A regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing COVID-19 vaccines to residents in six counties after a narrow decision by its board.
Southwest District Health appears to be the first in the nation to be restricted from giving COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccinations are an essential function of a public health department.
Comments closedThe co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team on Wednesday night endorsed vaccine conspiracy theories pushed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and suggested the activist and Trump ally would be given federal data in order to check vaccines’ safety if former President Donald Trump is elected.
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 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.
Comments closedScientists investigating long COVID in youth found similar but distinguishable patterns between school-age children (ages 6-11 years) and adolescents (ages 12-17 years) and identified their most common symptoms. The study, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published in JAMA, comes from research conducted through the NIH’s Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, a wide-reaching effort to understand, diagnose, treat, and prevent long COVID, a condition marked by symptoms and health problems that linger after an infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Children and adolescents were found to experience prolonged symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection in almost every organ system with most having symptoms affecting more than one system.
Comments closedLast week, a mask ban in Nassau County, New York was signed into law. If I lived just 60 miles east of my New Jersey town, I would be under threat of a fine or jail time every time I left the house.
I’ve been masking consistently in public since 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic began, because I have a kidney transplant and will take immunosuppressant medication for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, my lifesaving medication also makes me more susceptible to infectious diseases like measles, the flu, and Covid-19. Even when people like me are vaccinated against the virus, we are at higher risk of being infected and are more likely to experience adverse health outcomes, including hospitalization and death.
The legislation in Nassau County and elsewhere primarily targets people who wear masks to hide their identity while committing crimes or during public protests, specifically against the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Masks are defined as any facial covering that disguises the face, and facial coverings worn for religious or health reasons are exempt. But people like me, who wear masks for health reasons, are disproportionally affected by these bans even when they include medical exemptions.
Comments closedThe US Food and Drug Administration is poised to sign off as soon as next week on updated Covid-19 vaccines targeting more recently circulating strains of the virus, according to two sources familiar with the matter, as the country experiences its largest summer wave in two years.
The agency is expected to greenlight updated mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech that target a strain of the virus called KP.2, said the sources, who declined to be named because the timing information isn’t public. It was unclear whether the agency simultaneously would authorize Novavax’s updated shot, which targets the JN.1 strain.
The move would be several weeks ahead of last year’s version of the vaccine, which got FDA signoff on September 11.
Comments closedAbout 14% of participants in a new long-COVID study from Yale said they didn’t return to work in the months after their infection, suggesting that the condition results in major economic losses. The study is published in PLOS One.
The study was based on the outcomes of 6,000 participants at eight study sites in Illinois, Connecticut, Washington, Pennsylvania, Texas, and California from 2020 through 2022 as part of the Innovative Support for Patients with SARS-CoV-2 Infections Registry, or INSPIRE study.
Comments closedTomorrow the US government agency responsible for biomedical and public health research, The National Institutes of Health, will shut down its Covid-19 ‘special populations’ website.
This site hosts a huge amount of information about how to treat covid and long covid in the immunocompromised and in people with HIV, cancer and similar immune supressing conditions – so-called ‘special populations.’
The site is going totally offline.
Comments closedComments closedAs new variants continue to emerge and infect people, older adults remain highly vulnerable to long-term health effects from this pathogen. Continued multidisciplinary research is needed to understand and prevent long COVID to reduce morbidity and mortality and maintain quality of life in older adults.
About 400 million people worldwide have been afflicted with long Covid, according to a new report by scientists and other researchers who have studied the condition. The team estimated that the economic cost — from factors like health care services and patients unable to return to work — is about $1 trillion worldwide each year, or about 1 percent of the global economy.
The report, published Friday in the journal Nature Medicine, is an effort to summarize the knowledge about and effects of long Covid across the globe four years after it first emerged.
It also aims to “provide a road map for policy and research priorities,” said one author, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the chief of research and development at the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He wrote the paper with several other leading long Covid researchers and three leaders of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, an organization formed by long Covid patients who are also professional researchers.
Comments closedFor months, governmental officials around the world have appeared to want to forgo discussing the specter of long COVID. As a new review makes clear, that is wishful thinking—and the latest COVID variants may well kick long COVID into overdrive, a scenario that researchers and experts have been warning about for some time.
“I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over and that long COVID does not exist,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System and lead author of the review. “It is much more pleasant to pretend as if emergency department visits and hospitalizations haven’t been rising sharply this summer.”
In a Nature Medicine review this week, Al-Aly and several other top researchers lay out a difficult truth: Long COVID has already affected an estimated 400 million people worldwide, a number the authors say is likely conservative, at an economic cost of about $1 trillion annually—equivalent to 1% of the global economy.
Comments closedCalifornia-based engineer and scientist Patrick Vaughan made a troubling discovery July 10. Dozens of facilities providing COVID-19 wastewater data went offline, seemingly overnight.
Vaughan had been following WastewaterSCAN, a national program that monitors wastewater for diseases. He noticed that 42 of the previously reporting 194 facilities suddenly displayed small blue triangles with the message “data is no longer collected from this site.” The development came just as people across the U.S. scrambled for information during a summer COVID wave that even infected President Joe Biden.
“This is a major blow to our COVID wastewater tracking abilities,” Vaughan told his followers in a video he posted the same day.
Comments closedThe Nassau County Legislature passed the Mask Transparency Act Monday – a law that prohibits the wearing of masks in public in some scenarios.
Those over the age of 16 will not be allowed to wear masks, unless it is being worn for the person’s health, religion or celebratory purposes. Officials say police will be the ones to determine whether or not the masks are being used for those purposes.
Legislators explained their reasoning for supporting the measure during the hearing.
Comments closedComments closedFor far too long, millions of Americans suffering from long Covid have had their symptoms dismissed or ignored — by the medical community, by the media, and by Congress. That is unacceptable and has got to change.
The legislation that we have introduced finally recognizes that long Covid is a public health emergency and provides an historic investment into research, development, and education needed to counter the effects of this terrible disease. Congress must act now to ensure treatments are developed and made available for Americans struggling with long Covid. Yes. It is time for a long Covid moonshot.
