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Tag: good news

  • Out-of-state volunteers help Citrus County homeowners recovering from Idalia

    Out-of-state volunteers help Citrus County homeowners recovering from Idalia

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    OZELLO, Fla. — A few out-of-state volunteers are lending a helping hand to Citrus County homeowners who are still picking up the pieces after Hurricane Idalia brushed the Nature Coast last August.

    It’s some much needed help that otherwise no one could do alone.

    In the marshes of Ozello, you’ll hear the occasional sound of power tools drilling away inside Linda Florea’s home.

    What You Need To Know

    • Volunteers from North and South Dakota have traveled thousands of miles to help homeowners make repairs in Ozello after Hurricane Idalia

    • Those volunteers are with St. Andrew’s Mission Society, who make these type of trips year after year

    • The group has seven projects total they are working on in the Tampa Bay Area

    “This is work after the hurricane,” she said.

    Idalia rocked Florea’s home last August — and months later, reminders of the storm are still visible from her possessions sitting outside to the water marks left on walls.

    “From what I understand, this was higher than Hermine,” Florea recalled. “In the early ‘90s, they had the no-name storm which was higher. But this last hurricane was higher than Hermine.”

    Repairing her property alone seemed impossible until one day she received a phone call.

    “This kind of wears on you when you have this much damage and you know it’s going to take a year or two to fix it and they have sped that up so much for me. It was just fantastic that they would do this for me. It’s good neighbors across the country,” she said.

    Those ‘good neighbors’ are volunteers with St. Andrew’s Mission Society. They traveled more than a thousand miles from North and South Dakota. All on a mission to help homeowners like Florea.

    “You just can’t even believe their stories and how appreciative they are,” volunteer Kim Rieger said. “I mean, none of us are trained in construction. None of us. We’re all just novices and we’re making mistakes and not doing things right, but Linda is so happy to have us here, and that makes you feel good.”

    The group has seven projects they’re working on in the Tampa Bay area. But Florea’s home has required a little extra attention.

    “All of my appliances I’ve had to replace,” said Florea. “They’re out right now but, hopefully, it will come back better. We’ve moved all of the outlets up a little bit, so that next time I won’t have to replace those.”

    Having her home back will mean more than just having a roof over her head — she’ll have her life back, too.

    “Not being hanging on the edge of this around the house is not working, or this has to be fixed,” she said. “The walls aren’t in. I can’t do this or can’t do that because I can’t. Normal never looked so good, so it’ll be nice.”

    A sense of normal that has been months in the making.

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    Calvin Lewis

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  • Ken Nelson loves volunteering for Meals on Wheels

    Ken Nelson loves volunteering for Meals on Wheels

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    TAMPA, Fla. — A Polk County man has spent several decades being involved with the Meals on Wheels of Polk County, the organization that delivers meals to shut in residents.

    What You Need To Know

    •  82-year-old Ken Nelson served on the Meals on Wheels board for decades

    •  Nelson served as a volunteer driver delivering meals during the pandemic

    •  Nelson helps to pack up hundreds of meals a day

    • Nominate an Everyday Hero

    Ken Nelson, 82, served on the organization’s board for decades and in recent years he has both delivered meals and worked on meal preparation at the Meals on Wheels facility in Winter Haven.

    Nelson knows all the ins-and-outs of how the organization works. He can take you on a tour of the facility, including a huge cooler where food is stored.

    “Today was a rather simple prep day because it’s food that we actually didn’t have to prepare that much. Just potato salad,” he said as he displayed a big container of the food.

    Nelson also works on the line of volunteers that place the different foods onto plastic takeout style containers.

    “Oh yea,’’ he said while working on the line. “There’ll be over 400 meals today.”

    Executive Director Susan Eldridge said Nelson is one of her many outstanding volunteers.

    “We couldn’t do it without the volunteers,” she said. “We had mentioned they are 98% of our workforce.”

    Nelson enjoyed his time as a volunteer driver taking meals to people in their homes.

    “I like to be out and see the smiles on the people’s faces when then got those meals,” he said. “And felt that there was someone there to care about them.”

    Nelson is very enthusiastic about his volunteer work.

    “Just the idea of helping other people,” he said. “Giving back to God. God has given me a good life, so I feel like I owe it to him to help other people.”

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    Rick Elmhorst

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  • How Much Less to Worry About Long COVID Now

    How Much Less to Worry About Long COVID Now

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    Compared with the worst days of the pandemic—when vaccines and antivirals were nonexistent or scarce, when more than 10,000 people around the world were dying each day, when long COVID largely went unacknowledged even as countless people fell chronically ill—the prognosis for the average infection with this coronavirus has clearly improved.

    In the past four years, the likelihood of severe COVID has massively dropped. Even now, as the United States barrels through what may be its second-largest wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections, rates of death remain near their all-time low. And although tens of thousands of Americans are still being hospitalized with COVID each week, emergency rooms and intensive-care units are no longer routinely being forced into crisis mode. Long COVID, too, appears to be a less common outcome of new infections than it once was.

    Read: The future of long COVID

    But where the drop in severe-COVID incidence is clear and prominent, the drop in long-COVID cases is neither as certain nor as significant. Plenty of new cases of the chronic condition are still appearing with each passing wave—even as millions of people who developed it in years past continue to suffer its long-term effects.

    In a way, the shrinking of severe disease has made long COVID’s dangers more stark: Nowadays, “long COVID to me still feels like the biggest risk for most people,” Matt Durstenfeld, a cardiologist at UC San Francisco, told me—in part because it does not spare the young and healthy as readily as severe disease does. Acute disease, by definition, eventually comes to a close; as a chronic condition, long COVID means debilitation that, for many people, may never fully end. And that lingering burden, more than any other, may come to define what living with this virus long term will cost.

    Most of the experts I spoke with for this story do think that the average SARS-CoV-2 infection is less likely to unfurl into long COVID than it once was. Several studies and data sets support this idea; physicians running clinics told me that, anecdotally, they’re seeing that pattern play out among their patient rosters too. The number of referrals coming into Alexandra Yonts’s long-COVID clinic at Children’s National, in Washington, D.C., for instance, has been steadily dropping in the past year, and the waitlist to be seen has shortened. The situation is similar, other experts told me, among adult patients at Yale and UCSF. Lisa Sanders, an internal-medicine physician who runs a clinic at Yale, told me that more recent cases of long COVID appear to be less debilitating than ones that manifested in 2020. “People who got the earliest versions definitely got whacked the worst,” she said.

    That’s reflective of how our relationship to COVID has changed overall. In the same way that immunity can guard a body against COVID’s most severe, acute forms, it may also protect against certain kinds of long COVID. (Most experts consider long COVID to be an umbrella term for many related but separate syndromes.) Once wised up to a virus, our defenses become strong and fast-acting, more able to keep infection from spreading and lingering, as it might in some long-COVID cases. Courses of illness also tend to end more quickly, with less viral buildup, giving the immune system less time or reason to launch a campaign of friendly fire on other tissues, another potential trigger of chronic disease.

    In line with that logic, a glut of studies has shown that vaccination—especially recent and repeated vaccination—can reduce a person’s chances of developing long COVID. “There is near universal agreement on that,” Ziyad Al-Aly, an epidemiologist and a clinician at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. Some experts think that antiviral use may be making a dent as well, by decreasing the proportion of COVID cases that progress to severe disease, a risk factor for certain types of long COVID. Others have pointed to the possibility that more recent variants of the virus—some of them maybe less likely to penetrate deeply into the lungs or affect certain especially susceptible organs—may be less apt to trigger chronic illness too.

    But consensus on any of these points is lacking—especially on just how much, if at all, these interventions help. Experts are divided even on the effect of vaccines, which have the most evidence to back their protective punch: Some studies find that they trim risk by 15 percent, others up to about 70 percent. Paxlovid, too, has become a point of contention: While some analyses have shown that taking the antiviral early in infection helps prevent long COVID, others have found no effect at all. Any implication that we’ve tamed long COVID exaggerates how positive the overall picture is. Hannah Davis, one of the leaders of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, who developed long COVID during the pandemic’s first months, told me that she’s seen how the most optimistic studies get the most attention from the media and the public. With a topic as unwieldy and challenging to understand as this, Davis said, “we still see overreactions to good news, and underreactions to bad news.”

    That findings are all over the place on long COVID isn’t a shock. The condition still lacks a universal definition or a standard method of diagnosis; when recruiting patients into their studies, research groups can rely on distinct sets of criteria, inevitably yielding disparate and seemingly contradictory sets of results. With vaccines, for instance, the more wide-ranging the set of potential long-COVID symptoms a study looks at, the less effective shots may appear—simply because “vaccines don’t work on everything,” Al-Aly told me.

    Studying long COVID has also gotten tougher. The less attention there is on COVID, “the less likely people are to associate long-term symptoms with it,” Priya Duggal, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Fewer people are testing for the virus. And some physicians still “don’t believe in long COVID—that’s what I hear a lot,” Sanders told me. The fact that fewer new long-COVID cases are appearing before researchers and clinicians could be in part driven by fewer diagnoses being made. Al-Aly worries that the situation could deteriorate further: Although long-COVID research is still chugging along, “momentum has stalled.” Others share his concern. Continued public disinterest, Duggal told me, could dissuade journals from publishing high-profile papers on the subject—or deter politicians from setting aside funds for future research.

    Even if new cases of long COVID are less likely nowadays, the incidence rates haven’t dropped to zero. And rates of recovery are slow, low, and still murky. At this point, “people are entering this category at a greater rate than people are exiting this category,” Michael Peluso, a long-COVID researcher at UCSF, told me. The CDC’s Household Pulse Survey, for instance, shows that the proportion of American adults reporting that they’re currently dealing with long COVID has held steady—about 5 to 6 percent—for more than a year (though the numbers have dropped since 2021). Long COVID remains one of the most debilitating chronic conditions in today’s world—and full recovery remains uncommon, especially, it seems, for those who have been dealing with the disease for the longest.

    Exact numbers on recovery are tricky to come by, for the same reasons that it’s difficult to pin down how effective preventives are. Some studies report rates far more optimistic than others. David Putrino, a physical therapist who runs a long-COVID clinic at Mount Sinai Health System, where he and his colleagues have seen more than 3,000 long-haulers since the pandemic’s start, told me his best estimates err on the side of the prognosis being poor. About 20 percent of Putrino’s patients fully recover within the first few months, he told me. Beyond that, though, he routinely encounters people who experience only partial symptom relief—as well as a cohort that, “no matter what we think to try,” Putrino told me, “we can’t even seem to stop them from deteriorating.” Reports of higher recovery rates, Putrino and other experts said, might be conflating improvement with a return to baseline, or mistakenly assuming that people who stop responding to follow-ups are better, rather than just done participating.

    Read: Long COVID is being erased—again

    Davis also worries that recovery rates could drop. Some researchers and clinicians have noticed that today’s new long-COVID patients are more likely than earlier patients to come in with certain neurological symptoms—among them, brain fog and dizziness—that have been linked to slower recovery trajectories, Lekshmi Santhosh, a pulmonary specialist at UCSF, told me.

    In any case, recovery rates are still modest enough that long-COVID clinics across the country—even ones that have noted a dip in demand—remain very full. Currently, Putrino’s clinic has a waitlist of three to six months. The same is true for clinical trials investigating potential treatments. One, run by Peluso, that is investigating monoclonal-antibody therapy has a waitlist that is “hundreds of people deep,” Peluso told me: “We do not have the problem of not being able to find people who want to participate.”

    Any decrease in long-COVID incidence may not last, either. Viral evolution could always produce a new variant or subvariant with higher risks of chronic issues. The protective effects of vaccination may also be quite temporary, and the fewer people who keep up to date with their shots, the more porous immunity’s safety net may become. In this way, kids—though seemingly less likely to develop long COVID overall—may remain worryingly vulnerable, Yonts told me, because they’re born entirely susceptible, and immunization rates in the youngest age groups remain extremely low. And yet, little kids who get long COVID may need to live with it the longest. Some of Yonts’s patients have barely started grade school and have already been sick for three-plus years—half of their lives so far, or more.

    Long COVID can also manifest after repeat infections of SARS-CoV-2—and although several experts told me they think that each subsequent exposure poses less incremental risk, any additional exposure is worrisome. People all over the world are being exposed, over and over again, as the pathogen spreads with blistering speed, more or less year-round, in populations that have mostly dropped mitigations and are mostly behind on annual shots (where they’re available). Additional infections can worsen the symptoms of people living with long COVID, or yank them out of remission. Long COVID’s inequities may also widen as marginalized populations, less likely to receive vaccines or antivirals and more likely to be exposed to the virus, continue to develop the condition at higher rates.

    There’s no question that COVID-19 has changed. The disease is more familiar; the threat of severe disease, although certainly not vanished, is quantitatively less now. But dismissing the dangers of the virus would be a mistake. Even if rates of new long-COVID cases continue to drop for some time, Yonts pointed out, they will likely stabilize somewhere. These risks will continue to haunt us and incur costs that will keep adding up. Long COVID may not kill as directly as severe, acute COVID has. But people’s lives still depend on avoiding it, Putrino told me—“at least, their life as they know it right now.”

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • America Is Having a Senior Moment on Vaccines

    America Is Having a Senior Moment on Vaccines

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    For years now, health experts have been warning that COVID-era politics and the spread of anti-vaxxer lies have brought us to the brink of public-health catastrophe—that a Great Collapse of Vaccination Rates is nigh. This hasn’t come to pass. In spite of deep concerns about a generation of young parents who might soon give up on immunizations altogether—not simply for COVID, but perhaps for all disease—many of the stats we have are looking good. Standard vaccination coverage among babies and toddlers, including the pandemic babies born in 2020, is “high and stable,” the CDC reports. And kindergarteners’ immunization rates, which dipped after the pandemic started, are no longer losing ground.

    Whatever gaps in early childhood vaccination were brought on by the chaos of early 2020 have since been reversed, Alison Buttenheim, a professor of nursing and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told me: “We’ve substantially caught up, which is incredible. It’s actually an amazing feat.”

    Read: The good news about vaccine hesitancy

    But even in the shadow of this triumph, a more specific crisis in vaccine acceptance has emerged. Americans aren’t now suspicious of inoculations on the whole—the nation isn’t anti-vax—but we have lost faith in yearly COVID shots. Barely any children have been getting them. Among adults, the drop in uptake has been rapid and relentless: By the spring of 2022, 56 percent of all adults had received their initial booster shot; a year later, just 28 percent were up to date; so far this COVID season, just 19 percent can say the same.

    Of course, the dangers from infection have been dropping too. Almost all of us have been exposed to COVID at this point, either through prior immunization, natural infection, or—most likely—both. That makes the disease much less deadly than it’s ever been before. (Among kids, the CDC now attributes “0.00%” of weekly deaths to COVID.) But for one age group in particular—people over 65—the crashing vaccination rates should inspire dread. More than 1,500 deaths each week are still associated with COVID, and almost all of them are senior citizens; current data hint that COVID has been killing seniors at seven times the rate of flu. Across the nation’s nursing homes and retirement communities, the Great Collapse is real.

    Like younger American adults, seniors haven’t been avoiding all recommended immunizations, just the ones for COVID. Their flu-shot rates have gone down a little in the past few years, but only by a handful of percentage points from a pandemic-driven, all-time high of 75 percent. This season, about 70 percent of people over 65 have received their flu vaccine, in line with average rates that haven’t changed that much for decades. In the meantime, seniors’ uptake of the latest COVID shots has fallen off by more than half since 2022, to just 38 percent. These diverging rates—steady for the flu, plummeting for COVID—are notably at odds with the attendant risks. Seniors seem to understand the value of inoculating themselves against the flu. So why do they forgo the same precaution against something so much worse?

    Read: The COVID strategy America hasn’t really tried

    One might blame the toxic political battles around vaccines, and rampant misinformation about their ill effects. “Something terrible has happened to broaden and intensify public rejection of vaccines and other biomedical innovations in the United States,” the vaccine expert Peter Hotez wrote in his recent book The Deadly Rise of Anti-science. Certainly, toxic politics and rampant misinformation exist, but the turn against the experts that Hotez and others have decried doesn’t really fit the emergency described above. Taken as a whole, the population of Americans over 65 is hardly soured on vaccines. Nor are they afraid of COVID vaccination in particular: Though political divides persist, more than 95 percent of seniors received their initial round of shots. More than 95 percent!

    Echoing Hotez in an opinion piece for JAMA that came out last week, the FDA commissioner, Robert Califf, and a senior FDA official named Peter Marks cited the abysmal uptake of COVID shots by senior citizens as one of several signs that the country is nearing “a dangerous tipping point” on vaccination, driven by an oceanic online tide of vaccine misinformation. (Health-care providers should try to stem that tide, they wrote, with “large amounts of truthful, accessible scientific evidence.”) But the volume and intensity of anti-vaccine rhetoric seems to have diminished somewhat since 2022, Buttenheim told me: “You’d have to come up with some reason why it’s having more of an effect now than it did over the past couple of years.”

    Confusion and fatigue may well be bigger factors here than fear or false beliefs. Many Americans, young and old, have long since moved beyond the pandemic in their daily life, and may not want to think about the topic long enough to schedule another shot. The fact that people are fed up with COVID and all of the arguments it spawned is a “major drag on uptake of the vaccine,” Noel Brewer, a professor who studies health behavior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Along with many other adults, seniors have also been thrown off by changes in what the shot is called and when it’s recommended for which groups. Buttenheim doesn’t think that people are particularly afraid of this year’s dose. “This is not, like, Back off,” she said. “It’s like, Oh, there is one?”

    Read: America’s fall booster plan has a fatal paradox

    Another theory holds that the CDC is responsible for this indifference, by pushing yearly COVID shots on people of all ages, including those for whom the net benefits of further vaccination are hard to see. In the U.K., where a much narrower group of people is eligible for updated COVID shots, uptake among seniors has been almost double what it is in the U.S., at 70 percent. That’s not because the British health-care system is better organized than ours—or not only on account of that. Even in that context, British seniors only get their flu shots at a rate that’s slightly higher than American seniors do.

    The broader rollout could contribute to the problem, Rupali Limaye, an epidemiologist who studies health communication at Johns Hopkins University, told me: “When it’s a blanket recommendation, it does dilute the message.” The CDC’s messaging on COVID shots has the benefit of being simple, but at the cost of being less persuasive for the people who are at highest risk. Then again, all Americans above the age of six months are advised to get the flu shot, and more or less the same proportions do so every year. That’s a product of our training, Brewer told me: “The U.S. has invested for decades in developing the habit of getting an annual flu shot. Older adults know that this is the thing they need to do, and they are used to it.”

    Even more important than the habit of getting flu shots is the habit of supplying them. Local clinics, businesses, and retirement communities know how to give these vaccinations (and they understand how the costs will be covered); they’ve been doing this for years. Buttenheim told me that her university sets up a flu-shot clinic every fall, where she can usually get immunized in less than 90 seconds. But the equivalent for COVID shots is yet to become routine. Where the vaccines are available, appointments have been canceled over missing doses or mix-ups with insurance. Government efforts to improve access were delayed.

    With the end of the pandemic emergency, obtaining a COVID shot has simply gotten harder, no matter your intentions or beliefs. “The very well-structured and scaffolded process for getting those vaccines before has just evaporated,” Buttenheim said. For the uptake rates to turn around, a new, post-emergency system for delivery might have to be established, with less confusion over cost and coverage. Even that development alone would do a lot to end the geriatric vaccine crash. If COVID shots could be made as standardized and reflexive as the ones for flu, seasonal vaccination rates might start rising once again, at least until about two-thirds of people over 65 are getting shots. That’s the rate we see for flu shots, and probably an upper limit, Brewer said: “We won’t do better than that.”

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    Daniel Engber

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  • Catching up with Floridians whose stories inspired us in 2023

    Catching up with Floridians whose stories inspired us in 2023

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    FLORIDA — As we reach the holiday season’s peak and look back at a year that brought happy times for many people but major struggles for even more, the stories of those who found the strength to overcome adversity often make the most inspiring impression.

    Spectrum News catches up with some of the incredible individuals who taught us all a little bit about the best of humanity in 2023.

    Storm devastation reveals strength of spirit

    When Category 4 Hurricane Idalia stormed Florida’s Big Bend, it sent destructive storm surge into the Tampa Bay area and left parts of Central Florida flooded.

    The floors of Beatrice Hall’s Rubonia home buckled and collapsed, but the great grandmother stood tall. She made fast friends with David Couzens, when he generously brought her a new refrigerator.

    Days later, when a fall landed Hall in the hospital for 60 days, Couzens and a friend got to work, making her home safe to live in once again.

    Some parts of hurricane recovery occur pretty rapidly, and areas that avoid a storm’s most destructive effects can sometimes slip from the headlines even fasterIn Orlo Vista, it didn’t take long for the waist-high flood waters to recede from Willie Wright Jr.’s family home on Hope Circle, but he’s been working to repair all the damage for more than a year.

    Help from neighbors and kindhearted strangers meant the world in the beginning. Now, Wright’s mission to move his father back into the home he built decades ago fuels his determination to complete the massive task at hand.

    Life’s obstacles provide unique perspectives

    At 15 years old, Jasmine Zipperer found herself in the foster care system. When she aged out and faced the prospect of figuring life out all alone, she found a place to call home — and a family to help her prepare for the opportunities and responsibilities of adulthood.

    It’s all because of a former NFL player, who was adopted by a loving family when he was just a week old. Jeff Faine says he always felt an obligation to share his blessings and give back. So he and his wife opened Faine House for 18-23-year-olds on the verge of homelessness.

    When James McCallum was born with a large, bulging birthmark on his neck and back, his parents didn’t know how it would affect him. But after three surgeries and numerous trips to his doctor in Chicago, the two-year-old continues to inspire with his simply effortless smiles.

    The painful process may not yet be over, but the McCallum family is certainly looking to the future. James’ mom, Kaitlyn, is pregnant.

    She shared the moment of concern they made their way through, wondering if their second child would face the same struggles as their first. Then, they realized — they would just have to follow James’ example.

    At this time last year, Janet Thompson had just undergone surgery for stage 1 pancreatic cancer and was scheduled to start chemotherapy right after Christmas. 

    The treatment took an expectedly harsher toll than she expected, but Thompson fought her way to ringing the cancer-free bell.

    With her follow-up scans since then all giving her a clean bill of health, she’s back in the holiday spirit at her home in Titusville and grateful for life’s simply joys — like gathering with family in the kitchen to decorate Christmas cookies.

    Culture fuels entrepreneurial purpose

    Floridians are from everywhere, and that natural diversity of culture has cooked up a wide range of culinary options in small towns and big cities across the state.

    An Orlando restaurant is serving up Filipino food that feeds a growing sense of community and is turning its small bungalow-style building into somewhat of a cultural center.

    Milosz Gasior doesn’t speak much — but he doesn’t have to. The 2023 Gibbs High School graduate has developed a remarkable talent for talking with 88 black and white keys that, his mother hopes, will open doors to a bright and successful future.

    Gasior has autism and is mostly non-verbal.

    With prospects for holding down a job after graduation unlikely to manifest, he was connected with a professional musician who has since gotten him several paid piano gigs. 

    Good people find cool ways to help

    Reasons for helping others vary as much as the ways people go about doing it.

    For Brian Farr, a family tragedy moved him to put smiles on the faces of some incredible children — and keep them safe.

    His daughter, Maddie, died three years ago. She had White-Sutton syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder, that caused her many difficulties in life. But every Friday night, they would head to the pool for swimming lessons, loving every minute of it.

    Farr created a foundation in his daughter’s name to help special needs children learn swimming safety.

    Now, Maddie’s legacy and love of the water lives on through other kids.

    At 10-years-old, Greshaun Dabrezil has already made quite a name for himself.

    You can call him “Cooler Boy.” It’s a moniker he both relishes and counts on to continue his mission, which is as simple as it is successful.

    Dabrezil is a decorated gymnast and certainly understands the importance of hydration. So when he noticed the people who spend hot days on street corners, he decided to help.

    For a while now, he has been handing out free bottles of water and leaving coolers at bus stops around Orlando. Each one has a straightforward sign on the handle. And Dabrezil isn’t finished. He hopes to partner with Lynx to put coolers on buses, too. 

    Sports can facilitate healing

    On a sports field, the prospect of injury always lingers. But when an athlete gets badly hurt away from the game, sport can drive them down the road toward recovery. 

    Mona Rodriguez was a professional soccer player, and fitness has always been paramount. She was riding her motorcycle to the gym, when a driver making a turn didn’t see her. 

    Rodriguez woke up in the hospital with multiple major injuries — but her spirit never shattered.

    Now, she lives by a simple mantra, and she’s using soccer to regain her mobility.

    When a player suffers a personal loss, teammates often help heal the invisible wounds. 

    Bella Rodrigues was a flag football star at Robinson High School, where she helped lead the team to their 7th-straight championship her senior year. She did that while dealing with the loss of her father, who died of cancer during the season.

    The Knights, and the rest of the school, rallied around her.

    Now, even though she’s in college, Rodrigues loves to return and just enjoy a grueling workout with her family.

    Faith inspires grand transformations

    From barber to YouTube star, life looks a lot different for Travis Settineri these days.

    He spent 18 years cutting hair for a living, but decided to take a leap of faith. He put a longtime passion for filming to use and started a channel focused on spreading kindness around Plant City and Lakeland.

    A year-and-a-half later, he’s introducing his almost 4 million subscribers to the many different people he meets and helps with food, finances and shelter.

    The massive following has given him the financial freedom to expand and focus all his time on making a difference.

    When a group of teenage boys dove into Spring Bayou in January on a quest to retrieve the Epiphany cross, they continued a 118-year Tarpon Springs tradition. 

    George Stamas surfaced victorious, and he says, as promised by his Greek Orthodox faith, the cross brought him numerous blessings over the last year. 

    He led his high school football team to a 9-1 season, and his coach says he’s made a number of positive changes in his life. 

    Stamas’ family is no stranger to the Epiphany cross. His cousin retrieved it a few years back, and his great grandfather did the same 85 years go.

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    Curtis McCloud

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  • Woman with Prader-Willi syndrome celebrates graduation with family

    Woman with Prader-Willi syndrome celebrates graduation with family

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    WESLEY CHAPEL, Fla. — Winter graduations are getting underway and one family is particularly excited to see their loved one walk across the stage.

    Tyanna Tran was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder when she was born and her parents were told she might not live. But now, it’s graduation time for 24-year-old Tran.

    What You Need To Know

    • NIH reports less than 50,000 people in the United States have the disease

    “I’m excited,” said Tran as she worked on decorating her graduation cap in her Pasco County home with her mother, sister and personal support aide.

    Tran’s mother, Julie Dang-Martinez, says it’s a day doctors told her might never come. Her daughter was diagnosed with Prader-Wille syndrome and given a limited lifespan.

    Prader-Willi syndrome is a genetic disorder characterized by a variety of physical, mental and behavioral features.

    “We were told that she wouldn’t even live to middle school,” said Dang-Martinez. “And then when she got to high school, she got Honor Roll, she got high GPA awards and now she’s graduating college. It’s a huge thing for our family not just because she’s graduating college, but she wasn’t expected to live.”

    Tran is defying those odds. She’s walking the stage Wednesday, after earning her AA from Pasco-Hernando State College. She plans to continue her education and pursue a bachelor’s degree.

    University of Florida Professor Dr. Jennifer Miller specializes in Prader-Willi syndrome and says this is a rare achievement.

    An exciting achievement this family hopes inspires others.

    “We want to show other families that it can be done,” said Dang-Martinez. “When they want to give up hope when it’s hard, when their child’s in the hospital for diabetes or obesity complications and stuff like that, it’s possible.”

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    Melissa Eichman

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  • Cancer survivor painting to raise money for research

    Cancer survivor painting to raise money for research

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    MANATEE COUNTY, Fla. — For this week’s “On the Town,” a cancer survivor is painting to raise money for cancer research. It’s at the Dancing Crane Gallery in Bradenton, where local artists are donating a portion of the proceeds to the American Cancer Society.

    What You Need To Know

    • More than 20 years ago, Joan Schnuerch was diagnosed with breast cancer

    • Later, she was diagnosed with both colon and ovarian cancer

    • Painting was her therapy and she’s using her skills to sell her artwork to raise money towards cancer research

    With a dip of a brush, Joan Schnuerch lets her thoughts paint for her.

    “Every once in a while, I feel I want to be wild,” she said.

    It’s an art form she’s been practicing since she was a little kid, creating anything with the tip of a brush.

    “I paint sailboats. Being out in the water is a similar freedom as when you paint; it makes me feel free,” she said.

    Painting has helped her through tough times in her life. In 2002, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

    “It takes the mind away from the worries of ‘How are you going to survive?’” Schnuerch said.

    Four years later, she was diagnosed with colon and ovarian cancer.

    “Dealing with three cancers at once, we made our will, and I was all set to say goodbye to everyone. I had children; I had a husband. I wasn’t ready to go,” she said.

    But she underwent chemo and received good news in 2010.

    “I did the chemo, and yeah, it worked,” she said.

    But with each flip of a page in her photo album is a reminder of how positive she was.

    “You have to continue living; you can’t just sit back and feel sorry for yourself,” Schnuerch said.

    And some tough moments.

    “I cried just once when my husband drove me to the hospital when I went in for the mastectomy,” she said.

    Painting was her therapy. Now she’s using her skills to sell her artwork to raise money towards cancer research, also hoping people feel the sense of freedom she does when they look at her paintings.

    “I always have sailboats in my dreams and thoughts — always so freeing,” she said. It’s nature that gives her inspiration to create beautiful pieces of work.

    “Peaceful. I love how the wild weeds and grasses grow around the pond,” Schnuerch said.

    Using her skills for a good cause to help others who are going through what she did.

    The event will go on for the entire month to raise money for the American Cancer Society at the Dancing Crane Gallery at 1019 10th Ave. West, Bradenton, Fla., 34205.

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    Julia Hazel

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  • Sheroes honors female veteran with fishing trip

    Sheroes honors female veteran with fishing trip

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    HOMOSSASSA, Fla. — In the words of JFK, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

    A new nonprofit Sheroes Warriors on Water, Inc. in Citrus County took 23-year Navy veteran Jeanetta Mundis on a fishing trip.

    It was the first in what the Sheroes organization hopes to be many charters to honor and pay tribute to female veterans.

    What You Need To Know

    • Sheroes Warriors on Water, Inc. started after founders won fishing tournament in May 2022

    • The group decided to honor female veterans

    • The first veteran to receive an all expenses paid fishing trip off the waters of Citrus County is Jane Mundis

    • Mundis is a 23-year veteran of the Navy who is still very involved with veterans groups

    The moment came quick for Jeanetta to reel in a big catch. It took her 10 seconds from the moment she dropped her line to the moment she hooked a grouper.

    The struggle to bring one of Florida’s favorite fish was real but short-lived, as Jeanetta, also known as Jane, brought in the grouper in 30 seconds.

    It had to go back in the water as it is currently offseason for grouper fishing.

    How Jane even got to today’s catch is a feel-good story of its own.

    Clear blue skies and lots of fish usually await Captain Katie Jo Davis as she navigates daily the waters off of Citrus County.

    On that day of fishing, Capt. Julie Meconnahey, a Coast Guard accredited Captain and founder of the Sheroes organization, took in those clear blue skies and calm waters.

    Both fishing captains were doing what they normally do in their charter fishing businesses.

    This time, they were honoring Vietnam-Era veteran Mundis.

    She told us what it is like to be a veteran in the sunshine state.

    “The comradery is great and the people are so friendly, you know,” Jane said. “As soon as they see you’re a veteran, they automatically say thank you for your service and we appreciate that.”

    Mundis enlisted in the Navy straight out of high school. Then, she dedicated 23 years to her country.

    Jane said she did it as payback for what her country did for her.

    She was in foster care from the age of three until she enlisted. She said she owed the government for taking care of her.

    “I felt the need to support my country, and I was a foster child,” she said.

    Capt. Katie Jo has a shared experience with Jane. The fishing captain is also a veteran herself, serving in the Army.

    She wanted to share what makes her feel good every day.

    “This is my therapy, whether you’re seeing the dolphins, you hear the whistling of the winds from the fishing lines, you’re reeling in the biggest fish you’ve ever caught,” said Captain Katie Jo. “Everything about being out here is very therapeutic.”

    She along with Capt. Julie and the help of many donors in Citrus launched the Sheroes charity.

    Sheroes started after the captains won a fishing tournament last year and, with their winnings, wanted to give back.

    “We needed to do something with it,” Julie said. “And we get so much peace from the fishing that we do.”

    “And it’s not just about the fishing,” said Katie Jo. “What we want to focus on is getting female veterans out on the water.”

    During the trip, Jane also reeled in a 20-inch redfish which became the day’s trophy.

    She said she is proud to be the first veteran honored by this new non-profit.

    “It’s a first step for these ladies to showcase their desire to help the veterans,” said Jane. “It’s a great thing.”

    The efforts are all in line with the theme of paying it forward.

    Jane is still very involved with veterans’ organizations.

    She is part of the Female Veterans Network in Inverness, the local American Legion, and served as the first national chaplain of the Fleet Reserve Association, which she is still a part of now more than 30 years.

    The Sheroes group is now planning to take six lady veterans for a sunset cruise.

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    Roy De Jesus

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  • The Election Reform That Could Help Republicans in a Swing State

    The Election Reform That Could Help Republicans in a Swing State

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    When Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania announced in September that the nation’s largest swing state would implement automatic voter registration, Donald Trump threw a conniption. “Pennsylvania is at it again!” the former president posted on Truth Social, his social-media platform. The switch, Trump said, would be “a disaster for the Election of Republicans, including your favorite President, ME!”

    Trump’s panic is consistent with his (baseless) view that any reforms designed to increase voter turnout, such as expanding mail balloting and early voting, are part of a Democratic conspiracy to rig elections in their favor. But he may be wrong to fear automatic voter registration: Although Shapiro is a Democrat, if either party stands to gain from his move, it’s likely to be the GOP. In Pennsylvania, the reform “really has a potential to lean more Republican,” Seo-young Silvia Kim, an elections expert who has studied the system, told me. It’s “not great news for Democrats.”

    First implemented in Oregon in 2016, automatic voter registration is now used in 23 states, including three—Alaska, Georgia, and West Virginia—that are governed by Republicans. Rather than requiring citizens to proactively register to vote, some states that use the system automatically enroll people who meet eligibility requirements and then give them the option to decline or opt out. The shift is subtler in Pennsylvania; the state has simply started prompting people to register to vote when they obtain a new or renewed driver’s license or state ID.

    David A. Graham: Actually good news about voting, for a change

    The seemingly minor change, which voting-rights advocates still place under the umbrella of “automatic” registration, is based on behavioral research showing that people are less likely to opt out of a choice than to opt in. By including voter registration as part of a commonly used process such as obtaining a driver’s license—and by presenting it as the default option rather than a form that citizens have to request—states have found that they can increase both registration and turnout in elections. “Even though the process isn’t that big of a shift, the effects are great,” Greta Bedekovics, the associate director of democracy policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told me.

    Democrats have led the move toward automatic voter registration, and their 2021 comprehensive voting-rights legislation known as the For the People Act included a requirement that state-elections chiefs implement the policy. (The bill died in the Senate.) But automatic registration does not inherently favor one party or the other, and it has appealed to Republicans in some states because it helps officials clean up voter rolls and safeguard elections. “I don’t know who it will help, and that’s kind of the point,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting-rights program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me.

    A 2017 study by the Center for American Progress found that the voters who enrolled through Oregon’s automatic-registration system were more likely to be younger, more rural, lower income, and more ethnically diverse than the electorate as a whole—a demographic mix that suggests that Republicans might have benefited as much as Democrats.

    Other research shows a more partisan advantage. While an assistant professor at American University in 2018, Kim, the elections expert, studied the effects of automatic registration in Orange County, California, the site of several hard-fought congressional races that year. She found that among residents who needed to update their registration because they had moved within the county, automatic registration resulted in no meaningful shift for Democrats. But it substantially boosted turnout among Republicans and independents—by 8.1 points and 7.4 points, respectively. “I was actually very surprised,” Kim said, adding that she’d expected that if any party gained, it would be Democrats. She suspects that Democrats may have been unaffected by the change because in 2018, they were already motivated to vote by Trump’s recent election.

    The impact of automatic registration on any one election is likely to be marginal, but even small shifts could be significant in a state such as Pennsylvania, where less than one percentage point separated Trump from Hillary Clinton in 2016 and just more than one point separated Joe Biden from Trump four years later. Several factors suggest that the new system could benefit the GOP in Pennsylvania. Although Democrats have more registered voters in the state, Republicans have been closing the gap during the Trump era as more white working-class and rural voters who stopped voting for Democrats years ago have chosen to join the GOP. Democrats have countered that drift by capturing wealthier suburban voters, a group that helped Shapiro and first-term Democratic Senator John Fetterman win their races during last year’s midterm elections. Because this demographic already goes to the polls pretty reliably, though, automatic registration is more likely to boost turnout among the right-leaning rural working class.

    An early-2020 study also suggested that the GOP stood to gain from higher voter turnout in Pennsylvania. The Knight Foundation surveyed 12,000 “chronic non-voters” nationwide before Democrats had settled on Biden as their nominee. Across the country, nonvoters said that if they cast a ballot, they would support the Democratic candidate over Trump by a slim margin, 33 percent to 30 percent. But in Pennsylvania, nonvoters went strongly in the other direction: By a 36–28 percent margin, they said they’d prefer Trump over the Democrat. The eight-point gap was the second largest (after Arizona) in favor of Trump in any of the 10 swing states that the organization polled.

    Jerusalem Demsas: Americans vote too much

    “Democrats sometimes have the mistaken opinion that anybody that doesn’t show up is going to vote Democrat,” Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s been one of the myths in Democratic circles for years. Quite frankly, given the changing of the respective party bases, it makes sense that [automatic registration] may somewhat benefit Republicans.” Other recent polls have suggested that the political realignment of the Trump era has made the GOP more reliant on infrequent voters.

    The place where Democrats could most use stronger turnout—particularly among the party’s base of Black voters—is Philadelphia, which provided about one-sixth of Biden’s statewide vote in 2020. The city had higher turnout than Pennsylvania as a whole in both 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama led the Democratic ticket, but it has lagged further and further behind in each election since. Last year, turnout in Philadelphia was just 43 percent, compared with 54 percent statewide.

    Yet automatic voter registration might have less impact in Philadelphia than in other parts of the state. Studies have found that the switch drives higher turnout outside urban areas, where Democratic voters are most concentrated. That’s partly because automatic voter registration is operated through the state Department of Motor Vehicles—an agency with which people who rely on public transit are less likely to interact. For that reason, when New York implemented automatic registration in 2020, voting-rights advocates lobbied aggressively for the state to enroll voters through other agencies in addition to the DMV; as of 2018, a majority of the more than 3 million households in New York City did not own a car.

    Pennsylvania has no plans to implement automatic voter registration beyond the state DMV. Democrats have been adamant that in enacting the new system, Shapiro was not trying to benefit his party but merely trying to reach the 1.6 million Keystone State residents who are eligible but not registered to vote. Although Republicans argued that the change should have gone through the state legislature, they have not formally challenged automatic registration in court. Few of them seemed to agree with Trump that the reform would doom the GOP. “Its impact will be somewhere between inconsequential and a nothingburger,” Christopher Nicholas, a Republican consultant in Pennsylvania, told me.

    Democrats say it’s too early to assess the electoral impact of automatic voter registration, but they acknowledged that Republicans might gain more voters as a result. More than 13,500 Pennsylvanians registered to vote through the new system during its first six weeks of implementation, according to numbers provided by the Shapiro administration. Of that total, Republicans added about 100 more voters than Democrats. “Our former president is almost always wrong,” Joanna McClinton, who leads a narrow Democratic majority as the speaker of the Pennsylvania state House, told me. The fact that Trump is so opposed to the reform, she said, “reveals something we’ve always known, which is Republicans want to keep the electorate small, selective, and they don’t want to expand access to voting even if they could be the beneficiaries of it.”

    Whether Trump regains the presidency next year could hinge on the tightest of margins in Pennsylvania. I asked McClinton if she worried that by implementing automatic voter registration, Shapiro had unintentionally bestowed an electoral gift on Republicans ahead of an enormously significant election. McClinton didn’t hesitate. “Not at all,” she replied quickly. “I look forward to seeing the full data, but I definitely am not looking at this from a political perspective but from a big-D democracy perspective.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • Fox squirrels meet match at Plant City fall farm festival

    Fox squirrels meet match at Plant City fall farm festival

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    TAMPA, Fla. — Charlotte Weronik knows how to find her way out on the farm.

    “If you do the maze correctly it’ll be one mile,” she explained, “It is five acres. It has a lot of twists and turns and little stops with scarecrows and mirrors and tables and decorations that you can take nice pictures in.”

    The fifth grader volunteers here at the Fox Squirrel Corn Maze in Plant City.

    She hasn’t missed a weekend, and she helps set up too.

    She looks through the hundreds of little funky gourds near their pumpkin house, which clearly a witch lives there. “When pumpkins feel really light and hollow and they have all these spots, it means that they are going bad,” said Weronik.

    Her next job? Weronik drops a peace offering.

    “I am putting sunflower seeds around the base of the tree,” she said.

    That’s because it will distract the fox squirrels from eating all the pumpkins.

    “It’s a very good snack for them, but this kind of distracts them from that,” Weronik said.

    Set up also calls for someone to test the equipment, so she bounces on the jump pad under large oak trees covered in Spanish moss.

    “Sometimes it’ll be way too puffed up that it’s very hard or it will be very floppy and hard to bounce on, but right now, it’s pretty good,” Weronik explained.

    Weronik discovered this Florida-style fall celebration thanks to her aunt and the event organizer, Lisa Steward.

    “I like helping her with flowers and unloading pumpkins like I am right now,” Weronik said.

    She’s the only 9-year-old kid she knows with her advanced seasonal celebration skills.

    “It’s a very unique experience and it’s quite fun,” Weronik said.

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    Virginia Johnson

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  • What If There’s a Secret Benefit to Getting Asian Glow?

    What If There’s a Secret Benefit to Getting Asian Glow?

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    At every party, no matter the occasion, my drink of choice is soda water with lime. I have never, not once, been drunk—or even finished a full serving of alcohol. The single time I came close to doing so (thanks to half a serving of mulled wine), my heart rate soared, the room spun, and my face turned stop-sign red … all before I collapsed in front of a college professor at an academic event.

    The blame for my alcohol aversion falls fully on my genetics: Like an estimated 500 million other people, most of them of East Asian descent, I carry a genetic mutation called ALDH2*2 that causes me to produce broken versions of an enzyme called aldehyde dehydrogenase 2, preventing my body from properly breaking down the toxic components of alcohol. And so, whenever I drink, all sorts of poisons known as aldehydes build up in my body—a predicament that my face announces to everyone around me.

    By one line of evolutionary logic, I and the other sufferers of so-called alcohol flush (also known as Asian glow) shouldn’t exist. Alcohol isn’t the only source of aldehydes in the body. Our own cells also naturally produce the compounds, and they can wreak all sorts of havoc on our DNA and proteins if they aren’t promptly cleared. So even at baseline, flushers are toting around extra toxins, leaving them at higher risk for a host of health issues, including esophageal cancer and heart disease. And yet, somehow, our cohort of people, with its intense genetic baggage, has grown to half a billion people in potentially as little as 2,000 years.

    The reason might hew to a different line of evolutionary logic—one driven not by the dangers of aldehydes to us but by the dangers of aldehydes to some of our smallest enemies, according to Heran Darwin, a microbiologist at New York University. As Darwin and her colleagues reported at a conference last week, people with the ALDH2*2 mutation might be especially good at fighting off certain pathogens—among them the bug that causes tuberculosis, or TB, one of the greatest infectious killers in recent history.

    The research, currently under review for publication at the journal Science, hasn’t yet been fully vetted by other scientists. And truly nailing TB, or any other pathogen, as the evolutionary catalyst for the rise of ALDH2*2 will likely be tough. But if infectious disease can even partly explain the staggering size of the flushing cohort—as several experts told me is likely the case—the mystery of one of the most common mutations in the human population will be one step closer to being solved.

    Read: Tuberculosis got to South America through … seals?

    Scientists have long been aware of aldehydes’ nasty effects on DNA and proteins; the compounds are carcinogens that literally “damage the fabric of life,” says Ketan J. Patel, a molecular biologist at the University of Oxford who studies the ALDH2*2 mutation and is reviewing the new research for publication in Science. For years, though, many researchers dismissed the chemicals as the annoying refuse of the body’s daily chores. Our bodies produce them as part of run-of-the-mill metabolism; the compounds also build up during infection or inflammation, as byproducts of some of the noxious chemicals we churn out. But then aldehydes are generally swept away by our molecular cleanup systems like so much microscopic trash.

    Darwin and her colleagues are now convinced that the chemicals deserve more credit. Dosed into laboratory cultures, aldehydes can kill TB within days. In previous research, Darwin’s team also found that aldehydes—including ones produced by the bacteria themselves—can make TB ultra sensitive to nitric oxide, a defensive compound that humans produce during infections, as well as copper, a metal that destroys many microbes on contact. (For what it’s worth, the aldehydes found in our bodies after we consume alcohol don’t seem to much bother TB, Darwin told me. Drinking has actually been linked to worse outcomes with the disease.)

    The team is still tabulating the many ways in which aldehydes are exerting their antimicrobial effects. But Darwin suspects that the bugs that are vulnerable to the chemicals are dying “a death by a thousand cuts,” she told me at the conference. Which makes aldehydes more than worthless waste. Maybe our ancestors’ bodies wised up to the molecules’ universally destructive powers—and began to purposefully deploy them in their defensive arsenal. “It’s the immune system capitalizing on the toxicity,” says Joshua Woodward, a microbiologist at the University of Washington who has been studying the antibacterial effects of aldehydes.

    Specific cells show hints that they’ve caught on to aldehydes’ potency. Sarah Stanley, a microbiologist and an immunologist at UC Berkeley, who has been co-leading the research with Darwin, has found that when immune cells receive certain chemical signals signifying infection, they’ll ramp up some of the metabolic pathways that produce aldehydes. Those same signals, the researchers recently found, can also prompt immune cells to tamp down their levels of aldehyde dehydrogenase 2—the very aldehyde-detoxifying enzyme that the mutant gene in people like me fails to make.

    If holstering that enzyme is a way for cells to up their supply of toxins and brace for inevitable attack, that could be good news for ALDH2*2 carriers, who already struggle to make enough of it. When, in an extreme imitation of human flushers, the researchers purged the ALDH2 gene from a strain of mice, then infected them with TB, they found that the rodents accumulated fewer bacteria in their lungs.

    The buildup of aldehydes in the mutant mice wasn’t enough to, say, render them totally immune to TB. But even a small defensive bump can make for a massive advantage when combating such a deadly disease, Russell Vance, an immunologist at UC Berkeley who’s been collaborating with Darwin and Stanley on the project, told me. Darwin is now curious as to whether TB’s distaste for aldehyde could be leveraged during infections, she told me—by, for instance, supplementing antibiotic regimens with a side of Antabuse, a medication that blocks aldehyde dehydrogenase, mimicking the effects of ALDH2*2.

    Tying those results to the existence of ALDH2*2 in half a billion people is a larger leap, several experts told me. There are clues of a relationship: Darwin and Stanley’s team found, for instance, that in a cohort from Vietnam and Singapore, people carrying the mutation were less likely to have active cases of TB—echoing patterns documented by at least one other study from Korea. But Daniela Brites, an evolutionary geneticist at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, told me that the connection still feels a little shaky. Other studies that have searched for genetic predispositions to TB, or resistance to it, she pointed out, haven’t hit on ALDH2*2—a sign that any link might be weak.

    The team’s general idea could still pan out. “They are definitely on the right track,” Patel told me. Throughout most of human history, infectious diseases have been among the most dramatic influences over who lives and who dies—a pressure so immense that it’s left obvious scars on the human genome. A mutation that can cause sickle cell anemia has become very common in parts of the African continent because it helps guard people against malaria.

    Read: A history of humanity in which humans are secondary

    The story with ALDH2*2 is probably similar, Patel said. He’s confident that some infectious agent—perhaps several of them—has played a major role in keeping the mutation around. TB, with its devastating track record, could be among the candidates, but it wouldn’t have to be. A few years ago, work from Woodward’s lab showed that aldehydes can also do a number on the bacterial pathogens Staphylococcus aureus and Francisella novicida. (Darwin and Stanley’s team have now shown that mice lacking ALDH2 also fare better against the closely related Francisella tularensis.) Che-Hong Chen, a geneticist at Stanford who’s been studying ALDH2*2 for years, suspects that the culprit might not be a bacterium at all. He favors the idea that it’s, once again, malaria, acting on a different part of our genome, in a different region of the world.

    Other tiny perks of ALDH2*2 may have helped the mutation proliferate. As Chen points out, it’s a pretty big disincentive to drink—and people who abstain (which, of course, isn’t all of us) do spare themselves a lot of potential liver problems. Which is another way in which the consequences of my genetic anomaly might not be so bad, even if at first flush it seems more trouble than it’s worth.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Bay Area Youth Wind Band Alumni reunite for Summer Breeze concert

    Bay Area Youth Wind Band Alumni reunite for Summer Breeze concert

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    TAMPA, Fla. — It’s the last rehearsal for Francisco Quixtan and his fellow alumni from the Bay Area Youth Wind Band before their annual reunion concert.

    What You Need To Know

    • Florida Wind Band and Summer Breeze concert: July 1 at 5:30 p.m. at Carrollwood Village Park, Tampa
    • Florida Wind Band concert: July 2, 6 p.m. at Palma Cela Presbyterian Church, Tampa
    • Francisco Quixtan is among the Bay Area Youth Wind Band alumni that will be performing in the Summer Breeze concert

    “I was one of the first to join this group in 2012. I was a senior in high school,” said Quixtan.

    The band welcomes back the best middle and high school wind musicians in the Tampa Bay area as Summer Breeze, under conductor and founder Dr. Matthew McCutchen, who is also the University of South Florida’s Director of Bands.

    And there is another concert that involves a flow of different instruments.

    “So the wind band is made of all woodwind, brass and percussion instruments, so we don’t involve any string instruments,” said Tony Negron, executive director of the Florida Wind Band. “And so they are going to see two different ensembles — the first is going to be the Summer Breeze group, which is the Alumni for Bay Area Youth Winds, and then the second group that they’re going to see is the Florida Wind Band, which is the professional ensemble.”

    While some of these musicians only pick up their instruments once a year for this ongoing tradition, others never let it go.

    “I play the clarinet. I’ve been playing since fifth grade, then went to college, got a degree in Music Education and Performance. I love music so much,” Quixtan said.

    As for his current work?

    “I’m an orchestra high school director,” Quixtan said. “I’m also a conductor, a community band conductor and a professional musician.”

    With such a full plate, why come back every year? To be surrounded by people from different walks of life, in different stages of life, brought together by the music of life.

    “People that just want to do this because they love it,” he said.

    The Florida Wind Band and Summer Breeze concert will be held on July 1 at 5:30 p.m. at Carrollwood Village Park in Tampa.

    And the Florida Wind Band will have another concert that will be held on July 2 at 6 p.m. at Palma Cela Presbyterian Church in Tampa.

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    Virginia Johnson

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  • Wildfire Masking Is Just Different

    Wildfire Masking Is Just Different

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    Late last night, New Yorkers were served a public-health recommendation with a huge helping of déjà vu: “If you are an older adult or have heart or breathing problems and need to be outside,” city officials said in a statement, “wear a high-quality mask (e.g. N95 or KN95).”

    It was, in one sense, very familiar advice—and also very much not. This time, the threat isn’t viral, or infectious at all. Instead, masks are being urged as a precaution against the thick, choking plumes of smoke from Canada, where wildfires have been igniting for weeks. The latest swaths of the United States to come into the crosshairs are the Midwest, Ohio Valley, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic.

    The situation is, in a word, bad. Yesterday, New Haven, Connecticut, logged its worst air-quality reading on record; in parts of New York and Pennsylvania, some towns have been shrouded in pollutants at levels the Environmental Protection Agency deems “hazardous”—the more severe designation on its list. It is, to put it lightly, an absolutely terrible time to go outside. And for those who “have to go outdoors,” says Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech, “I’d strongly recommend wearing a mask.”

    The masking advice might understandably spark some whiplash. For the majority of Americans, face coverings are still most saliently a COVID thing—a protective covering meant to be worn when engaging in risky gatherings indoors. Now, though, we’re having to flip the masking script: Right now, it’s outdoor air that we most want to guard our airways against. In more ways than one, the best masking practices in this moment will require snubbing some of our basest COVID-fighting instincts.

    The COVID masking mindset can, to be fair, still be helpful to game out the risks at play. Viral outbreaks and wildfires both introduce dangerous particles into the eyes and the airway; both can be blocked with the right barriers. The difference is the source: Pathogens travel primarily aboard people, making crowds and crummy indoor airflow some of the biggest risks; fires and their smoky, ashy by-products, meanwhile, can get stoked and moved about by the very outdoor winds we welcome during viral outbreaks. Conflagrations clog the air with all sorts of pollutants—among them, carbon monoxide, which can poison people by starving them of oxygen, and a class of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that’s been linked to increased cancer risk. But the primary perils are the fine-particulate-matter components of soot, ash, and dust, fine enough to be borne over great distances until they reach an unsuspecting face.

    Once breathed in, these particles, which the EPA tracks by a metric known as PM2.5, can deposit deep in the airway and possibly even infiltrate the blood. The flecks irritate the moist membranes that line the nose, mouth, lungs, and eyes; they spark bouts of inflammation, triggering itching and irritation. Chronic exposure to them has been linked to heart and lung issues, and the risks are especially high for individuals with chronic medical conditions—burdens that concentrate among people of color and the poor—as well as for older adults and children.

    But N95s and many other high-quality masks have their roots in environmental health; they were designed specifically to filter out microscopic particulate matter that travels through the air. And they’re astoundingly good at their job. Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, recently put their performance to the test with an N95 strapped to his own face. Using an industry-standard test, he measured the particulate matter outside the mask, then checked how much made it through the device and into the space around his nose and mouth. Percentage-wise, he told me, “it removes 99.99 … I didn’t measure how many nines; it was working so well.” On broader scales, too, the protective math plays out: Well-fitting masks can curb smoke-related hospitalizations; studies back up their importance as a firefighting mainstay.

    The key, Jimenez told me, is choosing the right mask and getting it flush against your face. Experts in the field even get professionally fit-tested to avoid contamination infiltrating through any gaps. Surgical masks, cloth masks, or any other loose accessories that aren’t specifically designed to filter out tiny particles just won’t do the trick, though they’re still better than not covering up at all. (If that sounds familiar, it should; viral or smoky, “masks don’t care what the particle is,” Marr told me. “They care about the size.”)

    N95 masks aren’t perfect protectives either. They don’t shield the eyes, and they aren’t great at staving off carbon monoxide and the other gaseous pollutants that wildfires emit. (That’s for a reason: Allowing gas through masks is how we continue to breathe while wearing them.) But gases are volatile and quickly dissipate; for Americans hundreds or even thousands of miles from the source of the smoke, “it’s going to be the particulate matter that is most concerning to us,” Marr told me. Even in the parts of New York and Pennsylvania where PM2.5 has rocketed up to dangerous levels, the carbon-monoxide stats have remained low.

    Considering how dicey the discourse over masking has gotten, masking advice won’t necessarily be embraced by all. Less than a month after the official end of the United States’ COVID public-health emergency, people are fatigued by face coverings and other mitigations. And we’re fast entering the stretch of the year when having synthetic polymer fabrics strapped across your face can get downright miserable, especially in the humidity of northeastern heat. But when it comes to avoiding the harms of wildfire smoke, experts generally consider masks a second-line defense. The first priority is trying to minimize any exposure at all—which, for now, means staying indoors with the doors and windows tightly shut, especially for people at highest risk. Paula Olsiewski, an environmental-health researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, also recommends running whatever air filters might be available; air conditioners, portable air cleaners, and DIY air filters all help.

    It’s also a good time, experts told me, to be mindful of the differences between filtration and ventilation, or increasing flow to turn over stale air. Both are crucial, sustainable interventions against respiratory viruses. But in the context of wildfires, excellent ventilation could actually increase harm, Jimenez told me, by allowing in excess smoke. For right now, stale indoor air—a classic COVID foe—is a smoke-avoider’s ally. The masks come in for anyone who must go outside in a part of the country where the air quality is bad—say, above an index of 150 or so.

    The move might feel especially counterintuitive for people who have long since stopped masking against COVID—or even ones who still do, simply because the rules don’t mesh. Through the flip-flopping guidance of mask everywhere to mask until you’re vaccinated to actually, mask after you’re vaccinated too to mask only indoors, Americans never hit much of a stable rhythm with the practice. The inertia may be especially powerful on the East Coast, which has largely been spared from the scourge of wildfires that’s constantly plaguing the West. (That puts the U.S. well behind other countries, especially in East Asia, where masking against viruses and pollutants indoors and out has long been commonplace; even in California, N95 and HEPA shortages aren’t anything new.)

    That said, our COVID-centric view on masking was always going to get a wake-up call. Wildfires—and viral outbreaks, for that matter—are expected to become more common going forward, even in regions that haven’t historically experienced them. And for all their weariness with COVID, Americans now have far more awareness of and, in many cases, access to masks than they did just a few years ago. The wildfires aren’t good news, but maybe a mask-friendly response to them can be. Smoke does, from a public-health perspective, have one thing going for it, Olsiewski told me: It is visible and ominous in ways that a microscopic virus is not. “People can see that their air is not clean,” she told me. It’ll take more than ash and haze to break through the divisiveness around masks. But a threat this obvious might at least forge a tiny crack.

    This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Turkish Airlines Flies Hero Dogs Home In Style | Entrepreneur

    Turkish Airlines Flies Hero Dogs Home In Style | Entrepreneur

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    Dogs who participated in rescue efforts after the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria got a special treat from Turkish Airlines — a ride in business class, rather than the cargo section, according to Insider.

    “It was the least we could to do show our appreciation for these heroic dogs’ sincere and heroic efforts,” the company told the outlet.

    An earthquake of 7.8 magnitudes hit parts of Turkey and Syria on February 6 and some 49,000 people have died as of February 24, per The New York Times. Two weeks later, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit the region adding to the death totals.

    Dogs from the U.S., Poland, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Croatia, and Libya, have all taken part in recovery efforts, Insider noted.

    A dog’s sense of smell can pick out human remains from other types of remains (like animals) and find live survivors trapped in the rubble, especially after live rescuers have done their work. These types of dogs typically have a handler.

    Some countries, like Mexico for example, have a national dog rescue team, which found fame in 2017 after helping find survivors after an earthquake hit Puebla, a state southeast of Mexico City.

    Turkish Airlines shared photos of the dogs in transit with Entrepreneur, calling them “our heroic friends.” The company flew the dogs back to their home countries, it added.

    A dog from China flying home. Courtesy company

    A dog from Kyrgyzstan. Courtesy company

    A rescue dog from Thailand. Courtesy company

    Another dog from Thailand. Courtesy company.

    Aid has come to the country from various countries, aid organizations, and the United Nations, but efforts to get help into Syria have been difficult amid the country’s ongoing civil war, which has been raging since 2011, Insider noted.

    The dogs flown home by Turkish Airlines were done so for free, along with their handlers, and some were even treated to business class seats, Insider added.

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    Gabrielle Bienasz

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  • Are Colds Really Worse, or Are We All Just Weak Babies Now?

    Are Colds Really Worse, or Are We All Just Weak Babies Now?

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    For the past few weeks, my daily existence has been scored by the melodies of late winter: the drip of melting ice, the soft rustling of freshly sprouted leaves—and, of course, the nonstop racket of sneezes and coughs.

    The lobby of my apartment building is alive with the sounds of sniffles and throats being cleared. Every time I walk down the street, I’m treated to the sight of watery eyes and red noses. Even my work Slack is rife with illness emoji, and the telltale pings of miserable colleagues asking each other why they feel like absolute garbage. “It’s not COVID,” they say. “I tested, like, a million times.” Something else, they insist, is making them feel like a stuffed and cooked goose.

    That something else might be the once-overlooked common cold. After three years of largely being punted out of the limelight, a glut of airway pathogens—among them, adenovirus, RSV, metapneumovirus, parainfluenza, common-cold coronaviruses, and rhinoviruses galore—are awfully common again. And they’re really laying some people out. The good news is that there’s no evidence that colds are actually, objectively worse now than they were before the pandemic started. The less-good news is that after years of respite from a bunch of viral nuisances, a lot of us have forgotten that colds can be a real drag.

    Read: The pandemic broke the flu … again

    Once upon a time—before 2020, to be precise—most of us were very, very used to colds. Every year, adults, on average, catch two to three of the more than 200 viral strains that are known to cause the illnesses; young kids may contract half a dozen or more as they toddle in and out of the germ incubators that we call “day cares” and “schools.” The sicknesses are especially common during the winter months, when many viruses thrive amid cooler temps, and people tend to flock indoors to exchange gifts and breath. When the pandemic began, masks and distancing drove several of those microbes into hiding—but as mitigations have eased in the time since, they’ve begun their slow creep back.

    For the majority of people, that’s not really a big deal. Common-cold symptoms tend to be pretty mild and usually resolve on their own after a few days of nuisance. The virus infiltrates the nose and throat, but isn’t able to do much damage and gets quickly swept out. Some people may not even notice they’re infected at all, or may mistake the illness for an allergy—snottiness, drippiness, and not much more. Most of us know the drill: “Sometimes, it’s just congestion for a few days and feeling a bit tired for a while, but otherwise you’ll be just fine,” says Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago. As a culture, we’ve long been in the habit of dismissing these symptoms as just a cold, not enough of an inconvenience to skip work or school, or to put on a mask. (Spoiler: The experts I spoke with were adamant that we all really should be doing those things when we have a cold.)

    The general infectious-disease dogma has always been that colds are a big nothing, at least compared with the flu. But gentler than the flu is not saying much. The flu is a legitimately dangerous disease that hospitalizes hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, and, like COVID, can sometimes saddle people with long-term symptoms. Even if colds are generally less severe, people can end up totally clobbered by headaches, exhaustion, and a burning sore throat; their eyes will tear up; their sinuses will clog; they’ll wake up feeling like they’ve swallowed serrated razor blades, or like their heads have been pumped full of fast-hardening concrete. It’s also common for cold symptoms to stretch out beyond a week, occasionally even two; coughs, especially, can linger long after the runny nose and headache resolve. At their worst, colds can lead to serious complications, especially in the very young, very old, and immunocompromised. Sometimes, cold sufferers end up catching a bacterial infection on top of their viral disease, a one-two punch that can warrant a trip to the ER. “The fact of the matter is, it’s pretty miserable to have a cold,” Landon told me. “And that’s how it’s always been.”

    Read: Don’t worry, it’s not COVID

    As far as experts can tell, the average severity of cold symptoms hasn’t changed. “It’s about perception,” says Jasmine Marcelin, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. After skipping colds for several years, “experiencing them now feels worse than usual,” she told me. Frankly, this was sort of a problem even before COVID came onto the scene. “Every year, I have patients who call me with ‘the worst cold they’ve ever had,’” Landon told me. “And it’s basically the same thing they had last year.” Now, though, the catastrophizing might be even worse, especially since pandemic-brain started prompting people to scrutinize every sniffle and cough.

    There’s still a chance that some colds this season might be a shade more unpleasant than usual. Many people falling sick right now are just coming off of bouts with COVID, flu, or RSV, each of which infected Americans (especially kids) by the millions this past fall and winter. Their already damaged tissues may not fare as well against another onslaught from a cold-causing virus.

    It’s also possible that immunity, or lack thereof, could be playing a small role. Many people are now getting their first colds in three-plus years, which means population-level vulnerability might be higher than it normally is this time of year, speeding the rate at which viruses spread and potentially making some infections more gnarly than they’d otherwise be. But higher-than-usual susceptibility seems unlikely to be driving uglier symptoms en masse, says Roby Bhattacharyya, an infectious-disease physician and microbiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Not all cold-causing viruses leave behind good immunity—but many of those that do are thought to prompt the body to mount relatively durable defenses against truly severe infections, lasting several years or more.

    Plus, for a lot of viruses going around right now, the immunity question is largely moot, Landon told me. So many different pathogens cause colds that a recent exposure to one is unlikely to do much against the next. A person could catch half a dozen colds in a five-year time frame and not even encounter the same type of virus twice.

    Read: Maybe consider not kissing that baby

    It’s also worth noting that what some people are categorizing as the worst cold they’ve ever had might actually be a far more menacing virus, such as SARS-CoV-2 or a flu virus. At-home rapid tests for the coronavirus often churn out false-negative results in the early days of infection, even after symptoms start. And although the flu can sometimes be distinguished from a cold by its symptoms, they’re often pretty similar. The illnesses can only be definitively diagnosed with a test, which can be difficult to come by.

    The pandemic has steered our perception of illness into a false binary: Oh no, it’s COVID or Phew, it’s not. COVID is undoubtedly still more serious than a run-of-the-mill cold—more likely to spark severe disease or chronic, debilitating symptoms that can last months or years. But the range of severity between them overlaps more than the binary implies. Plus, Marcelin points out, what truly is “just” a cold for one person might be an awful, weeks-long slog for someone else, or worse—which is why, no matter what’s turning your face into a snot factory, it’s still important to keep your germs to yourself. The current outbreak of colds may not be any more severe than usual. But there’s no need to make it bigger than it needs to be.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Performer talks about bringing the Carnival fun to Busch Gardens

    Performer talks about bringing the Carnival fun to Busch Gardens

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    TAMPA, Fla. — Mardi Gras marks the end of Carnival season, but not at Busch Gardens.

    What You Need To Know

    • Mardi Gras at Busch Gardens continues weekends through March 5

    • Several parades will be held each day, with beignets and other New Orleans-style offerings

    • Performers like Devin Collins bring the joie de vivre

    From the expert glitter application on his face to the green Chucks on his feet, Devin Collins is the walking embodiment of Mardi Gras ensconced in purple, green and gold — the holiday colors.

    “Basically, anything you that you throw at any of our performers, we learn it, we master it, we throw it in the show,” said Collins.

    Devin Collins started here with stilt walking in 2008, so the intricate Mardi Gras stage make-up is no big deal.

    It’s prepping and performing with his friends that puts Collins at ease, especially in the moments before they go live in the park.

    “There’s so much love and passion here within our Busch Gardens family, so we really like to just show that to our guests,” Collins said.

    Couple the performers with New Orleans jazz, and the crowds get wise quick. It’s parade time.

    “The vibe? they’re ready to party!” Collins said about the crowds, over the cacophony of music and clapping.

    The best part comes last — throwing the beads.

    “We have fun, the kids love this,” said Collins. “We get to bring a smile to everybody’s faces.”

    Happy Mardi Gras, Devin Collins.

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    Virginia Johnson

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  • Honey & Arts Festival to debut in Lealman as community grows

    Honey & Arts Festival to debut in Lealman as community grows

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    LEALMAN, Fla. — Hopes of community redevelopment is bringing new festivals to St. Petersburg.

    The Pinellas County Housing Authority is working with engagement committees and a long list of sponsors to bring the first Lealman Honey and Arts Festival to the Tampa Bay area.

    What You Need To Know

    • The Lealman Honey and Arts Festival is set for Saturday, Feb. 18

    • Dozens of local sponsors are supporting the event

    • A visiting artisan shares his story

    “I’m very excited,” said Kym Solitaire, a St. Petersburg resident. “As a retired schoolteacher of Pinellas County, this area represents schools I’ve taught at. It’s a historically underserved area. This is a deserving acknowledgment of the community, the hard-working parents and great students that live here.”

    Raymond H. Neri Community Park will be hosting the inaugural festival on Saturday, Feb. 18. There will be several events such as local honey and beekeepers selling their wares, craft vendors, food trucks and chainsaw art. Local radio personality Monika from 102.5 The Bone will be broadcasting live. Local bands The Black Honkeys, La Lucha and Pink Streets will also be in attendance delivering live performances. 

    “Coming together to celebrate the rich history of Lealman has been a dream of mine,” said Pinellas County Commissioner Charlie Justice. “The Honey and Arts Festival represents the dedication of many in the community working together to transform Lealman into a vibrant destination, a place where people can live, work and play.” 

    People from all over the nation are coming to support the festival, like chainsaw art cultivator, Alex Bieniecki. He traveled from New Hampshire to perform at the festival on Saturday.

    “I’ve been a tattoo artist for 22 years,” said Bieniecki. “Right out of high school, I was doing that so artistically. That was my training in the art world, all the different things they liked to do rounded me out as an artist.”

    Bieniecki said he’s been a woodsman for over a decade.

    “Normally, I work with white pine,” he said. “It’s light compared to other species of wood. This stuff has more sap in it, more than any I’ve worked with before.”

    Bieniecki was carving an image of a woman with Florida sand pine Wednesday.

    “I drove up to West Palm Beach for this wood. I cut the tree down from their yard for this,” said Bieniecki. “Some of these pieces take more than 40 hours to complete. I started this on Monday of last week and I worked on it every day until Thursday. 10-hour days, 10 hours of sanding,” said Bieniecki.

    What was once a hobby for Bieniecki, turned into a stream of income.

    “People love wood carvings. My whole world opened up to people I would have never tattooed. I have a lot of fun doing them because it’s like drawing and painting and carving. It’s two-dimensional but also three-dimensional and you get to paint it, so I really enjoy,” he said.

    For more on Lealman’s Honey and Arts Festival, view its Facebook page.

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    Ashonti Ford

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  • Youth Changemakers Nationwide Answer the 2023 Call for Kindness

    Youth Changemakers Nationwide Answer the 2023 Call for Kindness

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    Annual program provides funding and innovative leadership development opportunities for young people to tackle some of society’s most pressing problems.

    Press Release
    –

    Jan 18, 2023


    NEW YORK, January 18, 2023 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Riley’s Way Foundation opened their Call For Kindness program today, calling on young changemakers (13-22 years old) from across the country to submit their ideas for projects rooted in kindness, empathy, and inclusivity. The Call For Kindness, now in its fifth year, offers youth the chance to participate in a dynamic Leadership Development Fellowship and win up to $3,000 to fund a project that strengthens their local, national, or global communities.

    “It’s been incredibly inspiring to see the range of projects young people are leading in their schools and communities,” remarked Dr. Christine O’Connell, Executive Director of Riley’s Way Foundation. “Their passion, resolve, and leadership remind us that the hope for the future lies in great part with the ideas and actions of today’s youth.”

    Young people (13-22) are invited to submit a new or existing idea, managing everything from prevailing social justice issues to pressing community-based needs. As many as 36 youth-led projects will receive awards. This year, a separate category will consider 10 projects focused on environmental justice, as the climate crisis and other environmental problems require critical attention. 

    Additionally, Riley’s Way will continue to support a dance and arts category, the Yuriko Kikuchi Arigato Award, in honor of Yuriko, the pioneering dancer, and choreographer. 

    “Becoming a Riley’s Way Call For Kindness Fellow has meant that even if things get hard, I’m not alone, and have all these resources if I need anything,” shared 2022 Call For Kindness Fellow Ryan Syed, founder of SAYA’s Project Loving Me.

    Past projects have addressed the mental health and well-being of vulnerable communities, promoted education equity, bridged the tech industry’s demographic gap, supported those experiencing homelessness, combatted food insecurity, and much more. The complete list of Call For Kindness projects can be found here.

    “The future belongs to a new generation of leaders, who with unshakable determination and a clear sense of purpose, will blaze a trail of innovation and progress to tackle society’s toughest challenges,” shared Ian Sandler, Co-Founder, Board Chair of Riley’s Way. “I am honored to be a part of their journey and will tirelessly work to empower them with the tools and resources they need to make their boldest visions a reality.” 

    Visit CallForKindness.org to learn more and read about past Fellows.

    About Riley’s Way Foundation 

    Riley’s Way Foundation is a national nonprofit organization that empowers a youth-led kindness movement, providing young people with the programs, support, and inclusive community they need to thrive as changemakers. Their programs provide young leaders with the tools and resources to envision and achieve change. Riley’s Way is committed to supporting these young leaders to build a better world that values kindness, empathy, connection, and the voices of all youth. Mackenzie and Ian Sandler established Riley’s Way in 2014 in memory of their daughter Riley Hannah Sandler.

    Source: Riley’s Way Foundation

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  • The good news generator of 2022

    The good news generator of 2022

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    2022 hasn't been all bad. See the good news

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  • Consider Armadillo COVID

    Consider Armadillo COVID

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    This past spring, Amanda Goldberg crouched in the leafy undergrowth of a southwestern Virginia forest and attempted to swab a mouse for COVID. No luck; its nose was too tiny for her tools. “You never think about nostrils until you start having to swab an animal,” Goldberg, a conservation biologist at Virginia Tech University, told me. Larger-nosed creatures that she and her team had trapped, such as raccoons and foxes, had no issue with nose swabs—but for mice, throat samples had to do. The swabs fit reasonably well into their mouths, she said, though they endured a fair bit of munching.

    Goldberg’s throat-swabbing endeavors were part of a study she and her colleagues devised to answer an unexplored question: How common is COVID in wildlife? Of the 333 forest animals her team swabbed around Blacksburg, Virginia, spanning 18 species, one—an opossum—tested positive. This was to be expected, Goldberg said; catching a wild animal that happened to have an active infection right when it was swabbed was like finding Waldo. But the researchers also collected blood samples, and those were more telling about whether the animals had experienced previous bouts with COVID. Analysis by the Molecular Diagnostics Lab and the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech revealed antibodies across 24 animals spanning six species, including the opossum, the Eastern gray squirrel, and two types of mice. “Our minds were blown,” Goldberg said. “It was basically every species we sent” to the lab.

    That animals can get COVID is one of the earliest things we learned about the virus. Despite the endless debate over its origins, SARS-CoV-2 most likely jumped from an animal through an intermediate host to humans in Wuhan. Since then, it has since spread back to a range of animals. People have passed it to household pets, such as dogs and cats, and to a Disney movie’s worth of beasts, including lions, hippos, hyenas, tigers, mink, and hamsters. Three years into the pandemic, animals are still falling sick with COVID, just as we are. COVID is likely circulating more widely in animals than we are aware of, Edward Holmes, a biologist at the University of Sydney, told me. “In all my 30-plus years of doing work on this subject, I have never seen a virus that can infect so many animal species,” he said. More than 500 other mammal species are predicted to be highly susceptible to infection.

    Given that most people nowadays aren’t fretting too much about human-to-human spread, it makes sense that animal-to-human spread has largely been forgotten. But even when there are so many other pandemic concerns, animal COVID can’t be ignored. The consequences of sustained animal transmission are exactly the same as they are in people: The more COVID spreads, the more opportunities the virus has to evolve into new variants. What’s most alarming is the chance that one of those variants could spill back into humans. As we’ve known since the pandemic started, SARS-CoV-2 is not a human virus, but one that can infect multiple animals, including humans. As long as animals are still getting COVID, we’re not out of the doghouse either.

    Perhaps part of the reason COVID in animals has been overlooked—apart from the fact that they’re not people—is that most species don’t seem to get very sick. Animals that have gotten infected generally exhibit mild symptoms—typically some coughing and sluggishness, as in pumas and lions. But our research has gone only fur-deep. “We certainly can’t ask them, ‘Are you feeling headaches, or sluggish?’” said Goldberg, who worries about long-term or invisible symptoms going undiagnosed in species. And so animal COVID has lingered unchecked, increasing the chances that it could mean something bad for us.

    The good news is that the overall risk of getting COVID from animals is considered low, according to the CDC. This is partly explained by evolutionary theory, which predicts that most variants that emerge in an animal population will have adapted to become better at infecting the host animal—not us. But some of them, strictly by chance, “could be highly transmissible or virulent in humans,” Holmes said. “It’s an unpredictable process.” His concern is not that animals will start infecting people en masse—your neighbors are far likelier to do that than raccoons—but that in animals, SARS-CoV-2 could form new variants that can spill over into people. Some scientists believe that Omicron emerged this way in mice, though evidence remains scant.

    A troubling sign is that there’s already some evidence that COVID has made its way from humans to animals, where it mutated, and then made its way back into humans. Take white-tailed deer, by now a well-known COVID host. Every fall, hunters take to the golden meadows and reddening forests of southwestern Ontario to shoot the deer, giving researchers an opportunity to test some of the hunted animals for COVID. The species has been infected with the same variants circulating widely in humans—a handful of Staten Island deer caught Omicron last winter, for example—which suggests that people are infecting them. How the deer get infected still isn’t clear: Extended face time with humans, nosing around in trash, or slurping up our wastewater are all possibilities.

    The researchers in Canada found not only that some of the animals tested positive, but also that the variant they carried had never before been seen in humans, indicating that the virus had been spreading and mutating within the population for a long time, Brad Pickering, a research scientist for the Canadian government who studied the deer, told me. In fact, the new variant is among the most evolutionarily divergent ones identified so far. But despite its differences, it appeared to have infected at least one person who had interacted with deer the week before falling ill. “We can’t make a direct link between them,” Pickering said, but the fact that such a highly diverged deer variant was detected in a human is very suggestive of how that person got sick.

    This research adds to the small but growing body of evidence that the COVID we spread to animals could come back to bite us. Fortunately, this particular spillback does not appear to have had serious consequences for humans; rogue deer variants don’t seem to be circulating in southern Canada. But this is not the sole documented instance of animal-to-human spread: People have been infected by mink in the Netherlands, hamsters in Hong Kong, and a cat in Thailand. Other spillbacks have probably occurred and gone unnoticed. So far, no data show that the animal variants that have spread to humans are more dangerous for us. Even if a potential animal variant isn’t the next Omicron, it could still be better at dodging our existing treatments and vaccines, Pickering said.

    But there is also, frankly, a lack of data. Local wildlife-surveillance efforts led by researchers like Goldberg and Pickering are ongoing, but they do not exist in most countries, Holmes said. An international database of known animal infections, maintained by Complexity Science Hub Vienna, is a promising start. An interactive map shows the locations of previously infected animals, including large hairy armadillos (Argentina), manatees (Brazil), and cats (everywhere). At the very least, with animal COVID, “we need to know what species it’s in, in what abundance, and genetically, what those variants look like,” Holmes said. “It’s absolutely critical to know where [the virus] is going.” Without this, there is no way of knowing how often spillback occurs and whether it puts humans at risk. And we can’t tell whether new COVID variants are also putting animals in danger, Goldberg said; a devastating Omicron-like variant could emerge in their populations too.

    The steps we need to take to mitigate the animal-COVID problem—and prevent other zoonotic diseases from jumping into humans—are clear, even if they don’t seem to be happening. Eliminating wet markets where wild animals are sold is an obvious preventive measure, but it has been difficult to implement because the livelihoods and diets of many people, especially in the global South, depend on them. As climate change and land development decimate even more habitats, wildlife will be forced into ever-closer quarters with us, fostering an even more efficient exchange of viruses between species. Unlike mask wearing and other straightforward options for curbing the human spread of COVID, preventing its transmission to, from, and among animals will require major upheavals to the way our societies run, likely far greater than we are willing to commit to.

    Humans tend to act like COVID ends up afflicting us after traveling through a long chain of species. But to think so is like living in the Middle Ages, Holmes said, when the Earth was considered the center of the universe. As we learned then, we are not that important: Humans are but a node in an immense network of species that viruses move through in many directions. Just as animal viruses infect us, human viruses can spread to animals (measles, for example, kills a variety of great apes). There are definitely bigger problems than animal COVID—no one needs to hunker down for fear of sneezing deer—but as long as animals keep getting infected, we can’t overlook what that means for us. Paying attention to animal COVID often starts with a single swab—and a snout to stick it in.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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