World Health Organization Declares Monkeypox a Global Emergency
LONDON — The World Health Organization said the expanding monkeypox outbreak in more than 70 countries is an “extraordinary” situation that now qualifies as a global emergency, a declaration Saturday that could spur further investment in treating the once-rare disease and worsen the scramble for scarce vaccines.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the decision to issue the declaration despite a lack of consensus among members of WHO’s emergency committee. It was the first time the chief of the U.N. health agency has taken such an action.
“In short, we have an outbreak that has...
Source: TIME: Health - July 23, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Time Tags: Uncategorized wire Source Type: news
Virologists try to keep up with faster coronavirus evolution.
Health officials are trying to make far-reaching policy decisions, including on booster shots, based on little biological certainty of which viral variants will be dominant. (Source: NYT Health)
Source: NYT Health - July 20, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Adeel Hassan Tags: Coronavirus Omicron Variant Vaccination and Immunization Source Type: news
Operational considerations for respiratory virus surveillance in Europe, ECDC
This document outlines operational considerations to support the continuity of national surveillance systems and public health laboratories for epidemiological and virological surveillance for influenza, SARS-CoV-2, and potentially other respiratory viruses (such as RSV or new viruses of public health concern) in the 2022/2023 winter season and beyond. It builds on previously published documents on COVID-19 and influenza surveillance. (Source: Current Awareness Service for Health (CASH))
Source: Current Awareness Service for Health (CASH) - July 19, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news
A Super Contagious Omicron Mutant Is Worrying Scientists. It ’s Called BA.2.75
The quickly changing coronavirus has spawned yet another super contagious Omicron mutant that’s worrying scientists as it gains ground in India and pops up in numerous other countries, including the United States.
Scientists say the variant—called BA.2.75—may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infection. It’s unclear whether it could cause more serious disease than other Omicron variants, including the globally prominent BA.5.
“It’s still really early on for us to draw too many conclusions,” said Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical viro...
Source: TIME: Health - July 11, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Laura Ungar and Aniruddha Ghosal/AP Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 overnight wire Source Type: news
What to Know About the New BA.2.75 Omicron Subvariant
(MedPage Today) -- Even as BA.4 and BA.5 continue to climb the charts, crowding out earlier Omicron subvariants, scientists are warning about an even newer strain: BA.2.75.
Tom Peacock, PhD, a virologist at Imperial College London, tweeted on... (Source: MedPage Today Public Health)
Source: MedPage Today Public Health - July 8, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: news
The Pox is On Us
For a virologist, this transmission is worth study, and it ’ll probably teach us a few new things about monkeypox. But for the average person, on a worry meter from 0 to 10, it’s probably below a 1 - Grant McFadden PhD, Arizona State Universityread more> (Source: Health WorldNet)
Source: Health WorldNet - July 7, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news
The Many Faces Of Omicron
As Omicron continues to evolve, here we analyze virological evolution in terms of new monoclonal antibody treatments. (Source: Forbes.com Healthcare News)
Source: Forbes.com Healthcare News - July 6, 2022 Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: William A. Haseltine, Contributor Tags: Healthcare /healthcare Innovation /innovation business pharma & Source Type: news
How Jennifer Doudna ’s Life Has Changed Since Discovering CRISPR 10 Years Ago
Jennifer Doudna was staring at a computer screen filled with a string of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs—the letters that make up human DNA—and witnessing a debilitating genetic disease being cured right before her eyes. Just a year earlier, in 2012, she and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier had published a landmark paper describing CRISPR-Cas9, a molecular version of autocorrect for DNA, and she was seeing one the first demonstrations of CRISPR’s power to cure a human disease. She was in the lab of Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a Harvard researcher who was eager to show her the results from an experiment he had just finish...
Source: TIME: Health - July 1, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Alice Park Tags: Uncategorized feature Genetics healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
Bad news for Paxlovid? Coronavirus can find multiple ways to evade COVID-19 drug
Prescriptions for Pfizer’s blockbuster drug Paxlovid have skyrocketed in recent weeks. That’s good news for many COVID-19 patients, as the pill has been proven to reduce severe disease from SARS-CoV-2 infections. But a bevy of new lab studies shows the coronavirus can mutate in ways that make it less susceptible to the drug, by far the most widely used of the two oral antiviral drugs authorized to treat COVID-19 in the United States. Researchers have found some of those mutations in variants already circulating in infected people, raising fresh concerns that physicians could soon lose one of their best therapies for fi...
Source: ScienceNOW - June 29, 2022 Category: Science Source Type: news
WHO declines to label monkeypox a global emergency
After 2 days of deliberation, an advisory panel convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) has concluded the monkeypox outbreak that has spread to more than 50 countries does not yet warrant the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), its highest alert level. WHO currently has PHEIC declarations for polio and COVID-19, and many infectious disease scientists had expected one for monkeypox. Monkeypox is endemic in many African countries but has never before spread so widely on other continents; more than 4100 cases have been recorded so far.
“I am very surprised by the decision...
Source: ScienceNOW - June 25, 2022 Category: Science Source Type: news
U.S. report on COVID response says Atlas strategy caused deaths
A new report issued by a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on the Trum...Read more on AuntMinnie.comRelated Reading:
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Atlas urges Michigan to 'rise up' against COVID-19 rulesComments:
6/22/2022 3:25:23 PMJochem
Quiet frankly, I am a bit tired of all the experts sitting in their well paid science labs and making these allegations AFTER, or in retrospect. That's like predicting a baseball ...
Source: AuntMinnie.com Headlines - June 22, 2022 Category: Radiology Source Type: news
Why the monkeypox outbreak is mostly affecting men who have sex with men
Ever since monkeypox started sickening thousands of people worldwide this spring, two big questions have loomed: Why is a virus that has never managed to spread beyond a few cases outside Africa suddenly causing such a big, global outbreak? And why are the overwhelming majority of those affected men who have sex with men (MSM)?
A long history of work on sexually transmitted infections and early studies of the current outbreak suggest the answers may be linked: The virus may have made its way into highly interconnected sexual networks within the MSM community, where it can spread in ways that it cannot in the ge...
Source: ScienceNOW - June 20, 2022 Category: Science Source Type: news
Bird flu is on the rise in the UK. Are chickens in the back garden to blame?
The risk to humans from the disease, spread by wild birds, is low but a record level of outbreaks this year has researchers worriedBird flu outbreaks rose nearly fivefold last year, creating an urgent need for research into preventing the spread of the disease, according to the head of a new consortium investigating the virus.The record of 26 outbreaks involving H5N1 in 2021 has been shattered, with 121 outbreaks involving the H5 serotype this year, according to Prof Ian Brown, head of virology at the government ’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (Apha).Continue reading... (Source: Guardian Unlimited Science)
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - June 19, 2022 Category: Science Authors: James Tapper Tags: Bird flu Health Infectious diseases Medical research UK news Birds Society Environment Source Type: news
Monkeypox Testing Shows the U.S. Learned Little from the COVID-19 Pandemic
U.S. testing for monkeypox is insufficient to determine how widespread the virus is and where new cases are cropping up, according to infectious disease experts and advocates concerned about a sluggish response to the outbreak that’s already hit 32 countries.
While government labs have the capacity to test as many as 8,000 samples a week, they’re only using 2% of that capability, suggesting that about 23 monkeypox tests are being performed a day, said James Krellenstein, the cofounder of PrEP4All, an HIV advocacy group that widened its focus during the pandemic. Much more testing is needed to find out where the...
Source: TIME: Health - June 16, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Madison Muller / Bloomberg Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate News Desk wire Source Type: news
From ‘open-minded’ to ‘underwhelming,’ mixed reactions greet latest COVID-19 origin report
Some content has been removed for formatting reasons. Please view the original article for the best reading experience.
“Further studies needed.” That’s the main message in a
preliminary report
released today by a scientific advisory group convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) to clarify the cloudy origin of COVID-19. But in stark distinction to a report from an earlier WHO committee, which drew controversy in 2021 by all but dismissing that SARS-CoV-2 might have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, this panel recommends more investigations into the lab-leak scenario possibility.
“All...
Source: ScienceNOW - June 9, 2022 Category: Science Source Type: news
