Tag: could

Scientists don’t know exactly what percentage of the population will need to get a COVID vaccine to achieve herd immunity. Some diseases, such as whooping cough, need very high rates of vaccination between 90-95%. The rise of new, more infectious coronavirus variants might mean even more people may need to be vaccinated against COVID than

As a viral immunologist who develops immunization strategies to prevent infectious diseases and treat cancers, I would like to highlight outstanding questions about the emergency use of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. These vaccines have raised hopes that the pandemic is nearing an end. Hopefully this is true, but here are some

NRF2 is just one of thousands of critical proteins in the cell, but it is one that we now know a lot about. Once any molecule achieves a certain level of celebrity status, it tends to acquire a groupie following in the supplement market. Today, we have all manner of NRF enhancers, releasers, activators and

New strain of coronavirus having a ‘survival advantage’ is ‘concerning’: Siegel Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel reacts to New York confirming the state’s first case of the new coronavirus strain. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top disease expert in the U.S., said Tuesday that the U.S. could soon be giving at least a million COVID-19

California has recorded a half-million coronavirus cases in the last two weeks and in a month could be facing a once-unthinkable caseload of nearly 100,000 hospitalizations, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s top health official said Monday. Gov. Gavin Newsom, himself quarantined for the second time in two months, acknowledged that a state projection model

Lost in the U.S. launch of the coronavirus vaccine is a fact most don’t know when they roll up their sleeves: In rare cases of serious illness from the shots, the injured are blocked from suing and steered instead to an obscure federal bureaucracy with a record of seldom paying claims. Housed in a nondescript

Across the US, states are increasingly using preemption to stymie local advancement of public health policy strategies, according to updated data released today to LawAtlas.org by the Center for Public Health Law Research and the National League of Cities with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The updated data capture state preemption of local

The United States could start injecting the first Americans with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine by Monday, the country’s health secretary said Friday. Alex Azar told news channels that final details were being ironed out, after an expert committee convened by regulators voted to grant the two-dose regimen emergency approval for people aged 16 and over.

A new online calculator for estimating individual and community-level risk of dying from COVID-19 has been developed by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The researchers who developed the calculator expect it to be useful to public health authorities for assessing mortality risks in different communities, and for prioritizing certain groups

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 2, 2020 — Levels of some small molecules called metabolites in the body may affect your risk of stroke, a new analysis suggests. Metabolites come from the food people eat, and they cause chemical processes within the bodies and microbes. An analysis of previously published studies found that the levels of 10 of

Many cancer researchers can claim to have devised “smart bombs.” What has been missing is the stealth bomber—a delivery system that can slip through the body’s radar defenses. Oncolytic viruses, or viruses that preferentially kill cancer cells, have been discussed and tested for decades. An oncolytic virus against melanoma was approved by the FDA in

The World Health Organization is discussing how best to allocate and prioritize COVID-19 vaccines when they arrive. It is focusing on the immediate crisis. To reduce deaths quickly when there are extremely limited vaccine doses available, vaccinating older, more vulnerable people is expected to be the best option, even if the vaccine is relatively poor

Similar to bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics, viruses can evolve resistance to vaccines, and the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 could undermine the effectiveness of vaccines that are currently under development, according to a paper published November 9 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by David Kennedy and Andrew Read from Pennsylvania State University, U.S. The authors

An autoimmune side effect of immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) drugs could signal improved control of kidney cancer, according to a new study by researchers in UT Southwestern’s Kidney Cancer Program (KCP). The study, published today in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, may have broad implications for patients being treated with ICIs, a type of

Halloween is right around the corner and people are definitely getting creative when it comes to ways of making trick-or-treating as safe as possible. Of course, leave it to the King of Halloween Candy, Reese’s, to take that creativity to a whole new level. The brand announced that it would be unleashing a robotic trick-or-treat

New research suggests when the COVID-19 pandemic is slowing, low-cost, recurring screening of asymptomatic people—at an expense of approximately $3 or less per test every two weeks—could decrease COVID-19 infections and deaths and be cost-effective. When the pandemic is surging, screening can be cost-effective when done more often, even if tests costs are higher. The

As the first peak of the COVID-19 pandemic approached, governments feared there would not be enough ventilators—machines that ‘breathe’ for patients when they cannot do so themselves—to help all those who needed one. Now, researchers from King’s College London and Imperial College London have developed a theoretical model for how one ventilator could be used

Patients with early onset psychosis may benefit from treatment for depression, including with anti-depressants alongside other medication, new research shows. According to scientists at the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Mental Health, depression may be an intrinsic part of early phase psychotic disorders that should be treated together with other more prominent symptoms to improve

Two different types of detectable antibody responses in SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) tell very different stories and may indicate ways to enhance public health efforts against the disease, according to researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor binding domain (S-RBD) are speculated to neutralize virus infection, while

The rate of seasonal flu vaccinations among high-risk groups such as people over age 50 and nursing home residents is extremely low, and those who do get their flu vaccination significantly lower their cardiovascular risks for heart attack, TIA (transient ischemic attack), death and cardiac arrest, according to preliminary research to be presented July 27-30,