Australian life expectancy has gone backwards for the second year straight after a surge in COVID-19 deaths in 2022.
An Australian girl born today is expected to live to 85.1 years, and a boy to 81.1 years.
Australians still have the fourth-highest life expectancy in the world after Japanese, Swiss and Koreans.
Comments closedAs COVID-19 continues to circulate widely, a report from the INSPQ warns that the risk of getting long COVID increases with each reinfection, and notes that the Quebec health system is failing to help the growing number of people who have had persistent symptoms for months or even years.
The report by the Institut national de la santé publique du Québec (INSPQ), which surveyed thousands of health workers in Quebec who were infected between the beginning of the pandemic and summer 2023, was released quietly on Monday. Yet, this report warns that post COVID-19 condition, commonly known as long COVID, is affecting more and more people.
« This is an important and real issue. We want to raise awareness among the public and public health authorities,” says Sara Carazo, one of the authors of the report.
Comments closedLong COVID can have wide-ranging impacts, but is most commonly associated with brain fog, breathing difficulties and debilitating fatigue.
“Long COVID has really mystified a lot of physicians and scientists,” according to Dr. Douglas Fraser. Fraser is a researcher with Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, based in London, Ont.
Comments closedA new retrospective cohort study conducted in Dubai shows that the antiviral nirmatrelvir plus ritonavir, sold as Paxlovid, is tied to a 61% reduction in COVID-19 hospitalization and a 58% lower rate of long COVID.
Comments closedIn experiments designed to learn more about the threat from the H5N1 avian flu virus spreading from cows to people, researchers found that an isolate from a sick dairy worker may be capable of replicating in human airway cells, is pathogenic in mice and ferrets, and can transmit among ferrets by respiratory droplets.
The team, based at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Japan, reported its findings today in Nature. Working in a high-containment lab, the researchers used an H5N1 isolate grown from the eye of a dairy worker who had experienced conjunctivitis after exposure to infected cows.
Comments closedImagine, for a moment, that you wake up one morning with a debilitating illness that won’t let go. Weeks and months pass, but the crushing fatigue, constant headaches, and aching muscles remain. You can’t think straight. Simply showering or doing the dishes leaves you floored for days at a time, and the unpredictable symptoms — shortness of breath, dizziness, a racing heart — ebb and flow without warning. You find your life as you knew it slipping away.
This is life with long Covid: a condition that transforms the familiar rhythms of daily life into a living nightmare and constant battle for energy and clarity. But what happens when the only hope of lessening its severity becomes an issue of equity?
We are two of the more than 400 million people worldwide who have experienced long Covid. While we are both over four years into this illness, there is still not a single FDA-approved treatment for this devastating condition. Given the slow pace of research and development, there is unlikely to be proven treatment for years — possibly decades.
Comments closedMedical researchers at the University of Calgary say a condition affecting autonomic bodily processes — those that occur automatically, such as heart rate, bladder function and sweating — is frequently found in people diagnosed with long COVID.
The condition is known as dysautonomia, an umbrella term for a group of related conditions. Support networks for those who suffer from it are working to raise awareness throughout October, which has been deemed Dysautonomia Awareness Month by the advocacy group, Dysautonomia International.
Comments closedSince the COVID pandemic began, claims that the disease poses only minimal risk to children have spread widely, on the presumption that the lower rate of severe acute illness in kids tells the whole story. Notions that children are nearly immune to COVID and don’t need to be vaccinated have pervaded.
These ideas are wrong. People making such claims ignore the accumulating risk of long COVID, the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection, in children who may get infected once or twice a year. The condition may already have affected nearly six million kids in the U.S. Children need us to wake up to this serious threat. If we do, we can help our kids with a few straightforward and effective measures.
Comments closedCovid-19 could be a powerful risk factor for heart attacks and strokes for as long as three years after an infection, a large new study suggests.
The study was published Wednesday in the medical journal Atherosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. It relied on medical records from roughly a quarter of a million people who were enrolled in a large database called the UK Biobank.
Comments closedDamage to the brainstem – the brain’s ‘control centre’ – is behind long-lasting physical and psychiatric effects of severe Covid-19 infection, a study suggests.
Using ultra-high-resolution scanners that can see the living brain in fine detail, researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford were able to observe the damaging effects Covid-19 can have on the brain.
The study team scanned the brains of 30 people who had been admitted to hospital with severe Covid-19 early in the pandemic, before vaccines were available. The researchers found that Covid-19 infection damages the region of the brainstem associated with breathlessness, fatigue and anxiety.
Comments closedThe second Canadian Symposium on Long COVID came to a close in Edmonton on Friday, with an urgent call for the establishment of a national registry for the condition.
The event, organized by Long Covid Web, a network dedicated to research and support for people suffering from post COVID-19 condition, in collaboration with the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Alberta Health Services, brought together researchers, clinicians and patients to discuss the challenges associated with the condition.
The speakers’ testimonies highlighted the devastating impact of long COVID on patients’ daily lives.
Comments closedTwo months after the Ontario government pulled the plug on wastewater surveillance, Ottawa health and research institutions have teamed up to extend the program in the city for a least another year.
Calling it an innovative solution that allowed for better monitoring of COVID-19 in the community, CHEO, the CHEO Research Institute, the University of Ottawa and Ottawa Public Health announced an extension of wastewater surveillance on Friday.
In addition to monitoring COVID-19 levels in wastewater, the program monitors levels of influenza, RSV and mpox in Ottawa. The program has been extended until September 2025.
Comments closedComments closedOur research group is truly grateful for the overwhelming support we’ve received from the community over the past few months through emails, letters, and phone calls advocating for the continuation of our wastewater monitoring system.
We’ve gained invaluable insights into how this information is essential for community members facing health challenges, and we are thrilled to continue providing this vital service. A heartfelt thank you to OPH, CHEO, and CHEO-RI for their unwavering support.
Previously, I wrote about Paxlovid being underprescribed for treating acute Covid in patients at high risk for serious illness. The FDA granted an Emergency Use Authorization based on data showing that “Paxlovid significantly reduced the proportion of people with Covid-19 related hospitalization or death” by 88% compared to placebo.
In unvaccinated people, Paxlovid was also associated with a 26% lower risk of long Covid in a study by Ziyad Al-Aly.
The data on Paxlovid for those previously vaccinated is mixed. A smaller study from the University of California at San Francisco found no benefit in people who had been previously vaccinated.
Comments closedThese days, it’s tempting to compare COVID-19 with the common cold or flu. It can similarly leave you with a nasty cough, fever, sore throat—the full works of respiratory symptoms. And it’s also become a part of the societal fabric, perhaps something you’ve resigned yourself to catching at least a few times in your life (even if you haven’t already). But let’s not forget: SARS-CoV-2 (the virus responsible for COVID) is still relatively new, and researchers are actively investigating the toll of reinfection on the body. While there are still a lot of unknowns, one thing seems to be increasingly true: Getting COVID again and again is a good deal riskier than repeat hits of its seasonal counterparts.
It turns out, SARS-CoV-2 is more nefarious than these other contagious bugs, and our immune response to it, often larger and longer-lasting. COVID has a better ability to camouflage itself in the body, “and it has the keys to the kingdom in the sense that it can unlock any cell and get in,” says Esther Melamed, PhD, an assistant professor in the department of neurology at Dell Medical School, University of Texas Austin, and the research director of the Post-COVID-19 program at UT Health Austin. That’s because SARS-CoV-2 binds to ACE2 receptors, which exist in cells all over your body, from your heart to your gut to your brain. (By contrast, cold and flu viruses replicate mostly in your respiratory tract.)
Comments closedThe COVID-19 pandemic has been especially hard on individuals with disabilities. New research from the University of Kansas shows that this population is also experiencing long COVID at significantly higher rates than the general population, which exacerbates existing barriers to accessing care.
Researchers from KU’s Institute for Health and Disability Policy Studies at the KU Life Span Institute and the Patient-Led Research Collaborative published a study showing that more than 40% of individuals with pre-existing disabilities who had tested positive for COVID-19 experienced long COVID, defined as symptoms lasting three months or longer. This rate is more than twice the 18.9% of individuals without disabilities who contracted COVID and experienced long COVID symptoms.
Research has long documented that individuals with disabilities face barriers to health care access and experience poorer health outcomes than their nondisabled peers. However, many studies during the pandemic have only asked about disabilities present at the time of the survey rather than whether individuals had a disability prior to the start of the pandemic. The research team compared data from the 2022 National Survey on Health and Disability, conducted by the IHDPS, to the Household Pulse Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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