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Category: Health

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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Will Omicron end the pandemic? Here’s what experts say

Will Omicron end the pandemic? Here’s what experts say

Nature reports: On 11 January, just seven weeks after the Omicron variant was first reported, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned of a “tidal wave” of infection washing from west to east across the world. Fifty of the 53 countries in Europe and central Asia had reported cases of Omicron, said Hans Henri Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe. Countries would have to cope as best they could, he said, guided by their individual epidemiological situation, available resources, vaccination-uptake…

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When fact checking goes wrong: Facebook versus the British Medical Journal

When fact checking goes wrong: Facebook versus the British Medical Journal

The BMJ reports: On 3 November Howard Kaplan, a retired dentist from Israel, posted a link to a BMJ investigation article in a private Facebook group. The investigation reported poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia, a contract research company helping to carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial. The article brought in record traffic to bmj.com and was widely shared on Twitter, helping it achieve the second highest “Altmetric” score of all time across all biomedical publications.3…

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The Rorschach features of the pandemic

The Rorschach features of the pandemic

David Wallace-Wells writes: “Omicron is in retreat,” declared the January 19 headline of the New York Times’ Morning Newsletter, by David Leonhardt, which reaches millions of inboxes each weekday. That same Wednesday, according to Our World in Data, 3,830 new deaths were reported in the country — not just the highest figure in the Omicron wave but, putting aside a one-day post-Thanksgiving reporting anomaly, the highest since January 2021. In the week that followed, the deaths continued: A few days…

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In China, Covid-era controls may outlast the virus

In China, Covid-era controls may outlast the virus

The New York Times reports: The police had warned Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer, not to go to Shanghai to visit the mother of a dissident. He went to the airport anyway. His phone’s health code app — a digital pass indicating possible exposure to the coronavirus — was green, which meant he could travel. His home city, Changsha, had no Covid-19 cases, and he had not left in weeks. Then his app turned red, flagging him as high…

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Doctors find ‘antibody signature’ for patients most at risk for long Covid

Doctors find ‘antibody signature’ for patients most at risk for long Covid

The Guardian reports: Doctors have discovered an “antibody signature” that can help identify patients most at risk of developing long Covid, a condition where debilitating symptoms of the disease can persist for many months. Researchers at University hospital Zurich analysed blood from Covid patients and found that low levels of certain antibodies were more common in those who developed long Covid than in patients who swiftly recovered. When combined with the patient’s age, details of their Covid symptoms and whether…

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90% of Americans have a poor diet, and 25% don’t exercise

90% of Americans have a poor diet, and 25% don’t exercise

Ars Technica reports: As the pandemic enters its third year with cases and hospitalizations as high as ever, fresh data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds us that we already had a long track record of failing to manage our health. The latest data from a decades-long health survey finds that—yet again—the vast majority of Americans have a poor diet and many of us are inactive. Specifically, just 10 percent of Americans eat enough vegetables, and only…

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Covid will continue but the end of the pandemic is near

Covid will continue but the end of the pandemic is near

Christopher J L Murray writes: The world is experiencing a huge wave of infection with the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. Estimates based on Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) models suggest that on around Jan 17, 2022 there were 125 million omicron infections a day in the world, which is more than ten times the peak of the delta wave in April, 2021. The omicron wave is inexorably reaching every continent with only a few countries in eastern Europe,…

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Omicron has changed the shape of the pandemic. Will it end it for good?

Omicron has changed the shape of the pandemic. Will it end it for good?

CNN reports: The world feared the worst when a worrying new coronavirus variant emerged in late November and ripped through South Africa at a pace not seen before in the pandemic. But two months later, with Omicron dominant across much of the globe, the narrative has shifted for some. “Levels of concern about Omicron tend to be lower than with previous variants,” Simon Williams, a researcher in public attitudes and behaviors towards Covid-19 at Swansea University, told CNN. For many,…

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