Tuesday, Jun 06th
Last update05:38:04 PM GMT
Health Glance
A COVID rebound has been detected through New York City wastewater.
All 14 of the city's wastewater treatment plants reported high concentrations of COVID.
Some areas near the city are also trending upward, but public health officials say it's too early to know if it's the start of a full-blown COVID wave.
It might have been one of Alfred Hitchcock’s fanciful tales of the supernatural: a 5,000-mile wide blob of murky seaweed creeping menacingly across the Atlantic before dumping itself along the US shoreline.
But now giant clumps of the 13m-ton morass labeled the Great Atlantic sargassum belt are washing up on Florida’s beaches, scientists are warning of a real-life threat from the piles of decomposing algae, namely high levels of the flesh-eating Vibrio bacteria lurking in the vegetation.
The alarming discovery by marine biologists at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) lends a dangerous new aspect to the brown seaweed onslaught, which is already threatening to spoil the state’s busy summer tourism season as coatings of decaying goop exude a pungent aroma akin to that of rotting eggs.
A blood test for more than 50 types of cancer has shown real promise in a major NHS trial, researchers say.
The test correctly revealed two out of every three cancers among 5,000 people who had visited their GP with suspected symptoms, in England or Wales.
In 85% of those positive cases, it also pinpointed the original site of cancer.
The Galleri test looks for distinct changes in bits of genetic code that leak from different cancers. Spotting treatable cancer early can save lives.
At biological research facilities across the United States and around the world, hundreds of safety breaches happen every year at labs experimenting with dangerous pathogens. Scientists and other lab workers are bitten by infected animals, stuck by contaminated needles and splashed with infectious fluids. They are put at risk of exposures when their protective gear malfunctions or critical building biosafety systems fail.
And, like all humans, the people working in laboratories make mistakes and they sometimes cut corners or ignore safety procedures – even when working with pathogens that have the potential to cause a global pandemic.
et the public rarely learns about these incidents, which tend to be shrouded in secrecy by labs and the government officials whose agencies often both fund and oversee the research. My new book, Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk, reveals how these and other kinds of lab accidents have happened with alarming frequency and how the lack of stringent, mandatory and transparent biosafety oversight and incident reporting is putting all of us at risk.
Former first lady Rosalynn Carter has been diagnosed with dementia, the Carter Center said in a statement Tuesday.
Carter is the founder of The Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers, an organization that supports caregivers for those who are elderly or experiencing illness or disability.
“We recognize, as she did more than half a century ago, that stigma is often a barrier that keeps individuals and their families from seeking and getting much-needed support,” the Carter family said in the statement. The family doesn’t intend to comment further, the statement added, but hopes the news will encourage others to have similar conversations.
A schizo patient can’t differentiate between ideas and thoughts from reality. As a result, they may believe in supernatural beings like ghosts. Schizo is a mental disorder with symptoms of hallucinations, delusions, muddled thoughts, and other behavioral anomalies.
Schizo typically occurs earlier in men (late adolescence to early twenties) than in women (late twenties). About 0.3–0.7% of the adult population has schizo. Its risk factors include being male, pregnancy/birth complications, high parental age, early traumatic life events, and social isolation.
But none of these factors fully explain or are specific for schizo. Birth complications and early traumatic life events are also risk factors for borderline personality or anxiety disorders, for instance.
According to the most recent estimates, more than 65 million people worldwide may be living with some form of long Covid, a startling number that will only continue to increase, given the lack of available treatment options.
One of the scientists leading the race to try to unravel the complexities of long Covid is Akiko Iwasaki, an immunology professor at Yale School of Medicine. Iwasaki has been at the forefront of numerous research breakthroughs throughout the course of the pandemic, from understanding why men were more vulnerable to the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the autoimmunity that made some people unexpectedly susceptible, and why a small minority have experienced heart inflammation in response to the Covid-19 vaccines. Most recently, Iwasaki has been awarded the prestigious Else Kröner Fresenius Prize for Medical Research, worth €2.5m (£2.2m), in part due to her ongoing work on long Covid.
Are we getting closer to understanding some of the causes of long Covid?
Long Covid is a blanket term that likely describes multiple diseases with different causes. We still don’t have the answers, but there are some hypotheses that are becoming more likely and others less likely. There’s more evidence now showing either viral proteins or viral RNA in various tissues, months after infection.
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