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Category: Health

Inflammatory responses to pathogens changed dramatically during the Neolithic period

Inflammatory responses to pathogens changed dramatically during the Neolithic period

Science reports: When early farmers of the Vinca culture first sowed barley and wheat 7700 years ago in the rich soil of the Danube River and its tributaries, they changed more than their diet: They introduced a new way of life to the region. They crowded together in mud huts, living cheek by rump with aurochs, cows, pigs, and goats—and their poop—in settlements that eventually swelled to thousands of people. Togetherness brought a surge in diseases such as influenza, tuberculosis,…

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A new way to think about clean air

A new way to think about clean air

Sarah Zhang writes: When London vanquished cholera in the 19th century, it took not a vaccine, or a drug, but a sewage system. The city’s drinking water was intermingling with human waste, spreading bacteria in one deadly outbreak after another. A new comprehensive network of sewers separated the two. London never experienced a major cholera outbreak after 1866. All that was needed was 318 million bricks, 23 million cubic feet of concrete, and a major reengineering of the urban landscape….

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The next attack on the Affordable Care Act may cost you free preventive health care

The next attack on the Affordable Care Act may cost you free preventive health care

A provision of the Affordable Care Act makes it easier for patients to receive preventive care. Jose Luis Pelaez Inc/Digital Vision via Getty Images By Paul Shafer, Boston University and Alex Hoagland, Boston University Many Americans breathed a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court left the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in place following its third major legal challenge in June 2021. This decision left widely supported policies in place, like ensuring coverage regardless of preexisting conditions, coverage for dependents…

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Number of daily steps to good health

Number of daily steps to good health

Science Alert reports: In the latest study to explore this territory, a team led by physical activity epidemiologist Amanda Paluch from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst tracked a cohort of over 2,000 middle-aged Black and White men and women, sourced from four different US cities. The group, with an average age of just over 45, wore accelerometers that tracked their daily step count and step intensity during waking hours, as they went about their lives. The experiment began back in…

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Another study promoting ivermectin has suspect data

Another study promoting ivermectin has suspect data

BuzzFeed News reports: For anti-vaccine activists, the clinical trial results couldn’t have been better. The drug ivermectin, scientists in Argentina announced last year, prevented 100% of COVID-19 infections. That glowing finding helped spark a craze for the decades-old medication, which is normally used to delouse people and deworm livestock, and drive the perception that it is a silver bullet against the pandemic. “If you take it, you will not get sick,” an ivermectin-boosting physician told a Senate committee in December,…

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Risk of breakthrough infections remains very rare, three studies find

Risk of breakthrough infections remains very rare, three studies find

NBC News reports: The Covid-19 vaccines continue to offer strong protection against severe illness and hospitalization, according to research on more than 1 million people published Wednesday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The findings come as the United States prepares to begin offering booster shots to all Americans later this month — a decision driven in part by data federal officials have said indicates the vaccines’ ability to curb infections may be waning. But protection against the most severe forms…

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Medical science is failing millions of Covid long-haulers

Medical science is failing millions of Covid long-haulers

Ed Yong writes: While watching the scientific community grapple with long COVID, I have thought a lot about a scene in The Lord of the Rings. Faced with impending doom, the hobbits Merry and Pippin ask the powerful treelike ents for help. But despite the urgency of the situation, the ents are slow. They meet for hours, and after a lot of deliberation, they announce that they’ve agreed that the hobbits are not orcs. The hobbits, who already knew that,…

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Ending an eviction moratorium increases Covid-19 hazard, study finds

Ending an eviction moratorium increases Covid-19 hazard, study finds

MIT News reports: Ending an eviction moratorium for renters makes people in a community significantly more likely to contract Covid-19, according to a new study co-authored by MIT researchers. The study uses the variable timing of state-level moratoriums, issued and terminated at different points during the Covid-19 pandemic, to quantify their effect. It is the first study to identify the individual-level risk for people in different social circumstances, due to eviction moratoriums ending. The increased risk runs throughout communities, the…

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Vaccines could affect how the coronavirus evolves – but that’s no reason to skip your shot

Vaccines could affect how the coronavirus evolves – but that’s no reason to skip your shot

Vaccines against COVID-19 are the safest – and fastest – way to prevent the spread of variants. Luis Alvarez/ DigitalVision via Getty Images By Andrew Read, Penn State Takeaways A 2015 paper on a chicken virus showed vaccines could enable more deadly variants to spread – in chickens. But that outcome is rare. Only a minority of human and animal vaccines have affected the evolution of a virus. In most of those cases, evolution didn’t increase the severity of the…

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It’s easy to judge the unvaccinated. As a doctor, I see a better alternative

It’s easy to judge the unvaccinated. As a doctor, I see a better alternative

Jay Baruch writes: The anger I feel toward vaccine-hesitant people becomes a more complicated emotion when I witness them reckoning with their choices. Many of the unvaccinated people I’ve talked with are hard-working, loving individuals struggling to catch a break in a life that hasn’t been fair. They’re unmoored and don’t know what to believe when truth itself has supply-chain problems and the health care system has been letting them down for years. Belonging to a moral profession implies the…

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HHS unveils small office to address climate change as a public health issue

HHS unveils small office to address climate change as a public health issue

Politico reports: The federal health department is creating a new office to address climate change as a public health issue, in an effort to tie growing environmental concerns to the administration’s broader health equity agenda. The Office of Climate Change and Health Equity will take a wide-ranging approach to evaluating the impact that the warming planet is having on people’s health, including initiatives aimed at reducing health providers’ carbon emissions and expanding protections to the most vulnerable populations. Senior National…

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Having Covid once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine — but no infection parties, please

Having Covid once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine — but no infection parties, please

Science reports: The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label. The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become…

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Show me the data

Show me the data

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Who should get vaccine booster shots and when? Can vaccinated people with a breakthrough infection transmit the virus as easily as unvaccinated people? How many people with breakthrough infections die or get seriously ill, broken down by age and underlying health conditions? Confused? It’s not you. It’s the fog of pandemic, in which inadequate data hinders a clear understanding of how to fight a stealthy enemy. To overcome the fog of war, the Prussian general and military…

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How a cheap antidepressant emerged as a promising Covid-19 treatment

How a cheap antidepressant emerged as a promising Covid-19 treatment

Vox reports: Since Covid-19 patients started showing up at clinics and hospitals a year and a half ago, doctors and researchers have been hard at work trying to figure out how to treat them. Most drugs and treatments haven’t panned out, producing either no results or small ones in large-scale clinical trials. Many of the few that work are expensive and difficult to administer. Hydroxychloroquine, enthusiastically endorsed by President Trump last year, has been shown to have no measurable benefits….

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Why walking helps us think

Why walking helps us think

Ferris Jabr writes: In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by…

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Ivermectin for Covid-19: abundance of hype, dearth of evidence

Ivermectin for Covid-19: abundance of hype, dearth of evidence

Peter G. Lurie writes: In striking testimony before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in December 2020, Pierre Kory, a critical care physician who formerly worked for the University of Wisconsin Health University Hospital, described the “immense potency” of ivermectin, characterizing it as effectively a “miracle drug.” “All studies are positive,” he testified, “with considerable magnitude benefits, with the vast majority reaching strong statistical significance.” Unfortunately, and not for the first time in the Covid-19 pandemic, the…

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