- Most US public schools plan to make masks optional for start of classes
- Demand soars for hard-to-find monkeypox vaccines
- What to know about Covid rebound
- Taking this popular vitamin won't protect your bones, study finds
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Most US public schools plan to make masks optional for start of classes |
A new school year is on the horizon for many parents and students. Some schools have even gotten underway. But there seem to be fewer discussions and fretting about masks and other Covid-19 mitigation measures despite a rise of infections sweeping the country. Most of the largest public school districts in the United States are not requiring masks for the new school year, making masking "optional" as students return to classes and the highly transmissible Omicron BA.5 subvariant spreads. In its guidance for schools, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal indoor masking in K-12 schools and early education programs that are in counties with a high Covid-19 community level. Almost half -- 45.8% -- of US counties are at high Covid-19 community levels, according to CDC data. Among the top 500 K-12 school districts based on enrollment, about 98% do not require masks, according to the data company Burbio's school policy tracker. "The possibility of mandating masks is there, in case of a surge, but I would have to say that it's going to be much more difficult to implement that mask mandate if it came down to that because we have been without masks now for long periods," said Gladys Cruz, president-elect of the School Superintendents Association and district superintendent for Questar III in New York. |
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Demand soars for hard-to-find monkeypox vaccines |
With more than 5,000 confirmed monkeypox cases in the US, the demand for vaccines continues to outstrip supply. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 1.5 million people are eligible for the two-dose vaccine, but as of Thursday, the US Department of Health and Human Services says that 336,000 doses have been delivered. It expects nearly 800,000 more doses to be available in the coming weeks. In order to make the doses go farther, some cities like Chicago and New York are moving to a single-dose strategy, focusing on getting first shots to people now and figuring out second doses later. Although the CDC initially recommended vaccinating only "high-risk" contacts of monkeypox patients, as well as the health-care workers treating them, experts say that vaccinating such a targeted group requires swift and robust outreach to all of a patient's known contacts -- which was becoming increasingly difficult to do as cases were growing in more places and not all contacts were known or easily identified. That strategy "was just doomed to failure," said Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "I think we're going to have to live with [monkeypox] until they vaccinate every high-risk person." Monkeypox can infect anyone. The most common mode of transmission is through prolonged skin-to-skin contact. The majority of cases in this outbreak have been among men who have sex with men, including people who identify as gay, bi and transgender, according to the CDC. Many in the LGBTQ community feel like the government should have acted faster to contain the outbreak. "At the end of the day, we need vaccines, and we need them yesterday. There's no reason it should be taking this long," said Samuel Garrett-Pate, managing director of external affairs for Equality California, an LGBTQ+ civil rights group. |
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What to know about Covid rebound |
President Joe Biden tested positive for Covid-19 again over the weekend after coming out of isolation last week. The 79-year-old President, who is fully vaccinated and double boosted, first tested positive on July 21 and had mild symptoms for several days. He completed a five-day course of the antiviral Paxlovid, which has US Food and Drug Administration authorization for use in people at risk of severe illness. Biden ended his isolation on Wednesday after two negative Covid-19 tests. Biden gave a speech from the Rose Garden on Wednesday in which he said he was "feeling great" and back to working in person, but he tested positive again Saturday. The CDC recently issued guidance about these "rebound" cases, saying people who test positive again or whose symptoms come back after they finish taking Paxlovid should restart their isolation period and isolate for five full days. The agency says people can then end their isolation period as long as their fever has been gone for 24 hours without fever-reducing medication and their symptoms have improved. The agency also recommends that people wear a mask for 10 days after their symptoms come back. Recent studies have found that people who have rebound infections can still infect others. It's not entirely clear that rebound Covid is linked to Paxlovid itself. In studies of more than 2,200 Covid-19 patients, drugmaker Pfizer said there were a few whose infections came bouncing back after a negative test. However, they were in the group that took Paxlovid as well as in those who got a placebo, suggesting that Covid just reappears in some people, even without treatment. |
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Taking this popular vitamin won't protect your bones, study finds |
The largest study to date has found that taking a higher dose of vitamin D to protect your bones isn't necessary if you are a healthy middle-age or older adult with no bone disease or vitamin D deficiency. Your body needs vitamin D to fully absorb calcium and phosphorus from food. Taking 2,000 IU (international units) a day of supplemental vitamin D3 without calcium over the course of more than five years did not reduce hip, wrist or pelvic fractures when compared with a daily placebo, according to the study, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. "This is the largest, longest, randomized controlled trial on vitamin D supplementation in the US; 25,871 men and women were enrolled from all 50 states, including 20% Black participants," said study author Dr. Meryl LeBoff, chief of the calcium and bone section in the Endocrinology, Diabetes and Hypertension Division at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "Overall, the results from this large clinical trial do not support the use of vitamin D supplements to reduce fractures in generally healthy US men and women," said LeBoff, also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. However, the study results would not apply to people with a severe vitamin D deficiency or anyone with low bone mass, which is less than optimal bone mineral density, or osteoporosis, a bone-thinning disease that causes bones to become so brittle that a fall or even a mild stress might cause a fracture. In addition, the results don't apply to the elderly who live in nursing homes who may not have good nutrition or other conditions or gastrointestinal issues. |
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| Friendships can be one of the strongest predictors of how healthy we are and how long we live, and they can boost our overall well-being. They can be hard to maintain in our busy lives, but studies show that simple acts to stay in touch can be extremely beneficial. |
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It's hard to believe we are face-to-face with a new health crisis, monkeypox, before we are even out of the woods with the previous -- but still very much current -- crisis, Covid-19. The pandemic should have taught us about how to manage a public health emergency, but it seems we are making some of the same mistakes we made not even three years ago, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus started to spread. In many ways, we are better prepared to deal with this outbreak than we were with Covid-19: We have tests, we have potential treatments, and we have the vaccines in hand. And yet testing is underused and the demand for vaccines is outpacing supply. While there are nearly 2 million courses of the likely highly effective Tpoxx antiviral sitting in the Strategic National Stockpile, many health care providers are having a hard time getting the medication for their patients. As I have learned over the past few years, there is a significant difference between preparedness and response, even though the two are often conflated. The United States is extraordinarily prepared, ranked No. 1 for pandemic preparedness in the 2021 Global Health Security Index. But we are also leading in a different way. As of today, we have the most confirmed cases of monkeypox of any country on the planet, more than 5,000. It is now clear that preparedness alone does not guarantee a rapid response. With Covid-19 and now monkeypox, we were too slow to respond. It was as if we were sitting in a turbo-charged Ferrari, capable of massive acceleration but instead only idling in the driveway. There are many reasons for this – including misinformation, lack of public trust and the entangling of public health and politics – but I think one often gets missed: We have adopted what I call a "cavalry culture." We wait for the cavalry to ride in and rescue us instead of taking smaller preventive steps such as establishing modern and reliable data systems, mastering our supply chain and acting early to head off the outbreak in the first place. This may sound familiar, because we too often do the same with our personal health matters. Research shows that nearly half of the chronic disease in the United States is mostly preventable with lifestyle changes. Even knowing that, however, the medical system is set up for the cavalry to come in with expensive medications and high-tech interventions instead of providing equitable access and incentives for preventive care. If we want to improve our response in such situations, there are some basic preventive measures we need to take in public health. "First, there's a lack of data access needed to understand where disease outbreaks are spreading. This is due to data collection limitations that Congress needs to fix," said Dr. Tom Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives and a former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Second, we lack sufficient numbers and, in some cases, skills of people and systems at the federal, state and local levels that can deliver services and communicate effectively with communities. Finally, we are in perpetual panic and neglect funding cycles," he said. He said there is also a need to update analog systems and connect them to each other -- getting them to speak the same language. Right now, it's the Tower of Babel. Investment in these areas may not sound as flashy as vaccines and treatments, but it's necessary to help us protect our health as a nation. The faster we can streamline this information, the stronger our response can be. We have learned painful lessons in the last few years, and we are in the midst of our first significant test since the Covid pandemic began. There is no doubt that we are capable and prepared. The question is, will we use all those remarkable resources and respond, or will we wait and suffer until the cavalry has to rescue us once again? |
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| Dreams can transport us to magical worlds...or cause anxiety. Fellow neuroscientist, Sidarta Ribeiro, and I discuss how to find meaning in our dreams and how we can harness their power in our waking lives. |
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