Tag: research

Published by: Centenary Institute
Published on: July 18, 2025

A promising new COVID-19 vaccine candidate developed by researchers at the Centenary Institute and the University of Sydney has shown strong potential to protect against both current and emerging coronavirus variants. By targeting features shared by a range of coronaviruses, the vaccine is designed to offer broader and longer-lasting protection as the virus continues to evolve.

The development comes as Australia faces continued COVID-19 circulation during winter, with new Omicron subvariants such as XBB.1.5 contributing to infections and hospitalisations. To date, there have been over 115,000 COVID-19 cases reported to the Australian Government’s National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System for 2025.

Published in the scientific journal npj Vaccines, the new study shows that the vaccine candidate, named CoVEXS5, protected mice from multiple coronaviruses, including the highly immune-evasive Omicron XBB.1.5 variant and SARS-CoV-1, a relative of SARS-CoV-2 that was responsible for the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak.

In laboratory tests, CoVEXS5 reduced virus levels in the lungs of infected mice by approximately 99.9% compared to unvaccinated controls, demonstrating a dramatic protective effect.

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cognitive issues

COVID hospitalization linked to cognitive impairment 2 years later

Published July 17, 2025

Published by: CIDRAP
Published on: July 17, 2025
By Stephanie Soucheray

Almost 20% of people who were hospitalized for COVID-19 infections early in the pandemic still had signs of impairment with brain function 2 years after infection, finds a new study in Scientific Reports.

The study population came from Portugal, in a region hit hard by the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on hospital admission episodes and SARS-CoV-2 infection status from March 2020 to February 2021, the authors identified four groups: group 1 (101) hospitalized for COVID-19 infections, group 2 (87) hospitalized but uninfected with COVID-19, group 3 (252) infected but not requiring hospitalization, and group 4 (258) uninfected and not hospitalized for any reason.

Cognitive assessments were conducted in two parts 2 years after infection, a general screening using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and a subsequent neuropsychological assessment conducted by one of four psychologists if the score of the general screening was low. Overall, verbal memory, visual memory, executive functions, language, and information processing speed and attention were evaluated.

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Alberta

Alberta wastewater unlocked key information about COVID-19. Could it help with measles too?

Published July 16, 2025

Published by: CBC News
Published on: July 16, 2025
By Jennifer Lee

As Alberta’s measles outbreaks grow, researchers are now watching the province’s wastewater for the highly contagious virus and hoping to determine if the technology could eventually serve as an early detection tool.

The magnitude of Alberta’s outbreaks and the speed at which cases are climbing has sparked widespread concern. As of midday Tuesday, 1,323 cases had been confirmed since the outbreaks began in March.

Piggybacking off weekly wastewater samples, collected through the provincial COVID-19 surveillance program, the team has designed a test that can identify both the wild type measles virus (indicating actual infection) and vaccine-related shedding in the wastewater.

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vaccines

Study finds no link between aluminum in vaccines and autism, asthma

Published July 14, 2025

Published by: NBC News
Published on: July 14, 2025
By Kaitlin Sullivan

Aluminum in childhood vaccines is a target of vaccine skeptics, who blame the ingredient on myriad health concerns. But a study of more than 1 million people, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found no link between aluminum in vaccines and an increased risk of 50 chronic conditions, including autoimmune diseases, allergies and autism.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spread vaccine misinformation for years, said on a podcast in 2024 that aluminum in vaccines is “extremely neurotoxic.” (An HHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

Senior study author Anders Hviid said that, as a parent, he understood the concerns about vaccine safety.

“Our study addresses many of these concerns and provides clear and robust evidence for the safety of childhood vaccines. This is evidence that parents need to make the best choices for the health of their children,” said Hviid, who is a professor and the head of epidemiology research at Statens Serum Institut, a sector of the Danish Ministry of Health focused on combating and preventing infectious diseases.

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air quality

Toronto has some of the worst air quality in the world right now — and a new study says smog and wildfire smoke can damage your heart

Published July 14, 2025

Published by: Toronto Star
Published on: July 14, 2025
By Omar Mosleh

With the city once again blanketed in wildfire smoke, experts are warning that long-term exposure to air pollution can lead to higher risk of heart failure.

Environment Canada issued a special air quality statement on Sunday night due to wildfire smoke from northern Ontario pushing Toronto’s Air Quality Health Index to 10+, classified as “very high risk.” Poor air quality was expected to persist Monday and possibly into Tuesday.

The effects of air pollution on the heart are underscored in a recent study, which found that long-term exposure to air pollution, in particular fine particulate matter, was linked to higher levels of diffuse myocardial fibrosis, a type of heart scarring that can lead to higher risk of heart failure.

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HIV

US aid cuts halt HIV vaccine research in South Africa, with global impact

Published July 13, 2025

Published by: The Associated Press
Published on: July 13, 2025
By Mogomotsi Magome

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Just a week had remained before scientists in South Africa were to begin clinical trials of an HIV vaccine, and hopes were high for another step toward limiting one of history’s deadliest pandemics. Then the email arrived.

Stop all work, it said. The United States under the Trump administration was withdrawing all its funding.

The news devastated the researchers, who live and work in a region where more people live with HIV than anywhere else in the world. Their research project, called BRILLIANT, was meant to be the latest to draw on the region’s genetic diversity and deep expertise in the hope of benefiting people everywhere.

But the $46 million from the U.S. for the project was disappearing, part of the dismantling of foreign aid by the world’s biggest donor earlier this year as President Donald Trump announced a focus on priorities at home.

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vaccines

‘Tremendous uncertainty’ for cancer research as US officials target mRNA vaccines

Published July 12, 2025

Published by: The Guardian
Published on: July 12, 2025
By Melody Schreiber

As US regulators restrict Covid mRNA vaccines and as independent vaccine advisers re-examine the shots, scientists fear that an unlikely target could be next: cancer research.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines have shown promise in treating and preventing cancers that have often been difficult to address, such as pancreatic cancer, brain tumors and others.

But groundbreaking research could stall as federal and state officials target mRNA shots, including ending federal funding for bird flu mRNA vaccines, restricting who may receive existing mRNA vaccines and, in some places, proposing laws against the vaccines.

The Trump administration has also implemented unprecedented cuts to cancer research, among other research cuts and widespread layoffs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Florida

Chagas disease–carrying kissing bugs establish new base in Florida homes

Published July 9, 2025

Published by: CIDRAP
Published on: July 9, 2025
By Mary Van Beusekom

Kissing bugs that carry the parasite for Chagas disease, a potentially serious tropical condition, have established a base in Florida, researchers say.

Chagas disease, which is rare in the United States, can cause a brief illness or remain latent for years before causing symptoms. If untreated, it can become a chronic condition that damages the heart, brain, and other organs.

Scientists from the University of Florida (UF) and Texas A&M University collected more than 300 kissing bugs, or triatomines, from 23 Florida counties—one third of them from people’s homes—from 2013 to 2023. The team analyzed the bugs’ stomach contents to determine the source of their last meal and whether it contained the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite implicated in Chagas disease.

Their findings were published this week in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

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Adults who survived childhood cancer are at increased risk of severe COVID-19, says new study

Photo of a woman who is wearing a white coat and a white mask. She has long blond hair. Photo: Bruce Mars / Unsplash.

research

Adults who survived childhood cancer are at increased risk of severe COVID-19, says new study

Published July 4, 2025

Published by: Medical Xpress
Published on: July 4, 2025
By Karolinska Institutet

People who have survived cancer as children are at higher risk of developing severe COVID-19, even decades after their diagnosis. This is shown by a new study from Karolinska Institutet published in the journal The Lancet Regional Health—Europe.

Thanks to medical advances, more and more children are surviving cancer. However, even long after treatment has ended, health risks may remain. In a new registry study, researchers investigated how adult childhood cancer survivors in Sweden and Denmark were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study included over 13,000 people who had been diagnosed with cancer before the age of 20 and who were at least 20 years old when the pandemic began. They were compared with both siblings and randomly selected individuals from the population of the same gender and year of birth.

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Trump regime

Destroying 50 years of women’s health samples is like ‘burning the Library of Congress’

Published July 1, 2025

Published by: CNN
Published on: July 1, 2025
By Sandee LaMotte

For decades, researchers have been collecting samples from hundreds of thousands of women and tracking their health. The work has deepened our basic understanding of human health, but now the entire project is in danger.

When nurses Patricia Chubb, 70, and her mother, Charlotte Mae Rohrbaugh, 98, joined the fledgling Harvard University-led Nurses’ Health Study in 1976, they had no idea it would last for nearly 50 years.

“It’s probably the longest, if not one of the longest, prospective health care studies for women that’s ever been done,” said Chubb, who lives in Pennsylvania. “They picked nurses to do the study because they know how to answer health questions correctly and can draw their own blood and the like — it’s very cost-effective.”

Study data gathered through the years from some 280,000 nurses in the United States has contributed enormously to improving how we live. The work has informed dietary recommendations, including national dietary guidelines led to hormonal therapies for breast cancer prevention and treatment; and contributed to research about how nutrients, inflammatory markers and heavy metals influence disease development.

Yet all of that priceless data may soon be discarded due to President Donald Trump’s ongoing feud with Harvard over what Trump claims is a failure to protect Jewish students during campus protests.

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vaccines

Childhood vaccines were a global success story. Misinformation and other obstacles are slowing that progress, a study shows

Published June 25, 2025

Published by: CNN
Published on: June 25, 2025
By Jen Christensen

Routine vaccines have prevented the deaths of about 154 million children around the world over the past 50 years, a new study shows, but efforts have been slowing recently, allowing for the growth of some vaccine-preventable diseases. This backslide could lead to many more unnecessary illnesses and deaths without an increased effort to vaccinate children and counter misinformation.

The report, published Tuesday in the medical journal The Lancet, says that over the past five decades, the World Health Organization’s Expanded Programme on Immunization has vaccinated more than 4 billion children. This doubling of global coverage of vaccines has prevented countless cases of tuberculosis, measles, polio, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.

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kakistocracy

The U.S. is cutting billions from science. Canadian researchers say it’s time to step up

Published June 21, 2025

Published by: CBC Radio
Published on: June 21, 2025
By Philip Drost

Scientists in Canada are scrambling. Over the past few months, the U.S. government has cut billions of dollars in funding from scientific research as part of sweeping cost-cutting measures.

“It’s really shocking. It’s really like this big cloud over science,” Kate Moran, CEO of Ocean Networks Canada, told Quirks & Quarks. Ocean Networks Canada participates in a project called the Argo system, an international program that collects information from on and under the ocean using a fleet of robotic instruments that drift with the ocean currents.

But that program, which is led by researchers in the U.S., could be at risk.

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Bethesda Declaration

NIH scientists publish declaration criticizing Trump’s deep cuts in public health research

Published June 9, 2025

Published by: The Associated Press
Published on: June 9, 2025
By Calvin Woodward, Nathan Ellgren

WASHINGTON (AP) — In his confirmation hearings to lead the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya pledged his openness to views that might conflict with his own. “Dissent,” he said, ”is the very essence of science.”

That commitment is being put to the test.

On Monday, scores of scientists at the agency sent their Trump-appointed leader a letter titled the Bethesda Declaration, challenging “policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.”

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pandemic response

COVID-19 Disease Burden Remains Greater Than Influenza, Study Shows

Published May 31, 2025

Published by: Forbes
Published on: May 31, 2025
By Dave Wessner

Researchers in Denmark conducted a large-scale evaluation of the disease burdens associated with COVID-19 and influenza. Their conclusion? COVID-19 has a greater impact than influenza, resulting in more hospitalizations and deaths. These findings, they note, emphasize the continued need for a strong public health response.

COVID-19 Exhibits Greater Disease Burden Than Influenza

To compare the disease burden of COVID-19 and influenza, the researchers evaluated data available from Danish health registries from May 16, 2022 to June 7, 2024. The results were published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. A commentary about the findings was published in the same issue of the journal.

During this period, the risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19 was approximately two times higher than the risk of hospitalization due to influenza. The risk of death was approximately three times higher. The researchers note that these increased risks were greater during the first year of the study period but still were evident during the second year. The risk of mortality, for example, was five times greater for COVID-19 during the first year of the study. That increased risk dropped during the second year, but COVID-19 still had a two and a half times greater risk of mortality than influenza.

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research

Scientists have lost their jobs or grants in US cuts. Foreign universities want to hire them

Published May 25, 2025

Published by: The Associated Press
Published on: May 25, 2025
By Christina Larson, Adithi Ramakrishnan, Jamey Keaten

As the Trump administration cut billions of dollars in federal funding to scientific research, thousands of scientists in the U.S. lost their jobs or grants…

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long COVID

Long COVID May Cause Long-Term Changes in the Heart and Lungs and May Lead to Cardiac and Pulmonary Diseases

Published May 6, 2025

Published by: Mount Sinai Health System
Published on: May 6, 2025

Mount Sinai study suggests COVID-19 infection should be considered a risk factor for future cardiopulmonary conditions

New York, NY (May 6, 2025) — Patients suffering from long COVID may exhibit persistent inflammation in the heart and lungs for up to a year following SARS-CoV-2 infection—even when standard medical tests return normal results—potentially placing them at elevated risk for future cardiac and pulmonary conditions. These findings come from a new study conducted by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published April 30, in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

The study, the largest of its kind using advanced PET/MRI imaging, discovered significant abnormalities in cardiovascular and pulmonary tissues, as well as altered levels of circulating immune-regulating proteins, in long COVID patients. These abnormalities could serve as early warning signs of diseases such as heart failure, valvular heart disease, and pulmonary hypertension.

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vaccines

VA study: Pfizer COVID booster 68% effective against hospitalization

Published May 2, 2025

Published by: CIDRAP
Published on: May 2, 2025
By Stephanie Soucheray

A study published earlier this week in Nature Communications using claims data from the US Veterans Affairs (VA) Healthcare System finds protection from the 2024-25 Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine was 68%, 57%, and 56% against COVID-19–associated hospitalizations, emergency department and urgent care (ED/UC) visits, and outpatient visits, respectively.

However, the authors caution that uptake of the vaccine was extremely low—only 3.7% through November 2024—and the study did not assess waning effectiveness.

The study estimated early BNT162b2 KP.2 (2024-25 formulation) vaccine effectiveness (VE) against COVID-19 outcomes compared to not receiving the vaccine.

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long COVID

Possible treatments for long COVID at the centre of new Western study

Published April 24, 2025

Published by: CTV News
Published on: April 24, 2025
By Bailey Shakyaver

More than 300 patients across four continents are at the centre of a Western long COVID study, which hopes to find an effective treatment for those who struggle with long COVID.

The study will look to trial two anti-inflammatory medicines as potential treatments, and hopes to bring into view people who struggle with the disease outside of North America.

“Despite the global prevalence of long COVID, patients report different symptoms and their presentation can be influenced by where they happen to live,” said Dr. Douglas Fraser, professor at Western’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. “A study with global reach, tailored to examine each patient’s most severe symptoms, has the potential to bring hope to people well beyond Canada and the U.S.”

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Tag: research

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