Today we bring you a live on location show at the 3rd Canadian Symposium on Long COVID. We talk to doctors, researchers, students and patients…
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A surprise bonus from COVID-19 vaccines: bolstering cancer treatment
The innovative messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines that thwarted the ravages of COVID-19 may also help fight tumors in cancer patients, according to a new analysis of medical records and studies in mice.
People with cancer who coincidentally received the mRNA shots before starting drugs designed to unleash the immune system against tumors lived significantly longer than those who didn’t get vaccinated, a research team announced yesterday at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Berlin. Laboratory experiments by the group suggest the vaccines rev up the immune system, making even stubborn tumors more susceptible to treatment.
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Federal Contract for up to $40 Million Fuels Research to Revolutionize Clean Indoor Air and Defend Against Next Pandemic
When a public building catches fire, its built-in systems automatically respond: Smoke alarms blare, sprinklers kick on, and occupants quickly evacuate.
But what if the life-threatening danger isn’t fire but invisible airborne contaminants that can make occupants sick? Could a similar smart-building system monitor and improve the quality of the air indoors, where Americans spend 90 percent of their time?
With a contract for up to $40 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an ambitious multi-institutional research team led by Virginia Tech and including researchers at the University of California, Davis, aims to create just such a system.
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Chaos following mass firings, rehirings at CDC
Late Friday night more than 1,000 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were sent an email saying they had been let go due to reduction-in-force (RIF) efforts at the end of the second week of the federal government shutdown.
Some, however, were mistakenly fired and were rehired the next day, according to sources close to the situation.
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Covid virus changes sperm in mice, may raise anxiety in offspring: study
Sydney (AFP) – Covid-19 infection causes changes to sperm in mice that may increase anxiety in their offspring, a study released Saturday said, suggesting the pandemic’s possibly long-lasting effects on future generations.
Researchers at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne, Australia, infected male mice with the virus that causes Covid, mated them with females, and assessed the impacts on the health of their offspring.
“We found that the resulting offspring showed more anxious behaviours compared to offspring from uninfected fathers,” the study’s first author Elizabeth Kleeman said.
Comments closedTopic: long COVIDView all posts for the topic: long COVID
Scientists may have discovered what’s behind long COVID-related brain fog
If you’re among the estimated one-in-five Canadians who developed long COVID symptoms after infection with COVID-19, you might be familiar with the memory problems, focusing difficulties and a whole slew of other cognitive impairments that have become emblematic of the condition — collectively known as “brain fog.”
But despite these cognitive symptoms being present in nearly 90 per cent of long COVID cases, the biological mechanism behind why brain fog happens — and how we can treat it — has remained largely elusive. Until now.
A new paper, published in peer-reviewed journal Brain Communications, found that people living with long COVID had more significantly higher levels of a certain brain receptor than their healthy peers. The more they had, the worse their symptoms tended to get, the study suggested.
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COVID ages women’s blood vessels, according to a study
COVID-19 causes women’s blood vessels to age prematurely, according to an international study involving two researchers from Université Laval. The disease should therefore be considered an additional risk factor in cardiovascular health analyses. Specifically, in those who have developed severe symptoms, they warn.
The aging of blood vessels results in greater rigidity, which can increase the risk of certain cardiovascular diseases.
“The heart must work a little harder to propel blood through the arterial system, and this causes variations in pressure that can damage sensitive organs, including the brain and kidneys,” explains Catherine Fortier, a kinesiologist and researcher in vascular aging at the CHU de Québec-Université Laval.
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Uncovering the Molecular Basis of Long COVID Brain Fog
Researchers use a specialized brain imaging technique to identify a potential biomarker and therapeutic target of Long COVID
Long COVID is a chronic condition that causes cognitive problems known as “brain fog,” but its biological mechanisms remain largely unclear. Now, researchers from Japan used a novel imaging technique to visualize AMPA receptors—key molecules for memory and learning—in the living brain. They discovered that higher AMPA receptor density in patients with Long COVID was closely tied to the severity of their symptoms, highlighting these molecules as potential diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets.
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Long Covid Risk for Children Doubles After a Second Infection, Study Finds
Children and teenagers are twice as likely to develop long Covid after a second coronavirus infection as after an initial infection, a large new study has found.
The study, of nearly a half-million people under 21, published Tuesday in Lancet Infectious Diseases, provides evidence that Covid reinfections can increase the risk of long-term health consequences and contradicts the idea that being infected a second time might lead to a milder outcome, medical experts said.
Dr. Laura Malone, director of the Pediatric Post-Covid-19 Rehabilitation Clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, who was not involved in the study, said the findings echo the experience of patients in her clinic.
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COVID vaccines may have averted thousands of hospital stays in infants, pregnant women over 18 months
A US modeling study published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics estimates that vaccinating pregnant women against COVID-19 prevented 7,000 hospitalizations in infants and 3,000 in pregnant women from January 2024 to May 2025.
The Stanford University–led research team analyzed COVID-NET surveillance data on COVID-19 hospitalization rates in infants younger than 6 months and incidence data on pregnant women aged 18 to 49 years under a relative risk of 2.65. The aim was to estimate the health impact of vaccination during pregnancy, mainly during the second or third trimester.
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Kids with COVID had a 50% to 60% higher risk of depression, anxiety in 2021, researchers say
Relative to uninfected children, COVID-19 patients aged 8 to 17 years were at a 49% higher risk for new-onset depression or anxiety in 2021, rising to 59% in those with severe illness, according to a University of Utah study published this week in PLOS One.
The researchers mined the Utah All Payers Claims Database to explore the link between COVID-19 infection, illness severity, and risk of depression and anxiety among 154,565 school-aged youth who had private insurance or Medicaid coverage. The average participant age was 10.8 years in 2019, when the study period began, and 48% were girls.
Key contributors to mental illness among children include the pandemic’s direct impacts on daily life, such as school closures, isolation from peers, and disrupted family routines, the authors noted.
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Six Nobel laureates speak out against Trump: ‘The closest analogy is with the Hitler regime’
In recent weeks, EL PAÍS contacted most of the Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine from the United States over the past 20 years with a questionnaire about Donald Trump’s policies on science, research, and health. The vast majority are established researchers — some even retired — who should not fear retaliation; but only a handful of them agreed to respond.
“Why am I sad?” writes Roald Hoffmann, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “We came to the U.S. when I was 11. Even as my parents could not work making full use of their training and talents, the country gave their child, me (and my sister, born here), a chance to get an education and to do wonderful research with talented coworkers from all over the world. If the Trump policies are carried through, the full flow of what I experienced will be very unlikely in the generation of my scientific grandchildren.”
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Antihistamine nasal spray prevents COVID-19, study finds
Results from a single-center randomized controlled trial published yesterday in JAMA Internal Medicine show that azelastine, an antihistamine nasal spray used as a preventive measure, was associated with a 69% reduction of COVID-19 infection.
Azelastine is a widely available over-the-counter treatment for seasonal allergies (hay fever).
“This clinical trial is the first to demonstrate a protective effect in a real-world setting,” said Robert Bals, MD, PhD, a professor at Saarland University in Germany and senior author of the study, in a university press release.
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Kennedy Sought to Fire C.D.C. Director Over Vaccine Policy
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. summoned Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to his office in Washington earlier this week to deliver an ultimatum.
She needed to fire career agency officials and commit to backing his advisers if they recommended restricting access to proven vaccines — or risk being fired herself, according to people familiar with the events.
Dr. Monarez’s refusal to do so led to an extraordinary standoff on Thursday that paralyzed the nation’s health agency, which is still reeling from mass layoffs and a shooting this month that killed a police officer and terrified employees.
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CDC director fired after she ‘refused to rubber-stamp’ Kennedy’s vaccine directives
Susan Monarez, PhD, was fired late yesterday as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after clashing with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaccine policy.
The White House fired her after Monarez refused to resign, and the action kicked off a mass resignation wave of three of the CDC’s top officials: Debra Houry, MD, MPH, the CDC’s chief medical officer; Demetre Daskalakis, MD, MPH, head of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; and Daniel Jernigan, MD, MPH, head of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. Earlier this week Jennifer Layden, MD, PhD, who led the Office of Public Health Data, also stepped down.
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Wildfires are reversing Canada’s progress on improving air quality
It’s hard not to forget the 2023 Canadian wildfire season, when more than 16 million hectares of forest were lost, thousands were displaced and smoke suffocated cities across both Canada and the U.S.
And it turns out Canada experienced its worst air pollution levels that year since 1998, according to a new report released today by the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index (AQLI). At the same time, the report found that pollution levels didn’t change much for the rest of the world in 2023.
If those levels continued for a person’s lifetime, the average Canadian would lose roughly two years of their life expectancy, according to the report.
Efforts have been made around the world, including in Canada, to curb harmful emissions of fine particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometres, also known as PM 2.5. But wildfires are reversing those advances — with serious health consequences.
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