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Category: Health

‘We’ve learned absolutely nothing’: Tests could again be in short supply if Covid surges

‘We’ve learned absolutely nothing’: Tests could again be in short supply if Covid surges

Politico reports: The United States could yet again find itself with too few Covid-19 tests if Congress fails to authorize new funds and cases surge, warn White House officials, diagnostic manufacturers and public health experts. The Biden administration estimates that the testing market will remain stable until the early summer, but rapidly falling demand for once-popular at-home Covid-19 tests is leading some manufacturers to cut back. “If we get to a point where companies really are turning off lines or…

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A doctor’s impassioned critique of Big Pharma

A doctor’s impassioned critique of Big Pharma

By Troy Farah, Undark, March 18, 2022 Compared to other high-income countries, the fitness of Americans is in dismal shape — and has been declining for decades. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated health disparities, crisis on top of crisis has compounded to create even more devastating conditions for a growing number of people, especially marginalized groups. There is the diabetes crisis, the obesity crisis, and, of course, the despair crisis, which includes the rising tide of suicides, alcohol poisoning,…

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Another Covid surge may be coming. Are we ready for it?

Another Covid surge may be coming. Are we ready for it?

The New York Times reports: Scarcely two months after the Omicron variant drove coronavirus case numbers to frightening heights in the United States, scientists and health officials are bracing for another swell in the pandemic and, with it, the first major test of the country’s strategy of living with the virus while limiting its impact. At local, state and federal levels, the nation has been relaxing restrictions and trying to restore a semblance of normalcy. Encouraging Americans to return to…

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America is zooming through the pandemic panic-neglect cycle

America is zooming through the pandemic panic-neglect cycle

Ed Yong writes: All epidemics trigger the same dispiriting cycle. First, panic: As new pathogens emerge, governments throw money, resources, and attention at the threat. Then, neglect: Once the danger dwindles, budgets shrink and memories fade. The world ends up where it started, forced to confront each new disease unprepared and therefore primed for panic. This Sisphyean sequence occurred in the United States after HIV, anthrax, SARS, Ebola, and Zika. It occurred in Republican administrations and Democratic ones. It occurs…

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New research points to Wuhan market as pandemic origin

New research points to Wuhan market as pandemic origin

The New York Times reports: Scientists released a pair of extensive studies on Saturday that point to a market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. Analyzing data from a variety of sources, they concluded that the coronavirus was very likely present in live mammals sold in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late 2019 and suggested that the virus twice spilled over into people working or shopping there. They said they found no support for an…

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Got a Covid booster? You probably won’t need another for a long time

Got a Covid booster? You probably won’t need another for a long time

The New York Times reports: As people across the world grapple with the prospect of living with the coronavirus for the foreseeable future, one question looms large: How soon before they need yet another shot? Not for many months, and perhaps not for years, according to a flurry of new studies. Three doses of a Covid vaccine — or even just two — are enough to protect most people from serious illness and death for a long time, the studies…

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Wood burners emit more particle pollution than traffic, UK data shows

Wood burners emit more particle pollution than traffic, UK data shows

The Guardian reports: Wood burning in homes produces more small particle pollution than all road traffic in the UK, according to revised government data. The new data significantly cuts the estimated proportion of small particle pollution that comes from wood burners from 38% to 17%. But wood burning pollution remains a “major contributor” to particle pollution, another government report said. Road transport is responsible for 13% of particle pollution. The data shows tiny particle pollution, called PM2.5, produced by wood…

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Pharmaceutical drugs have dangerously polluted the world’s rivers, scientists warn

Pharmaceutical drugs have dangerously polluted the world’s rivers, scientists warn

The Guardian reports: Humanity’s drugs have polluted rivers across the entire world and pose “a global threat to environmental and human health”, according to the most comprehensive study to date. Pharmaceuticals and other biologically active compounds used by humans are known to harm wildlife and antibiotics in the environment drive up the risk of resistance to the drugs, one of the greatest threats to humanity. The scientists measured the concentration of 61 active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) at more than 1,000…

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Heart-disease risk soars after Covid — even with a mild case

Heart-disease risk soars after Covid — even with a mild case

Nature reports: Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study1 shows. Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease. What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such…

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Did Omicron come from mice?

Did Omicron come from mice?

Carolyn Kormann writes: Last Thanksgiving, Rilu, an eleven-year-old snow leopard and father of seven, began sneezing and wheezing. Snow leopards are native to the Himalayas, but Rilu was born in a zoo in Oklahoma City, then moved to the Miller Park Zoo, in Illinois, in 2011, to form part of the Species Survival Plan—the zoos’ matchmaking effort to maintain a genetically diverse “insurance” population of endangered animals. A PCR test in early December confirmed that Rilu had Covid-19. He developed…

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The time to end pandemic restrictions is now

The time to end pandemic restrictions is now

Yascha Mounk writes: In March 2020, I wrote that America should “cancel everything” in response to the acute threat posed by COVID-19: Mass events should be postponed, companies should send employees home from the office, and schools should move classes online. I remain convinced that this was the right thing to do. Before anyone was vaccinated, and before doctors had even a preliminary understanding of how to treat the disease, these measures were necessary to save lives and avert a…

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Changing your diet could add ten years to your life – new research

Changing your diet could add ten years to your life – new research

By Laura Brown, Teesside University Everyone wants to live longer. And we’re often told that the key to doing this is making healthier lifestyle choices, such as exercising, avoiding smoking and not drinking too much alcohol. Studies have also shown that diet can increase lifespan. A new study has found that eating healthier could extend lifespan by six to seven years in middle-aged age adults, and in young adults, could increase lifespan by about ten years. The researchers brought together…

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The Covid policy that really mattered wasn’t a policy

The Covid policy that really mattered wasn’t a policy

Ezra Klein writes: If the C.D.C. had recommended better masks from the beginning, how many people would have worn them and for how long? If the Biden administration had flooded stores with cheap rapid tests, would people have used them? If boosters had been pushed earlier, and more loudly, would the United States no longer trail peer nations in vaccinations? Put differently: How much would getting our pandemic policies right have mattered? It’s easy to speak as if policy smoothly…

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Climate change enters the therapy room

Climate change enters the therapy room

The New York Times reports: It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl. Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children. She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth….

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More people ill at the same time than in any period since the 1918-1919 flu pandemic

More people ill at the same time than in any period since the 1918-1919 flu pandemic

The Wall Street Journal reports: The world is living through a unique moment: In the past five or six weeks, the Omicron coronavirus variant has likely gotten more people sick than any similar period since the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, according to global health expert While Omicron infections have peaked in many places, February is likely to see similar case loads as the variant continues to spread before it flames out, causing worker shortages from hospitals to factories and spurring debate…

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Exposure to one nasal droplet enough for Covid infection, study finds

Exposure to one nasal droplet enough for Covid infection, study finds

The Guardian reports: Exposure to a single nasal droplet is sufficient to become infected with Covid-19, according to a landmark trial in which healthy volunteers were intentionally given a dose of the virus. The trial, the first to have monitored people during the entire course of infection, also found that people typically develop symptoms very quickly – on average, within two days of encountering the virus – and are most infectious five days into the infection. The study was carried…

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