Drug companies sidestepping the WHO’s technology transfer hub in Africa

a young nurse standing with stethoscope at the neck and catches her head.

Pharmaceutical company Moderna announced on 7 March 2022 that it would develop a site in Kenya to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines. The company holds much of the key intellectual property relating to the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines. Due to their higher efficacy, mRNA vaccines are the preferred option in developed countries. They account for 92% of […]

Artificial intelligence may be the only way researchers can solve the perplexing puzzle of Long COVID. It ’s already categorizing patients and even identifying them

artificial intelligence

Long COVID may be too big a problem for humans to solve—alone, at least. Increasingly, researchers are turning to artificial intelligence to help them sort through the electronic medical records of millions of long-COVID patients in hopes of better understanding the enigmatic condition with hundreds of potential symptoms. In some cases, A.I. is helping patients: […]

Omicron Hit Rural America Harder Than Cities

Omicron

The omicron wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2021 and early 2022 spread like a grass fire in America’s densely populated cities but led to higher rates of death in rural counties where vaccinations are lagging. The latest study by the University of Cincinnati, published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, revealed striking disparities in health care […]

Catching Omicron variant ‘does NOT provide immunity from reinfection’, scientists reveal – saying it helps explain the continued rise in cases

New Variant of the Covid-19 Omicron

Covid sufferers who caught the Omicron variant will not be protected from catching it again, according to scientists at Imperial College London. The investigators say Omicron and its evolutions could explain why Covid cases remain higher than predicted in the UK. Earlier studies found that past illnesses with Covid provided some immunity against re-infection – […]

Can long Covid lead to death? A new analysis suggests it could

drive-thru COVID-19 test

The CDC is beginning to look at death certificates that indicate more than 100 people who died had long Covid. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is analyzing more than 100 deaths that could be attributed to long Covid by looking at death certificates from across the country over the last two years, according […]

Lives Cut Short: COVID-19’s Heavy Burden on Older Latinos

Man looking outside

The coronavirus pandemic has eaten away at the Latino edge in life expectancy in staggering fashion, and taken a disproportionate toll on older members of the community compared with whites. LOS ANGELES – In December 2020, about 10 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Javier Perez-Torres boarded a bus from Los Angeles to Tijuana, Mexico, to […]

Doctors, nurses risked their lives to battle COVID. Now they’re facing a mental health crisis

Medical Team

COVID hospitalizations and deaths may be down from their surge peaks, but the nation’s hospitals and clinics still face a population in crisis: the healthcare workers themselves. Overworked medical professionals, who risked their health and their families’ well-being to help patients through the pandemic, are now dealing with a public that is increasingly distrustful in a politicized environment where hospital violence […]

Covid was vanishing last Memorial Day. Cases are five times higher now.

pedestrian

For the third year, Americans are greeting the unofficial start of summer shadowed by the specter of the coronavirus amid rising covid-19 cases and hospitalizations across the country. The United States is recording more than 100,000 infections a day — at least five times higher than this point last year — as it confronts the […]

Viruses that were on hiatus during Covid are back — and behaving in unexpected ways

Virus Word Cloud

For nearly two years, as the Covid pandemic disrupted life around the globe, other infectious diseases were in retreat. Now, as the world rapidly dismantles the measures put in place to slow spread of Covid, the viral and bacterial nuisances that were on hiatus are returning — and behaving in unexpected ways. Consider what we’ve […]