ReportWire

Tag: Pandemic

  • COP27’s Soil Reckoning: How Agriculture Is Returning To Its Roots

    COP27’s Soil Reckoning: How Agriculture Is Returning To Its Roots

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    Lee Jones is a farmer in Huron, Ohio. He’s also a devotee of John Steinbeck, whose depression-era masterpiece “Grapes of Wrath” sang to him of soils robbed of value and people robbed of homes and livelihoods.

    Today, Jones and his 400-acre “Chef’s Garden” farm and state of the art culinary school on the banks of Lake Erie are the toast of Michelin star chefs. But around 40 years ago, when he was just shy of age 20, the Jones family experienced how climate and the economy can destroy a business. In 1983, hundreds of acres of Jones Farm fresh market vegetables were crushed in an unprecedented rain of hail. The avalanche of debt that followed at 22 percent interest rates smothered the business almost to death. The bank took their home and land and they moved into a 150-year-old house with a leaky ceiling and curtains for doors. They rebuilt their growing acreage in small rented parcels, selling goods from the back of farm trucks and station wagons. Farm life is tough, but this was next-level.

    It was at that point that Lee Jones understood firsthand how the ravages of climate, bad agricultural practices, unrelenting monoculture – in this case, cotton crops – and systemic financial depression made life hell on the 1930’s American prairies.

    “The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke…The finest dust did not settle back to earth now, but disappeared into the blackening sky.” John Steinbeck, 1939, Grapes of Wrath.

    The Dust Bowl with its searing droughts, blinding black storms of not rain but mocking dry dusty soil is almost a hundred years in the rear-view mirror. Ultimately, the story of American agriculture was re-set through aggressive New Deal conservation and agriculture programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who famously told American governors in 1937, “the nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” Also helpful, a changing climate cycle.

    What gives us hope about nature is that there are cycles. And what makes us fearful about nature is that there are cycles. And while the science, machinery, and now technology of farming have leapt into the 21st century, so have the brutal environmental realities. These are the challenges of planet earth in 2022. The vise of rapacious farming practices, climate change, a deadly pandemic, inflation, and war has hundreds of millions of people on the planet in a chokehold.

    That is why agriculture is in hot focus at this juncture in history and the degraded condition of soils globally is sharing the stage as political leaders, environment ministers, advocates, and climate-focused organizations of all kinds convene in Egypt for the COP27 summit.

    The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports the world faces its greatest crisis in modern history, with as many as 50 million people on the verge of famine.

    Global organizations agree that feeding the hungry is the shared moral responsibility of affluent nations. At the same time these nations themselves are facing a reckoning of climate extremes and radically depleted soil quality, says Ronald Vargas, Secretary of the FAO’s Global Soils Partnership.

    When governments and activists talk about environmental quality, Vargas observes, they refer to air quality and water quality. But rarely will they include soil quality or soil health. Yet, he says, “the interface between air and water is soils. With the Dust Bowl, for example, the soil rose to the atmosphere. If your soil is polluted with heavy metals, or the remnants of pesticides, or other materials, these contaminants will also be found in the air. And water quality depends on the soils.”

    Today, aggravating an already bad situation is the onslaught of Covid19 pandemic-era plastics for a multitude of health equipment. At the same time, the food packaging that has kept restaurants alive has kept microplastics percolating in the atmosphere. “These contaminants are everywhere,” says Vargas. “Where are the masks and packaging ending up? In the soils. And in many countries, waste management is not adequate. Those particles of microplastic go into the soil, from there they go to the air, and then they go to the water. “

    Sustainable farming practices that give to, rather than take from, the soil are critically in demand, says Vargas. And the question, will there be enough calories to consume? is very different from the question: will there be enough healthy food to eat?

    What is in the soil is the difference between boom and bust for Lee Jones, a purveyor

    of top quality vegetables to best-of-the-best restaurants, and now to consumers online. Emerging from the near ruin of their farm business almost four decades ago, the Jones family learned there was an opportunity to do better by nature and, as a result, better by consumers. Since then, Jones has engaged a staff of farmworkers, packagers, managers, scientists and a resident chef to curate his crops. He’s cultivated a network of demanding star chefs who have inspired him to develop unique,

    regeneratively grown produce: golden zucchini blossoms, miniature squash, delicate carrots of multiple colors, tomatoes and cucumbers of myriad colors, sizes and flavors, cauliflowers, lettuces and root vegetables in a rainbow of colors, and much more.

    “It’s the farmer’s goal to leave the land in better condition for future generations,” says Jones. “We’ve added to that. We believe that a farm needs to have healthy soil, grow healthy food, feed healthy people, in a healthy environment. My dad had a saying – ‘We’re just trying to get as good at what we’re doing as the growers were a hundred years ago.’”

    The Chef’s Garden fields are fertilized through strips of clover and other small growth, established between rows of plants, drawing nutrients from the sun and pulling them into the soil for the larger harvest. Composted plants and grasses protect the base of plants along each row. And the rhythm of farming is geared to restoring the soils, as opposed to the ravages of big-business mono-culture.

    On his 400-acre farm, Jones keeps 200 acres planted with undemanding cover crops to harvest the sun’s energy. The other half is for crops to take to market. The two segments are rotated every year. Jones won’t say his produce is organic, strictly, because – even though chemical fertilizers and pesticides are avoided at most costs – if a chemical product can save a crop, it will be used.

    In his signature daily outfit of blue overalls, white oxford shirt, and red bow tie, Lee Jones is expressing a solidarity with farmers who struggle and endure, and saluting those who have gone before, like the working people Steinbeck depicted in “Grapes of Wrath.”

    Jones knows he is just one farmer working a few hundred acres on a planet where only 38 percent of the land can be farmed. For him, it is “one step” in the shared human agricultural “journey of a thousand miles,” but well worth the passion.

    WfpA global food crisis | World Food Programme

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    Louise Schiavone, Contributor

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  • Long COVID Patients Find Aid and Risk in Online Support Groups

    Long COVID Patients Find Aid and Risk in Online Support Groups

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    Editor’s note: Find the latest long COVID news and guidance in Medscape’s Long COVID Resource Center.

    Nov. 9, 2022 — Jill Sylte wrote that she would not have made it through long COVID without her Facebook support group, Survivor Corps. 

    “It has helped me so much, by being able to be in touch with other long hauler members,” the Pensacola, FL, woman wrote in a comment on a group post in March. “Everyone in this group understands each other. Unless you are a long-hauler you don’t completely feel what we are going through.”

    The listing of hundreds of Facebook long COVID communities goes on for page after page. Some have a few members. Survivor Corps has nearly 200,000.  

    “This space has absolutely exploded in the past 2 years,” says Fiona Lowenstein, a journalist who started the group called Body Politic that has become a COVID support group. 

    The public Facebook COVID and long COVID groups are studded with posts and comments like this among the hundreds that can come in a day.

    On a single day in late October, Survivor Corps posters were trying to find out if anyone else had hair loss, rashes, sleep apnea issues, migraines, bladder problems, neck pain, vertigo, allergies, or double vision. An October post on increasing cholesterol levels drew more than 50 comments within 17 hours. 

    The support groups provide advice and encouragement that patients often are not getting from their medical providers, friends, and family. They’re also a source of valuable data for researchers. But some doctors worry that they are not always entirely benign, even as they gain popularity.

    From hospital Meeting Rooms to Online

    Patient support groups have moved out of the hospital community room and onto Facebook, Reddit, WhatsApp, and other online spaces. Before long COVID was recognized, these forums were a lifeline for patients with chronic conditions.

    After having lived with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) for years, long COVID seemed familiar to JD Davids, a chronic disabilities activist in Brooklyn who works with a group called Long COVID Justice. He thinks patient groups are important for otherwise healthy people with unexplained post-infection symptoms like extreme fatigue. 

    “One of the problems is that these often-volunteer-based patient support groups are all that people have,” Davids says. The groups are essential to patients but need to be part of a comprehensive care plan, he says.

    While offering support, online groups can be sources of misinformation and unproven remedies. Advocates and doctors say some group members come to them asking about miracle cures and supplements.  

    Alexander Truong, MD, a doctor at Emory University in Atlanta who works with long COVID patients, says many of his patients have bought expensive but useless vitamins and supplements they learn about online.  

    “A lot of these patients are grasping at straws to try to figure out anything that can make them feel better and they are very vulnerable to this kind of scam,” he said during a live online forum hosted by SciLine, a project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    Privacy can be another issue. Tens of thousands of people post details about their health and lives in public Facebook groups. Anyone signed on to Facebook can read the posts.

    A Treasure Trove of Data

    Analysis of these private patient conversations can also produce useful data for researchers. The organization Patients Like Me, founded in 2005 to support families with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) is built around the concept. 

    Researchers at Yale and elsewhere are already working with long COVID patient groups. Facebook’s Data for Good program offers three COVID databases based on posting on the platform. The Patient-Led Research Collaborative provided data for a study published in The Lancet that was among the first the characterize long COVID.

    For Facebook groups, the site’s rules requiregroup moderators to “obtain user consent for your use of the content and information that you collect.” But the platform has been fighting “unauthorized scrapers” who lift data off Facebook and republish it. 

    The Survivor Corps group, the largest long COVID Facebook group with nearly 200,000 members, is public. Anyone can read any of the posts. Those signed into Facebook can click on the “People” tab and see any group members who have a single mutual contact. 

    Diana Berrent, a New York photographer who caught COVID-19 early in the pandemic, is the founder of and a contributor to the Survivor Corps Facebook group and its sister website. She thinks the choice of support group might be a matter of where someone already spends their time online. 

    “And I don’t see it’s a privacy issue,” she says.  “It’s really whatever platform you’re most comfortable in.” 

    Berrent also runs polls and had worked with researchers at Yale, the National Institutes of Health, and elsewhere.Although the data on her site can be valuable, Berrent says she has turned down offers from buyers.

    At the same time, she says she received grant money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative when she started her work, but it has run out. She doesn’t want to ask for donations from support group members. She says she has funds to pay for one full-time employee and one part-time employee.   

    Group moderators say money for this cause is hard to come by. And this need for funding can be a vulnerability. Some well-established patient groups specializing in a range of conditions get money from the pharmaceutical industry. But with no marketable treatment for long COVID, corporate sponsors are scarce. 

    That can lead to please for cash.“To be blunt, our financial situation is dire. We estimate Body Politic, including our Slack space, will cease to exist by early 2023 without funding (GOAL: $500k),” Body Politic said in an Instagram post early in November.

    “Our team is pursuing private donors, foundations, and strategic partners, and we could use more connections and insights on potential partners.”

    Groups like Body Politic say they need money to hire more moderators, pay for increasingly robust software subscriptions, advocate for patients, offer public education, and work with government and health leaders. 

    The Struggle to Keep Up

    Hosting a group can be a big commitment. Florida nurse Laney Bond says when COVID-19 emerged, she set up a Facebook group to help fellow nurses. Bond, who had been treated previously for mast cell activation syndrome — which can cause allergic reactions – started to develop long COVID symptoms like heart problems and brain fog. 

    Bond says she noticed online discussions about long COVID patients with similar symptoms and wanted to share the evidence-based medicine she had been gathering about post-viral illness.

    “I just threw a group out there for people in hopes that the information and my experience would shorten their journey,” she says.

    Now Bond has trouble keeping up with the 95,000 members signed up for her COVID-19 Long Haulers Support group. She also hosts a web page where she posts simplified information on COVID-19 she gets from the National Institutes of Health.  

    Bond is a volunteer with a day job. She says she makes about $10 a month from Google ads on the website she runs in addition to the Facebook page, but otherwise, has no funding source. So she’s backed up on the moderation. 

    “It’s too much, but I do my best,” she says. Facebook has provided some moderator tools to help.

    A New Age of Advocacy

    The internet has spawned the engaged patient – people who do their own research and plan care along with their doctors. The engaged long COVID patient is bringing in “a new age of advocacy,” David Putrino, PhD, a physical therapist and professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, writes in a Perspective for Medscape, WebMD’s sister site for medical professionals.  

    “Such organizations are driving incredibly comprehensive biomedical and clinical research, and doing so at an unprecedented pace,” he writes.

    Support from other patients is essential for people with chronic conditions, but it need to be paired with solid medical care and support services, advocates say.

    Davids says he is most active in the Body Politic channel on the online tool Slack, where 11,000 members meet privately. He appreciates that a human, not an algorithm, chooses which posts he sees. And he thinks Body Politic is well moderated, something he and others suggest patients consider when joining a group. 

    “Support groups should be moderated. You could ask as a support group member — how are our moderators trained? How do you know are they equipped to manage the space?” he asks. 

    The Survivor Corps page is “heavily, heavily, moderated,” Berrent says. Users “cannot state a scientific fact unless they link to a legitimate source,” she says. They can talk about what has helped them, but they can’t give medical advice or talk politics. 

    Conflict among group members may be a source of agitation and that could be a drawback, Davids cautions. He suggests that patients try out a few groups and see what happens when conflicts emerge. 

    “How is it handled? Does it sit right with you? Does it get your heart racing — which you certainly don’t need?” he says. Davids offers a list of recommended groups on his Long COVIDJustice page. 

    The Body Politic group was founded as a wellness collective before the pandemic but morphed into a long COVID group in 2020 when Lowenstein and another member got sick. They say they couldn’t find help anywhere else.

    Lowenstein, who now has mild symptoms and no longer runs the group, agrees that patient support groups should be well-moderated. Lowenstein also thinks they should be limited to those with long COVID and worries that journalists and people curious about COVID dwell on the public sites. 

    “It’s not a particularly private or safe-feeling space for people with long COVID,” Lowenstein says. 

    Facebook has taken some action on COVID communities, including an effort to look for members in distress. Bond, who runs the COVID Care Group, says she was vetted by Facebook earlier this year and they shared some moderator tools, including a red flag for postings that suggest suicide. Bond says she did 20 suicide interventions last year for long COVID patients.

    Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has COVID and vaccine misinformation policies. The company reports that it has removed 27 million pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram feeds and more than 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups for violations.

    But the stream of posts and comments continues. Christian Sandrock, MD, director of critical care at University of California Davis, says many of his long COVID patients get information on Facebook. 

    “What we really say is — almost as an absolute — is if anyone is saying this definitely works, this is awesome, it is a quick fix … don’t go with,” he said during the SciLine briefing. “We know this disease is complex. We know we don’t have good answers.“

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  • Long COVID Patients Find Aid and Risk in Online Support Groups

    Long COVID Patients Find Aid and Risk in Online Support Groups

    [ad_1]

    Nov. 9, 2022 — Jill Sylte wrote that she would not have made it through long COVID without her Facebook support group, Survivor Corps. 

    “It has helped me so much, by being able to be in touch with other long hauler members,” the Pensacola, FL, woman wrote in a comment on a group post in March. “Everyone in this group understands each other. Unless you are a long-hauler you don’t completely feel what we are going through.”

    The listing of hundreds of Facebook long COVID communities goes on for page after page. Some have a few members. Survivor Corps has nearly 200,000.  

    “This space has absolutely exploded in the past 2 years,” says Fiona Lowenstein, a journalist who started the group called Body Politic that has become a COVID support group. 

    The public Facebook COVID and long COVID groups are studded with posts and comments like this among the hundreds that can come in a day.

    On a single day in late October, Survivor Corps posters were trying to find out if anyone else had hair loss, rashes, sleep apnea issues, migraines, bladder problems, neck pain, vertigo, allergies, or double vision. An October post on increasing cholesterol levels drew more than 50 comments within 17 hours. 

    The support groups provide advice and encouragement that patients often are not getting from their medical providers, friends, and family. They’re also a source of valuable data for researchers. But some doctors worry that they are not always entirely benign, even as they gain popularity.

    From Hospital Meeting Rooms to Online

    Patient support groups have moved out of the hospital community room and onto Facebook, Reddit, WhatsApp, and other online spaces. Before long COVID was recognized, these forums were a lifeline for patients with chronic conditions.

    After having lived with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) for years, long COVID seemed familiar to JD Davids, a chronic disabilities activist in Brooklyn who works with a group called Long COVID Justice. He thinks patient groups are important for otherwise healthy people with unexplained post-infection symptoms like extreme fatigue. 

    “One of the problems is that these often-volunteer-based patient support groups are all that people have,” Davids says. The groups are essential to patients but need to be part of a comprehensive care plan, he says.

    While offering support, online groups can be sources of misinformation and unproven remedies. Advocates and doctors say some group members come to them asking about miracle cures and supplements.  

    Alexander Truong, MD, a doctor at Emory University in Atlanta who works with long COVID patients, says many of his patients have bought expensive but useless vitamins and supplements they learn about online.  

    “A lot of these patients are grasping at straws to try to figure out anything that can make them feel better and they are very vulnerable to this kind of scam,” he said during a live online forum hosted by SciLine, a project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    Privacy can be another issue. Tens of thousands of people post details about their health and lives in public Facebook groups. Anyone signed on to Facebook can read the posts.

    A Treasure Trove of Data

    Analysis of these private patient conversations can also produce useful data for researchers. The organization Patients Like Me, founded in 2005 to support families with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) is built around the concept. 

    Researchers at Yale and elsewhere are already working with long COVID patient groups. Facebook’s Data for Good program offers three COVID databases based on posting on the platform. The Patient-Led Research Collaborative provided data for a study published in The Lancet that was among the first the characterize long COVID.

    For Facebook groups, the site’s rules requiregroup moderators to “obtain user consent for your use of the content and information that you collect.” But the platform has been fighting “unauthorized scrapers” who lift data off Facebook and republish it. 

    The Survivor Corps group, the largest long COVID Facebook group with nearly 200,000 members, is public. Anyone can read any of the posts. Those signed into Facebook can click on the “People” tab and see any group members who have a single mutual contact. 

    Diana Berrent, a New York photographer who caught COVID-19 early in the pandemic, is the founder of and a contributor to the Survivor Corps Facebook group and its sister website. She thinks the choice of support group might be a matter of where someone already spends their time online. 

    “And I don’t see it’s a privacy issue,” she says.  “It’s really whatever platform you’re most comfortable in.” 

    Berrent also runs polls and had worked with researchers at Yale, the National Institutes of Health, and elsewhere.Although the data on her site can be valuable, Berrent says she has turned down offers from buyers.

    At the same time, she says she received grant money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative when she started her work, but it has run out. She doesn’t want to ask for donations from support group members. She says she has funds to pay for one full-time employee and one part-time employee.   

    Group moderators say money for this cause is hard to come by. And this need for funding can be a vulnerability. Some well-established patient groups specializing in a range of conditions get money from the pharmaceutical industry. But with no marketable treatment for long COVID, corporate sponsors are scarce. 

    That can lead to please for cash.“To be blunt, our financial situation is dire. We estimate Body Politic, including our Slack space, will cease to exist by early 2023 without funding (GOAL: $500k),” Body Politic said in an Instagram post early in November.

    “Our team is pursuing private donors, foundations, and strategic partners, and we could use more connections and insights on potential partners.”

    Groups like Body Politic say they need money to hire more moderators, pay for increasingly robust software subscriptions, advocate for patients, offer public education, and work with government and health leaders. 

    The Struggle to Keep Up

    Hosting a group can be a big commitment. Florida nurse Laney Bond says when COVID-19 emerged, she set up a Facebook group to help fellow nurses. Bond, who had been treated previously for mast cell activation syndrome — which can cause allergic reactions – started to develop long COVID symptoms like heart problems and brain fog. 

    Bond says she noticed online discussions about long COVID patients with similar symptoms and wanted to share the evidence-based medicine she had been gathering about post-viral illness.

    “I just threw a group out there for people in hopes that the information and my experience would shorten their journey,” she says.

    Now Bond has trouble keeping up with the 95,000 members signed up for her COVID-19 Long Haulers Support group. She also hosts a web page where she posts simplified information on COVID-19 she gets from the National Institutes of Health.  

    Bond is a volunteer with a day job. She says she makes about $10 a month from Google ads on the website she runs in addition to the Facebook page, but otherwise, has no funding source. So she’s backed up on the moderation. 

    “It’s too much, but I do my best,” she says. Facebook has provided some moderator tools to help.

    A New Age of Advocacy

    The internet has spawned the engaged patient – people who do their own research and plan care along with their doctors. The engaged long COVID patient is bringing in “a new age of advocacy,” David Putrino, PhD, a physical therapist and professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, writes in a Perspective for Medscape, WebMD’s sister site for medical professionals.  

    “Such organizations are driving incredibly comprehensive biomedical and clinical research, and doing so at an unprecedented pace,” he writes.

    Support from other patients is essential for people with chronic conditions, but it need to be paired with solid medical care and support services, advocates say.

    Davids says he is most active in the Body Politic channel on the online tool Slack, where 11,000 members meet privately. He appreciates that a human, not an algorithm, chooses which posts he sees. And he thinks Body Politic is well moderated, something he and others suggest patients consider when joining a group. 

    “Support groups should be moderated. You could ask as a support group member — how are our moderators trained? How do you know are they equipped to manage the space?” he asks. 

    The Survivor Corps page is “heavily, heavily, moderated,” Berrent says. Users “cannot state a scientific fact unless they link to a legitimate source,” she says. They can talk about what has helped them, but they can’t give medical advice or talk politics. 

    Conflict among group members may be a source of agitation and that could be a drawback, Davids cautions. He suggests that patients try out a few groups and see what happens when conflicts emerge. 

    “How is it handled? Does it sit right with you? Does it get your heart racing — which you certainly don’t need?” he says. Davids offers a list of recommended groups on his Long COVIDJustice page. 

    The Body Politic group was founded as a wellness collective before the pandemic but morphed into a long COVID group in 2020 when Lowenstein and another member got sick. They say they couldn’t find help anywhere else.

    Lowenstein, who now has mild symptoms and no longer runs the group, agrees that patient support groups should be well-moderated. Lowenstein also thinks they should be limited to those with long COVID and worries that journalists and people curious about COVID dwell on the public sites. 

    “It’s not a particularly private or safe-feeling space for people with long COVID,” Lowenstein says. 

    Facebook has taken some action on COVID communities, including an effort to look for members in distress. Bond, who runs the COVID Care Group, says she was vetted by Facebook earlier this year and they shared some moderator tools, including a red flag for postings that suggest suicide. Bond says she did 20 suicide interventions last year for long COVID patients.

    Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has COVID and vaccine misinformation policies. The company reports that it has removed 27 million pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram feeds and more than 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups for violations.

    But the stream of posts and comments continues. Christian Sandrock, MD, director of critical care at University of California Davis, says many of his long COVID patients get information on Facebook. 

    “What we really say is — almost as an absolute — is if anyone is saying this definitely works, this is awesome, it is a quick fix … don’t go with,” he said during the SciLine briefing. “We know this disease is complex. We know we don’t have good answers.“

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  • ICYMI: A look back at Sunday’s 60 Minutes

    ICYMI: A look back at Sunday’s 60 Minutes

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    <br /> ICYMI: A look back at Sunday’s 60 Minutes – Belief in the Ballot, Pathogen X, David Sedaris – CBS News

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  • 10/30/2022: Belief in the Ballot, Pathogen X, David Sedaris

    10/30/2022: Belief in the Ballot, Pathogen X, David Sedaris

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    10/30/2022: Belief in the Ballot, Pathogen X, David Sedaris – CBS News


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    Election deniers running for office and allegations about 2020; Searching for the next deadly virus, before it ignites another pandemic; David Sedaris: The 60 Minutes Interview

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  • Searching for the next deadly virus, before it ignites another pandemic | 60 Minutes

    Searching for the next deadly virus, before it ignites another pandemic | 60 Minutes

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    Searching for the next deadly virus, before it ignites another pandemic | 60 Minutes – CBS News


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    Bill Whitaker reports from Uganda’s Impenetrable Forest, where scientists are trying to find the next deadly virus before it finds us.

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  • On the lookout for viruses that could trigger another pandemic

    On the lookout for viruses that could trigger another pandemic

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    Since 2009, American scientists have discovered more than 900 new viruses. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government is doubling down sending virus hunters to global hotspots to TRY AND find the next deadly virus before it finds us. Bill Whitaker joined a team from the University of California Davis and their Ugandan partners in the rugged Impenetrable Forest on the search for Pathogen X for a report this week on 60 Minutes.

    “I would say another pandemic is guaranteed,” wildlife epidemiologist Christine Johnson told Whitaker. “Johnson: It’s not a matter of if, but when. That’s why we’re so committed to preparation.”

    Johnson leads the UC Davis team and has been hunting viruses around the globe for decades. Of top concern are viruses that are capable of jumping from wild animals to humans, as COVID-19 likely did. It’s called spillover. Disease detectives warn the threat of spillover has never been higher as urban populations grow and come into contact with wild animals – and their viruses – for the first time.

    Whitaker went along with the UC Davis team and their Ugandan partners as they headed to an abandoned mine shaft to look for bats. Johnson said bats are prime suspects for spillover. They harbor more viruses lethal to humans than any other mammal. New bat species—and new viruses—are still being discovered.

    They’re also known to carry coronaviruses—the same virus family that spawned COVID-19—as well as lethal ebola viruses.

    So Whitaker and company had to dress head to toe in protective gear. Once the hazmat suit was on, they added two sets of gloves, a mask, and a face shield to guard against flying guano and other toxins. 

    The Impenetrable Forest was soon pitch black and we had only the light from our headlamps to guide us. Soon, they’d trapped a large Egyptian fruit bat. Ugandan wildlife vet Benard Ssebide gently disentangled it and put it in a fabric sack. We followed him back to the makeshift lab, glowing in the dark.

    Up close, the bats did little to dispel their fearsome reputations. Whitaker and his crew watched as the fruit bat grew agitated, trying to escape. The scientists held its nose to a test tube filled with a mild anesthetic. Finally, the bat succumbed. Johnson said the bat would be swabbed for a suite of viruses. 

    “It doesn’t hurt the bat,” Johnson said. “We get the right size swab so that we’re just doing an oral sample. It might be a little uncomfortable.”

    The bat’s wings were examined for parasites and ticks that might also have pathogens. All the samples would be sent to a lab for DNA sequencing. Johnson said a virus’s genetic code can help identify which might cross to humans.

    After the tests were done, the bats were released, groggy but unharmed.

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  • Virus hunters searching for new pathogens to help prevent another pandemic

    Virus hunters searching for new pathogens to help prevent another pandemic

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    An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Uganda has alarmed scientists. While no cases have yet been discovered outside Africa, the U.S. has started screening all arrivals from Uganda. Ebola is among the deadliest of pathogens capable of jumping from wild animals to humans—just as COVID-19 likely did. It’s called spillover. Disease detectives warn the threat of spillover has never been higher as urban populations grow and come into contact with wild animals and their viruses. Since 2009, American scientists have discovered more than 900 new viruses. Now, the U.S. government is doubling down, sending virus hunters to global hotspots to find the next deadly virus before it finds us. We joined a team from the University of California Davis and their Ugandan partners in the rugged Impenetrable Forest on the search for Pathogen X.

    We landed in Kihihi, a speck of a town in southwest Uganda. As we headed off to the Impenetrable Forest, we soon saw how it got its name. It’s so thick with trees, vines, and roots that Ugandans call it the place of darkness. As our 4x4s bumped and swerved along deeply rutted tracks, we passed tea farmers, loggers, villagers, all living on the edge of the forest, where the risk of infectious disease spilling over from animals is highest. Wildlife epidemiologist Christine Johnson handicapped the stakes.

    Bill Whitaker: How would you rate the odds of another pandemic?

    Christine Johnson: I would say another pandemic is guaranteed. 

    Bill Whitaker: Guaranteed.

    Christine Johnson: It’s not a matter of if, but when. That’s why we’re so committed to preparation.

    pathogenxscreengrabs00.jpg
      Christine Johnson

    Johnson leads the UC Davis team and has been hunting viruses around the globe for decades. We were headed to an abandoned mineshaft to look for bats. Johnson told us bats are prime suspects for spillover. They harbor more viruses lethal to humans than any other mammal. New bat species—and new viruses—are still being discovered. 

    Bill Whitaker: It seems like a really daunting task for you to find Pathogen X before it finds us?

    Christine Johnson: It’s definitely achievable.

    Bill Whitaker: It is achievable.

    Christine Johnson: Absolutely. It’s all here right now, right? It’s not like we’re exploring outer space. All of these viruses, and – and – and all of the wildlife are right here on our planet. 

    The bats would start flying at dusk. We waited as the UC Davis team and their Ugandan partners hung a fine mesh net across the entrance of the cave. We wore masks and goggles to protect ourselves against any early risers. 

    Benard Ssebide, one of Uganda’s top wildlife vets, told us this area used to be all forest. Now, villagers had planted a cornfield right up to the mouth of the bat cave, increasing the risk of spillover. As if on cue, we watched women carrying water cut through the cornfield, while school children ran home.

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    Correspondent Bill Whitaker speaks with  Benard Ssebide

    Bill Whitaker: The transfer between bats and humans, it’s much more likely when you’ve got people living so close.

    Benard Ssebide: Exactly. The population has grown. People have moved into areas they’ve never aspired before. That shrinkage of the buffer, the habitat, between the people and wildlife has become so narrow, so that increases the contact.

    Bill Whitaker: We were talking about people who are now living right on the edge of the Impenetrable Forest.

    Benard Ssebide: Exactly. Governments cannot stop people from moving into some of these areas because they have nowhere else to go.

    Bats are known to carry coronaviruses—the same virus family that spawned COVID-19—as well as lethal ebola viruses.

    Christine Johnson Make sure there’s boots.

    So we had to dress head to toe in protective gear. Once the hazmat suit was on, we added two sets of gloves, a mask, and a face shield to guard against flying guano and other toxins. 

    Bill Whitaker: Once we begin, I must assume everything is contaminated?

    Christine Johnson: Exactly

    The Impenetrable Forest was soon pitch black and we had only the light from our headlamps to guide us. Soon, they’d trapped a large egyptian fruit bat. Wildlife vet Benard Ssebide gently disentangled it and put it in a fabric sack. We followed him back to the makeshift lab, glowing in the dark.

    The bat sacks quivered in the ghostly light. It felt like we were on the set of a sci-fi movie. 

    Bill Whitaker: Oh he’s a big guy.

    pathogenxscreengrabs06.jpg
    Scientists hold a captured bat’s nose to a test tube filled with a mild anesthetic  

    Up close, the bats did little to dispel their fearsome reputations. We watched as the fruit bat grew agitated, trying to escape. The scientists held its nose to a test tube filled with a mild anesthetic. Finally, the bat succumbed. Epidemiologist Christine Johnson told us the bat would be swabbed for a suite of viruses. 

    Bill Whitaker: Does this hurt the bat at all?

    Christine Johnson: No, it doesn’t hurt the bat. We—we get the right size swab so that we’re just doing an oral sample. It might be a little uncomfortable.

    The bat’s wings were examined for parasites and ticks that might also have pathogens. All the samples would be sent to a lab for DNA sequencing. Johnson told us a virus’s genetic code can help identify which might cross to humans.

    After the tests were done, the bats were released, groggy but unharmed. 

    The next day we joined Tierra Smiley Evans, a UC Davis epidemiologist and wildlife vet. We were looking for monkeys and baboons. Like bats, primates carry many viruses that have leapt to people. Smiley Evans told us catching an outbreak early, at the point of spillover, is vital to containing it.

    Bill Whitaker: It sounds like there’s no shortage of viruses that can infect humans that come out of the forest?

    Tierra Smiley Evans: There are probably more pathogens that we don’t know about than ones that we do know about. We need to gather more information and more intelligence about what may be out there and able to spill over before it does. 

    Bill Whitaker: So they come right down to the hospital?

    Tierra Smiley Evans: Yeah in the back, it butts up right against the forest.

    pathogenxscreengrabs09.jpg
      Tierra Smiley Evans

    We met her at the Bwindi Community Hospital on the edge of the forest.  

    Bill Whitaker: This really is something. 

    It’s so close, we saw baboons casually strolling on the hospital grounds, sometimes getting into patients’ rooms. 

    Tierra Smiley Evans: Whenever you’re creating a new opportunity for humans to come in contact with wildlife populations that they were never in contact with before, you’re creating a brand-new situation.

    Bill Whitaker: So as human populations grow, that’s pushing us into areas we’ve never been before.

    Tierra Smiley Evans: Exactly.

    Bill Whitaker: Putting us into contact with animals we’ve never been in contact with before.

    Tierra Smiley Evans: Exactly.

    To find out what viruses the baboons were carrying, Smiley Evans pioneered a simple but groundbreaking method to collect saliva samples: the stealth banana. Tied to a string, the banana is tossed to the curious baboons. But hidden inside is an oral swab coated in something sweet that the baboons love to chew. Smiley Evans and Ugandan wildlife vet Bukamba Nelson had prepared the bananas earlier in the day.

    Tierra Smiley Evans: So we have tried strawberry jam. We have tried mango juice.

    Bill Whitaker: Have you found they like one more than the other?

    Tierra Smiley Evans: The difference is that sometimes they’ll chew on that swab for longer periods of time with a different attractant versus another. And that’s what we really want. 

    It’s like bubble gum for primates. When the sweet is gone the baboons throw the swab away, leaving behind plenty of saliva that can be decoded for viruses. 

    But family politics can sometimes get in the way. Meet the big daddy of this troop. He wasn’t about to let anyone else get even a mouthful. Mom hauled the babies out of the way until, finally, the coast was clear. By then, all that was left were soggy leftovers. Wildlife vet Bukamba Nelson told us it was worth the wait. It was rare to see babies venture this close.

    pathogenxscreengrabs11.jpg
      Bukamba Nelson

    Bill Whitaker: So you got saliva samples from the babies?

    Bukamba Nelson: Yeah, yeah.

    Bill Whitaker: That’s unusual?

    Bukamba Nelson: It’s very unusual.

    Bill Whitaker: So what do you get from the babies that you don’t get from the adults?

    Bukamba Nelson: You never know. I might find a particular disease in this age bracket, which might not be found in the juvenile or the females. Sex, age, all that plays a lot in disease intelligence. 

    Disease intelligence that also includes training villagers to be on the look-out for any unusual fevers or flu-like symptoms. Scientists can then match human illnesses to the animal viruses they’ve found in the same area. Smiley Evans told us it was putting pieces of a puzzle together.

    Tierra Smiley Evans: All the samples are tested in the same way for the same pathogens. So, the goal is that if we’re sampling at the same time, in the same area we can start to connect the dots and understand when there’s been transmission of a particular virus. 

    One of the most closely monitored species in the Impenetrable Forest are its star residents, the endangered mountain gorilla. Nearly half the world’s remaining gorillas are here, 459 at last count. They’re always on the move, so we set off to find them. One ridge led to another, each steeper than the last. The forest was so dense there was no sunlight. And no gorillas. Wildlife vet Benard Ssebide assured us we were on the right path. 

    Bill Whitaker: Are you seeing signs of the gorillas around here?

    Benard Ssebide: Yeah, I’ve seen some already. 

    Our porters breezed along unfazed. We? Not so much. 

    Then, hours after trekking, suddenly, there they were. We spotted a mother first, high in the trees gorging on twigs. Soon we were surrounded by all 19 members of an extended family, including a massive silverback and another mother cradling her infant. We had put on our masks, not to protect ourselves, but to protect the gorillas from any infection we might be carrying. Amy Bond is with Gorilla Doctors, an international conservation group. She told us how they identify each gorilla.

    pathogenxscreengrabs17.jpg
      Amy Bond

    Amy Bond: Just like humans where we each have our own unique fingerprint that helps us be identifiable as an individual, gorillas have unique nose prints.

    Bill Whitaker: A nose print?

    Amy Bond: A nose print and that’s what allows us to identify those individuals. And so we go through and we make sure we get each individual in the group that we can do a visual assessment, looking for signs of illness or injury.

    Bond and wildlife vet Benard Ssebide told us that gorillas are susceptible to many of the same pathogens that we are and they can be an early harbinger of disease. The gorillas are monitored daily for any warning signs. 

    Amy Bond: When they’re sick, it’s very similar, right?

    Benard Ssebide: Yeah

    Amy Bond: Runny nose, coughing, sneezing

    Benard Ssebide: Coughing, sneezing

    Amy Bond: They’re not moving, they don’t want to eat.


    Speaking to gorillas in the Impenetrable Forest | 60 Minutes

    05:25

    If a gorilla is lying down, Ssebide told us, they’ll assess if he’s resting or if something else is preventing him from moving. We spotted one young male on his own, but Amy Bond told us he was likely suffering from a problem of a different sort.

    Amy Bond: You can also sometimes tell which silverback is dominant by the number of females around him.

    Bill Whitaker: So this poor guy sitting over here? (chuckles) He’s just out.

    Amy Bond: He’s just always second choice. 

    Aside from a case of wounded male pride, Bond told us this family appeared to be thriving. But their future isn’t guaranteed. And if theirs isn’t, neither is ours. Bond told us as spillover threats grow, it’s impossible to separate human health from the health of the natural world. As UC Davis scientists continue their work, the search for Pathogen X is a search for what threatens the animals of the impenetrable forest as much as it threatens us.

    Produced by Heather Abbott. Associate producer, LaCrai Mitchell. Broadcast associate, Natalie Breitkopf. Edited by Peter M. Berman.

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  • Speaking to gorillas in the Impenetrable Forest

    Speaking to gorillas in the Impenetrable Forest

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    For this week’s 60 Minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker traveled to the Impenetrable Forest in a remote part of southwestern Uganda. He and his crew went with American virus trackers, who are trying to locate and stop the next virus from jumping from wildlife to humans.

    Getting to the Impenetrable Forest took about a full day of travel, first from New York to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Kigali, Rwanda, and then from Kigali to Entebbe, Uganda. Then they flew in a small commuter jet from Entebbe to Kahihi before driving another hour from to Bwindi. 

    “And you finally get to Bwindi, and Bwindi was like a garden,” Whitaker said. “And it’s just lush green with flowers blooming everywhere. It was quite magnificent.”

    The Impenetrable Forest is as it sounds, dense and thick with vines and giant ferns, fir trees and hardwood trees. At some points the sun could not shine through the thick growth. 

    Some of the American doctors the 60 Minutes team was with are from an organization called Gorilla Doctors. When they first started monitoring the Impenetrable Forest’s gorillas in the 1980s, there were about 250 mountain gorillas. Today, there are 459, and the gorilla population is growing. 

    The 60 Minutes team was also with park rangers, who keep track of the forest’s gorilla families. Park ranger Wilbur Tumwesigye was able to call a family of gorillas over to Whitaker and the crew, communicating with the gorillas to assure them the group was safe. 

    Tumwesigye told Whitaker that humans have identified 14 different sounds mountain gorillas make. He has mastered many of those sounds, including the sound silverbacks make when telling their group, “It’s time to leave.”

    Whitaker recalled the experience of watching the gorillas up close. 

    “They were eating and grooming, and the mothers were breastfeeding the babies,” Whitaker said. “The babies were playing. The teenagers were roughhousing. And the big silverback was just sort of sitting, watching guard over the whole thing. And they were right in front of us. It was magical.”

    The video above was produced by Will Croxton and Brit McCandless Farmer. It was edited by Will Croxton.

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  • How the Pandemic Changed You (and You May Not Even Know It)

    How the Pandemic Changed You (and You May Not Even Know It)

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    Oct. 27, 2022 – The pandemic changed a lot. The way we work, educate our kids, and visit the doctor. The job market, the housing market, and entire industries. Our average life expectancy fell by nearly 3 years.

    But the pandemic has also changed something else: You. 

    That’s not just a guess. Scientists have been putting out papers documenting the many ways you – and all of us – have changed, from habits to health. The latest such study suggests that our very personalities have changed.

    Researchers from Florida State University and other institutions compared data pre-pandemic versus later and found declines in four traits: extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The changes were about “one-tenth of a standard deviation,” roughly the level of personality change you’d expect to see over a decade – not 2 years. A fifth trait, neuroticism, also increased in young adults. 

    In some ways, that’s the opposite of what should happen as we grow and mature, explains study author Angelina Sutin, PhD, a professor of behavioral sciences and social medicine at Florida State University College of Medicine. The paper calls it “disrupted maturity.” Normally, neuroticism goes down, and agreeableness and conscientiousness go up. 

    “In young adults, we found the exact opposite pattern,” Sutin says. Middle-aged adults also saw a decline in agreeableness and conscientiousness, though the oldest adults saw no significant changes.

    “Having a worldwide pandemic was a stressor that affected everyone in some way,” Sutin says. “There has not been an event like that in modern time, in modern psychology, that we could look at that disrupted all of society.” 

    Natural disasters are disruptive and stressful but tend not to affect the entire population. They also don’t last as long. 

    “The pandemic has been this ongoing threat,” Sutin says. “It’s hard to have gone through this experience and not been changed in some way.”

    Scientists have seized the opportunity to study all kinds of things: the pandemic’s impact on our blood pressure, our microbiomes, our eyesight, our mental health. Many more long-term changes may be revealed with time. 

    Are they permanent? Perhaps – but perhaps not. We are not without agency; if you’re feeling more anxious and stressed (signs of neuroticism), you can seek help and learn ways to manage that. If you’re concerned about conscientiousness, practice those skills: Stick to a schedule, follow through on commitments. 

    “All those things that make conscientious people conscientious,” Sutin says. 

    On the other hand, some changes – like washing your hands more and reevaluating what matters – may be positive. And those you can choose to keep. 

    It starts with taking a moment to reflect and recognize what changes are helpful or harmful, which you’d like to carry forward, and which you’ll leave behind. 

    So, how have we  changed since the pandemic? Have a look.

    Our Blood Pressure Went Up

    A study of half a million U.S. adults found systolic blood pressure (the top number in your blood pressure measurement) jumped by about 2 millimeters of mercury from April 2020 to December 2020, while diastolic pressure (the bottom number) went up, too. (This after holding steady in 2019 and the first 3 months of 2020.)

    Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, raising blood pressure, says study author Luke Laffin, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Blood Pressure Disorders. It also inspires unhealthy behaviors, like scarfing down junk food, drinking alcohol, and sleeping less. 

    Even a small rise in blood pressure can increase heart attack and stroke risk. But you can help reverse the damage by exercising, cutting back on salt and saturated fat, making sleep a priority, and taking blood pressure medications as prescribed. Another useful exercise: Take a long look at how you react to stress triggers, no matter if they come from family, TV, or social media. Tracking your blood pressure at home can help too, Laffin says. Find validated monitors at ValidateBP.org. 

    We Need More Space 

    Remember Seinfeld’s “close talker” (Judge Reinhold) who gets uncomfortably I-can-feel-your-breath close? We all know that visceral urge to step back, and now we may be stepping back even farther. 

    Taking advantage of a pre-pandemic study on personal space, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital recruited the same people for a new study after the pandemic began. They found that space needs increased by 45%, from 2 to 3 feet to 3 to 4 feet, on average. 

    The clever part of this study is that they used both real people and avatars to test the results. 

    “Even though avatars are not real, we do not want an avatar in our personal space,” says study author Daphne Holt, MD, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. You can’t catch COVID from an avatar. Yet people still needed more space in a virtual setting, suggesting the brain systems regulating personal space may have been altered. 

    No need to force this one. You’ll readjust at your own pace, Holt says. 

    “These behaviors are fairly automatic and sensitive to change, and thus should quickly adapt again to the new normal.” 

    We’ve Become Germ-Fighting Ninjas – and That May Be Bad for Our Health 

    For many of us, the pandemic was a crash course on virology and immunology. We now know what a spike protein is, the difference between an N95 and a regular-old face mask, the virtues of alcohol-based hand sanitizer, and how far and fast virus-carrying droplets can travel. 

    But we may have fended off good germs too, meaning your microbiome may have taken a hit. 

    “We have a tension in our society between hygiene and healthy [microbe] exposure,” says Brett Finlay, PhD, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of British Columbia and author of Let Them Eat Dirt. 

    That goes back well before the pandemic, to when scientists discovered about a century ago that germs cause infection. That’s when we broke out the disinfectant, sterilizing our world and killing healthy microbes in the process. 

    “When we realized this and how important the microbiome is to our health, we started pushing back,” says Finlay. “Then COVID came along, and we went back to being hyper hygienic, which will set us back considerably.”

    Healthy microbes help protect against disease. And a BMJ study even found that the gut microbiome may influence COVID severity.

    Strike a balance, Finlay recommends. Keep handwashing, but eat more fiber, fermented foods, and probiotics, and cut back on sugar, flour, and red meat. Also exercise, manage stress, and get outside. Microbes in the environment can be ingested and become part of your gut community, where they can help fuel healthy gut cells, he says. A pet is another good way to expose yourself to different microbes.

    Our Vision Got Blurrier

    The pandemic, by virtue of trapping us indoors and keeping us close to screens, may have sped up a rise in nearsightedness, or myopia, especially among young children. That’s when you can see things up close but struggle to view objects far away. The fix is simple: glasses. But if myopia worsens too quickly, it can increase the risk of retinal detachment and glaucoma, conditions that in turn can lead to permanent blindness.

    Children are especially at risk. 

    “The younger the person, the more influence near activity has on progression of myopia,” says Howard Krauss, MD, a neuro-ophthalmologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA. “But even the young adult may induce myopia with prolonged near work,” as may be the case among law students and medical students. 

    You can help protect yourself (or your child) against myopia progression by getting outside, Krauss says. Exposure to bright light triggers the release of dopamine, which may prevent the eye from elongating (the basis of myopia). Maximize your outdoor time as you can, aiming for at least 2  hours a day.

    Our Teeth Hurt

    Some 70% of dentists saw more teeth grinding, or bruxism, among patients. Dr. Google noticed too: Searches for “bruxism,” “teeth grinding,” and “teeth clenching” spiked between May and October 2020. 

    Grinding is linked to stress, and some research suggests the tensing-and-relaxing motion (like chewing gum) may be a subconscious stress reducer. 

    If it gets bad enough, grinding can cause tooth fractures or loss of teeth, says Robert DiPilla, DDS. If you’re concerned, see your dentist. A fitted mouth guard may solve the problem.

    We’re More Anxious (and More Aware of That, Too)

    Rates of depression and anxiety soared during the pandemic. The reason? Take your pick: unprecedented stress, frustration, isolation, uncertainty, grief over losing loved ones. Some research points to “emotional contagion.” That’s when you see other anxious people, so you start to feel anxious too, an effect that can run rampant on social media. 

    But guess what? We’ve noticed. A recent survey from CNN and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 9 out of 10 adults believe there’s a mental health crisis in the U.S. today. We’re talking more about mental health now, says Ariana Mufson, a social worker in Newton Centre, MA, and we may be more aware of it than ever, as evidenced by the rise in demand for mental health services. 

    “People I hadn’t seen in years came back to my practice,” says Mufson, “and I received daily referrals to the point where I had to keep a long waitlist.” 

    Paying more attention to your mental health is a positive change. So put down the phone and keep up the self-care. Our mental health needs “exercise” just as our bodies do, Mufson says.

    We Stopped Catching Colds

    It’s not true that getting infections boosts general immunity. In fact, infection can cause inflammation and may trigger autoimmune disease. One study found that prior infection with a common cold coronavirus may have increased the risk of severe illness from COVID.

    “One of the things we learned from the pandemic was how effective masking is at preventing all sorts of illnesses,” says Meghan May, PhD, a professor of microbiology and infectious disease at the University of New England College of Medicine. Take the unusually low 2020-2021 flu season, she says. 

    “We can apply that knowledge forward to help curtail diseases other than COVID.” 

    Keep washing your hands, using sanitizer, and minding your personal space, May recommends. And continue to eat outside at restaurants if you can, even during the chilly months of cold and flu season. Heat lamps, fire pits, and portable stoves have become common at many places, she notes. 

    We Reevaluated What Matters 

    Amid the disruption and isolation, the pandemic may have helped us focus on what’s most important. Engagements, career shifts, and moves all spiked. Job loss and furloughs encouraged many to reconsider their careers, prompting an unprecedented high in U.S. resignations. Inflation forced some to rethink their spending – a Capital One survey found 58% of those surveyed have completely changed how they think about money due to the pandemic.

    This is one change you want to make permanent, so keep fostering that compassionate and curious inner voice, says Mufson. 

    “Ask yourself, ‘Is this job making me happy? Is it giving me the work-life balance I want? Do I have enough free time to see family and friends?’” If not, figure out the steps needed to get where you want to be.  

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  • Leslie Jordan’s final TV interview: “CBS Mornings” extended cut

    Leslie Jordan’s final TV interview: “CBS Mornings” extended cut

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    Leslie Jordan’s final TV interview: “CBS Mornings” extended cut – CBS News


    Watch CBS News



    Emmy-winning actor, comedian and singer Leslie Jordan died unexpectedly on Oct. 24 at 67 years old. CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason had just visited him in Nashville two weeks prior to chat about his life, career, becoming a viral internet sensation during the pandemic, and his recent pivot to country music. They met up for what would be Jordan’s final sit-down TV interview at Nashville’s Sound Emporium Studios, where he recorded his debut gospel album.

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  • The Dangers of Remote Work Put Young Employees Most At Risk. Here’s Why.

    The Dangers of Remote Work Put Young Employees Most At Risk. Here’s Why.

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    As Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky recently put it: “The mall is Amazon. The theatre is Netflix. The office is Zoom. There’s a future where you never leave your home and after Covid is over, the most dangerous thing will be loneliness.”

    Loneliness was a global pandemic before Covid-19, but its consequences have only grown more severe, especially among our youth. A study published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education noted that 36% of respondents reported severe loneliness — feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time,” including 61% of young people aged 18–25. More notably, 43% of young adults reported increases in loneliness since the pandemic’s outbreak.

    At the same time, as the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic has started to wane, leaders have begun to hypothesize what a return to normalcy will look like, which social and economic changes will stay and which will fade. With that emerges the definition of what the new working world will become.

    Related: What a Workplace Loneliness Expert Wants You to Know About the Emotion

    And with that debate comes one major underlying theme and the center of many boardroom discussions — productivity. As recent trends such as quiet quitting emerge, leaders are asking whether their employees can actually be more productive working from home, remote meetings can be just as effective as in person and the virtual water cooler conversation can serve the same level of beneficial means. Yet there is one major elephant in the room that remains, an underlying theme that many companies continue to overlook because, in the end, they don’t see that it directly translates to productivity and, frankly, there isn’t a correlation to the bottom line.

    That component is loneliness.

    As leaders reimagine the new definition of a return to the office, we must take our employees’ mental health into account, addressing the role an in-office environment plays for each category of worker, especially younger workers. To attain desirable positions, many of today’s younger workers are required to move away from their respective universities, relocate far from their families and friends and work long hours to learn and grow in their respective trades. Many of them are now even more isolated due to their remote work environments.

    In assessing the new return-to-office environment, today’s companies must consider factors beyond profit and productivity. We, as company leaders, have a responsibility to consider the mental health of those who join our ranks. And we must be more comprehensive in our approach to doing so.

    Here are five things companies should consider as they assess a remote environment in the context of the growing loneliness pandemic:

    1. Get to know your employee base

    Understand those you are hiring and take factors such as their life stages, social environments and geographic locations into account. Develop a longer-term new hire onboarding process, enabling deeper, lasting integration into the company culture. Create ongoing communications touchpoints and an interdepartmental leadership task force that incorporates diverse feedback into the human capital plan.

    2. Create authentic social outlets

    Develop in-person meetups that cater to employees’ personal interests. These need to be more than just casual happy hours. Consider activities that employees would not have the opportunity to experience together otherwise with a focus on wellness, education, exploration and personal development. Create “growth groups” whereby employees with similar passions align with activities that cater to their interests, fostering opportunities for more meaningful bonding that is sustained over a longer term.

    3. Develop strong mentoring cohorts

    The more remote a work environment, the more important it can be to create meaningful mentor/mentee relationships. These relationships may have been more naturally fostered in in-person environments, so they may require more deliberate attention if a company chooses to remain remote.

    4. Redesign the office space

    The role of the executive office is changing. Companies have the opportunity to redesign their offices to serve as creative hubs with more communal spaces, places where employees choose to go versus having to go. There is an opportunity for more of a hoteling type of drop-in environment with greater flexibility in terms of open office hours and a design that fosters communal engagement versus siloed work styles.

    5. Reinvent the retreat

    In prior times, company retreats or off-sites have been a one-off occurrence, marked by expensive locales and master-planned schedules. There is now an opportunity to make the retreat a more frequent occurrence. It could be a once-a-month on-site at an inspiring out-of-office location where colleagues gather with the sole purpose of spending quality time together. Nothing more.

    Related: How Leaders Can Make the Best of Remote Working

    Reframing the role of the company in today’s diversified work environment is the right thing to do. As the mental health epidemic continues to grow, especially among our youth, the responsibility becomes even more prevalent. We must take a deeper dive to develop programs that make a more meaningful impact. Companies that do so will not only better serve their employees, but they will also be those that the best employees choose to work for with loyalty. In turn, this will help foster team members who are well-balanced, engaged, and, as a result, more productive.

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    Kalon Gutierrez

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  • Is It Flu, RSV or COVID? Experts Fear the ‘Tripledemic’

    Is It Flu, RSV or COVID? Experts Fear the ‘Tripledemic’

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    Oct. 25, 2022 – Just when we thought this holiday season, finally, would be the back-to-normal one, some infectious disease experts are warning that a so-called tripledemic – influenza, COVID-19, and RSV – may be in the forecast.

    The warning isn’t without basis. 

    • The flu season has gotten an early start. As of Oct. 21, early increases in seasonal flu activity have been reported in most of the country, the CDC says, with the southeast and south-central areas having the highest activity levels. 
    • Children’s hospitals and emergency departments are seeing a surge in children with RSV.
    • COVID-19 cases are trending down, according to the CDC, but epidemiologists – scientists who study disease outbreaks – always have their eyes on emerging variants. 

    Predicting exactly when cases will peak is difficult, says Justin Lessler, PhD, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lessler is on the coordinating team for the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, which aims to predict the course COVID-19, and the Flu Scenario Modeling Hub, which does the same for influenza.

    For COVID-19, some models are predicting some spikes before Christmas, he says, and others see a new wave in 2023. For the flu, the model is predicting an earlier-than-usual start, as the CDC has reported.  

    While flu activity is relatively low, the CDC says, the season is off to an early start. For the week ending Oct. 21, 1,674 patients were hospitalized for flu, higher than in the summer months but fewer than the 2,675 hospitalizations for the week of May 15, 2022. 

    As of Oct. 20, COVID-19 cases have declined 12% over the last 2 weeks, nationwide. But hospitalizations are up 10% in much of the Northeast, The New York Times reports, and the improvement in cases and deaths has been slowing down. 

    As of Oct. 15, 15% of RSV tests reported nationwide were positive, compared with about 11% at that time in 2021, the CDC says. The surveillance collects information from 75 counties in 12 states. 

    Experts point out that the viruses — all three are respiratory viruses —  are simply playing catchup. 

    “They spread the same way and along with lots of other viruses, and you tend to see an increase in them during the cold months,” says Timothy Brewer, MD, professor of medicine and epidemiology at UCLA.

    The increase in all three viruses “is almost predictable at this point in the pandemic,” says Dean Blumberg, MD, a professor and chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California Davis Health. “All the respiratory viruses are out of whack.” 

    Last year, RSV cases were up, too, and began to appear very early, he says, in the summer instead of in the cooler months. Flu also appeared early in 2021, as it has this year. 

    That contrasts with the flu season of 2020-2021, when COVID precautions were nearly universal, and cases were down. At UC Davis, “we didn’t have one pediatric admission due to influenza in the 2020-2021 [flu] season,” Blumberg says. 

    The number of pediatric flu deaths usually range from 37 to 199 per year, according to CDC records. But in the 2020-2021 season, the CDC recorded one pediatric flu death in the U.S.

    Both children and adults have had less contact with others the past 2 seasons, Blumberg says, “and they don’t get the immunity they got with those infections [previously]. That’s why we are seeing out-of-season, early season [viruses].” 

    Eventually, he says, the cases of flu and RSV will return to previous levels. “It could be as soon as next year,” Blumberg says. And COVID-19, hopefully, will become like influenza, he says.

    “RSV has always come around in the fall and winter,” says Elizabeth Murray, DO, a pediatric emergency medicine doctor at the University of Rochester Medical Center and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. This year, children are back in school and for the most part not masking, she says. “It’s a perfect storm for all the germs to spread now. They’ve just been waiting for their opportunity to come back.” 

    Self-Care vs. Not

    RSV can pose a risk for anyone, but most at risk are children under age 5, especially infants under age 1, and adults over age 65.  There is no vaccine for it. Symptoms include a runny nose, decreased appetite, coughing, sneezing, fever, and wheezing. But in young infants, there may only be decreased activity, crankiness, and breathing issues, the CDC says.

    Keep an eye on the breathing if RSV is suspected, Murray tells parents. If your child can’t breathe easily, is unable to lie down comfortably, can’t speak clearly, or is sucking in the chest muscles to breathe, get medical help. Most kids with RSV can stay home and recover, she says, but often will need to be checked by a medical professional.

    She advises against getting an oximeter to measure oxygen levels for home use. “They are often not accurate,” she says. If in doubt about how serious your child’s symptoms are, “don’t wait it out,” she says, and don’t hesitate to call 911.

    Symptoms of flu, COVID, and RSV can overlap.  But each can involve breathing problems, which can be an emergency. 

    “It’s important to seek medical attention for any concerning symptoms, but especially severe shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, as these could signal the need for supplemental oxygen or other emergency interventions,” says Mandy De Vries, a respiratory therapist and director of education at the American Association for Respiratory Care. Inhalation treatment or mechanical ventilation may be needed for severe respiratory issues.

    Precautions

    To avoid the tripledemic – or any single infection – Timothy Brewer, MD, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at UCLA, suggests some familiar measures: “Stay home if you’re feeling sick. Make sure you are up to date on your vaccinations. Wear a mask indoors.”

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  • Remembering actor, comedian and viral sensation Leslie Jordan

    Remembering actor, comedian and viral sensation Leslie Jordan

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    Remembering actor, comedian and viral sensation Leslie Jordan – CBS News


    Watch CBS News



    Tributes are pouring in across the entertainment industry for Leslie Jordan, who died unexpectedly on Monday. CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason visited Jordan in Nashville just two weeks earlier, where he reflected on his acting career, unexpected turn to country music and becoming a beloved viral internet sensation during the pandemic.

    Be the first to know

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  • Pfizer Plans to Charge Over $100 Per COVID Shot in 2023

    Pfizer Plans to Charge Over $100 Per COVID Shot in 2023

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    By Cara Murez 

    HealthDay Reporter

    MONDAY, Oct. 24, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Some Americans could pay up to $130 to get a COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer starting in 2023, but most will still get it for free.

    A Pfizer executive noted that people who would get its vaccine for free would likely include those on public health insurance programs such as Medicare or Medicaid and those with private health insurance, the Associated Press reported.

    Recommended vaccines must be covered by insurers as part of the Affordable Care Act. Pfizer also has an income-based assistance program for eligible U.S. residents.

    The U.S. government is expected to stop buying and distributing the shots sometime next year, the AP said.

    While Pfizer said last year it was charging $19.50 per dose to the U.S. government, that increased to about $30 per shot in June. The company has said it had three tiers of pricing globally, depending on a country’s financial situation, the AP reported.

    The newest price reflects both commercial distribution costs and switching to single-dose vials, Pfizer executive Angela Lukin said last week, the AP reported.

    That is well below expected limits “for what would be considered a highly effective vaccine,” Lukin added.

    By comparison, annual flu shots range from $50 to $95, depending on the specific type, according to CVS Health, the AP said.

    Pfizer’s vaccine, which starts with two initial doses, is the most commonly used shot to prevent COVID-19 in the United States.

    Americans have been vaccinated with 375 million doses of the original Pfizer vaccine since late 2020, plus 41 million doses of an updated booster shot, CDC data shows.

    The company’s revenue for the shots was $36.8 billion last year and is expected to be $32 billion this year, according to FactSet. Sales are expected to fall after that, the AP said.

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  • ‘Nation’s Report Card’ Shows Decline in Reading Scores, Record Decline In Math

    ‘Nation’s Report Card’ Shows Decline in Reading Scores, Record Decline In Math

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    Students across the U.S. have fallen behind in both math and reading in the past three years, illuminating the drastic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams released Monday.

    The exams, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” sampled about 450,000 fourth and eighth graders in more than 10,000 schools across the country between January and March. The last exams were administered in 2019, just before the beginning of the pandemic and a widespread transition to virtual learning.

    In the past three years, math scores showed the steepest declines ever reported by NAEP since its initial trial assessment in 1990, according to Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Eighth graders’ scores sank by eight points since 2019. Fourth graders’ scores were slightly better, but still declined in 41 states. Just 36% of fourth graders were considered proficient in math, compared to 41% in 2019.

    “Eighth grade is that gateway to more advanced mathematical course taking,” Carr said, according to CNN. “This is what these students are missing. They’re missing these important skills that will prepare them eventually for (science, technology, engineering and math) level careers.”

    Last month, the national assessment released results showing that math and reading scores for 9-year-olds have declined since 2020 at a level not seen in decades.

    Compared to math scores, students’ reading performance was less affected, possibly because students received more help from parents during the pandemic, The New York Times reports. Still, reading scores declined in more than half the states, continuing a downward trend that had already been observed in 2019. No state showed improvement in reading, with only about 1 student in 3 meeting proficiency standards.

    All students across the country were affected by the pandemic, as reflected by the report, but there was a disproportionate effect on certain marginalized groups. Eighth-grade math scores declined across most racial and ethnic groups, among low-, middle- and high-performing students. Fourth graders’ math scores in 2022 declined at the lower and higher percentiles for Black and Hispanic students, students of two or more races, and white students compared to 2019, and scores declined at the lower percentile for Native and Asian students.

    “What we’re seeing is (lower performing) students… dropping even faster and we’re also seeing students who were not showing declines ― students at the top, meaning students at the higher performing levels ― they were holding steady before the pandemic or even improving,” Carr said. “Now all the students, regardless of their ability, are dropping. That is the point we need to be taking away from this report.”

    The results show the ways that school closures during the pandemic affected students. But researchers indicated it doesn’t necessarily follow that states where remote learning lasted longer experienced dramatically worse results. Factors like poverty levels and individual state education policies may have also played a role.

    More analysis is needed to understand the pandemic’s role in the declines, said Carr, along with examination of other factors like teacher shortages and bullying.

    “If this is not a wake-up call for us to double down our efforts and improve education, even before it was ― before the pandemic, then I don’t know what will,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said Monday, according to CNN.

    The federal government invested $123 billion in American schools last year to help students catch up from learning lost during the beginning of the pandemic, according to The New York Times. School districts were required to spend at least 20% of the funds on academic recovery.

    The funding is due to expire in 2024, but research suggests billions more dollars may be needed for students to truly recover.

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  • Don’t Lose the Talent: How to Help Employees With Long COVID

    Don’t Lose the Talent: How to Help Employees With Long COVID

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    Oct. 24, 2022 – As a leading disability insurance attorney in the U.S., Frank Darras has seen firsthand the impact long COVID has had on employees and the challenges they face navigating not only the disease itself, but also the workplace.

    Through referrals that come in from across the country, Darras says he has a real-time view of the pandemic and the enormous obstacles employees with long COVID face trying to explain and prove their condition.

    “It’s terrifying to be suffering from a disease and a problem that there’s no cure for yet,” says Darras, a founding partner of law firm DarrasLaw in Ontario, CA. “And having your job and your family’s financial future hanging in the balance … is horrific for the employee.”

    Already, experts are predicting that the economic fallout and ripple effect of long COVID could be in the trillions of dollars.

    “It’s a very significant fraction of the total workforce … in a tight labor market environment as we’re in, it’s a really important factor,” says Matt Craven, MD, a partner with consulting firm McKinsey & Co., and author of an upcoming report that estimates that acute and long COVID will cost the U.S. economy a billion productive days in 2022.

    Meanwhile, there is still much about long COVID that remains unclear. The CDC describes it as a “wide range of new, returning, or ongoing health problems” that happen at least 4 weeks after infection. In one recent large study involving 100,000 people in Scotland, one in 20 COVID patients said they had not recovered “at all” more than half a year after the start of their infection, while about 40% reported being “only partially recovered.”

    “Long COVID is a term that we use a lot, but it’s really not well-defined, because different people have been impacted by COVID in very different ways,” says Cheryl Bates-Harris, the senior disability advocacy specialist with the National Disability Rights Network.

    Engaging and Accommodating Employees

    Employees with long COVID generally fall into two categories: those with debilitating, long-term symptoms that prevent them from working altogether and those with milder to moderate symptoms that allow them to remain productive with the right workplace accommodations.

    Employees may not realize they can ask for accommodations, experts say, while inexperienced employers may not know how to help, or what to do with an employee who suddenly may only be able to function at 50% capacity. 

    “In a situation where many industries are labor-constrained right now, the importance of maintaining the long-term employer-employee relationship is greater than ever before,” says Craven, who leads McKinsey’s public health response to COVID-19. “What flexibility are they able to offer so that they’re not permanently losing a worker who could be a great asset for them over the longer term?”

    For employees with mild to moderate long COVID symptoms, employers should provide a safe and supportive environment to openly discuss how they can help, advocates say. It is also important to be educated about long COVID.

    Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, employers are expected to make “reasonable accommodations” for people with a disability, but advocates encourage employers to set a positive example by having these conversations and listening to their employee’s needs regardless of their status under the Disabilities Act.

    “You would hate to throw away years of work experience and years of training that’s gone into that person, simply because there’s a part of their job they can’t do or they’re now experiencing health impairments,” Bates-Harris says.

    If an employee cannot walk long distances because they become out of breath easily or tire quickly, employers can offer telework as an option where feasible, allowing an employee to work from home, experts suggest. They can make sure the employee is equipped at home with the devices and tools they need to do their job well. 

    If an employee’s job does not allow them to work from home, an employer can reduce their physical exertion, make sure they are given enough or extra rest breaks, or give them more time to use inhalers and nebulizers for shortness of breath, for example. They can also provide individual mobility devices, like electric scooters, so that an employee can move around without exhausting themselves, says Bates-Harris.

    Those who have brain fog may prefer a quieter workspace. There are also apps that can help, including ones that can help workers keep track of tasks and stay organized. Employers can also provide a shorter workday or set a more flexible work schedule, while maintaining employees’ full-time status.

    “I don’t care if my people come in at 4 in the morning and work till 10 a.m.,” Darras says. “Whatever kind of flexible schedule works for them, I want to make sure that I’m flexible in making my premises accessible.”

    A collaborative workplace environment and using shared tools and documents can help lessen interruptions if an employee is sick or absent. Zoom meetings that are recorded can also help employees catch up and stay connected. An employee may request different responsibilities and tasks more suited to their health condition.

    As an employer himself, Darras has tried to make these accommodations, saying it’s a chance for employers to figure out how to keep staff happy.

    A Legal Right to Go on Leave

    Ultimately, long COVID requires employers to be more flexible, experts say. If a worker is exhausted from an intense week, they may need to take time off to recover or attend medical appointments. Bates noted that one of the biggest complaints her organization gets are calls regarding time off and attendance.

    While every case is different, in the U.S., the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family Medical Leave Act grant many workers a number of protected rights, including unpaid sick leave. Those working for a company with 50 or more employees or for a government or public entity for at least 1,250 hours over the course of 12 months may qualify for up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year for family and medical reasons.

    The Leave Act protects an employee from being fired for going on extended leave and requires employers to continue their group health benefits during that period of absence. 

    If people have long COVID symptoms so severe that they can’t work at all, they may qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance benefits, advocates say. But they caution that the process to qualify may not be quick or easy, and is compounded by the fact that many with long COVID can’t work due to extreme fatigue and brain fog, making the physical process of applying even more daunting.

    Re-Evaluating Workplace Policies

    As many pandemic-related costs shift away from the government back to individuals and the private sector, employers will need to decide what kind of workplace benefits and health coverage they offer, says Pooja Kumar, MD, a senior partner with McKinsey who leads the firm’s work on U.S. public health.

     “What do their benefits structures look like? How matched are they to the known impact from long COVID?” she says, adding that it is not just about benefits and accommodations. “How do you actually continue to motivate a workforce when people are functioning at 80% because of physiological reasons?”

    Darras says employers should also have a COVID-19 safety plan and make sure the company’s short- and long-term disability insurance benefits do not have limits on self-reported conditions – symptoms such as pain and chronic fatigue that are difficult to verify using medical tests but that are common among long COVID patients. It is something he has done at his own firm, and he suggests employers ask for guidance from a regional office for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration if necessary.

    Part-time employees should not be forgotten either, advocates say. Employers can consider what they can do to help part-time staff meet the requirements to make them eligible for disability insurance.

    While many of these accommodations may cost money, advocates stress the long-term benefits.

    “The institutional knowledge and experience that current employees have far outweighs anything they’re going to get by hiring a new person off the street and training,” Bates-Harris says. “Employers who have experience hiring people with disabilities learned long ago that the cost of accommodating an employee far outweighs the cost of hiring new employees.”

    With less than 3 years of information on COVID-19, Craven also stresses the importance of being agile. “Create policies now but revisit them over time based on new information, how people are using them, how they’re working for employees, how they’re working for employers,” he says.

    “Version one doesn’t have to be perfect.”

    Resources for Employers

    Employers can also reach out to the Job Accommodation Network, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Labor. It is a leading source of free, expert, and confidential advice for issues including workplace accommodations and disability employment.

    It’s a resource many employers are unaware of, Bates-Harris says, and is “designed to keep people on the job and to allow employers to retain long-term employees.”

    Employers can also consult the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency that deals with employment discrimination, or the Department of Labor website to learn more about their legal obligations.

    “Frankly, as an employer, I’m responsible for [my employees], so I’ve looked at it and said, “It’s just an investment in my people,’” says Darras, who has a large percentage of staff who have been with the firm for more than 20 years.

    “I want people to retire with me. … I want them to be healthy and thrive.”

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  • Add COVID Shot to Routine Vaccine Schedule: CDC Panel

    Add COVID Shot to Routine Vaccine Schedule: CDC Panel

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    By Cara Murez and Robin Foster 

    HealthDay Reporters

    FRIDAY, Oct. 21, 2022 (HealthDay News) – In an unanimous vote on Thursday, a panel of U.S. vaccine experts recommended that COVID shots be added to the list of recommended vaccinations for children and adults.

    Now it’s up to the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention to decide whether to follow the advice of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

    Even if the agency does approve adding the shots to the schedule, it doesn’t amount to a vaccine mandate. State and local jurisdictions will still decide what vaccines are required for schools, NBC News reported.

    “Moving COVID-19 to the recommended immunization schedule does not impact what vaccines are required for school entrance, if any,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “Local control matters. And we honor that the decision around school entrance for vaccines rests where it did before, which is with the state level, the county level and at the municipal level, if it exists at all.”

    “This discussion does not change that,” he told NBC News.

    An example of local jurisdictions making their own choices includes the HPV vaccine, which has been on the immunization schedule since 2006. Only Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., actually require it for both girls and boys. Virginia requires the vaccine for girls, NBC News reported.

    Despite having a recommended national vaccine schedule, vaccination rates for American children have dropped during the pandemic.

    COVID cases are also declining among U.S. children, totally close to 28,000 last week, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. It is the first time since early April that cases were under 30,000.

    An advantage to having COVID-19 shots on the vaccine schedule is that insurance providers typically will cover recommended vaccines. Though federal dollars are still paying for those vaccines, that will eventually end, NBC News reported.

    The COVID vaccines could also become a part of the federal Vaccines for Children program, which would provide them free to children covered by Medicaid.

    “By adding it to the VFC program, it now makes these vaccines available to these uninsured and underinsured children,” said Dr. Julie Morita, executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, former public health commissioner for Chicago and a former practicing pediatrician.

    Morita called the schedule the “gold standard” for clinicians.

    “I used to look every year, waiting for this vaccine schedule, to make sure I was following the best vaccination guidance available,” Morita told NBC News.

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  • Warming climate could boost Arctic

    Warming climate could boost Arctic

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    A warming climate could bring viruses in the Arctic into contact with new environments and hosts, increasing the risk of “viral spillover,” according to research published Wednesday. Viruses need hosts like humans, animals, plants or fungi to replicate and spread, and occasionally they can jump to a new one that lacks immunity, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Scientists in Canada wanted to investigate how climate change might affect spillover risk by examining samples from the Arctic landscape of Lake Hazen.

    It is the largest lake in the world entirely north of the Arctic Circle, and “was truly unlike any other place I’ve been,” researcher Graham Colby, now a medical student at University of Toronto, told AFP.

    CANADA-ARCTIC-SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT-HEALTH
    This handout picture taken on May 29, 2017 and made available by Graham Colby on October 17, 2022 shows researchers drilling holes to collect sediment at the Lake Hazen in Nunavut, to investigate how climate change might increase the risk of “viral spillover.”

    GRAHAM COLBY/Graham COLBY/AFP via Getty Images


    The team sampled soil that becomes a riverbed for melted glacier water in the summer, as well as the lakebed itself — which required clearing snow and drilling through two meters of ice, even in May when the research was carried out.

    They used ropes and a snowmobile to lift the lake sediment through almost 300 meters of water, and samples were then sequenced for DNA and RNA, the genetic blueprints and messengers of life.

    “This enabled us to know what viruses are in a given environment, and what potential hosts are also present,” said Stephane Aris-Brosou, an associate professor in the University of Ottawa’s biology department, who led the work.

    But to find out how likely they were to jump hosts, the team needed to examine the equivalent of each virus and host’s family tree.

    “Basically what we tried to do is measure how similar these trees are,” said Audree Lemieux, first author of the research.

    Similar genealogies suggest a virus has evolved along with its host, but differences suggest spillover.

    And if a virus has jumped hosts once, it is more likely to do so again.

    “Should climate change also shift species range of potential viral vectors and reservoirs northwards, the High Arctic could become fertile ground for emerging pandemics,” the researchers wrote in Proceedings B, the Royal Society’s biological research journal.

    “It’s really unpredictable”

    The analysis found pronounced differences between viruses and hosts in the lakebed, “which is directly correlated to the risk of spillover,” said Aris-Brosou.

    The difference was less stark in the riverbeds, which the researchers theorize is because water erodes the topsoil, removing organisms and limiting interactions between viruses and potential new hosts.

    Those instead wash into the lake, which has seen “dramatic change” in recent years, the study says, as increased water from melting glaciers deposits more sediment.

    “That’s going to bring together hosts and viruses that would not normally encounter each other,” Lemieux said.

    The authors of the research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences journal, caution they are neither forecasting an actual spillover nor a pandemic.

    “The likelihood of dramatic events remains very low,” Lemieux said.

    They also warn more work is needed to clarify how big the difference between viruses and hosts needs to be to create serious spillover risk.

    “Disentangling this risk from actual spillovers and pandemics will be a critical endeavour to pursue in parallel with surveillance activities, in order to mitigate the impact of spillovers on economy and health-related aspects of human life, or on other species,” the researchers wrote.

    They argue that warming weather could increase risks further if new potential hosts move into previously inhospitable regions.

    “It could be anything from ticks to mosquitoes to certain animals, to bacteria and viruses themselves,” said Lemieux.

    “It’s really unpredictable… and the effect of spillover itself is very unpredictable, it can range from benign to an actual pandemic.”

    The team wants more research and surveillance work in the region to understand the risks.

    “Obviously we’ve seen in the past two years what the effects of spillover can be,” said Lemieux.

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  • New COVID Subvariants Rising: How Concerned Should We Be?

    New COVID Subvariants Rising: How Concerned Should We Be?

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    Oct. 18, 2022 – Move over, BA.5. There are some new kids in town and no one is sure yet if we should be worried.

    But there is concern that COVID-19 virus subvariants BQ.1 and BQ1.1 will become a major threat in the U.S. and that XBB could alter the COVID picture globally. 

    At this point, infectious disease experts have only predictions. 

    A worst-case scenario would be a surge of one or more strains that evade our immune protections just as a predicted fall and winter surge hits the United States.

    At the same time, we know a lot more about SARS-CoV-2 than we did when COVID first became a household name. And despite some widespread pandemic fatigue, people know the basics of protection at this point should it be necessary – gulp — to go back to masking, obsessive handwashing, and keeping a safe distance from our neighbors. 

    The most recent CDC data shows BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 subvariants have grown to about 12% of circulating virus strains in the U.S., doubling in the past week, compared to only 1% a month ago. 

    “I don’t think we should panic, but I am little concerned,” says Hannah Newman, MPH. “I would not be surprised to see a surge of infections as we enter respiratory season and in light of the emergence of new subvariants.”

    “We are already seeing COVID on the rise in some European countries, in part due to these circulating subvariants,” adds Newman, director of infection prevention at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

    The emergence of BQ.1 and BQ1.1 in the U.S. and XBB globally is not completely unexpected, says Amesh Adalja, MD. “This is a virus that’s going to continue to evolve to become more able to infect us, and so these variants should not be surprising.”

    Better Protection From Bivalent Boosters?

    One unanswered question is how well the new bivalent mRNA vaccine boosters could work against these specific subvariants.

    “The new booster is a better match to what is circulating than the old booster, but we don’t know what that means in real life,” says Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. It’s difficult to answer that question because no one is planning to compare the two booster types in a clinical trial. 

    Newman is more optimistic. “A bit of good news is that the bivalent COVID booster will provide some protection against these strains, and we really just need people to roll up their sleeves and receive it,” she says.

    The XBB subvariant, currently surging in Singapore, could be a cautionary tale for the U.S., says Eric Topol, MD, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, CA, and executive editor of Medscape, WebMD’s sister site for medical professionals.

    For example, prior to XBB emerging, the COVID reinfection rate in Singapore was 5%. Now it is 17%. “So that means a lot of people who had an infection are going to get hit again,” Topol says. Furthermore, Singapore reports 92% of their population is vaccinated and their uptake of boosters is twice the U.S. rate. 

    “And despite that, they have a very significant wave, which is going to be bigger than anything except the original Omicron,” he says. 

    Fewer Treatment Options

    The drug Paxlovid will continue to play an important role in preventing more severe COVID outcomes, Adalja says. This is because “Paxlovid works on a whole different area of the virus, different from these mutations that get around immunity.”

    In contrast, evidence so far suggests that monoclonal antibody therapies will not be effective against these new subvariants. “The ability to evade monoclonal antibody treatments is a concern for me, because it could leave our most vulnerable open to more severe outcomes,” Newman says. 

    “If strains are able to escape antibody immunity and monoclonal antibodies aren’t effective, we can expect to see more severe symptoms in high-risk individuals who would otherwise benefit from these treatments,” she says. 

    In particular, the monoclonal antibody bebtelovimab and the monoclonal combination Evusheld may be less effective against the new subvariants, Adalja says. 

    Does Recently Infected Mean Protected?

    Most people who had COVID-19 within the past 3 to 6 months will likely have antibody levels to protect them, at least against severe disease, Adalja says. That’s one reason U.S. officials suggest people wait 3 months to get a booster after infection and Canadian officials recommend 6 months. 

    “You’re certainly going to be protected against severe disease,” Adalja adds. “How long you’re going to be protected, how immune-evasive these variants are, and the degree to which their immune-evasiveness reaches, that’s going to determine if you’re susceptible to infection.”

    After natural immunity wanes, these immune-evasive variants could infect someone again, but they are more likely to experience a mild case, Adalja says. 

    Newman agrees. “There is a level of natural immunity that is gained with recent infection. However, it wanes over time. Staying up to date with vaccinations and boosters is the most proven and effective way to achieve uniform protection.”

    What is known is that COVID is likely to be with us for a while, Adalja says. “I was someone who was very forthright about this, that this was never going away. I wasn’t thinking this is like a hurricane that is going to leave one day. I thought this is a new normal,” he says.

    He adds we’re making progress on COVID being managed as an outpatient illness.

    The Future Is Uncertain

    It’s difficult to predict exactly what will happen this fall and winter based on current evidence, says Gregory Poland, MD, an internal medicine doctor at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. 

    Throughout the pandemic, however, what happens in the U.K. and India has consistently signaled what happens in the U.S. And these other countries are experiencing “significant upticks in the subvariants,” he says. 

    “Unfortunately, there is no crystal ball that will predict for sure what a future wave might look like at this moment,” Newman says. “It will really depend on whether a variant will outcompete other strains and the prevention measures taken.” 

    She is also concerned about a convergence of COVID and flu over the winter.

    “Prevention fatigue paired with upcoming holiday gatherings could be a potential for more superspreading events,” Newman says.

    One concern is the relatively low uptake of the bivalent boosters among Americans, Topol says. “This is going to be really bad because a few weeks from now, we will face a very significant wave.” 

    The relaxation of pandemic protection measures and the waning of immunity as more and more Americans go more than 6 months from their last immunization also are concerning, Topol says. “Our immunity wall is just developing more and more holes in it.”

    “We’ll see a wave even before the BQ1.1 really takes effect,” Topol predicts. “And then the two together could make for a very bad December or January.”

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