- With holiday season about to hit full stride, it's time to get your updated Covid-19 shot
- As respiratory illnesses hit hard, children's hospitals are feeling the pressure
- Study finds "huge" increase in children going to the ER with suicidal thoughts
- Lab-made blood could have enormous potential for people with rare blood conditions
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With holiday season about to hit full stride, it's time to get your updated Covid-19 shot |
Many families and friends will kick off the holiday season by getting together for Thanksgiving, giving respiratory viruses like RSV, flu and the coronavirus a chance to spread. Health officials are worried about a possible surge in respiratory illnesses – and they are urging people who are not up-to-date on their Covid-19 shots to get boosted as soon as possible. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people 5 and older get an updated bivalent booster if it has been at least two months since their initial two-dose primary series or previous booster. The US Food and Drug Administration has authorized these updated boosters from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that contain the original vaccine and a vaccine specifically designed against the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants. Moderna said this week that its updated bivalent booster proved to elicit a significantly higher antibody response to the subvariants than its original vaccine. The rollout of the updated boosters has been sluggish, with just 10% of people 5 and older getting an updated booster dose, despite 73% of that population having gotten their first two shots. It takes two weeks to gain full protection from the booster, but Biden administration officials said they would be "doubling down on our push to get folks vaccinated now so they are well-protected before Thanksgiving – working closely with national and local organizations across the country." |
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As respiratory illnesses hit hard, children's hospitals are feeling the pressure |
About half of the US – 22 states, along with Washington, DC, New York City and Puerto Rico – is reporting high or very high respiratory illness activity as flu season sweeps through the country weeks earlier than usual. The aggressive flu season is coming on top of an active RSV season. Most cases of RSV can resolve on their own at home, but the virus can be particularly severe in young infants. Parents should take their children for medical care if they're having a hard time breathing. The signs can be easy to miss but may include: - Fast or short breaths
- Grunting noises
- Chest caving in with each breath
- Skin turning blue or purple
- On darker skin, look for changes around lips, tongue, gums and eyes.
With viral activity so high across the country, federal data shows more than three-quarters of pediatric hospital beds and 80% of intensive care beds for kids are full. As a result, children who have chronic conditions and need procedures or hospital care, but whose conditions are stable, are often having to wait. Born with a congenital heart defect, 3-month-old MJ Chavez waited nearly a month for an operation. "We were essentially told that her case review was being delayed because they simply didn't have the beds," said her father, Aaron Chavez. |
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Study finds "huge" increase in children going to the ER with suicidal thoughts |
A new study says that the number of children being seen in emergency rooms for suicidal thoughts has increased 59% since 2016. The researchers found that the increase started even before the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought record high demand for psychological services for children. The pandemic's effects drew renewed attention to suicide in teens and young children. In June, the Biden administration called the recent rise in rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts among kids an "unprecedented mental health crisis." The researchers looked at the number of children ages 5 to 19 who sought help for suicide in Illinois emergency departments between January 2016 and June 2021. In that period, there were 81,051 emergency department visits by young people that were coded for suicidal ideation. About a quarter of those visits turned into hospital stays. The study found that visits to the ER with suicidal thoughts increased 59% from 2016-17 to 2019-21. There was a corresponding increase in cases in which suicidal ideation was the principal diagnosis, which rose from 34.6% to 44.3%. Hospitalizations for suicidal thoughts increased 57% between fall 2019 and fall 2020. "It just really highlights how mental health concerns were really a problem before the pandemic. I mean, we saw this huge increase in [emergency department] visits for kids of all ages, honestly, in 2019, and it's very concerning," said study co-author Dr. Audrey Brewer, an attending physician in advanced general pediatrics and primary care at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and a researcher in the Department of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "We saw more kids than we typically do that we … wouldn't necessarily have thought would have problems about suicidal ideation. We saw 5-year-olds," said Brewer. |
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Lab-made blood shows potential for people with rare blood conditions |
Scientists say they have transfused lab-made red blood cells into a human volunteer for the first time. Experts say this has major potential for people with hard-to-match blood types or conditions such as sickle cell disease. The research could someday mean an end to long searches for compatible donors or dangerous transfusion reactions. The experimental transfusion was done at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, England, as part of a collaborative effort among UK scientists to understand how lab-made blood transfusions could work. The scientists took whole blood from donors in a UK database and separated out the stem cells. These are the body's raw materials – the cells from which all specialized cells, like a red blood cell, can generate. The researchers grew red blood cells from those stem cells and transfused them into two healthy volunteers. The transfusions involved only a tiny amount of blood: the equivalent of one or two teaspoons. A standard blood transfusion would involve many hundred times that amount. This stage of the trial involves two mini transfusions at least four months apart, one with a standard donation of red cells and the other with lab-made cells from the same donor. Further trials will be necessary to determine whether there could be a clinical use of this lab-grown product. |
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As a neurosurgeon, I have worked with the brain intimately for the past 25 years, and yet I recently got to see something that I had never seen before. I traveled to Odense, Denmark, to visit the University of Southern Denmark's brain collection, a massive library of nearly 10,000 brains from Danish people diagnosed with dementia, schizophrenia, major depression and other mental illnesses. It is believed to be the largest collection of its kind in the world. At the end of World War II, Denmark had built psychiatric institutions across the country to provide care. But there was limited understanding of what was actually happening in the brain. When people died in these psychiatric hospitals, autopsies were routinely performed. Drs. Erik Stromgren and Larus Einarson thought, what if the brains were removed – and kept? An estimated half of all psychiatric patients in Denmark who died between 1945 and 1982 contributed their brains to this collection – unknowingly and without consent. Many of the brains gathered in the first decade are untouched by modern medicine, a time capsule of sorts for mental illness in the brain. While the brain collection was running from the 1940s until the early 1980s, Denmark reportedly did more lobotomies per capita than any other country in the world – and some of the brains show evidence of the primitive procedure. Use of the collection has not been without controversy, with debate among government scientists and ethicists. However, in 2006, the Danish government finally agreed that it is acceptable to use the collection for scientific purposes. Many studies have used the collection, including a discovery in 1970 of what is now known as familial Danish dementia, and a new study is ongoing, focused on mRNA in the brains. For the most part, the brains represent enormous potential and provide a rare and intimate look at who we are. |
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| The way we experience food depends on lots of different factors like smell, sound, texture, color and memory. Join in on the conversation about how a new and emerging field called neurogastronomy can help us harness those experiences and train our brains to gravitate toward healthier and more sustainable food. |
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