Tag Archives: Diseases and conditions

Health

Fibromyalgia symptoms, causes and treatments

Leave a comment

Five years ago, Lady Gaga revealed that she had fibromyalgia, a chronic illness so intense that it led to “severe pain” and tour cancellations during her music career.

Fibromyalgia is a long-lasting disorder that “causes pain and tenderness throughout the body,” according to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. But while its effects can have severe impacts on those with the disease, some people don’t view it as an actual medical condition — because it cannot currently be diagnosed through medical testing. People are often diagnosed with fibromyalgia because it’s the only explanation left, after doctors have ruled out everything else.

Gaga, whose given name is Stefani Germanotta, expressed her frustration with people who don’t view the condition as a real disease in an interview with Vogue.

“I get so irritated with people who don’t believe fibromyalgia is real,” the singer-actress said. “People need to be more compassionate. Chronic pain is no joke. And it’s every day waking up not knowing how you’re going to feel.”

She’s not alone: Fibromyalgia affects about 4 million adults in the U.S., or 2% of the country’s adult population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To get a better understanding of the condition and its effects on people living with it each day, CNBC Make It spoke with Benjamin Natelson, an expert on fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and professor of neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Fibromyalgia symptoms, causes and treatments

The CDC defines fibromyalgia as “pain all over the body,” or widespread pain. You might also have fibromyalgia if you’re experiencing tenderness in different parts of your body, when probed, with no medical explanation after several tests, Natelson says.

“For years, primary care doctors were just telling the patient there was nothing wrong with them or it was all in their head,” he says.

There’s currently no test to detect the illness: Fibromyalgia is diagnosed based on what the patient feels and expresses to their doctor, according to the American College of Rheumatology. Lab tests and X-rays can be used to rule out other conditions, the organization adds.

For some people, that raises doubt about whether fibromyalgia is a real condition, or simply a catch-all for unexplained chronic pain symptoms. And as doctors have learned more about the condition, its case definition has repeatedly changed.

Right now, its most commonly observed symptoms overlap with those of chronic fatigue syndrome, says Natelson. Chronic fatigue syndrome is an illness with long-term effects like severe fatigue, trouble sleeping and difficulty with concentration, according to the CDC.

“Whether those two illnesses are the same or different has been a focus of my research for the past decade,” he says. “And there are a lot of bits of data that suggest they’re different, but there are also similarities between the two.”

Symptoms

Fibromyalgia’s main symptom is achiness all over the body that can’t be linked to any other disease through medical testing, Natelson says. Living with the condition can also lead to symptoms like:

  • Difficulty sleeping
  • Fatigue
  • Pain that leads to disability

The chronic nature of the illness can also cause “mental and emotional distress,” Natelson adds. For someone who hasn’t experienced discomfort and fatigue at this level prior to developing fibromyalgia, chronic pain subsiding and reappearing can be emotionally draining, he says.

Causes

What causes fibromyalgia? It’s a tricky question: The condition’s causes are unclear, Natelson says. The condition does have a couple known risk factors, according to the CDC:

  • Most people with the condition are diagnosed when they’re middle-aged or older. However, fibromyalgia can impact anyone regardless of age, including kids.
  • You are more likely to develop fibromyalgia if you have lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.

The CDC also notes several more possible links to the development of fibromyalgia, but emphasizes that more research is needed to confirm or understand any connections:

  • Sex, as women are twice as likely to develop the condition than men.
  • Stressful or traumatic events like car accidents
  • Repetitive injuries or injury from repetitive stress on certain joints
  • Illness, like viral infections
  • Family history
  • Obesity

Treatments

Fibromyalgia can be treated in several ways, according to Natelson and the CDC:

  • Medications including prescriptions drugs — the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved three drugs for the condition — and over-the-counter pain relievers
  • Cardio and muscle-strengthening exercises
  • Patient education courses
  • Stress management practices like yoga, meditation and massages
  • Improved sleep habits for better rest
  • Therapy for the condition’s potential mental health impacts

“The best self-help thing that a patient with body-wide pain can do is to walk for 30 minutes every other day,” Natelson says. “Gentle physical conditioning, and I focus on the word ‘gentle’ if the person has really severe fibromyalgia, is best to relieve the discomfort and feel better.”

Just be careful: If you’re experiencing any of these symptoms, don’t self-diagnose or self-medicate. Contact your doctor to test for any possible conditions or health issues — whether fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome or otherwise.

Sign up now: Get smarter about your money and career with our weekly newsletter

Don’t miss:



Read original article here

Health

WHO plans to rename monkeypox over stigmatization concerns

Leave a comment

LONDON — The World Health Organization says it’s holding an open forum to rename the disease monkeypox, after some critics raised concerns the name could be derogatory or have racist connotations.

In a statement Friday, the U.N. health agency said it has also renamed two families, or clades, of the virus, using Roman numerals instead of geographic areas, to avoid stigmatization. The version of the disease formerly known as the Congo Basin will now be known as Clade one or I and the West Africa clade will be known as Clade two or II.

WHO said the decision was made following a meeting of scientists this week and in line with current best practices for naming diseases, which aims to “avoid causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional, or ethnic groups, and minimize any negative impact on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare.”

Numerous other diseases, including Japanese encephalitis, Marburg virus, Spanish influenza and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome have been named after the geographic areas where they first arose or were identified. WHO has not publicly suggested changing any of those names.

Monkeypox was first named in 1958 when research monkeys in Denmark were observed to have a “pox-like” disease, although they are not thought to be the animal reservoir.

WHO said it was also opening a way for the public to suggest new names for monkeypox, but did not say when any new name would be announced.

To date, there have been more than 31,000 cases of monkeypox identified globally since May, with the majority of those beyond Africa. Monkeypox has been endemic in parts of central and west Africa for decades and was not known to trigger large outbreaks beyond the continent until May.

WHO declared the global spread of monkeypox to be an international emergency in July and the U.S. declared its own epidemic to be a national emergency earlier this month.

Outside of Africa, 98% of cases are in men who have sex with men. With only a limited global supply of vaccines, authorities are racing to stop monkeypox before it becomes entrenched as a new disease.

Read original article here

US

Biden leaves White House for 1st time since getting COVID-19

Leave a comment

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — Ending his most recent COVID-19 isolation, President Joe Biden on Sunday left the White House for the first time since becoming infected with the coronavirus last month, settling in for a reunion with first lady Jill Biden in their home state of Delaware.

The president tested negative Saturday and Sunday, according to his doctor, clearing the way for him to emerge from an isolation that lasted longer than expected because of a rebound case of the virus. “He will safety return to public engagement and presidential travel,” Dr. Kevin O’Connor wrote.

“I’m feeling great,” Biden said before boarding Marine One outside the White House.

The Bidens were expected to spend the day in Rehoboth Beach, a popular vacation destination.

Biden originally tested positive on July 21, and he began taking the anti-viral medication Paxlovid, which is intended to decrease the likelihood of serious illness from the virus. According to his doctor, Biden’s vital signs remained normal throughout his infection, but he his symptoms included a runny nose, cough, sore throat and body aches.

After isolating for several days, Biden tested negative on July 26 and July 27, when he gave a speech in the Rose Garden, telling Americans they can “live without fear” of the virus if they get booster shots, test themselves for the virus if they become sick and seek out treatments.

But Biden caught a rare rebound case of COVID-19 on July 30, forcing him to isolate again. He occasionally gave speeches from a White House balcony, such as when he marked the killing of an al-Qaida leader or a strong jobs report.

He continued to test positive until Saturday, when he received his first negative result. While the president was isolating in the White House residence, the first lady remained in Delaware.

The Bidens are scheduled to visit Kentucky on Monday to view flood damage and meet with families.

Read original article here

Health

Melatonin poisoning reports are up in kids, study says

Leave a comment

NEW YORK — Researchers are drawing attention to a rise in poisonings in children involving the sleep aid melatonin — including a big jump during the pandemic.

Last year, U.S. poison control centers received more than 52,000 calls about children consuming worrisome amounts of the dietary supplement — a six-fold increase from about a decade earlier. Most such calls are about young children who accidentally got into bottles of melatonin, some of which come in the form of gummies for kids.

Parents may think of melatonin as the equivalent of a vitamin and leave it on a nightstand, said Dr. Karima Lelak, an emergency physician at Children’s Hospital of Michigan and the lead author of the study published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But really it’s a medication that has the potential to cause harm, and should be put way in the medicine cabinet,” Lelak said.

WHAT IS MELATONIN?

Melatonin is a hormone that helps control the body’s sleep cycle. It has become a popular over-the-counter sleeping aid, with sales increasing 150% between 2016 and 2020, the authors said.

In the U.S., melatonin is sold as a supplement, not regulated as a drug. Because melatonin is unregulated, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t have oversight over the purity of ingredients or the accuracy of dosage claims.

Other researchers have found that what’s on the label may not match what’s actually in the bottle, and some countries have banned the sale of over-the-counter melatonin.

HOW ARE MELATONIN OVERDOSES TREATED?

Many people can tolerate even relatively large doses of melatonin without significant harm, experts say. But there is no antidote for an overdose. In cases of a child accidentally ingesting melatonin, experts often ask a reliable adult to monitor them at home.

But slowed breathing or other worrisome signs can mean a child should be taken to a hospital.

WHAT DID THE RESEARCHERS FIND?

Lelak and her colleagues looked at reports to poison control centers from 2012 to 2021, counting more than 260,000 calls about kids taking too much melatonin. They represented 0.6% of all poison control calls in 2012 and about 5% in 2021.

In about 83% of those calls, the children did not show any symptoms. But other children endured vomiting, had altered breathing or showed other symptoms. Over the 10 years studied, more than 4,000 kids were hospitalized, five needed to be put on machines to help them breathe, and two — both younger than 2 — died.

Most of the hospitalized children were teenagers, and many of those were believed to be suicide attempts.

WHAT HAPPENED DURING THE PANDEMIC?

Reported melatonin poisonings have been increasing for at least a decade, but the largest increases happened after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in 2020. Between 2019 and 2020, the count shot up 38%.

There may be several reasons, Lelak said. Because of lockdowns and virtual learning, more children were at home all day, meaning there were more opportunities for kids to access melatonin. Also, the pandemic caused sleep-disrupting stress and anxiety that may have caused more families to consider melatonin.

“Children were upset about being home, teenagers were closed off from friends. And on top of all that everyone’s looking at screens for hours and hours a day,” Lelak said.

———

The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Read original article here

Health

African scientists baffled by monkeypox cases in Europe, US

Leave a comment

LONDON — Scientists who have monitored numerous outbreaks of monkeypox in Africa say they are baffled by the disease’s recent spread in Europe and North America.

Cases of the smallpox-related disease have previously been seen only among people with links to central and West Africa. But in the past week, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Italy, U.S., Sweden and Canada all reported infections, mostly in young men who hadn’t previously traveled to Africa.

There are about 80 confirmed cases worldwide and 50 more suspected ones, the World Health Organization said. France, Germany, Belgium and Australia reported their first cases Friday.

“I’m stunned by this. Every day I wake up and there are more countries infected,” said Oyewale Tomori, a virologist who formerly headed the Nigerian Academy of Science and who sits on several WHO advisory boards.

“This is not the kind of spread we’ve seen in West Africa, so there may be something new happening in the West,” he said.

To date, no one has died in the outbreak. Monkeypox typically causes fever, chills, rash and lesions on the face or genitals. WHO estimates the disease is fatal for up to one in 10 people, but smallpox vaccines are protective and some antiviral drugs are being developed.

British health officials are exploring whether the disease is being sexually transmitted. Health officials have asked doctors and nurses to be on alert for potential cases, but said the risk to the general population is low. The European Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommended all suspected cases be isolated and that high-risk contacts be offered smallpox vaccine.

Nigeria reports about 3,000 monkeypox cases a year, WHO said. Outbreaks are usually in rural areas, when people have close contact with infected rats and squirrels, Tomori said. He said many cases are likely missed.

Dr. Ifedayo Adetifa, head of the country’s Center for Disease Control, said none of the Nigerian contacts of the British patients have developed symptoms and that investigations were ongoing.

WHO’s Europe director, Dr. Hans Kluge, described the outbreak as “atypical,” saying the disease’s appearance in so many countries across the continent suggested that “transmission has been ongoing for some time.” He said most of the European cases are mild.

On Friday, Britain’s Health Security Agency reported 11 new monkeypox cases, saying “a notable proportion” of the infections in the U.K. and Europe have been in young men with no history of travel to Africa and who were gay, bisexual or had sex with men.

Authorities in Spain and Portugal also said their cases were in young men who mostly had sex with other men and said those cases were picked up when the men turned up with lesions at sexual health clinics.

Experts have stressed they do not know if the disease is being spread through sex or other close contact related to sex.

Nigeria hasn’t seen sexual transmission, Tomori said, but he noted that viruses that hadn’t initially been known to transmit via sex, like Ebola, were later proven to do so after bigger epidemics showed different patterns of spread.

The same could be true of monkeypox, Tomori said.

In Germany, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said the government was confident the outbreak could be contained. He said the virus was being sequenced to see if there were any genetic changes that might have made it more infectious.

Rolf Gustafson, an infectious diseases professor, told Swedish broadcaster SVT that it was “very difficult” to imagine the situation might worsen.

“We will certainly find some further cases in Sweden, but I do not think there will be an epidemic in any way,” Gustafson said. “There is nothing to suggest that at present.”

Scientists said that while it’s possible the outbreak’s first patient caught the disease while in Africa, what’s happening now is exceptional.

“We’ve never seen anything like what’s happening in Europe,” said Christian Happi, director of the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases. “We haven’t seen anything to say that the transmission patterns of monkeypox have been changing in Africa. So if something different is happening in Europe, then Europe needs to investigate that.”

Happi also pointed out that the suspension of smallpox vaccination campaigns after the disease was eradicated in 1980 might inadvertently be helping monkeypox spread. Smallpox vaccines also protect against monkeypox, but mass immunization was stopped decades ago.

“Aside from people in west and Central Africa who may have some immunity to monkeypox from past exposure, not having any smallpox vaccination means nobody has any kind of immunity to monkeypox,” Happi said.

Shabir Mahdi, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said a detailed investigation of the outbreak in Europe, including determining who the first patients were, was now critical.

“We need to really understand how this first started and why the virus is now gaining traction,” he said. “In Africa, there have been very controlled and infrequent outbreaks of monkeypox. If that’s now changing, we really need to understand why.”

———

Geir Moulson in Berlin, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Chinedu Asadu in Lagos, Nigeria, and AP reporters across Europe contributed to this report.

———

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Read original article here

Health

Puzzling outbreak of liver disease in kids spreads to EU, US

Leave a comment

Health officials say they have detected more cases of a mysterious liver disease in children that was first identified in Britain, with new infections in Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain

19 April 2022, 14:28

3 min read

LONDON — Health officials say they have detected more cases of a mysterious liver disease in children that was first identified in Britain, with new infections spreading to Europe and the U.S.

Last week, British officials reported 74 cases of hepatitis, or liver inflammation, found in children since January. The usual viruses that cause infectious hepatitis were not seen in the cases, and scientists and doctors are considering other possible sources.

Additional cases of hepatitis had been identified in Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said in a statement Tuesday without specifying exactly how many cases were found.

U.S. officials have spotted nine cases in Alabama in children aged 1 to 6.

“Mild hepatitis is very common in children following a range of viral infections, but what is being seen at the moment is quite different,” said Graham Cooke, a professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London. Some of the children in the U.K. have required specialist care at liver units and a few have needed a liver transplant.

The liver processes nutrients, filters the blood and fights infections. The infections caused symptoms like jaundice, diarrhea and abdominal pain. Hepatitis can be life-threatening if left untreated.

While it’s unclear what’s causing the illnesses, a leading suspect is an adenovirus. Only some of the children tested positive for coronavirus, but the World Health Organization said genetic analysis of the virus was needed to determine if there were any connections among the cases.

There are dozens of adenoviruses, many of them associated with cold-like symptoms, fever, sore throat and pink eye. U.S. authorities said the nine Alabama children tested positive for adenovirus and officials there are exploring a link to one particular version — adenovirus 41 — that’s normally associated with gut inflammation.

Public health officials ruled out any links to COVID-19 vaccines, saying none of the affected children was vaccinated.

The WHO noted that although there has been an increase in adenovirus in Britain, the potential role of those viruses in triggering hepatitis is unclear. WHO said there were fewer than five possible cases in Ireland and three confirmed cases in Spain, in children aged 22 months to 13 years.

The U.N. health agency said that given the jump in cases in the past month and heightened surveillance, it was “very likely” more cases will be detected.

———

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Read original article here

Health

COVID-19, overdoses pushed US to highest death total ever

Leave a comment

NEW YORK — 2021 was the deadliest year in U.S. history, and new data and research are offering more insights into how it got that bad.

The main reason for the increase in deaths? COVID-19, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work on death statistics.

The agency this month quietly updated its provisional death tally. It showed there were 3.465 million deaths last year, or about 80,000 more than 2020’s record-setting total.

Early last year, some experts were optimistic that 2021 would not be as bad as the first year of the pandemic — partly because effective COVID-19 vaccines had finally become available.

“We were wrong, unfortunately,” said Noreen Goldman, a Princeton University researcher.

COVID-19 deaths rose in 2021 — to more than 415,000, up from 351,000 the year before — as new coronavirus variants emerged and an unexpectedly large numbers of Americans refused to get vaccinated or were hesitant to wear masks, experts said.

The coronavirus is not solely to blame. Preliminary CDC data also shows the crude death rate for cancer rose slightly, and rates continued to increase for diabetes, chronic liver disease and stroke.

Drug overdose deaths also continued to rise. The CDC does not yet have a tally for 2021 overdose deaths, because it can take weeks of lab work and investigation to identify them. But provisional data through October suggests the nation is on track to see at least 105,000 overdose deaths in 2021 — up from 93,000 the year before.

New research released Tuesday showed a particularly large jump in overdose deaths among 14- to 18-year-olds.

Adolescent overdose death counts were fairly constant for most of the last decade, at around 500 a year, according to the paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. They almost doubled in 2020, to 954, and the researchers estimated that the total hit nearly 1,150 last year.

Joseph Friedman, a UCLA researcher who was the paper’s lead author, called the spike “unprecedented.”

Those teen overdose deaths were only around 1% of the U.S. total. But adolescents experienced a greater relative increase than the overall population, even though surveys suggest drug use among teens is down.

Experts attributed the spike to fentanyl, a highly lethal drug that has been cut into heroin for several years. More recently it’s also been pressed into counterfeit pills resembling prescription drugs that teens sometimes abuse.

The total number of U.S. deaths often increases year to year as the U.S. population grows. But 2020 and 2021 saw extraordinary jumps in death numbers and rates, due largely to the pandemic.

Those national death trends affect life expectancy — an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live.

With rare exceptions, U.S. life expectancy has reliably inched up year after year. But the CDC’s life expectancy estimate for 2020 was about 77 years — more than a year and a half lower than what it was in 2019.

The CDC has not yet reported its calculation for 2021. But Goldman and some other researchers have been making their own estimates, presented in papers that have not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Those researchers think U.S. life expectancy dropped another five or six months in 2021 — putting it back to where it was 20 years ago.

A loss of more than two years of life expectancy over the last two years “is mammoth,” Goldman said.

One study looked at death data in the U.S. and 19 other high-income countries. The U.S. fared the worst.

“What happened in the U.S. is less about the variants than the levels of resistance to vaccination and the public’s rejection of practices, such as masking and mandates, to reduce viral transmission,” one of the study’s authors, Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a statement.

Some experts are skeptical that life expectancy will quickly bounce back. They worry about long-term complications of COVID-19 that may hasten the deaths of people with chronic health problems.

Preliminary — and incomplete — CDC data suggest there were at least 805,000 U.S. deaths in about the first three months of this year. That’s well below the same period last year, but higher than the comparable period in 2020.

“We may end up with a ‘new normal’ that’s a little higher than it was before,” Anderson said.

———

The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Read original article here

Health

Bird flu’s grisly question: how to kill millions of poultry

Leave a comment

OMAHA, Neb. — The spread of a bird flu that is deadly to poultry raises the grisly question of how farms manage to quickly kill and dispose of millions of chickens and turkeys.

It’s a chore that farms across the country are increasingly facing as the number of poultry killed in the past two months has climbed to more than 24 million, with outbreaks reported nearly every day. Some farms have had to kill more than 5 million chickens at a single site with a goal of destroying the birds within 24 hours to limit the spread of the disease and prevent animals from suffering.

“The faster we can get on site and depopulate the birds that remain on site, the better,” Minnesota State Veterinarian Beth Thompson said.

The outbreak is the biggest since 2015, when producers had to kill more than 50 million birds. So far this year, there have been cases in 24 states, with Iowa the hardest hit with about 13 million chickens and turkeys killed. Other states with sizable outbreaks include Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota and Indiana.

Farms faced with the need to kill so many birds turn to recommendations by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Even as it has developed methods to kill the poultry quickly, the association acknowledges its techniques “may not guarantee that the deaths the animals face are painless and distress free.” Veterinarians and U.S. Department of Agriculture officials also typically oversee the process.

One of the preferred methods is to spray water-based firefighting foam over birds as they roam around the ground inside a barn. That foam kills the animals by cutting off their air supply.

When foam won’t work because birds are in cages above the ground or it’s too cold, the USDA recommends sealing up barns and piping carbon dioxide inside, first rendering the birds unconscious and ultimately killing them.

If one those methods won’t work because equipment or workers aren’t available, or when the size of a flock is too large, the association said a last resort is a technique called ventilation shutdown. In that scenario, farmers stop airflow into barns, which raises temperatures to levels at which the animals die. The USDA and the veterinary association recommend that farmers add additional heat or carbon dioxide to barns to speed up the process and limit suffering by the animals.

Mike Stepien, a spokesman for the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said the techniques are the best options when it’s necessary to quickly kill so many birds.

“State animal health officials and producers carefully weigh the different options to determine the best option for humane depopulation and do not make such decisions lightly,” Stepien said.

Not everyone agrees.

Animal welfare groups argue that all these methods for quickly killing birds are inhumane, though they are particularly opposed to ventilation shutdown, which they note can take hours and is akin to leaving a dog in a hot car. Animal rights groups delivered a petition last year signed by 3,577 people involved in caring for animals, including nearly 1,600 veterinarians, that urged the veterinary association to stop recommending ventilation shutdown as an option.

“We have to do better. None of these are acceptable in any way,” said Sara Shields, director of farm animal welfare science at Humane Society International.

Opponents of the standard techniques said firefighting foam uses harmful chemicals and it essentially drowns birds, causing chickens and turkeys to suffer convulsions and cardiac arrest as they die. They say carbon dioxide is painful to inhale and detectible by the birds, prompting them to try to flee the gas.

Karen Davis, of the nonprofit group United Poultry Concerns, urged the veterinary association to stop recommending all of its three main options.

“They’re all ways that I would not choose to die, and I would not choose anybody else to die regardless of what species they belong to,” Davis said.

Shields said there are more humane alternatives, such as using nitrogen gas but those options tend to be more expensive and could have logistical challenges.

Sam Krouse, vice president of Indiana-based MPS Egg Farms, said farmers feel miserable about using any of the options.

“We pour our lives and livelihoods into taking care of those birds, and it’s just devastating when we lose any of those birds,” Krouse said. “Everything that we’re doing every day is focused on keeping the disease out and making sure that we’re keeping our hens as safe as possible.”

Officials emphasize that this virus that’s spread primarily through the droppings of infected wild birds doesn’t threaten food safety or represent a significant public health threat. Sick birds aren’t allowed into the food supply and properly cooking poultry and eggs kills any viruses that might be present. And health officials say no human cases of bird flu have been found in the United States during this current outbreak.

Once poultry are dead, farmers must quickly dispose of the birds. They usually don’t want to risk the chance of spreading the virus by transporting the carcasses to landfills, so crews typically pile the birds up into huge rows inside barns and combine them with other materials, such as ground up corn stalks and sawdust to create a compost pile.

After a couple weeks of decomposition, the carcasses are converted into a material that can be spread on cropland to help fertilize crops. In some cases, carcasses are buried in trenches on the farm or incinerated.

Read original article here

US

Minneapolis teachers strike after failing to reach contract

Leave a comment

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Teachers in the Minneapolis School District walked off the job on Tuesday in a dispute over wages, class sizes and mental health support for students coping with two years of the coronavirus pandemic, at least temporarily pausing classes for about 29,000 students in one of Minnesota’s largest school districts.

Union members said they could not reach agreement on wages, especially a “living wage” for education support professionals, as well as caps on class sizes and more mental health services for students.

“We are on strike for safe and stable schools, we’re on strike for systemic change, we’re on strike for our students, the future of our city and the future of Minneapolis public schools,” Greta Cunningham, president of the teachers’ chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, said Tuesday outside a south Minneapolis elementary school where more than 100 union members and supporters launched a morning picket line in freezing weather.

The school district called the news disappointing but pledged to keep negotiating. Callahan said the union was also willing to resume bargaining, but no talks were scheduled.

Teachers in the neighboring St. Paul School District, with about 34,000 students, announced a tentative agreement late Monday night to avert a strike that had also been scheduled to start Tuesday.

Union officials in both cities said the issues were largely the same. The St. Paul teachers union said their tentative agreement — subject to approval by members — includes maintaining caps on class sizes, increased mental health supports and pay increases.

“This agreement could have been reached much earlier. It shouldn’t have taken a strike vote, but we got there,” local union President Leah VanDassor said in an announcement of the deal.

St. Paul Superintendent Joe Gothard said the agreements were fair while working within the district’s budget limitations.

State mediators facilitated the negotiations between administrators and union leaders in both districts.

National labor leaders say teachers and support staff across the country are experiencing the same sorts of overload and burnout challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but no other large districts were on the verge of a strike. School district officials have said they’re already facing budget shortfalls due to enrollment losses stemming from the pandemic and can’t spend money they don’t have.

The possibility of a strike earlier weighed on parents already stretched by the disruption of the pandemic.

Erin Zielinski’s daughter, Sybil, is a first-grader at Armatage Community School in southwest Minneapolis. She and her husband support the teachers, though she said she worries whether the union’s requests are sustainable.

Zielinski said her family is fortunate. She and her husband can count on support from their parents during a strike, and while he has had to return to the office, she still has some flexibility to work remotely. Her plan if teachers strike? “Survival,” she said and laughed.

“You kind of become immune to it, between distance learning, and home school, it’s now a way of life, unfortunately,” she said. “My husband and I will piece it together.”

For St. Paul schools, Gothard outlined the proposals in a statement Sunday night, saying the district offered to add language to the contract to keep average class sizes at their current levels, hire an additional four school psychologists, one-time cash payment of $2,000 for every union employee using federal stimulus funds, and to increase pay for the lowest-paid educational assistants.

“This comprehensive settlement offer addresses the union’s priorities, does not add to the projected $42 million budget shortfall next year, and most importantly, keeps our students, teachers and staff in the classroom,” Gothard wrote.

Minneapolis has about 3,265 teachers, while St. Paul has roughly 3,250 educators. The average annual salary for St. Paul teachers is more than $85,000, while it’s more than $71,000 in Minneapolis. However, the districts also employ hundreds of lower-paid support staffers who often say they don’t earn a living wage, and those workers have been a major focus of the talks. The Minneapolis union is seeking a starting salary of $35,000 for education support professionals, with union officials saying it’s essential to hire and retain people of color.

———

Associated Press writer Doug Glass contributed from Minneapolis.

Read original article here

Health

Omicron may be headed for a rapid drop in US and Britain

Leave a comment

Scientists are seeing signals that COVID-19′s alarming omicron wave may have peaked in Britain and is about to do the same in the U.S., at which point cases may start dropping off dramatically.

The reason: The variant has proved so wildly contagious that it may already be running out of people to infect, just a month and a half after it was first detected in South Africa.

“It’s going to come down as fast as it went up,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.

At the same time, experts warn that much is still uncertain about how the next phase of the pandemic might unfold. The plateauing or ebbing in the two countries is not happening everywhere at the same time or at the same pace. And weeks or months of misery still lie ahead for patients and overwhelmed hospitals even if the drop-off comes to pass.

“There are still a lot of people who will get infected as we descend the slope on the backside,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which predicts that reported cases will peak within the week.

The University of Washington’s own highly influential model projects that the number of daily reported cases in the U.S. will crest at 1.2 million by Jan. 19 and will then fall sharply “simply because everybody who could be infected will be infected,” according to Mokdad.

In fact, he said, by the university’s complex calculations, the true number of new daily infections in the U.S. — an estimate that includes people who were never tested — has already peaked, hitting 6 million on Jan. 6.

In Britain, meanwhile, new COVID-19 cases dropped to about 140,000 a day in the last week, after skyrocketing to more than 200,000 a day earlier this month, according to government data.

Kevin McConway, a retired professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Open University, said that while cases are still rising in places such as southwest England and the West Midlands, the outbreak may have peaked in London.

The figures have raised hopes that the two countries are about to undergo something similar to what happened in South Africa, where in the span of about a month the wave crested at record highs and then fell significantly.

“We are seeing a definite falling-off of cases in the U.K., but I’d like to see them fall much further before we know if what happened in South Africa will happen here,” said Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia.

Differences between Britain and South Africa, including Britain’s older population and the tendency of its people to spend more time indoors in the winter, could mean a bumpier outbreak for the country and other nations like it.

On the other hand, British authorities’ decision to adopt minimal restrictions against omicron could enable the virus to rip through the population and run its course much faster than it might in Western European countries that have imposed tougher COVID-19 controls, such as France, Spain and Italy.

Shabir Mahdi, dean of health sciences at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, said European countries that impose lockdowns won’t necessarily come through the omicron wave with fewer infections; the cases may just be spread out over a longer period of time.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said there have been 7 million new COVID-19 cases across Europe in the past week, calling it a “tidal wave sweeping across the region.” WHO cited modeling from Mokdad’s group that predicts half of Europe’s population will be infected with omicron within about eight weeks.

By that time, however, Hunter and others expect the world to be past the omicron surge.

“There will probably be some ups and downs along the way, but I would hope that by Easter, we will be out of this,” Hunter said.

Still, the sheer numbers of people infected could prove overwhelming to fragile health systems, said Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

“The next few weeks are going to be brutal because in absolute numbers, there are so many people being infected that it will spill over into ICUs,” Jha said.

Mokdad likewise warned in the U.S.: “It’s going to be a tough two or three weeks. We have to make hard decisions to let certain essential workers continue working, knowing they could be infectious.”

Omicron could one day be seen as a turning point in the pandemic, said Meyers, at the University of Texas. Immunity gained from all the new infections, along with new drugs and continued vaccination, could render the coronavirus something with which we can more easily coexist.

“At the end of this wave, far more people will have been infected by some variant of COVID,” Meyers said. “At some point, we’ll be able to draw a line — and omicron may be that point — where we transition from what is a catastrophic global threat to something that’s a much more manageable disease.”

That’s one plausible future, she said, but there is also the possibility of a new variant — one that is far worse than omicron — arising.

———

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Read original article here