Browsed by
Category: Health

Second U.S. Omicron case detected in Minnesota man who attended anime event in NYC

Second U.S. Omicron case detected in Minnesota man who attended anime event in NYC

The Daily Beast reports: A second case of the super-mutated Omicron variant of the coronavirus has been detected in the U.S. in a Minnesota resident who recently returned home from an anime convention in New York City, the Minnesota Department of Health said. The person, an adult male living in Hennepin County, is fully vaccinated and only has mild symptoms. He fell ill on Nov. 22 and got tested two days later. He had traveled to New York for the…

Read More Read More

Where did ‘weird’ Omicron come from?

Where did ‘weird’ Omicron come from?

Science reports: Since South African scientists announced last week they had identified an unsettling new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the world has anxiously awaited clues about how it might change the trajectory of the pandemic. But as big a mystery—if less urgent—is where and how Omicron evolved, and what lessons its emergence holds for avoiding future dangerous variants. Omicron clearly did not develop out of one of the earlier variants of concern, such as Alpha or Delta. Instead, it appears to…

Read More Read More

Charting changes in a pathogen’s genome yields clues about its past and hints about its future

Charting changes in a pathogen’s genome yields clues about its past and hints about its future

A virus’s genes hold a record of where it’s traveled, and when. imaginima/E+ via Getty Images By Claire Guinat, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich; Etthel Windels, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and Sarah Nadeau, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich More than 250 million people worldwide have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, usually after a diagnostic nose swab. Those swabs aren’t trash once they’ve delivered their positive result, though. For scientists like us they carry additional valuable information about…

Read More Read More

Omicron risks infecting vaccinated people but may not cause them severe illness

Omicron risks infecting vaccinated people but may not cause them severe illness

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus could lead to more infections among vaccinated people, according to several scientists, but some said there were reasons to believe the shots would protect against severe disease. While the new variant might evade the antibodies generated in reaction to the vaccines, the virus will likely remain vulnerable to immune cells that destroy it once it enters the body, said Ugur Sahin, co-founder of BioNTech SE, which sells a…

Read More Read More

It looks like Omicron causes milder illness – is this how COVID becomes endemic?

It looks like Omicron causes milder illness – is this how COVID becomes endemic?

AP Photo/Denis Farrell By Hamish McCallum, Griffith University These are very early days in terms of our understanding the Omicron variant. What is known is that it has a large number of mutations, particularly in the spike protein and it appears to be rapidly spreading in specific parts of the world. Very early indications from Africa suggest it does not cause particularly severe disease (though the World Health Organization has urged caution given the limited data available). At this point,…

Read More Read More

How the Omicron variant rattled the world in one week

How the Omicron variant rattled the world in one week

The Wall Street Journal reports: Over coffee at his office on Tuesday, Tulio de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation, let a colleague in on a secret. “There’s something going on,” he told Alex Sigal, a virologist growing coronaviruses at a South African laboratory. “They’ve found a variant they’ve never seen before.” For days, case numbers in the nation had been rising rapidly. Puzzled lab technicians had been getting back Covid-19 tests that were positive,…

Read More Read More

WHO chief: Omicron backlash against Africa shows why world needs pandemic treaty

WHO chief: Omicron backlash against Africa shows why world needs pandemic treaty

Politico reports: It’s time for a new pandemic treaty, the chief of the World Health Organization said on Monday. The emergence of the new Omicron coronavirus variant amid vaccine inequity and the rapid imposition of travel bans on southern African nations “demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics,” said WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at a special session of the World Health Assembly. Countries are gathering at the session where they will agree to start negotiations…

Read More Read More

Humans have evolved to stay active even in old age, new hypothesis claims

Humans have evolved to stay active even in old age, new hypothesis claims

Science Alert reports: In the modern western world, people tend to reduce their levels of physical activity as they get older. But with this inactivity comes a raft of adverse health effects, so why didn’t evolution engineer us so that people could maintain a decent quality of life as they inevitably slow down? In a newly published paper, researchers argue it is because we aren’t meant to reduce our physical activity as we age at all. Enter the ‘active grandparent…

Read More Read More

How dangerous Omicron is, won’t be known for weeks

How dangerous Omicron is, won’t be known for weeks

Science reports: At 7.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research in San Diego, received a message on Slack: “This variant is completely insane.” Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh was reacting to a new SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence found in three samples collected in Botswana on 11 November and one picked up a week later in a traveler from South Africa to Hong Kong. Andersen looked at the data and then replied: “Holy shit—that…

Read More Read More

Ten million deaths a year

Ten million deaths a year

David Wallace-Wells writes: Not​ all deaths are created equal. In February 2020, the world began to panic about the novel coronavirus, which killed 2714 people that month. This made the news. In the same month, around 800,000 people died from the effects of air pollution. That didn’t. Novelty counts for a lot. At the start of the pandemic, it was considered unseemly to make comparisons like these. But comparing the value of human lives is one thing the machine of…

Read More Read More

How Norilsk, Siberia, became one of the most polluted places on Earth

How Norilsk, Siberia, became one of the most polluted places on Earth

Marianne Lavelle reports: It was 2 a.m. and the sun was shining, as it does day and night in mid-July in Norilsk, a Siberian city 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Igor Klyushin went to the bank of the river where he used to fish with his father for grayling, a sleek and dorsal-finned beauty known for its graceful leaps above the water surface. “A very merry fish,” Klyushin recalled. “It enjoys cold and clean, clean water.” He doubted…

Read More Read More

What we need to understand about the Omicron variant

What we need to understand about the Omicron variant

Ashish Jha asks: How worrisome is Omicron? There are three key questions that help scientists understand how consequential any variant might be. The first question is whether the variant is more transmissible than the current, prevalent Delta strain? Second, does it cause more severe disease? And third, will it render our immune defenses — from vaccines and prior infections — less effective (a phenomenon known as immune escape)? On transmissibility, the data, while early, look worrisome. This new variant appears…

Read More Read More

Western countries are destroying surplus doses of Covid vaccine while the poorest nations go without

Western countries are destroying surplus doses of Covid vaccine while the poorest nations go without

Gordon Brown writes: Despite the repeated warnings of health leaders, our failure to put vaccines into the arms of people in the developing world is now coming back to haunt us. We were forewarned – and yet here we are. In the absence of mass vaccination, Covid is not only spreading uninhibited among unprotected people but is mutating, with new variants emerging out of the poorest countries and now threatening to unleash themselves on even fully vaccinated people in the…

Read More Read More

The West’s hoarding of vaccines set the stage for the Omicron variant to emerge

The West’s hoarding of vaccines set the stage for the Omicron variant to emerge

The New York Times reports: In poorer African nations, the cascade of travel closures triggered a wave of resentment among people who believed that the continent was yet again bearing the brunt of panicked policies from Western countries, which had failed to deliver vaccines and the resources needed to administer them. Richer countries, having already hoarded vaccines for much of 2021, were now penalizing parts of the world that they had starved of shots in the first place, scientists said….

Read More Read More

Corruption: Biden’s FDA nominee returns with deeper Big Pharma ties

Corruption: Biden’s FDA nominee returns with deeper Big Pharma ties

Bloomberg reports: President Joe Biden’s choice to lead the Food and Drug Administration made millions of dollars from health and drug companies since his last stint in government, raising new questions about his ties to firms the agency oversees. Robert Califf was paid $2.7 million by Verily Life Sciences, the biomedical research organization operated by Alphabet Inc., and sits on the boards of two pharmaceutical companies, AmyriAD and Centessa Pharmaceuticals PLC. He also reported ties to 16 other research organizations…

Read More Read More

The only nation in the world where civilian guns outnumber people

The only nation in the world where civilian guns outnumber people

CNN reports: Atlanta. Orlando. Las Vegas. Newtown. Parkland. San Bernardino. Ubiquitous gun violence in the United States has left few places unscathed over the decades. Still, many Americans hold their right to bear arms, enshrined in the US Constitution, as sacrosanct. But critics of the Second Amendment say that right threatens another: The right to life. America’s relationship to gun ownership is unique, and its gun culture is a global outlier. As the tally of gun-related deaths continue to grow…

Read More Read More