COVID-19

A large post-covid global surge in common communicable diseases including influenza, measles, tuberculosis, and whooping cough has been identified in a new analysis of data from 60 organisations and public health agencies. Since the beginning of 2022, 44 countries have experienced a 10-fold increase in the incidence of at least one of 13 infectious diseases compared with a pre-pandemic baseline, according to the analysis1 by the UK based disease forecasting firm Airfinity and the US news website Bloomberg. Experts said that with no historical precedent, they can’t fully explain the resurgence in infectious diseases. Jeremy Farrar, World Health Organization chief scientist, told The BMJ , “We’ve not had an acute, fast moving, and devastating pandemic in the modern scientific era. The last major devastating pandemic was in 1918 when …

Hi, it’s Bhuma in Mumbai. It seems everyone, everywhere is getting sick more than they used to. But first...

Hi, it’s Immanual in New York. As respiratory illnesses spread across the US, an unfamiliar medical term has been cropping up in some media coverage. I’d like to tell you a little more about it, but first...

There is no evidence that an individual is worse off for having avoided earlier infection

Infectious disease experts say term and its surrounding narrative are dangerous and can promote Covid-19 misinformation

At the beginning of the fifth season of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we the audience are introduced to a character, Dawn, we have never seen before. Intriguingly, every character

Photo by Gustavo Fring via pexels.As the number of hospitalized children with influenza, RSV, COVID-19 and other infections continues to soar,…

“Immunity debt” can explain this year’s eye-popping cold and flu season — but it can also be dangerously misinterpreted.

“I don’t necessarily like ‘immunity debt’ becoming a coined phrase,” Dr. Sarah Combs, an emergency medicine doctor at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., told Fortune.

COVID-19 has changed our way of life since it was first identified in December of 2019. While our understanding of the manifestations and outcomes of the immediate acute illness has improved, we are still learning about the medium to long-term impact of this diagnosis on patients’ health. For some time, it has been suggested that COVID-19 may be associated with incident cardiovascular events such as venous thromboembolism, stroke and myocardial infarction.1 However, the absolute risk of these events and whether an excess risk is present are challenging to determine without a contemporary reference population. This is particularly problematic in the midst of a global pandemic. The UK Biobank is a large robust contemporary cohort of middle-aged volunteers who were prospectively recruited between 2006 and 2010.2 In this cohort, half a million participants aged between 40 and 69 years provided informed consent for detailed clinical assessment, with data linkage to routine data sources including primary care and death register data. Raisi-Estabragh and colleagues3 identified 20 505 participants from the UK Biobank study who had recorded COVID-19 infection status, defined based on disease coding in primary care or hospital episode statistics using a positive antibody test or a positive reverse transcriptase PCR based test. The authors included participants from the first two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic and were able to perform matched analysis in 17 871 participants. The authors used 1-to-2 propensity score matching to link to a reference population of 35 742 patients without evidence of COVID-19 infection using nearest neighbour matching and tying with the date of COVID-19 infection. Several relevant variables were included for matching including age, sex, deprivation, body mass index, ethnicity, diabetes mellitus, …

Patients with mild Covid, defined as those not hospitalized, were 2.7 times more likely to develop blood clots, according to the U.K. journal study.

This Medical News article discusses increased risks for cardiovascular disease outcomes 1 year after SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The cardiovascular complications of acute coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are well described, but the post-acute cardiovascular manifestations of COVID-19 have not yet been comprehensively characterized. Here we used national healthcare databases from the US Department of Veterans Affairs to bui …

Here's what to know to stay safe.

Data from the Netherlands suggest that among people ages 25 and up, memory and concentration problems have risen by 24% since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Journal of Neurology - Systemic hypoxia occurs in COVID-19 infection; however, it is unknown if cerebral hypoxia occurs in convalescent individuals. We have evidence from other conditions...

Researchers explored the destruction of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) due to cognitive impairment associated with long coronavirus disease (COVID).

After three years of the COVID-19 pandemic we know more about PCNS or Long COVID, but there’s a vital need for more research says University of Melbourne expert

Strokes, seizures, memory and movement disorders among problems that develop in first year after infection

While brain fog is not a medical term, it is one of long COVID’s most misunderstood symptoms. Three physicians share how to manage brain fog.

Nature Medicine - Individuals with COVID-19 are at an increased risk for an array of neurologic disorders at 12 months, even in those who were not hospitalized during the acute phase of the infection.

Brain fog. Memory lapses. Difficulties focusing or sustaining attention. All these cognitive issues have plagued some who have otherwise recovered from a bout of Covid-19. In this video, Stanford neurologist Michelle Monje describes her work showing how even mild respiratory infections with the SARS-CoV-2 virus may lead to lingering problems with the brain. Monje, who has long treated and studied cancer patients with similar symptoms following chemotherapy, says that the damage isn’t necessarily caused by the virus itself. Instead, her work suggests that inflammatory molecules released in the lungs of someone with Covid may trigger a reaction of immune cells in the brain. These brain cells, called microglia, then start a cascade of signals that alter the behavior of other brain cells, eventually slowing communication between neurons. The good news, Monje says, is that the similarities to what she calls “chemobrain” may mean that many of these persistent cognitive problems will improve with time, just as chemobrain does. READ MORE: Reset: The Science of Crisis & Recovery https://knowablemagazine.org/report/reset ANNUAL REVIEW OF IMMUNOLOGY Neuroinflammation During RNA Viral Infections Some RNA viruses can infiltrate the brain and central nervous system. While the immune response often succeeds in clearing the pathogen, it may also cause inflammation and, in some cases, persistent changes that result in neurologic and psychiatric disease. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-immunol-042718-041417

The causes of long COVID, which disables millions, may come together in the brain and nervous system

As COVID cases rise once again, we're unprepared for the "mass disabling" event caused by long COVID

Nature - A leaky blood–brain barrier and inflammation might account for some of the cognitive symptoms of COVID-19.