Author: Claudinne Miller
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 Covid Bump
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
Ecuador reports three birds dead from avian flu in Galapagos
Retuers Ecuador’s Galapagos National Park (PNG) on Tuesday said that three birds had died of avian flu, prompting officials to activate biosecurity measures to reduce the risk of the virus spreading across the archipelago. “Preliminarily, of the five specimens examined, three of them have tested positive for H5N1 avian influenza,” PNG said in a statement, […]
Sep 19, 2023
Risk of long COVID main symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Nature This review aimed to summarise the relative risk (RR) of the main symptoms of long COVID in people infected with SARS-CoV-2 compared to uninfected controls, as well as the difference in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) after infection. MEDLINE, EMBASE, PubMed, NLM-LitCovid, WHO-COVID-19, arXiv and Europe-PMC were searched up to 23rd March 2022. Studies […]
Sep 19, 2023
What to know about Nipah virus amid outbreak in India
ABC News India’s southern state of Kerala is currently facing an outbreak of the rare, but potentially serious Nipah virus with at least two deaths so far, according to local reports. Health officials have closed schools and offices in Kerala and hundreds of residents are being tested. Despite Nipah virus’s high fatality rate and no specific treatments […]
Sep 19, 2023
Pfizer forecasts 24% COVID vaccination rate in US this year
Retuers Pfizer expects 24% of the U.S. population, or about 82 million people, to receive COVID-19 shots this year, CFO David Denton said at a conference on Monday, reiterating the vaccine maker’s estimates from earlier this year. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized updated COVID vaccines from Pfizer and its partner BioNTech as well as […]
Sep 19, 2023
New COVID variant BA.2.86 spotted in 10 states, though highly mutated strain remains rare
CBS News People across at least 10 states have now been infected by BA.2.86, a highly mutated variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 that authorities have been closely tracking. According to data tallied from the global virus database GISAID, labs have reported finding BA.2.86 in samples from Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and […]
Sep 19, 2023
How evasive and transmissible is the newest omicron offshoot, BA.2.86, that causes COVID-19?
The Conversation 1. What is BA.2.86 and how is it related to earlier variants? BA.2.86, nicknamed Pirola, is a highly mutated new omicron sublineage of SARS-CoV-2 that was first detected in Denmark in July 2023. The World Health Organization announced that, as of Sept. 6, 2023, BA.2.86 has been detected in 11 countries. A variant is […]
Sep 12, 2023