Author: Claudinne Miller
Are Seniors Prepared for Co-circulating Respiratory Viruses
Precision Vaccinations For the first time, seniors can prepare to defend themselves against co-circulating influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and the betacoronavirus that causes COVID-19. Vaccines can provide life-saving protection against all three viral respiratory diseases, says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). With the fall season’s increasing number of cases, now is an […]
Sep 19, 2023
Supercomputer simulation attacks problem of drug-resistant bacteria
Los Alamos National Laboratory Understanding molecular processes can improve the antibiotics and vaccines that fight disease A first-ever, atom-by-atom supercomputer simulation shows how antibiotics kill bacteria and illustrates other processes of the molecular machinery in living cells. The research opens fresh pathways to improving antibiotics, designing new ones to fight drug-resistant bacteria and developing vaccines […]
Sep 19, 2023
The Pandemic Was a Time Machine
NYT Recently I came across perhaps the most mind-bending chart about the pandemic I’d seen over three-plus years. Originally published two years ago in The British Medical Journal, it shows how Covid affected age-standardized mortality in England and Wales — a statistic that controls for demographic change in measuring death rates, so that a country doesn’t look […]
Sep 19, 2023
New Jersey Failed Veterans at Pandemic-Ravaged Nursing Homes, U.S. Says
NYT A scathing Justice Department report found that care at the state facilities was so poor that it violated residents’ constitutional rights and led to a rash of deaths. The care given to military veterans at two state-run nursing homes in New Jersey ravaged by the coronavirus was so poor that it violated residents’ constitutional […]
Sep 19, 2023
Covid is here to stay. How will we know when it stops being special?
Washington Post New coronavirus variants are making headlines. Photos of positive test results are popping up on social media feeds. Hospitalizations are increasing. Far from the start of a sensational new chapter in the pandemic, experts say this uptick is the new normal in a world with covid as an endemic disease.Now, withsome level of immunity nearly ubiquitous across […]
Sep 19, 2023
She wrote to a scientist about her fatigue. It inspired a breakthrough
Washington Post Her dogged efforts lead to a new scientific discovery that may help others with long covid and other chronically fatiguing illnesses Amanda Twinam’s journey to understand her decades-long fatigue began with a breast cancer diagnosis at age 28. Twinam underwent a mastectomy before enduring chemotherapy. The medicines made her sick and triggered seizures, […]
Sep 19, 2023
Cold virus may set the stage for Long COVID
NIH Many infections with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, resolve within days or weeks. But a significant number of people have symptoms that linger for weeks, months, or even years. This is called postacute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC)—commonly known as “Long COVID.” While several risk factors for PASC have been proposed, we still don’t […]
Sep 19, 2023
The New Yorker Call it the first wave of the endemic, a bona-fide covid bump. The statistics may be hard to parse—the United States stopped systematically collecting data on coronavirus cases months ago—but, almost certainly, growing numbers of Americans are coming down with covid. In recent weeks, Jill Biden went into isolation after testing positive, and John McEnroe […]
Sep 19, 2023
Meet the Man Who Named Covid’s New Variants
WSJ Pirola, Eris, Kraken: T. Ryan Gregory finds inspiration in mythology and the stars. Pirola. Eris. Kraken. Covid-19 subvariants’ viral nicknames lead back to one man: evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory. Gregory, 48 years old, a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, works with a band of unofficial Covid-19 trackers on social media to […]
Sep 19, 2023
How common long COVID is may depend on how it’s defined
CIDRAP In Open Forum Infectious Diseases, Dutch scientists report that the definition of post-COVID condition (PCC, or long COVID) matters when estimating prevalence in a population. In people who had previously tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the prevalence of long-term symptoms varied from 26.9% to 64.1%, depending on which of six different definitions was used, while in those who […]
Sep 19, 2023