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Category: Health

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic

Reuters reports: At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus. The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the…

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What causes long COVID? Case builds for rogue antibodies

What causes long COVID? Case builds for rogue antibodies

Nature reports: Antibodies isolated from people with long COVID increase pain sensitivity and reduce movement in mice when transferred to the animals, research shows. The findings suggest that antibodies might drive some symptoms of long COVID — although how that process works is unclear, and the results will need to be replicated in larger studies. “I think this will be a beacon of a paper that we can take forwards to further understand long COVID,” says Resia Pretorius, an immunologist…

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Record share of U.S. electorate is pro-choice and voting on it

Record share of U.S. electorate is pro-choice and voting on it

Gallup reports: A record-high 32% of U.S. voters say they would only vote for a candidate for major office who shares their views on abortion. The importance of a candidate’s abortion stance to one’s vote is markedly higher among pro-choice voters than it was during the 2020 presidential election cycle, while pro-life voters’ intensity about voting on the abortion issue has waned. Also, voters’ greater intensity on the issue today compared with 2020 is explained mainly by Democrats, while Republicans…

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An object lesson from Covid on how to destroy public trust

An object lesson from Covid on how to destroy public trust

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Big chunks of the history of the Covid pandemic were rewritten over the last month or so in a way that will have terrible consequences for many years to come. Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science….

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Why the pandemic probably started in the Wuhan research lab, in five key points

Why the pandemic probably started in the Wuhan research lab, in five key points

Alina Chan writes: On Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci will return to the halls of Congress to testify before the House subcommittee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic. He will most likely be questioned about how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until retiring in 2022, supported risky virus work at a Chinese institute whose research may have caused the pandemic. For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a…

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2023 set record for U.S. heat deaths, killing in areas that used to handle the heat

2023 set record for U.S. heat deaths, killing in areas that used to handle the heat

The Associated Press reports: David Hom suffered from diabetes and felt nauseated before he went out to hang his laundry in 108-degree weather, another day in Arizona’s record-smashing, unrelenting July heat wave. His family found the 73-year-old lying on the ground, his lower body burned. Hom died at the hospital, his core body temperature at 107 degrees. The death certificates of more than 2,300 people who died in the United States last summer mention the effects of excessive heat, the…

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Hundreds of Palestinian doctors disappeared into Israeli detention

Hundreds of Palestinian doctors disappeared into Israeli detention

The Intercept reports: It’s been two months since Osaid Alser has heard from his cousin, Khaled Al Serr, a surgeon at Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis. Before late March, they had been in regular contact — or as regular as the shredded communication infrastructure would allow. Al Serr had created a telemedicine WhatsApp group where he and Osaid, a surgical resident in the U.S., recruited doctors from stateside, the U.K., and Europe to give…

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Animals self-medicate with plants − behavior people have observed and emulated for millennia

Animals self-medicate with plants − behavior people have observed and emulated for millennia

A goat with an arrow wound nibbles the medicinal herb dittany. O. Dapper, CC BY By Adrienne Mayor, Stanford University When a wild orangutan in Sumatra recently suffered a facial wound, apparently after fighting with another male, he did something that caught the attention of the scientists observing him. The animal chewed the leaves of a liana vine – a plant not normally eaten by apes. Over several days, the orangutan carefully applied the juice to its wound, then covered…

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How 3M executives convinced a scientist the forever chemicals she found in human blood were safe

How 3M executives convinced a scientist the forever chemicals she found in human blood were safe

ProPublica reports: Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-­it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination. Several of 3M’s most successful products contained man-made compounds called fluorochemicals. In a spray called Scotchgard,…

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Medical workers evacuated from Gaza, but three Americans refuse to leave

Medical workers evacuated from Gaza, but three Americans refuse to leave

The Intercept reports: Some 20 American and British medical workers who had been unable to leave Gaza were evacuated from the European Hospital in Khan Younis on Friday, though three American members of medical missions refused to evacuate until Israel allows additional humanitarian workers to replace them. They remain at work, along with doctors and staff from separate medical missions, serving a population trapped in Gaza with no escape. The missions, as is often the case, had been scheduled to…

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‘More Neanderthal than human’: How your health may depend on DNA from our long-lost ancestors

‘More Neanderthal than human’: How your health may depend on DNA from our long-lost ancestors

Live Science reports: The group had traveled for thousands of miles, crossing Africa and the Middle East until finally reaching the dimly lit forests of the new continent. They were long-vanished members of our modern human tribe, and among the first Homo sapiens to enter Europe. There, these people would likely have encountered their distant cousins: Neanderthals. These small bands of modern-human relatives had hooded brows, large heads and squat bodies, and they had spent epochs acclimating to Europe’s colder…

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Increase in infectious diseases strongly associated with loss of biodiversity

Increase in infectious diseases strongly associated with loss of biodiversity

Anthropocene reports: When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world in 2020, it drew attention to the ways environmental damage can set the stage for disease outbreaks. Scientists pointed to the potential roles of urbanization, habitat loss, and trade in live animals for helping to fuel a disease that many scientists think leapt from wild animals to people. While all those factors might have influenced this particular pandemic, they aren’t the main ways that environmental destruction threatens to amplify infectious disease….

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Gaza’s unexploded-bomb crisis

Gaza’s unexploded-bomb crisis

Isaac Chotiner writes: Late last month, Charles (Mungo) Birch, who oversees the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) in the Palestinian territories, issued a warning about the dangers posed by unexploded ordnance in Gaza, especially if and when Gazan civilians return to the enclave’s north. (On Tuesday, the Israeli military entered the southern city of Rafah, after ordering tens of thousands of people to evacuate, and took control of the Rafah border crossing.) Birch said that more unexploded missiles and…

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Tyson Foods dumps millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into rivers and lakes

Tyson Foods dumps millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into rivers and lakes

The Guardian reports: Tyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals. Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide were among the 371m lb of pollutants released into waterways by just 41 Tyson slaughterhouses and mega processing plants between 2018 and 2022. According to research by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the contaminants were dispersed in 87bn…

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McKinsey is under criminal investigation for its opioid work

McKinsey is under criminal investigation for its opioid work

The New York Times reports: The Justice Department is investigating McKinsey & Company, the international consulting giant, for its role in helping drug companies maximize their sale of opioids. The investigation is led by the U.S. attorneys’ offices in Massachusetts and the Western District of Virginia in coordination with the department’s civil division in Washington, according to two officials familiar with the case who spoke on condition of anonymity. Since 2021, McKinsey has agreed to pay about $1 billion to…

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Pregnant women are being turned away from emergency rooms with fatal consequences

Pregnant women are being turned away from emergency rooms with fatal consequences

The Associated Press reports: One woman miscarried in the restroom lobby of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died. Complaints that pregnant women were turned away from…

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