THURSDAY, Dec. 16, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Along with being contaminated, there was also a basic design flaw in COVID-19 testing kits created by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention early in the pandemic, a new agency review shows. It was already known that the PCR kits wereContinue Reading
WEDNESDAY, Dec. 15, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The Omicron variant is spreading rapidly in the United States and could trigger a huge wave of COVID infections as early as January, federal health officials said Tuesday. In just one week there was a sevenfold spike in the highly contagious variant’s presenceContinue Reading
WEDNESDAY, Dec. 15, 2021 (HealthDay News) — When it comes to fending off new viruses, baby has Mom and Dad beat. An infant’s immune system is better than an adult’s at combating new viruses, researchers say. Compared to adults, babies get a lot of viral respiratory infections, but babies areContinue Reading
WEDNESDAY, Dec. 15, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Here’s a social distancing strategy that really worked in the early days of the pandemic: New research shows that providing hotel rooms to homeless people at high risk for severe COVID-19 significantly lowered their chance of infection. In early April 2020, the cityContinue Reading
TUESDAY, Dec. 14, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Compared to previous coronavirus variants, Omicron appears to cause less severe illness, but is more resistant to the Pfizer vaccine, researchers at South Africa’s largest health insurer report. The team at Discovery Health analyzed 211,000 positive coronavirus cases during the country’s fourth wave,Continue Reading
TUESDAY, Dec. 14, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Pfizer Inc. announced Tuesday that a final analysis shows its experimental antiviral pill Paxlovid sharply reduced hospitalizations and deaths among people at high risk for severe illness. The latest results, which reinforce an earlier analysis released in November, show that Pfizer’s drug cutContinue Reading
MONDAY, Dec. 13, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The COVID-19 death toll in the United States reached 800,000 on Monday, and one expert believes it will likely hit 1 million at some point in 2022. The 800,156 confirmed deaths in the nearly two years since the first known U.S. victims ofContinue Reading
MONDAY, Dec. 13, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The ability of two-dose COVID-19 vaccines to protect against symptomatic infection by the Omicron variant falls significantly short, but a booster shot provides considerable protection, according to the first real-world study of how effective vaccines are against the rapidly spreading new form ofContinue Reading
MONDAY, Dec. 13, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Long COVID can be tough to diagnose in children, but there are a number of things to look for. “Many children don’t have any symptoms when they have a COVID infection,” said Dr. Sindhu Mohandas, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and attending physicianContinue Reading
SATURDAY, Dec. 11, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Fever-related seizures in young children can be alarming for parents, but they’re usually not life-threatening, an expert says. During a so-called febrile seizure, a child may lose consciousness, experience body stiffness and have full-body shaking. The seizures — which typically last a minuteContinue Reading
FRIDAY, Dec. 10, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The Omicron variant could prompt a reshuffling of the way doctors treat COVID infections in the United States, and antiviral pills will likely lead the way in that redoubled effort, Harvard experts say. New antiviral pills developed by Merck and Pfizer are expectedContinue Reading
FRIDAY, Dec. 10, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Cutting-edge mRNA technology brought safe, effective COVID-19 vaccines to a world in crisis — could it do the same for a much older foe, HIV? An experimental HIV vaccine that uses the same mRNA platform technology as the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccinesContinue Reading
FRIDAY, Dec. 10, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The world isn’t ready to prevent or deal with another pandemic because many nations aren’t taking the necessary steps to prepare for what is likely an inevitable future scenario, a new report shows. The Global Health Security (GHS) index — an assessment ofContinue Reading
FRIDAY, Dec. 10, 2021 (HealthDay News) — U.S. operating rooms got busy once again soon after the first round of pandemic shutdowns, according to a study that challenges the widely held belief that operations have been curtailed indefinitely during the age of COVID-19. “It’s an untold story,” said senior studyContinue Reading