Various degrees of hearing loss affect 70% of those adults over 70. It certainly contracts the “audio-world” we live in, but that is, unfortunately, just the tip of the disability iceberg.
Disease
So far, 11 different variants of COVID-19 have been identified and assigned a Greek letter for identification. Although delta (originally from India) is making all kinds of trouble worldwide, it will eventually be replaced by something worse. All the more reason to get vaccinated now.
In the past week, two studies reported a nearly two-year loss of life expectancy in 2020 due to COVID-19. While that sounds bad, what exactly does it mean? Life expectancy is one of those terms that can be difficult to grasp. Here’s a closer look at what it means.
A persistent characteristic of the COVID-19 pandemic is the large range of effects over time and among locations, often exceeding an order of magnitude. We analyzed cumulative effects over 15 months, and focused on variability among 100 urban counties concerning selected plausible risk factors. We developed linear regression models and found highly significant risk factors. These models explained up to half of the observed variance, much more than typical epidemiology studies.
I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t fear the big “C” diagnosis. Most people spend a lot of time trying to figure out where it came from. Is this the same kind of cancer that Great Aunt Sally had, suggesting heredity played a role? Maybe there was an environmental/lifestyle cause; spending too much time near smokers, back in the day when smokers were not isolated from the rest of society.
The strange neurological symptoms of "long-COVID" may have an explanation: another virus. A study has examined whether COVID promotes the reactivation of the Epstein-Barr Virus, an ubiquitous herpes virus that causes mono in teens. The evidence suggests that this is, indeed, the case, and it's EBV that's causing some of the long-COVID symptoms.
COVID-19 remains a seasonal respiratory virus, and the pandemic has waxed and waned with our summers and winters. A new study tries to quantify the impact of three climate variables: temperature, humidity, and ultraviolet light. The study also updates our understanding of PM 2.5.
Most of the extant COVID-19 analyses have been based on national or state-level data; a more granular county-level analysis would be overwhelmed by “noise” since most counties experienced only single-digit daily caseloads. Here we used an intermediate scale, 100 counties that each include a major city. This protocol avoids the noise engendered by small populations and provides enough diversity for meaningful cross-sectional analysis.
The COVID-19 vaccines have been nothing short of miraculous. Life is returning to normal in many places. But ACSH advisor Dr. Henry Miller argues that we will still need effective medical treatments for COVID-19.
A virion is “the complete, infective form of a virus outside a host cell, with a core of RNA or DNA and a capsid.” It is the infectious form of the virus as it moves between cells and hosts. A year plus into the COVID-19 pandemic, and we still do not know the number of virions necessary and sufficient to cause an infection – a new study, at least, puts us into the ballpark.
The first general alarm about the lethal effects of community air pollution was sounded in London in December 1952 during a severe fog episode that shut the city down and flooded hospitals and morgues. Subsequent media discussions about the benefits of cleaner air often cite the World Health Organization's global estimate of 7 million air pollution-related deaths annually (about 12% of the total), primarily based on studies of long-term mortality differences among US cities during previous decades. More recent publications have focused on short-term temporal associations. So how do long- and short-term analyses relate?
Is Biogen's Alzheimer's drug a historic achievement or red herring? There are plenty of opinions on both sides. Nonetheless, it received FDA approval despite an unanimous downvote from its own expert panel. What is going on here? No one knows, but to me, it just doesn't smell right.