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Category: Health

Traditional healers are preserving their knowledge, and with it, the biodiversity of Brazil’s savanna

Traditional healers are preserving their knowledge, and with it, the biodiversity of Brazil’s savanna

Sarah Sax writes: Since Lucely Pio was a little girl, she has been collecting medicinal plants in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savanna. At 5, she walked through the grasslands and forests of the Cerrado with her grandmother, a midwife and healer, who taught her about where to find and how to harvest the thousands of different plants that only existed there. When picking leaves and flowers, they would arise in the dark hours of the morning, before the sun came…

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‘Covid is taking over’: Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe

‘Covid is taking over’: Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe

The Guardian reports: It was midway through February when André Machado realized Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe was racing into a bewildering and remorseless new phase. “The floodgates opened and the water came gushing out,” recalled the infectious disease specialist from the Our Lady of the Conception hospital in Porto Alegre, one of the largest cities in southern Brazil. Since then, Machado’s hospital, like health centres up and down the country, has been engulfed by a deluge of jittery, gasping patients –…

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Europe confronts a Covid-19 rebound as vaccine hopes recede

Europe confronts a Covid-19 rebound as vaccine hopes recede

The Wall Street Journal reports: The European Union’s fight against Covid-19 is stuck in midwinter, even as spring and vaccinations spur hope of improvement in the U.S. and U.K. Contagion is rising again in much of the EU, despite months of restrictions on daily life, as more-virulent virus strains outpace vaccinations. A mood of gloom and frustration is settling on the continent, and governments are caught between their promises of progress and the bleak epidemiological reality. Virus infections and deaths…

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The world isn’t building back better after the pandemic

The world isn’t building back better after the pandemic

Akshat Rathi writes: The exuberance of vaccine rollouts in rich countries is masking an ugly reality. Greenhouse gas emissions are already creeping higher than before the pandemic as economies come back to life. That shouldn’t be a total surprise. Even as governments around the world have spent trillions of dollars to aid their nation’s recoveries, only a tiny fraction has gone toward initiatives that would also cut pollution. Many politicians, including U.S. president Joe Biden, have adopted the phrase “build…

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Long Covid is raising awareness about pervasive undercared-for chronic suffering

Long Covid is raising awareness about pervasive undercared-for chronic suffering

Vox reports: Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room doctor in New York City, was no stranger to dangerous viruses when a brush with one landed him in Bellevue Hospital for 19 days. But it was only after he was discharged, and declared virus-free, that the really bizarre symptoms set in. Back at home, he noticed he couldn’t taste anything for several days. For months, he was tired all the time and his joints felt heavy and painful. When he woke…

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Seattle’s virus success shows what could have been

Seattle’s virus success shows what could have been

The New York Times reports: Facing the nation’s first widespread coronavirus outbreak, some of Washington State’s top leaders quietly gathered on a Sunday morning last March for an urgent strategy session. The virus had been rampaging through a nursing home in the Seattle suburbs. By the time the meeting began, the region had recorded most of the nation’s first 19 deaths. New cases were surfacing by the hour. As the meeting’s presentation got to the fifth slide, the room grew…

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Biden got the vaccine rollout humming, with Trump’s help

Biden got the vaccine rollout humming, with Trump’s help

The New York Times reports: When President Biden pledged last week to amass enough vaccine by late May to inoculate every adult in the United States, the pronouncement was greeted as a triumphant acceleration of a vaccination campaign that seemed to be faltering only weeks earlier. And it is true that production of two of the three federally authorized vaccines has sped up in part because of the demands and directives of the new president’s coronavirus team. But the announcement…

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DNA databases are too white

DNA databases are too white

Tina Hesman Saey writes: It’s been two decades since the Human Genome Project first unveiled a rough draft of our genetic instruction book. The promise of that medical moon shot was that doctors would soon be able to look at an individual’s DNA and prescribe the right medicines for that person’s illness or even prevent certain diseases. That promise, known as precision medicine, has yet to be fulfilled in any widespread way. True, researchers are getting clues about some genetic…

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Tracking the coronavirus’s evolution, letter by letter, is revolutionizing pandemic science

Tracking the coronavirus’s evolution, letter by letter, is revolutionizing pandemic science

Sarah Zhang writes: In the beginning, there was one. The first genome for the virus causing a mysterious illness we had not yet named COVID-19 was shared by scientists on January 10, 2020. That single genome alerted the world to the danger of a novel coronavirus. It was the basis of new tests as countries scrambled to find the virus within their own borders. And it became the template for vaccines, the same ones now making their way to millions…

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Unlocking the mysteries of long COVID

Unlocking the mysteries of long COVID

Meghan O’Rourke writes: The quest at mount sinai began with a mystery. During the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in New York City, Zijian Chen, an endocrinologist, had been appointed medical director of the hospital’s new Center for Post-COVID Care, dedicated both to research and to helping recovering patients “transition from hospital to home,” as Mount Sinai put it. One day last spring, he turned to an online survey of COVID‑19 patients who were more than a month past…

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Russian disinformation campaign aims to undermine confidence in Pfizer, other Covid-19 vaccines, U.S. officials say

Russian disinformation campaign aims to undermine confidence in Pfizer, other Covid-19 vaccines, U.S. officials say

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russian intelligence agencies have mounted a campaign to undermine confidence in Pfizer Inc.’s and other Western vaccines, using online publications that in recent months have questioned the vaccines’ development and safety, U.S. officials said. An official with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which monitors foreign disinformation efforts, identified four publications that he said have served as fronts for Russian intelligence. The websites played up the vaccines’ risk of side effects, questioned their efficacy, and…

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Yes, all of the COVID-19 vaccines are very good. No, they’re not all the same

Yes, all of the COVID-19 vaccines are very good. No, they’re not all the same

Hilda Bastian writes: Public-health officials are enthusiastic about the new, single-shot COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, despite its having a somewhat lower efficacy at preventing symptomatic illness than other available options. Although clinical-trial data peg that rate at 72 percent in the United States, compared with 94 and 95 percent for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, many experts say we shouldn’t fixate on those numbers. Much more germane, they say, is the fact that the Johnson & Johnson shot,…

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The virus is mutating — but we can still beat it, one vaccination at a time

The virus is mutating — but we can still beat it, one vaccination at a time

Dhruv Khullar writes: Last March, during the first wave of the pandemic, Adriana Heguy set out to sequence coronavirus genomes. At the time, New York City’s hospitals were filling up, and American testing capacity was abysmal; the focus was on increasing testing, to figure out who had the virus and who didn’t. But Heguy, the director of the Genome Technology Center at N.Y.U. Langone Health, recognized that diagnostic tests weren’t enough. Tracking mutations in the virus’s genetic code would be…

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The short-term, middle-term, and long-term future of the coronavirus

The short-term, middle-term, and long-term future of the coronavirus

Andrew Joseph and Helen Branswell write: When experts envision the future of the coronavirus, many predict that it will become a seasonal pathogen that won’t be much more than a nuisance for most of us who have been vaccinated or previously exposed to it. But how long that process takes — and how much damage the virus inflicts in the interim — is still anyone’s guess. “The most predictable thing about this coronavirus is its unpredictability,” said Howard Markel, a…

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Countries with highest levels of obesity have most Covid deaths, report finds

Countries with highest levels of obesity have most Covid deaths, report finds

The Guardian reports: Countries with high levels of overweight people, such as the UK and the US, have the highest death rates from Covid-19, a landmark report reveals, prompting calls for governments to urgently tackle obesity, as well as prioritising overweight people for vaccinations. About 2.2 million of the 2.5 million deaths from Covid were in countries with high levels of overweight people, says the report from the World Obesity Federation. Countries such as the UK, US and Italy, where…

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In Palm Beach, Covid-19 vaccines intended for rural Black communities are instead going to wealthy white Floridians

In Palm Beach, Covid-19 vaccines intended for rural Black communities are instead going to wealthy white Floridians

STAT reports: The winds blew southwest the day of Pahokee’s Covid-19 vaccination drive, which meant the sugarcane fields were ablaze. Growers are banned from burning excess leaves when there’s an eastward breeze, to keep fumes away from the gated communities of Florida’s Gold Coast 40 miles away. Pahokee is in the same county but, with a median personal income of $13,674, its residents live in a different world. A single highway connects the billionaire’s club of Mar-a-Lago to the working-class…

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