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Jessie Davis #5~We finally know why we grow wisdom teeth as adults

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Jessie Davis #5~We finally know why we grow wisdom teeth as adults

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Sam L.Ch. 10- What it's like to drink water that's 15,000 years old

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Sam L.Ch. 10- What it's like to drink water that's 15,000 years old

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Marissa Grunes is an environmental fellow at Harvard University; Alan Sel t zer is an assistant scientist in Marine Chemistry and Geochemisty at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Kevin M. Befus is an assistant professor of Hydrogeology at University of Arkansas. This story originally featured on The Conversation.

Communities that rely on the Colorado River are facing a water crisis. Lake Mead, the river's largest reservoir, has fallen to levels not seen since it was created by the construction of the Hoover Dam roughly a century ago. Arizona and Nevada are facing their first-ever mandated water cuts, while water is being released from other reservoirs to keep the Colorado River's hydropower plants running.

If even the mighty Colorado and its reservoirs are not immune to the heat and drought worsened by climate change, where will the West get its water?

There's one hidden answer: underground.

As rising temperatures and drought dry up rivers and melt mountain glaciers, people are increasingly dependent on the water under their feet. Groundwater resources currently supply drinking water to nearly half the world's population and roughly 40 percent of water used for irrigation globally.

What many people don't realize is how old-and how vulnerable-much of that water is.

Most water stored underground has been there for decades, and much of it has sat for hundreds, thousands or even millions of years. Older groundwater tends to reside deep underground, where it is less easily affected by surface conditions such as drought and pollution.

As shallower wells dry out under the pressure of urban development, population growth and climate change, old groundwater is becoming increasingly important.

Drinking ancient groundwater

If you bit into a piece of bread that was 1,000 years old, you'd probably notice.

Water that has been underground for a thousand years can taste different, too. It leaches natural chemicals from the surrounding rock, changing its mineral content. Some natural contaminants linked to groundwater age- like mood-boosting lithium -can have positive effects. Other contaminants, like iron and manganese, can be troublesome.

Older groundwater is also sometimes too salty to drink without expensive treatment. This problem can be worse near the coasts: Overpumping creates space that can draw seawater into aquifers and contaminate drinking supplies.

Flow timescales of groundwater through different layers. Diagram: USGS

Ancient groundwater can take thousands of years to replenish naturally. And, as California saw during its 2011-2017 drought, natural underground storage spaces compress as they empty, so they can't refill to their previous capacity. This compaction in turn causes the land above to crack, buckle and sink.

Yet people today are drilling deeper wells in the West as droughts deplete surface water and farms rely more heavily on groundwater.

What does it mean for water to be 'old'?

Let's imagine a rainstorm over central California 15,000 years ago. As the storm rolls over what's now San Francisco, most of the rain falls into the Pacific Ocean, where it will eventually evaporate back into the atmosphere. However, some rain also falls into rivers and lakes and over dry land. As that rain seeps through layers of soil, it enters slowly trickling "flowpaths" of underground water.

Some of these paths lead deeper and deeper, where water collects in crevices within the bedrock hundreds of meters underground. The water gathered in these underground reserves is in a sense cut off from the active water cycle-at least on timescales relevant to human life.

In California's arid Central Valley, much of the accessible ancient water has been pumped out of the earth, mostly for agriculture. Where the natural replenishment timescale would be on the order of millennia, agricultural seepage has partially refilled some aquifers with newer-too often polluted-water. In fact, places like Fresno now actively refill aquifers with clean water (such as treated wastewater or stormwater) in a process known as " managed aquifer recharge."

Average turnover times for groundwater in the US. Map: Alan Seltzer, based on data from Befus et al 2017, CC BY-ND

In 2014, midway through their worst drought in modern memory, California became the last western state to pass a law requiring local groundwater sustainability plans. Groundwater may be resilient to heat waves and climate change, but if you use it all, you're in trouble.

One response to water demand? Drill deeper. Yet that answer isn't sustainable.

First, it's expensive: Large agricultural companies and lithium mining firms tend to be the sort of investors who can afford to drill deep enough, while small rural communities can't.

Second, once you pump ancient groundwater, aquifers need time to refill. Flowpaths may be disrupted, choking off a natural water supply to springs, wetlands and rivers. Meanwhile, the change in pressure underground can destabilize the earth, causing land to sink and even leading to earthquakes.

Pumping accelerates groundwater flow to a well, delivering dissolved chemicals. Chart: USGS

Third is contamination: While deep, mineral-rich ancient groundwater is often cleaner and safer to drink than younger, shallower groundwater, overpumping can change that. As water-strapped regions rely more heavily on deep groundwater, overpumping lowers the water table and draws down polluted modern water that can mix with the older water. This mixing causes the water quality to deteriorate, leading to demand for ever-deeper wells.

Reading climate history in ancient groundwater

There are other reasons to care about ancient groundwater. Like actual fossils, extremely old "fossil groundwater" can teach us about the past.

Envision our prehistoric rainstorm again: 15,000 years ago, the climate was quite different from today. Chemicals that dissolved in ancient groundwater are detectable today, opening windows into a past world. Certain dissolved chemicals act as clocks, telling scientists the groundwater's age. For example, we know how fast dissolved carbon-14 and krypton-18 decay, so we can measure them to calculate when the water last interacted with air.

Younger groundwater that disappeared underground after the 1950s has a unique, man-made chemical signature: high levels of tritium from atomic bomb testing.

The various components and properties of an unconfined aquifer. Diagram: USGS

Other dissolved chemicals behave like tiny thermometers. Noble gases like argon and xenon, for instance, dissolve more in cold water than in warm water, along a precisely known temperature curve. Once groundwater is isolated from air, dissolved noble gases don't do much. As a result, they preserve information about environmental conditions at the time the water first seeped into the subsurface.

The concentrations of noble gases in fossil groundwater have provided some of our most reliable estimates of temperature on land during the last ice age. Such findings provide insight into modern climates, including how sensitive Earth's average temperature is to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These methods support a recent study that found 3.4 degrees Celsius of warming with each doubling of carbon dioxide.

Groundwater's past and future

People in some regions, like New England, have been drinking ancient groundwater for years with little danger of exhausting usable supplies. Regular rainfall and varied water sources-including surface water in lakes, rivers and snowpack-provide alternatives to groundwater and also refill aquifers with new water. If aquifers can keep up with the demand, the water can be used sustainably.

Out West, though, over a century of unmanaged and exorbitant water use means that some of the places most dependent on groundwater-arid regions vulnerable to drought-have squandered the ancient water resources that once existed underground.

How water use and recharge fit into the hydrological cycle. Illustration: State of California

A famous precedent for this problem is in the Great Plains. There, the ancient water of the Ogallala Aquifer supplies drinking water and irrigation for millions of people and farms from South Dakota to Texas. If people were to pump this aquifer dry, it would take thousands of years to refill naturally. It is a vital buffer against drought, yet irrigation and water-intensive farming are lowering its water levels at unsustainable rates.

As the planet warms, ancient groundwater is becoming increasingly important-whether flowing from your kitchen tap, irrigating food crops, or offering warnings about Earth's past that can help us prepare for an uncertain future.

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What it's like to drink water that's 15,000 years old

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Marissa Grunes is an environmental fellow at Harvard University; Alan Sel t zer is an assistant scientist in Marine Chemistry and Geochemisty at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Kevin M . Befus is an assistant professor of Hydrogeology at University of Arkansas. This story originally featured on The Conversation .

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Sam L.Ch. 9- Screen time linked to risk of myopia in young people

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Sam L.Ch. 9- Screen time linked to risk of myopia in young people

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A new study published in one of the world's leading medical journals has revealed a link between screen time and higher risk and severity of myopia, or short-sightedness, in children and young adults.

The open-access research, published this week in The Lancet Digital Health, was undertaken by researchers and eye health experts from Singapore, Australia, China and the UK, including Professor Rupert Bourne from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). The authors examined more than 3,000 studies investigating smart device exposure and myopia in children and young adults aged between 3 months old and 33 years old.

After analysing and statistically combining the available studies, the authors revealed that high levels of smart device screen time, such as looking at a mobile phone, is associated with around a 30% higher risk of myopia and, when combined with excessive computer use, that risk rose to around 80%.

The research comes as millions of children around the world have spent substantial time using remote learning methods following the closure of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Bourne, Professor of Ophthalmology in the Vision and Eye Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said: "Around half the global population is expected to have myopia by 2050, so it is a health concern that is escalating quickly. Our study is the most comprehensive yet on this issue and shows a potential link between screen time and myopia in young people.

"This research comes at a time when our children have been spending more time than ever looking at screens for long periods, due to school closures, and it is clear that urgent research is needed to further understand how exposure to digital devices can affect our eyes and vision. We also know that people underestimate their own screen time, so future studies should use objective measures to capture this information."

Journal Reference:

Joshua Foreman, Arief Tjitra Salim, Anitha Praveen, Dwight Fonseka, Daniel Shu Wei Ting, Ming Guang He, Rupert R A Bourne, Jonathan Crowston, Tien Y Wong, Mohamed Dirani. Association between digital smart device use and myopia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Digital Health, 2021; DOI: 10.1016/S2589-7500(21)00135-7

Cite This Page:

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children's health; menopause; eye care; child psychology; child development; educational psychology; educational technology; mobile computing; communications

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Screen time linked to risk of myopia in young people: High levels of exposure can increase risk of short-sightedness by up to 80%

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A new study published in one of the world's leading medical journals has revealed a link between screen time and higher risk and severity of myopia, or short-sightedness, in children and young adults.

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Researchers use bacteria to destroy cancer cells - Allison Ireland #7

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Researchers use bacteria to destroy cancer cells - Allison Ireland #7

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One day, an anti-cancer agent could be a cell with specially equipped potent balloons that pop when placed near an ultrasound beam-killing surrounding cancer cells in its wake. Researchers at Caltech have been testing this idea in the lab, and published their most recent work in the journal Nature Nanotechnology this week.

Key to this operation are tiny protein bubbles that biologists call gas vesicles. Some bacteria and protists have the genetic ability to generate these structures on demand: If a microbe wishes to rise to the surface, it can generate a few gas vesicles, making its body more buoyant and pushing it upwards. If it wishes to sink, it can pop a few gas vesicles and do the opposite.

Gas vesicles are old indeed: Some scientists think they evolved in Earth's primordial seas as early as three billion years ago. Now, in the 21st century, scientists have cleverly repurposed gas vesicles for their own devices. They've been able to genetically engineer microbes that can go into the body, where they're detectable by an ultrasound machine like the ones used during pregnancy.

But gas vesicles have other powers, too. Normally, when a gas vesicle pops, the gas inside fizzes away. But, by driving that gas with finely tuned ultrasound waves, researchers learned they could force gas bubbles to grow, and grow-until the bubbles themselves also pop, violently, creating shockwaves.

Scientists call that process inertial cavitation, and it's the same science that makes it possible for ultrasound to clean your jewelry. The study's authors wondered if they could put the shockwaves from those ultrasound-inflated bubbles to work against tumors. If a cell could be genetically engineered to produce gas vesicles, then it could be turned into a potent sleeper agent-ready to be activated by ultrasound.

"Now, the cell is becoming the explosive agent," says Mikhail Shapiro, a chemical engineer at Caltech, who was part of the research.

First, the researchers had to test gas vesicles' explosive capabilities. They placed gas vesicles into a petri dish, along with a type of glioblastoma cell that's often used in brain cancer research. After they blasted the dish with ultrasound, in a matter of mere seconds, they saw signs of widespread disruption that indicated the gas vesicles were responsible.
[Related: The next generation of skincare might come from frog foam]
Then, the researchers tested the process in living, cancer-stricken mice. The researchers inserted E. coli bacteria, which are known to be inclined to colonize tumors, modified with the gene to let the microbes create gas vesicles.

"We're kind of hitchhiking on these cells that know how to get to the right place," says Avinoam Bar-Zion, a postdoc at Caltech and the first author of this paper.

After letting the bacteria circulate for five days, they turned on the ultrasound. By that time, the researchers found that those bacteria had colonized deep inside of the tumors. Nearly two weeks after the ultrasound treatment, tumors that had been sabotaged had grown three times more slowly than those that weren't. And the mice who had received the gas vesicle treatment survived, on average, more than twice as long as their counterparts.

It's not the first time scientists have tinkered with little bubbles inside the human body. Tiny bubbles about the size of a red blood cell, fittingly called microbubbles, have been tested for decades now as a potential way to deliver drugs. Nor is it the first time scientists have thought about using microbes as a vehicle into the body. Researchers have tested certain bacteria's ability to deliver drugs that could treat some conditions, like certain bowel diseases. But they're far from being FDA-approved, and some scientists remain skeptical about the whole idea.

"After decades, I just haven't seen that come to fruition," says Mark Borden, a biomedical engineer at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved with this research.

The Caltech group says their approach is distinct. An operator can control their setup with an ultrasound machine. As a result, their therapy has the tantalizing ability to be-at least on paper-controllable from outside the body.

"It gives you this ability to turn on the therapy when you want, and then to expose the therapy as much as you want," says Borden. "You can officially turn it on and turn it off, which is very rare, I think, for therapeutics."

Furthermore, it's not always easy to make sure cancer treatment gets to the right place. But the Caltech group has harnessed microbes which are already naturally inclined to go into cancer cells, thus doing the work of getting the gas vesicles where they need to be.

"You can have cells be the delivery agent that gets them into the right place, and makes them on-site, at the right location," says Shapiro.

Of course, making this research work in the lab is one challenge; getting it into the hands of doctors is another beast entirely, and researchers still have a long way to go. For one, they need to ensure that inserting gas-vesicle-containing microbes into a human body won't end up triggering the immune system, or that they won't cause damage to tissues outside the tumor. So, they'd need to further test the therapy on animals, such as rodents, pigs, and non-human primates.

But, if it does work out, it could add to the ever-growing toolbox that can be used against the threat of cancer.

"It's a fascinating technology and I think it has a lot of potential," says Borden.

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Researchers are using gassy, explosive bacteria to destroy cancer cells

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One day, an anti-cancer agent could be a cell with specially equipped potent balloons that pop when placed near an ultrasound beam-killing surrounding cancer cells in its wake. Researchers at Caltech have been testing this idea in the lab, and published their most recent work in the journal Nature Nanotechnology this week.

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Malawi receives international accreditation for CDC-supported laboratories https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/stories/2021/malawi-cdc-supported-labs.html

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For the first time in Malawi, four laboratories have earned international standard accreditation. Medical laboratories are key partners in patient safety and can influence medical diagnoses. The quality of laboratory services is a major factor with direct impact on the quality of health care.

The Malawian laboratories earned International Organization for Standardization 15190 accreditation by meeting rigorous standards that ensure consistent, accurate, and reliable testing and safety. This was achieved through the Southern African Developmental Community Accreditation Services (SADCAS) with support from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

This accomplishment was celebrated with a ceremony in Lilongwe, Malawi on July 14 and attended by the Malawi Minister of Health Khumbidze Kandodo Chiponda and United States Ambassador to Malawi, Robert Scott.

A decade of work pays off

CDC, through PEPFAR, introduced international quality management system frameworks through laboratory assessments, training, mentorship, and supervision to help achieve the accreditation. As a result, the four supported laboratories obtained SADCAS accreditation were: the National HIV Reference Laboratory in HIV viral load and serology tests, Blantyre Dream, Balaka Dream, and Partners in Hope.

CDC and PEPFAR, in partnership with the University of Maryland at Baltimore, currently support 66 laboratories and a sample transportation network system that covers all 28 districts in Malawi. Since 2004, the U.S. Government has invested over $70 million in the network through CDC, USAID, and PEPFAR. This health partnership continues to prove vital especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Quickly adjusting to COVID-19 demands, network partners in collaboration with the Ministry of Health enhanced the existing laboratory system to meet the needs of the citizens of Malawi. This was attained by:

Supporting 12 high throughput molecular laboratories to test more than 100,000 COVID-19 samples

Training 66 laboratory technologists to conduct SARS-CoV-2 PCR testing

Procuring and distributing 25,000 laboratory reagents and 36,000 sample collection kits

Coordinating COVID-19 proficiency testing to maintain the highest quality standards

In conjunction with PEPFAR and USAID, CDC continues to work on accreditation efforts with the goal of six laboratories per year achieving international standards.

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molecular laboratory description: for the first time in malawi

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four laboratories have earned international standard accreditation.

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Malawi Achieves International Accreditation for CDC-supported Laboratories | CDC

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For the first time in Malawi, four laboratories have earned international standard accreditation. Medical laboratories are key partners in patient safety and can influence medical diagnoses. The quality of laboratory services is a major factor with direct impact on the quality of health care.

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‘Spillover’ diseases are emerging faster than ever before-thanks to humans

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‘Spillover’ diseases are emerging faster than ever before-thanks to humans

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/spillover-diseases-are-emerging-faster-than-ever-beforethanks-to-humans

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When a dozen merchant ships from the Black Sea docked in Messina, Sicily, in October 1347, they carried a deadly cargo that would change the course of history.

Most of the sailors onboard were dead. The few survivors were covered in oozing, black pustules. Though authorities quickly ordered all people to remain onboard the "death ships," rats had already disembarked. They and the fleas they carried were infected with Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague.

Over the next five years, the Black Death swept Europe, killing 34 to 50 million people-between a third and a half of the population at the time. Scholars at the University of Paris blamed the contagion on a dangerous "triple [astrological] conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars."

Nearly seven centuries after the Black Plague hit Europe, yet another pandemic is raging. This time scientists know it's caused by a virus, and modern germ theory coupled with advanced gene sequencing mean we have the tools to study its weaknesses and curb its spread. Nevertheless, the current recorded death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed 4.8 million, and experts say true numbers are far higher.

Deadly outbreaks and novel diseases have challenged human existence throughout history, profoundly impacting economics, culture, and commerce, killing world leaders and bringing down empires, says David Morens, a zoonotic disease expert at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Many of the viruses and bacteria behind these outbreaks existed for millennia without causing widespread harm. Human behavior has changed that. "Few people realize that measles, plague, and other diseases go back thousands of years, with Neolithic origins," he says.

The growing human population, increasing globalization, and environmental damage are all accelerating the process, says William Karesh, an executive vice president at EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that studies zoonoses, or diseases that spread between animals and humans. "The laws of biology haven't changed, but the playing field has changed dramatically," he says.

The result: Dangerous new human diseases are emerging at unprecedented rates, including Marburg virus, avian flu, AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Nipah virus, swine flu, Ebola, Lyme disease, chikungunya, Zika, dengue, Lassa fever, yellow fever, and now COVID-19. Some 2.5 billion people are infected with zoonotic diseases each year, and because many of these ailments have no cure, they kill about 2.7 million annually, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Unlike previous centuries when diseases took time to spread, the infected can now board a plane and disseminate their germs worldwide before they even show symptoms. COVID-19 emerged in China just 21 months ago, and cases have since been reported in 223 countries and territories. Humans have also enabled disease-carrying ticks and mosquitoes to expand their ranges by altering the climate. As the planet warms, these insects move into new territory.

Part of the problem is that forgetting the lessons from past disease outbreaks has become a recurring theme in human history, Morens says. "Almost all the experts I know think that this will keep happening again and again because the problem is not the germs. The problem is our behavior, right?"

The Neolithic revolution

From a pathogen's perspective, the bonanza of vulnerable hosts began 12,000 years ago during the Neolithic Revolution. Small bands of nomads that rarely came in contact with others couldn't spawn a pandemic. But once hunter-gatherers transitioned to farming and congregated in large, crowded settlements, infectious microbes flourished.

There were many opportunities for infection. Settlers shared the land with wild species. They domesticated wolves as companions, and later, tamed and lived with wild sheep, goats, and cows they used as livestock. Grain stores attracted flea- and tick-infected rodents. Standing water in wells and irrigation systems allowed mosquitoes to flourish.

In close contact, all of them swapped pathogens and parasites, allowing zoonotic diseases to jump the Darwinian divide between animals and humans. Some 60 percent of humankind's deadliest killers originated in animals, including smallpox, cholera, and influenza. "Some may have jumped multiple times before successfully infecting people," says Timothy Newfield, a historical epidemiologist at Georgetown University.

Some diseases use "middlemen" as part of their jump between species. Livestock often fill that role, acting as an intermediary host between wildlife and humans. One example is Nipah virus, which jumped from wild fruit bats to domesticated pigs to humans in Malaysia in 1998. Livestock sometimes becomes reservoirs for diseases: for example, people transmitted tuberculosis to cows, some of which now harbor the bacterium that causes it, allowing the disease to keep moving between species.

Still, it's a roll of the dice what happens once pathogens find a new host, Morens says. Factors such as contagion level, how a disease is spread, and the availability of appropriate hosts dictate whether an emerging disease becomes a dead-end infection, as most do, or explodes into a serious outbreak.

The rise of outbreaks

Historical accounts offer glimpses into ancient pandemics. Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, the world's oldest surviving writings, describe plague and pestilence that raged in 2000 B.C. These writings blame angry gods for illnesses, or sometimes, the demons they enlisted, which were known as "the hand of a ghost," says Troels Pank Arbøll, an Assyrian historian at the University of Oxford. Celestial conjunctions involving the planet Mars, which was linked to the Assyrian god of death, could portend an epidemic.

The cuneiform texts describe how venerated healers diagnosed patients. Male exorcists or physicians combined physical examination with environmental observations, which could be anything from a creaking door in the house to animals that appeared. How those animals moved was indicative of their impact: from the right, propitious, from the left, not good, Troels says.

The healers would then consult written "omens" to concoct and administer herbal remedies, which they applied as poultices or poured into the appropriate orifice. They chanted incantations and prayers to appease the deities and ritually dispelled symptoms by melting a figurine of the patient in a fire or tossing it in a river.

Warnings about rabid dogs are the tablets' only mention of zoonotic disease. But other ancient evidence exists. Smallpox is described in early Indian, Chinese, and Egyptian writings. When archaeologists discovered the mummy of ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses V in 1898, they found his skin pocked with scars. He, along with two other mummies, revealed that smallpox has existed for at least 3,000 years. Researchers note that it may have jumped from a rodent pox virus; rodents are also a reservoir for closely related cowpox and camelpox.

One of history's first documented plagues-the virulent Plague of Athens-ravaged ancient Greece from 430 to 425 B.C. As growing settlements and rising cities facilitated infection, people evolved resistance to local diseases. Then they began to travel, unwittingly spreading germs across the ancient world in a process Morens calls "pathogen pollution."

The Athens plague is thought to have arrived by sea, ravaging a city ripe for contagion. At the time, Athens was embroiled in war with neighboring Sparta and the city was crowded with refugees.

The historian Thucydides lived in Athens during the plague and vividly detailed the symptoms. People's heads burned with fever, their mouths bled, eyes turned red, they coughed, vomited, had dysentery, and developed an unquenchable thirst. Their reddened skin erupted in ulcers. Most were dead within a week. The suffering " seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure," Thucydides wrote in the History of the Peloponnesian War.

Scavenger animals avoided the unburied dead. Enveloped in a specter of death, the city descended into " unprecedented lawlessness ... the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or of law," Thucydides wrote.

This mysterious pestilence still has not been identified, though experts suggest it could have been anthrax, smallpox, typhus, or any of two dozen other infectious candidates. Whatever it was, the plague killed tens of thousands, and a weakened Athens fell to Sparta in 404 B.C.

Altering history with waves of disease

Over the next few centuries, devastating waves of bubonic plague, measles, and smallpox annihilated huge numbers of people across three continents.

"It shows how interconnected the world was 2,000 years ago," says Lucie Laumonier, a historian at Montreal's Concordia University. The Silk Road and trading ships connected Europe with North Africa and Asia, creating big opportunities for microbes, with each outbreak altering human history in its own way.

A pandemic may have sped the demise of the Han Empire in A.D. 160. Just five years later, Roman armies returning home from Western Asia imported an unknown disease that caused the Plague of Antonius. It killed emperor Marcus Aurelius as well as five million Romans and devastated the empire, impacting both the military and agriculture and emptying state coffers.

The Justinianic Plague struck Constantinople, now Istanbul, during the sixth century, the first of three pandemics of bubonic and pneumonic plague. They rank among humanity's most fatal biological events, says Georgetown's Timothy Newfield.

The historian Procopius, who carefully chronicled Emperor Justinian's reign, wrote that "there was a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated." He claimed it came from Egypt, which shipped wheat to Constantinople. That's feasible: Grain shipments back then could have carried plague-bearing rodents and fleas.

Mongol armies may have been responsible for the next bubonic plague pandemic by unwittingly bringing flea-infested rats from Central Asia to Ukraine in 1346 during the siege of Kaffa. Some historians have suggested that the Mongols used biological warfare and catapulted diseased corpses over the city walls to infect those inside-however, evidence is limited, and critics have since called that idea into question.

Either way, the survivors fled, sailing from the Black Sea to Genoa and Messina and bringing the Black Death with them. Within three years the disease had spread to England, Germany, and Russia.

In 1348, Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio described the bubonic plague as a disease that "would rush upon its victims with the speed of a fire racing through dry or oily substances ... Swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits ... waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg." These buboes turned black and purple, seeping blood and pus. Victims shook with fever, aches, and digestive distress.

To try to cure them, doctors often used bloodletting or induced vomiting. Most of the infected quickly succumbed. "The scale of mortality was unlike anything that we can even imagine," says Newfield.

Superstition ruled. Some people believed planetary movements, bad air, or poisoned water caused this deadly pestilence. Many thought it was a punishment from God. Other people blamed outsiders. Various minority groups were driven away, tortured, or killed. "The desire to scapegoat is very, very old," Newfield says.

Meanwhile, rats and fleas thrived in cities without regular garbage collection. They burrowed into rugs made from wetland rushes and nibbled leftovers that were thrown to pet cats and dogs. Their role in the pandemic went unnoticed, along with lice that may also have been carriers.

Back in Asia, the plague killed some 16 million people. Since pandemics limit travel and trade, this plague caused the Mongols to lose control of Persia and China, and that ultimately dissembled their empire.

Ancient roots of prevention

Fear of contagion during this second plague outbreak sparked countermeasures that are still in use today.

In 1377, in the Venetian-controlled port of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia), officials set up a place outside the city to treat the town's sick residents. They also isolated all ships and overland caravans for 30 days before allowing travelers entry to the city. That later stretched to 40 days-or quarantino in Italian. These measures created the cornerstone of Medieval preventative social distancing.

Still, the plague ebbed and recurred for the next 400 years. A ferocious 1664 outbreak in London is famous for ''dead carts'' that clattered along cobblestone streets with drivers shouting, ''Bring out your dead,'' immortalized by Monty Python. The last of the three bubonic plague pandemics began in the Chinese province of Yunan around 1855 and lasted until 1960.

It was during this episode that Swiss scientist Alexandre Yersin discovered the bacterial cause in 1894. Four years later, Jean-Paul Simond traced transmission from rodents to fleas to humans. When bubonic plague crossed the Pacific and reached San Francisco in 1900, officials rejected the accumulated science, instead quarantining Asian immigrants.

In 1897, scientists developed a preliminary vaccine; a better version emerged in 1931, and antibiotic treatment proved effective in 1947. With these tools in hand, plague in humans can be controlled and large outbreaks are far less likely. However, the bacteria are still circulating in the wild. Plague was in the headlines just this August after it was detected in chipmunks in Lake Tahoe, California, forcing some tourist destinations to shut down.

The modern viral explosion

Various viruses have also haunted humankind, and smallpox was among the deadliest. From the time of ancient Egypt onward, "the speckled monster" infected the Old World, often leaving survivors horribly scarred or blind. It killed 25 to 40 percent of victims, including pharaohs, nobles and royalty: China's Shunzi Emperor (1661), Queen Mary II of England (1694), Habsburg Emperor Joseph I (1711) , Russia's Czar Peter II (1730), and Louis XV of France (1774), among others. It's thought that Japan's Emperor Komei died of smallpox in 1867. Queen Elizabeth I of England and U.S. President Abraham Lincoln barely survived infection.

By contrast, the New World had been comparatively free of pandemic disease, possibly because indigenous peoples domesticated fewer animal species, offering fewer opportunities for germs to jump to humans. That ended when the conquistadors carried Eurasian germs across the Atlantic. The hueyzahautal-or "great eruption"-of smallpox exploded in Mexico in 1520 and spread into South America, slaying some 3.5 million people, including Aztec emperor Cuitláhuac and Incan emperor Huayna Capac. It crippled both empires and facilitated Spanish conquests.

"The age of exploration might more appropriately be called the age of global microbial devastation," says Morens.

Notably, an exponential rise in human population that also started around the 1500s brought with it a sharp increase in dangerous epidemics and pandemics.

In 1793 U.S. President George Washington was confronted by the " American plague" of yellow fever, which would burn its way across the country for the next six years. In 1832 a cholera pandemic spread from India into Europe, killing more than 18,000. And the devastating 1918 influenza pandemic erupted near the end of World War I, killing at least 50 million worldwide. From 1900 to today, the world has been introduced to microbial killers ranging from HIV, the H1N1 swine flu, Zika virus, and infectious coronaviruses that are still wreaking havoc.

Still, there is no global pandemic prevention strategy. Morens notes that since COVID-19 emerged in late 2019, there has been growing discussion of the need for greater surveillance, international communication, and vaccine development. But there has been little mention of mitigating the human activities that boost the risk of dangerous disease, he says. That includes deforesting land, encroaching into wild ecosystems and selling and consuming wild animals, actions that bring wildlife, livestock, and humans into close contact.

Global cooperation in a unified "one health" effort is needed to prevent the next pandemic, says Steve Osofsky, director of the Cornell Wildlife Health Center in Ithaca, New York. It's an approach that "recognizes the relationships between our own health, the health of our domestic animals, and the health of wildlife and how all that's underpinned by environmental stewardship," he says. This framework will protect both humanity and nature, but, he adds, it requires collaborations between a wide spectrum of experts, from medical doctors, veterinarians, epidemiologists, zoologists, business leaders and Indigenous peoples to agriculture, public health, and environment professionals. "How we treat the natural world has direct bearing on our future," Osofsky says.

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'Spillover' diseases are emerging faster than ever before-thanks to humans

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When a dozen merchant ships from the Black Sea docked in Messina, Sicily, in October 1347, they carried a deadly cargo that would change the course of history. Most of the sailors onboard were dead. The few survivors were covered in oozing, black pustules.

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Growing potential for toxic algae in the Alaskan Arctic - Katie #6

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Growing potential for toxic algae in the Alaskan Arctic - Katie #6

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Changes in the northern Alaskan Arctic ocean environment have reached a point at which a previously rare phenomenon -- widespread blooms of toxic algae -- could become more commonplace, potentially threatening a wide range of marine wildlife and the people who rely on local marine resources for food. That is the conclusion of a new study about harmful algal blooms (HABs) of the toxic algae Alexandrium catenella being published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The study, led by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in collaboration with colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other researchers in the U.S, Japan, and China, looked at samples from seafloor sediments and surface waters collected during 2018 and 2019 in the region extending from the Northern Bering Sea to the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas north of Alaska. The sediment samples allowed the researchers to count and map Alexandrium cysts -- a seed-like resting stage that lies dormant in the seafloor for much of the year, germinating or hatching only when conditions are suitable. The newly germinated cells swim to the surface and multiply using the sun's energy, producing a "bloom" that can be dangerous due to the family of potent neurotoxins called saxitoxins that the free-swimming cells produce.

Although microscopic algae in the ocean are most often beneficial and serve as the base of the marine food web, some species produce potent neurotoxins that can directly and indirectly affect humans and wildlife. When the Alexandrium cells are consumed by shellfish and some fish, those toxins can accumulate to levels that can be dangerous to humans and wildlife, resulting in the human syndrome called paralytic shellfish poisoning, with symptoms ranging from tingling lips, to respiratory distress, to death. In fish, toxin levels can be highest in digestive and excretory organs, such as the stomach, kidney, liver, but are very low in muscle and roe. The toxin can also cause illness and mortality of marine wildlife such as larger fish, marine mammals, and seabirds. This is of particular concern for members of coastal communities in northern and western Alaska who rely on a variety of marine resources for food.

"We've known about human and marine wildlife health risks associated with Alexandrium and its toxins in Alaskan waters for a long time, including occasional events north of Bering Strait, but these results show increased potential for large and recurrent blooms of this species as a new hazard for Alaska's Arctic," said Don Anderson, WHOI senior scientist and Director of the U.S. National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms, who led the study. "The rapid warming that we're seeing all across the Arctic is setting the stage for dangerous bloom events in the waters of western and northern Alaska that we formerly thought were too cold for significant germination and growth."

Alexandrium are part of a group of single-celled organisms found in oceans and lakes worldwide known as dinoflagellates, named for their flagella -- whip-like appendages that cells use to swim through the water. In their cyst stage, Alexandrium cells settle on the seafloor where they can remain inactive for decades, waiting for water temperatures to become favorable for them to germinate and take on their free-swimming form.

"As the climate has warmed, the significant and ongoing reduction in extent and duration of seasonal ice cover along the coast of western and northern Alaska has resulted in dramatic changes" said Bob Pickart, a WHOI physical oceanographer and co-leader of the project with Anderson. "These include warming temperatures due to local heating of ice-free waters, as well as an increased influx of warmer, fresher water from the Pacific flowing north through the Bering Strait region into the Chukchi Sea."

In addition, atmospheric conditions and less seasonal sea ice means organisms that rely on sunlight to grow, including Alexandrium, are able to thrive and multiply. As a result of this and related changes, the authors write in their paper, the Arctic Ocean ecosystem is witnessing an "unprecedented regime shift."

Among these shifts is both the timing and favorability of ocean conditions that promote the germination of Alexandrium cysts on the seafloor in the Ledyard Bay area of the northeast Chukchi Sea. Previously, Alexandrium was known to exist in the Chukchi Sea as dormant cysts or as bloom cells thought to be carried north through the Bering Strait from populations that originated in southeastern Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, or the east coast of Russia. The fast north-flowing currents through the narrow Bering Strait slow near Ledyard Bay, allowing Alexandrium cysts to settle to the seafloor. Over time, exceptionally dense and large beds of Alexandrium cysts have formed. Formerly, water temperatures on the seafloor were thought to be too cold to allow significant germination to inoculate local blooms. However, the authors demonstrate that warming over the last two decades has increased bottom water temperatures in Ledyard Bay and nearby waters by nearly 2°C, sufficient to nearly double the flux of germinated cells from the seafloor and also speeding up the process, thereby advancing bloom initiation by almost three weeks and lengthening the window for favorable growth and bloom formation in surface waters. The swimming Alexandrium cells in surface waters can grow and multiply As a result, they find increased potential for large blooms of Alexandrium to produce dangerous levels of the PSP toxins that can enter the food web and threaten the people and wildlife of the Arctic ecosystem during warmer years.

"What we're seeing now are very different Arctic Ocean conditions than anyone in living memory has known," said Anderson. "We've learned from the Gulf of Maine in the Atlantic Ocean how to monitor and manage Alexandrium bloom events and how to sustain commercial and recreational fisheries in the face of HABs, but navigating this new Alaskan Arctic HAB problem is going to take a great deal of targeted research and far more attention to the food security of coastal residents and Alaska Natives and the health of Arctic wildlife than we've paid so far."

"The threat is clear, but we don't yet know the extent to which these toxins will ultimately lead to increased human exposure or to impacts on the health of wildlife at all levels of the food web," said Kathi Lefebvre, a research biologist at NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center who, in partnership with Anderson, is leading a parallel study in close collaboration with Alaskan subsistence communities on the effects, concentrations, and movements of these toxins in food webs. "To complicate the challenge, this is a new stress on northern marine ecosystems that are already undergoing unprecedented change, adding yet another concern for the food security of coastal peoples for whom the ocean is a primary source of food and a central element of their identity. ??Alaskan coastal communities are now aware of this emerging issue and have been active partners in the research process to protect their subsistence life as well as advance our understanding of the changing Arctic and what it means for the future."

Support for research was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs and Ocean Sciences Division, by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Arctic Research Program and National Centers for Coastal and Ocean Science ECOHAB Program, and by the National Institutes of Health through the Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health.

Key takeaways:

-Changes in the northern Alaskan Arctic Ocean environment have reached a point at which widespread blooms of the toxic algae Alexandrium catenella could become more commonplace, potentially threatening a wide range of marine wildlife and the people who rely on local marine resources for food.

-Free-swimming Alexandrium cells produce saxitoxin, a family of neurotoxins responsible for paralytic shellfish poisoning in wildlife and in humans that consume affected animals.

-Field research showed extensive beds of Alexandrium cysts, a dormant, seed-like life stage of the algae, in seafloor sediments north of the Bering Strait, in the Chukchi Sea, and in the western Beaufort Sea near Pt. Barrow

-Conditions also favor germination of those cysts and the growth of the germinated, free-swimming swimming cells in surface waters, augmenting populations transported into the Arctic from waters further south.

Authors: Donald M. Anderson ¹, Evangeline Fachon ¹, Robert S. Pickart ², Peigen Lin ², Alexis D. Fischer1 ¹ Mindy L. Richlen ¹, Victoria Uva1 ¹, Michael Brosnahan ¹, Leah McRaven ², Frank Bahr ², Kathi Lefebvre ³, Jacqueline M. Grebmeier ⁴, Seth Danielson ⁵, Yihua Lyu ⁶, Yuri Fukai ⁷

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fish; marine biology; sea life; ecology research; oceanography; global warming; ecology; geography

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Growing potential for toxic algal blooms in the Alaskan Arctic: A warming Arctic presents potential new threats to humans and marine wildlife in the fast-changing region

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Changes in the northern Alaskan Arctic ocean environment have reached a point at which a previously rare phenomenon -- widespread blooms of toxic algae -- could become more commonplace, potentially threatening a wide range of marine wildlife and the people who rely on local marine resources for food.

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Emergency crisis protocols activated in 20 Alaska health care facilities - Katie #5

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Emergency crisis protocols activated in 20 Alaska health care facilities - Katie #5

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On Oct. 2, Alaska activated emergency crisis protocols that allow 20 medical facilities to ration care if needed as the state recorded the nation's worst COVID-19 diagnosis rates in recent days, straining the state's limited health care system.

The declaration covers three facilities that had already announced emergency protocols, including the state's largest hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage. The state's declaration also includes the other two hospitals in Anchorage, as well as facilities across the nation's largest but sparsely populated state.

"Today's action recognizes that Alaska has an interconnected and interdependent health care system, requiring the need for activation of the state's decision-making framework. That framework includes a progression of conventional, contingency, and crisis standards," the state health department said in a statement announcing the activation.

"I want to stress that our health care facilities in Alaska remain open and able to care for patients," said Adam Crum, the state's health commissioner. "Alaskans who need medical care should not delay seeking it, even during these difficult times."

Factors that led the state to activate the crisis of care standards include scarce medical resources at some facilities, limited staff, and difficulty transferring patients because of limited bed availability. Other factors include limited renal replacement therapy and oxygen supplies.

According to data collected by Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, one in every 84 people in Alaska was diagnosed with COVID-19 from Sept. 22 to Sept. 29. The next highest rate was one in every 164 people in West Virginia.

On Oct. 1, Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, which was covered by the state's announcement, activated its own policy because of a shortage of beds, staff, and monoclonal antibody treatments, along with the inability to transfer patients.

"The move to Crisis Standards of Care is not something we take lightly," Fairbanks Chief Medical Officer Dr. Angelique Ramirez said in a statement. "This is in response to a very serious surge of COVID in our community."

The move came the same day the state reported 1,044 new cases, 108 of them in the Fairbanks area. The hospital said that 35% of its patients on Oct. 2 were being treated for COVID-19.

Since March 2020, there have been 110,850 total COVID-19 cases in Alaska, which has a population of about 731,000. More than 24,000 new cases were reported in September as the delta variant drove a spike in cases in Alaska, which has never had a statewide mask mandate.

The state health department said in all, 2,432 people have been hospitalized and 557 Alaska residents have died.

Statewide, 60% of eligible residents are fully vaccinated. The Fairbanks North Star Borough is the third worst region for vaccination rates in Alaska, with just under 52% of eligible residents vaccinated.

Ramirez said the decision to move to crisis standards was because of many factors, including community spread caused by the low vaccination rates and a high number of patients waiting to be admitted.

"This impacts all patient care, those with broken bones, traumas, heart attacks, strokes, COVID, anyone needing medical care," Ramirez said. "The care we are able to provide is highly fluid and can change day by day and even hour by hour depending on the availability of resources within our system and stateside."

Heidi Hedberg, director of the Alaska Division of Public Health, encouraged all residents to wear masks and get vaccinated.

"Every action you take helps prevent COVID-19 from spreading and protects you, your family, other Alaskans, and our health care system. No one wants to use crisis standards of care guidelines," she said.

Here's the complete list of facilities:

Alaska Native Medical Center

Alaska Regional Hospital

Bartlett Regional Hospital

Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation/Kanakanak Hospital

Central Peninsula Hospital

Cordova Community Medical Center

Fairbanks Memorial Hospital

Maniilaq Health Center

Mat-Su Regional Medical Center

Norton Sound Health Corporation

Petersburg Medical Center

Providence Alaska Medical Center

Providence Kodiak Island Medical Center

Providence Seward Medical Center

Providence Valdez Medical Center

SEARHC/Mt. Edgecumbe

South Peninsula Hospital

Elias Specialty Hospital

Wrangell Medical Center

Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation

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Alaska activates emergency crisis protocols in 20 health care facilities

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On Oct. 2, Alaska activated emergency crisis protocols that allow 20 medical facilities to ration care if needed as the state recorded the nation's worst COVID-19 diagnosis rates in recent days, straining the state's limited health care system. The declaration covers three facilities that had already announced emergency protocols, including the state's largest hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage.