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- Top disease expert says US in the ‘eye of the hurricane’ as COVID cases decline amid growing concern over spread of UK variant Yahoo News
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Tag Archives: disease
Eating meat ‘raises risk of heart disease, diabetes and pneumonia’ | Meat
Eating meat regularly increases someone’s risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia and other serious illnesses, new research has found.
It is already known that intake of red and processed meat heightens the risk of being diagnosed with bowel cancer. But these findings are the first to assess whether meat consumption is linked to any of the 25 non-cancerous illnesses that most commonly lead to people being admitted to hospital in the UK.
The academics from Oxford University who have published the study found that consumption of red meat, processed meat and poultry meat such as chicken and turkey, either alone or together, at least three times a week was linked to a greater risk of nine different illnesses.
Their results add to the growing evidence from researchers and the World Health Organization that eating too much meat, especially red and processed meat, can damage someone’s health.
The findings, published in the journal BMC Medicine, are based on analysis of the health records of 474,985 middle-aged Britons. The researchers examined details provided about their diets with information from their medical records about hospital admissions and also mortality data for an average of eight years.
The study concluded: “On average, participants who reported consuming meat regularly (three or more times per week) had more adverse health behaviours and characteristics than participants who consumed meat less regularly.
“Higher consumption of unprocessed red and processed meat combined was associated with higher risks of ischaemic heart disease, pneumonia, diverticular disease, colon polyps and diabetes, and higher consumption of poultry meat was associated with higher risks of gastro-oesophageal reflux disease, gastritis and duodenitis, diverticular disease, gallbladder disease and diabetes.”
The academics, led by Dr Keren Papier from the university’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, found that every 70 grams of unprocessed red meat and processed meat that someone consumed daily raised their risk of heart disease by 15% and of diabetes by 30%.
Those meats may raise the risk of heart disease because they contain saturated fatty acids, which can increase low-density lipoprotein or “bad” cholesterol, which is known to put people at greater risk of heart problems.
Similarly, every 30 grams of poultry meat eaten daily increased the risk of developing gastro-oesophageal reflux by 17% and of diabetes by 14%, they found.
However, it was mainly meat-eaters who were overweight or obese who were running these risks, it emerged during the study. Most of the increased risks of disease identified were reduced once participants’ body mass index was taken into account.
“Differences in BMI across the categories of meat consumption appear to account for a substantial part of the increased risks,” the article in BMC Medicine says.
Eating meat regularly did reduce the risk of someone suffering from the iron deficiency anaemia, though.
“We have long known that unprocessed red meat and processed meat consumption is likely to be carcinogenic and this research is the first to assess the risk of 25 non-cancerous health conditions in relation to meat intake in one study,” said Papier.
Further research was needed into whether the differences in risk she and her team observed reflected “causal relationships [with meat intake] and, if so, the extent to which these diseases could be prevented by decreasing meat consumption”, she added.
Public Health England and the British Meat Processors Association have been approached for a response.
Michigan lung transplant recipient dies from COVID-19 spread by donor lungs
DETROIT – With careful screening, organ transplants are still carried out in the era of COVID-19.
However, doctors are learning more about how the disease can escape detection on a daily basis.
A Michigan woman tragically died of COVID-19 from the transplanted lungs that were supposed to save her life.
Lung transplants are still being done. In fact, a lung transplant can save the life of someone whose lungs have been destroyed by COVID-19.
In cases not related to COVID-19, both the donor and recipient are routinely screened to ensure that they are free of infection, but a new case highlights a need for more advanced screening. Last year, nearly 40,000 organs were transplanted in the U.S. with over 2,500 being lung transplants roughly the same number that had been done in past years.
Now a new report from the University of Michigan published in the American Journal of Transplantation describes the first case of COVID-19 that was transmitted in a pair of lungs.
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The donor was a woman who suffered a severe brain injury in a car accident. She had no history of COVID-19 or any symptoms like fever, cough, or headache and prior to organ procurement, she had a nasal swab that was negative for the COVID-19 virus.
The woman who received the donated lungs had end stage Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and was also negative for the COVID-19 virus.
Three days after her lung transplant, she developed fevers and worsening lung function. A CAT scan of her new lungs looked like COVID.
Even though the donor’s nasal swab had been negative for COVID, they were found to be positive when they went back and tested her original lung washings.
During the initial procedure, doctors believed both the donor and recipient were free of COVID and therefore weren’t required to wear an N-95 mask or eye protection.
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The thoracic surgeon who performed the transplant tested positive four days after the surgery. Sixty one days after the transplant, the recipient died.
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In studying what happened, the viruses from the donor, the recipient and the surgeon all underwent genetic sequencing.
The coronavirus in both the donor and recipient were identical. Additonally, the virus from the surgeon was essentially identical only different by one mutation thought to have occurred during his infection.
It’s not really clear if the virus can be spread by other organ transplants, but COVID screening of donors has been done since the start of the pandemic and specifically for non-lung donors they recommend at least one sample from the respiratory tract.
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Guinea declares new Ebola epidemic, first resurgence of disease since 2016
Guinea, the West Africa country, announced Sunday that the Ebola virus has become an epidemic after the deaths of three people and hospitalizations of four others, a report said.
Reuters reported that the country’s health system is not faced with the daunting task of responding to outbreaks of COVID-19 and Ebola. The report pointed out that while Ebola is far deadlier than the coronavirus, it is not transmitted by asymptomatic hosts.
The last outbreak ended up killing about 11,300. The country of 12 million, which is one of the world’s poorest, is in the process of erecting treatment centers to deal with the potential of an increase in patients. The outbreak has occurred in the southeast region of the country. Health officials there believe the outbreak started at a funeral.
CONGO BRACES FOR POTENTIAL EBOLA SPREAD AMID CORONAVIRUS
Sakoba Keita, the head of the National Health Security Agency, told the Washington Post that officials are trying to work quickly in tracking those who may have been in contact with an infected individual.
The paper said the country is also fighting outbreaks of yellow fever and measles. Keita told the Post, “We are facing four epidemics at the same time.”
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Last month the World Health Organization said it is creating a global emergency stockpile of about 500,000 doses of the Ebola vaccine to help stamp out future outbreaks, but only 7,000 were available at the time of the statement. The Ebola vaccine being stockpiled is made by Merck.
“There are tools and systems that can be mobilized quickly to address these cases. The key will be speed, ensuring appropriate people and materials are where they need to be,” said Donald Brooks, chief executive officer of Initiative: Eau, a U.S. aid group focused on water and sanitation, who has worked on establishing public health emergency response systems in West Africa.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
Ebola kills four in Guinea in first resurgence of disease in five years | World news
Four people have died of Ebola in Guinea in the first resurgence of the disease in five years, the health minister said on Saturday.
Remy Lamah told AFP officials were “really concerned” about the deaths, the first since a 2013-16 epidemic – which began in Guinea – left 11,300 dead across the region.
One of the latest victims in Guinea was a nurse who fell ill in late January and was buried on 1 February, National Health Security Agency head Sakoba Keita told local media. “Among those who took part in the burial, eight people showed symptoms: diarrhoea, vomiting and bleeding,” he said. “Three of them died and four others are in hospital.”
The four deaths from Ebola hemorrhagic fever occurred in the south-east region of Nzerekore, he said.
Keita also told local media that one patient had “escaped” but had been found and hospitalised in the capital Conakry. He confirmed the comments to AFP without giving further detail.
The World Health Organization has eyed each new outbreak since 2016 with great concern, treating the most recent one in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as an international health emergency.
DRC has faced several outbreaks of the illness, with the WHO on Thursday confirming a resurgence three months after authorities declared the end of the country’s latest outbreak.
The country had declared the six-month epidemic over in November. It was the country’s 11th Ebola outbreak, claiming 55 lives out of 130 cases.
The widespread use of vaccinations, which were administered to more than 40,000 people, helped curb the disease.
The 2013-16 outbreak sped up the development of a vaccine against Ebola, with a global emergency stockpile of 500,000 doses planned to respond quickly to future outbreaks, the vaccine alliance Gavi said in January.
In a Weird Twist, Scientists Discover Venus Flytraps Generate Little Magnetic Fields
The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) is already a fascinating enough plant, but scientists have discovered something else amazing about it: It generates measurable magnetic fields as its leaves snap shut.
And going way beyond D. muscipula, the latest research could teach us a lot about how plant life uses magnetic field signalling to communicate and as an indicator of disease (something we also see in human beings and other animals).
It’s well known that plants use electrical signals as a sort of nervous system, but capturing biomagnetism has been tricky.
A 2011 study attempted to detect a magnetic field around a Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanium) – that large, very smelly plant – using atomic magnetometers that are able to detect the smallest of fluctuations.
That study revealed that the plant generated no magnetic field greater than a millionth of the strength of the magnetic field surrounding us on Earth, resulting in the experiment being considered a failure.
The researchers involved in the 2011 study said their next steps, if they were to take any, would be to focus on a smaller plant.
For the new study, a different group of researchers did indeed go smaller.
“We have been able to demonstrate that action potentials in a multicellular plant system produce measurable magnetic fields, something that had never been confirmed before,” says physicist Anne Fabricant, from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (JGU) in Germany.
Putting Venus flytraps under observation. (Anne Fabricant)
These “action potentials” are quick bursts of electrical activity, and the Venus flytrap can have multiple triggers: If the plant is touched, injured, affected by heat or cold, or loaded with liquid, then action potentials can be set off.
Here the researchers used heat stimulation to activate the electrical activity, and a glass cell magnetometer to measure magnetic disturbances. This approach not only kept background noise down to a minimum but had advantages over other techniques in that it could be miniaturised and didn’t require cryogenic cooling.
The magnetic signals measured went up to an amplitude of 0.5 picotesla, comparable to nerve impulses firing in humans and millions of times weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field – a small ripple, but a detectable one.
“You could say the investigation is a little like performing an MRI scan in humans,” says Fabricant. “The problem is that the magnetic signals in plants are very weak, which explains why it was extremely difficult to measure them with the help of older technologies.”
Besides MRI scans, other techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) are used to measure magnetic fields in humans, potentially identifying problems without any invasive procedures.
With the help of this current research, the same sort of scanning might now be possible with plants too: crops could be scanned for temperature shifts, chemical changes or pests without having to damage the plants themselves, for example.
And we can add the findings to our growing knowledge about how plants send signals both internally and externally, communicating via a hidden network that scientists are only just beginning to properly explore.
“Beyond proof of principle, our findings pave the way to understanding the molecular basis of biomagnetism in living plants,” write the researchers in their published paper.
“In the future, magnetometry may be used to study long-distance electrical signaling in a variety of plant species, and to develop noninvasive diagnostics of plant stress and disease.”
The research has been published in Scientific Reports.
Disease experts warn of surge in deaths from Covid variants as US lags in tracking | US news
Experts who have spent the last year forecasting Covid-19 transmission across the US are now considering scenarios for the spread of new, more infectious strains of the coronavirus.
At the same time, the US continues to lag in surveillance for coronavirus variants, despite having among the most well developed genomic sequencing infrastructure in the world.
The warnings come as the US appears to have crested a devastating winter wave of infections, which at one time saw more than 300,000 new infections and 4,000 deaths a day. Even though daily infections have more than halved from the peak, with death rates expected to drop soon also, the threat of the more infectious variants now has some considering the possibility of a fresh surge.
“It’s a grim projection, unfortunately,” said Ali Mokdad, professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, one of the leading academic forecasters of Covid-19. “I’m concerned about a spike due to the new variant and the relaxation of social distancing,” he said. “People are tired. People are very tired.”
Forecasters still do not consider this the most likely scenario, though also not the worst-case scenario, but the addition of the model is a recognition of how dangerous new variants can be, even in an environment where hospitalization and death rates are expected to decline.
IHME’s “rapid variant spread” model predicts total deaths could increase by 26,000 over the most likely scenario by May. Such a forecast would result in a total of more than 620,000 Covid-19 deaths by that time.
Notably, the most accurate are often “ensemble” forecasts, which draw in many individual projections. The ensemble forecast published by the CDC makes a prediction only through 27 February, when it estimates up to 534,000 deaths could occur. IHME also estimates universal masking could save 31,000 lives.
The most well understood variant of concern is the B117 strain, first detected in the United Kingdom. B117 is believed to be as much as 50% more transmissible and to be now circulating in the US, where 541 cases have been found in 33 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Studies are still being conducted on how B117 may impact the effectiveness of the two vaccines currently authorized in the US, from Moderna and Pfizer. Another variant from South Africa, called B1351 and recently found in South Carolina, does appear to reduce vaccine efficacy. New strains can also impact the effectiveness of some of the only treatments for Covid-19 patients, including monoclonal antibodies.
“If the new variant makes the vaccines less effective and new variants come up, we could have a surge in the summer,” said Mokdad.
Variations in how a virus replicates genetic materials are expected and a feature of how viruses evolve over time. This can be especially true of viruses like the coronavirus, whose genetic material is made of ribonucleic acid (RNA), because these viruses lack some “proofreading” mechanisms that reduce mutations. Most changes are benign – like a typo in a paper – and do not change the functionality of the virus.
But rampant, widespread global transmission has given the coronavirus millions upon millions of chances to replicate, and change as it does. Among the random, inconsequential typos, are rare changes that alter how the virus behaves.
For example, B117 is believed to be more infectious. A more infectious virus is a more successful virus, and through thousands of new infections, natural selection will favor the successful virus, eventually replacing previous, once dominant strains.
“A small percentage of a big number is still a big number,” said Emily Bruce, a virologist and investigator at the Center for Immunology and Infectious Disease at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine. Variations are “a function of the number of people and number of infections and cycles of replication the virus is going through”.
Scientists can detect these changes using next generation sequencing technology. This technology was used in spring 2020 to show the origin of a majority of Covid-19 cases in New York were actually from Europe, not China as the Trump administration insisted.
While some labs were pursuing specific projects using this technology, a national, systematic surveillance program was never put in place. It wasn’t until November that the CDC began regularly receiving samples from Covid-19 patients from state labs. It now processes roughly 750 samples a week. The US currently ranks 43rd in the world for Covid-19 genomic sequencing, despite having well developed genomic sequencing infrastructure.
“There’s people who’ve done spectacular work here, but it wasn’t funded and strategized in a national way the way leaders in the field did this,” said Bruce.
The cost of genomic sequencing has dropped precipitously since the early 2000s, when ambitions to map the human genome cost $100m, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. Today, sequencing one human genome costs about $1,000.
Doctors hoped to start using this advanced technology, called next generation sequencing, to tailor treatment to specific patients. That field is touted as “precision medicine”, a way for doctors to tailor treatments to specific patients.
But, as in many other aspects of American life, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed weaknesses in the system. Experts said, in large part, the lack of a national surveillance program for coronavirus variants came down to lack of funding.
“It costs a certain amount of money to sequence each strain, and I am a brand new investigator, I don’t have the money to pay for that,” said Bruce. “And people’s insurance isn’t going to pay for that because it’s important information, but it’s not going to change an individual patient’s care.”
Sequencing an RNA virus is less expensive than sequencing a whole human genome, because they are far less complex organisms, but it is still far more expensive than a typical coronavirus test, running in the hundreds of dollars. That is because expert labor is needed to interpret the results – including molecular biologists and virologists like Bruce.
“This virus is here to stay,” said Mokdad. “We’re not going to reach herd immunity, simply, we’re not going to reach it. It’s going to be seasonal, and it’s going to be like the flu, and we’re going to need to be ready for it,” he said.
That leads to another potential need from vaccine-makers – vaccine updates to enhance immunity to new variants. Already, Moderna and Pfizer are working on “booster shots” for Covid-19 variants. Experts now recommend double-masking to protect against the virus, alongside more vigilant social distancing.
Together, these developments have made Mokdad certain of one outcome: “I’m 100% sure in winter [2021-22] we will have a surge – but it will slow down our decline. But I’m convinced it will happen.”
WHO team in Wuhan visits disease control centers
WUHAN, China (AP) — A World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic visited two disease control centers on Monday that had an early hand in managing the outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
The WHO investigators arrived in Wuhan, the provincial capital, last month to look for clues and have visited hospitals and a seafood market where early cases were detected.
The team on Monday visited both the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and its Wuhan city office, amid tight Chinese controls on access to information about the virus.
China has sought to avoid blame for alleged missteps in its early response to the outbreak, while promoting alternative theories that the virus originated elsewhere and may even have been brought to Wuhan from outside the country.
Following the visit to the provincial center, team member Peter Daszak told reporters it had been a “really good meeting, really important.” No other details were given.
The evidence the team assembles will add to what is expected to be a years-long quest for answers. Pinning down an outbreak’s animal sources requires massive amounts of research including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.
China has largely curbed domestic transmission through strict testing and contact tracing. Mask wearing in public is observed almost universally and lockdowns are routinely imposed on communities and even entire cities where cases are detected. The latest outbreaks have been mostly in the frigid northeast, with 33 new cases reported nationally Monday in three provinces.
Despite that, China recorded more than 2,000 new domestic cases of COVID-19 in January, the highest monthly total since the final phase of the initial outbreak in Wuhan last March. Two people died of the disease in January, the first reported COVID-19 deaths in China in several months.
Schools have gone online and travel has been drastically cut during this month’s Lunar New Year holiday, with the government offering incentives for people to stay put during the most important time for family gatherings across the vast nation.
A Physicist Has Worked Out The Math That Makes ‘Paradox-Free’ Time Travel Plausible
No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.
As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?
It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but in September last year a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, said he has worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.
“Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular time, this can tell us the entire history of the system,” said Tobar back in September 2020.
“However, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts the existence of time loops or time travel – where an event can be both in the past and future of itself – theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head.”
What the calculations show is that space-time can potentially adapt itself to avoid paradoxes.
To use a topical example, imagine a time traveller journeying into the past to stop a disease from spreading – if the mission was successful, the time traveller would have no disease to go back in time to defeat.
Tobar’s work suggests that the disease would still escape some other way, through a different route or by a different method, removing the paradox. Whatever the time traveller did, the disease wouldn’t be stopped.
Tobar’s work isn’t easy for non-mathematicians to dig into, but it looks at the influence of deterministic processes (without any randomness) on an arbitrary number of regions in the space-time continuum, and demonstrates how both closed timelike curves (as predicted by Einstein) can fit in with the rules of free will and classical physics.
“The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction,” said physicist Fabio Costa from the University of Queensland, who supervised the research.
Fabio Costa (left) and Germain Tobar (right). (Ho Vu)
The new research smooths out the problem with another hypothesis, that time travel is possible but that time travellers would be restricted in what they did, to stop them creating a paradox. In this model, time travellers have the freedom to do whatever they want, but paradoxes are not possible.
While the numbers might work out, actually bending space and time to get into the past remains elusive – the time machines that scientists have devised so far are so high-concept that for they currently only exist as calculations on a page.
We might get there one day – Stephen Hawking certainly thought it was possible – and if we do then this new research suggests we would be free to do whatever we wanted to the world in the past: it would readjust itself accordingly.
“Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency,” says Costa. “The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.”
The research has been published in Classical and Quantum Gravity.
A version of this article was first published in September 2020.
A Horrible Condition Turning Starfish Into Goo Has Finally Been Identified
In 2013, the lives of millions of sea stars were mysteriously extinguished. Limbs that were once strong, probing arms searching for sustenance, shrivelled and tore themselves away from the rest of their bodies and melted into a sickly goo.
“There were arms everywhere,” ecologist Drew Harvell told The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong last year. “It looked like a blast zone.”
The dismal remains of these animals, who are usually capable of regenerating their own limbs, were strewn along the entire West Coast of North America, in one of the largest mass wildlife mortality events ever recorded. Over 20 species of sea stars were perishing.
In some areas, sunflower star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) populations dropped by an average of around 90 percent in weeks, a loss that saw this once common and abundant species vanish from most of its range in just a few years.
The culprit causing this sea star wasting (SSW) even got to starfish in captivity, killing individual animals within days.
Leg of Pisaster ochraceus disintegrating from sea star wasting syndrome. (Elizabeth Cerny-Chipman/Oregon State University/CC BY-SA 2.0)
This led scientists to suspect some sort of pathogen, like a virus or bacterium, was infecting these stunning sea creatures. However, subsequent studies exonerated the lead viral suspect.
Meanwhile, more sea star deaths followed around the globe, including half a world away in Port Phillip Bay, Australia.
Now, San Francisco State University marine biologist Citlalli Aquino and colleagues have finally unravelled the mystery, showing something much more complicated was going on.
By comparing the types of bacteria within healthy sea stars and those suffering from the wasting disease, the researchers found bacteria that thrive in low oxygen environments were abundant in the sick animals, as were copiotrophs – bacteria that like high-nutrient environments.
Experiments back in the lab confirmed that depleting water of oxygen caused tissue-melting lesions in 75 percent of sea stars. Adding excess nutrients or phytoplankton to the water also caused the sea star’s health to decline.
Re-analysing tissue samples from the 2013 event, the researchers detected excess nitrogen – a sign these animals suffocated to death.
“Sea stars diffuse oxygen over their outer surface through little structures called papulae, or skin gills,” explained Cornell University marine microbiologist Ian Hewson. “If there is not enough oxygen surrounding the papulae, the starfish can’t breathe.”
These microorganisms aren’t directly causing disease, but stealing the sea stars’ oxygen supply when increased levels of organic matter are triggering the microbes to bloom. As a result, the sea stars literally drown in their own environment. Then their decaying bodies further increase nutrients for the microbes, creating a horrible feedback loop of sea star death.
Aquino and team noted most SSW events are reported in late fall or summer, when phytoplankton that increase levels of nutrients in the water via photosynthesis are more abundant.
Warmer temperatures are known drivers of phytoplankton blooms, and the sea star wasting event in Australia followed the longest and most intense heat wave on record. Sea star wasting events elsewhere have also followed increased sea temperatures.
“Warmer waters can’t have as much oxygen [compared with colder water] just by physics alone,” Hewson told Erin Garcia de Jesus at Science News.
None of this bodes well for our future on a warming planet.
University of Vermont biologist Melissa Pespeni, who was not involved in the study, told Science News this complicated tangle of biological and environmental factors is “a new kind of idea for [disease] transmission.”
Devastating repercussions from the loss of these precious stars of the sea have already echoed out across entire ecosystems. The sunflower star is a voracious predator with up to 24 arms that span as far as 1 metre (3.3 ft), feeling their way across the seafloor for sea urchins, snails, and other invertebrates to devour.
Without the sunflower and other sea stars keeping sea urchins in check, these herbivores are eating their way through giant kelp forests. By 2016, sea urchins had already reduced kelp populations by 80 percent in some areas, decimating these once thriving underwater forests.
“This is a very clear example of a trophic cascade, which is an ecological domino effect triggered by changes at the end of a food chain,” said Simon Fraser University marine ecologist Isabelle Côté, who investigated the environmental aftermath last year.
“It’s a stark reminder that everything is connected to everything else.”
This research was published in Frontiers in Microbiology.