Aug 12th, 2022 - Parents are relieved when school starts up again in the fall. Kids also are eager to see their friends and go on to the next level of learning.

Aug 12th, 2022 - Reducing people's unnecessary movement for a few days - a softer type of lockdown - as soon as dozens of new cases emerge is a key practice of China's "dynamic COVID-zero" strategy. The aim is to avoid turning efforts to halt an outbreak into the extended nightmares seen in Shanghai and Wuhan. The uncertainty over how long such smaller lockdowns may last - because Omicron's high transmissibilit...

Aug 12th, 2022 - Practice Essentials The definition of COVID-19 reinfection has evolved since early 2021. Fundamentally, it describes an infected individual who has been fully vaccinated, with or without a booster or boosters, and who becomes infected with COVID-19 again. The CDC more precisely defines it as COVID-19 infection of a given person with 2 different viral strains occurring at least 45 days apart. Al...

Aug 12th, 2022 - Practice Essentials The definition of COVID-19 reinfection has evolved since early 2021. Fundamentally, it describes an infected individual who has been fully vaccinated, with or without a booster or boosters, and who becomes infected with COVID-19 again. The CDC more precisely defines it as COVID-19 infection of a given person with 2 different viral strains occurring at least 45 days apart. Al...

Aug 12th, 2022 - The definition of COVID-19 reinfection has evolved since early 2021. Fundamentally, it describes an infected individual who has been fully vaccinated, with or without a booster or boosters, and who becomes infected with COVID-19 again. The CDC more precisely defines it as COVID-19 infection of a given person with 2 different viral strains occurring at least 45 days apart. Alternately, it may re...

Aug 11th, 2022 - JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -South Africa's Aspen Pharmacare's COVID-19 vaccine production lines may soon go idle, and without any new orders it could be forced to pivot to manufacturing other products, a senior executive said on Wednesday. Aspen currently produces vaccines for Johnson & Johnson and, in March, it struck a deal to produce, price, and sell its own-brand version of the shot for African...

Aug 11th, 2022 - (Reuters) - North Korea's Kim Jong Un declared victory in the battle against COVID-19 on Thursday, with the leader's sister indicating that he too caught the virus while vowing "deadly retaliation" against South Korea which the North blames for causing the outbreak. DEATHS AND INFECTIONS Eikon users, click on COVID-19: MacroVitals for a case tracker and summary of news. cpurl://apps.cp./cms/?na...

Aug 11th, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. It might be a good time to stock up on home COVID-19 tests. Today, the FDA issued new guidance on at-home COVID testing. It still recommends repeat testing after a negative result, but is also recommending that people who have no symptoms but think they have been exposed take three tests instead...

Aug 11th, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. The CDC today announced that because the risk of "medically significant" COVID-19 has decreased, some overall public health measures the agency initially recommended may no longer be necessary. For example, CDC recommendations on social distancing, quarantining and testing children for COVID-19 ...

Aug 11th, 2022 - Progress has occurred in reducing maternal-to-child transmission of hepatitis B but is still lagging, particularly in Africa, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on maternal-to-child transmission (MTCT) of hepatitis B virus (HBV). By December 2020, 190 (98%) of 194 World Health Organization (WHO) member states had introduced universal infant va...

Aug 11th, 2022 - Pregnant women should feel confident that Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccines against COVID-19 are safe, according to a large new study published today. In fact, pregnant vaccinated women had lower odds of a significant health event, compared with nonpregnant vaccinated women, after both doses of either mRNA vaccination, the researchers reported in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases. This s...

Aug 11th, 2022 - During the surge in coronavirus infections this summer, the chief executive of the German National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV), Andreas Gassen, MD, called for the isolation and quarantine requirement to be lifted for people infected with the coronavirus. "We cannot hide from the virus forever. We have to return to normality. If you are ill, stay at home. If you fe...

Aug 11th, 2022 - Alcohol abuse and the liver disease that results from it both accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, a review of the research shows. The emotional stress and social isolation of the pandemic combined with reduced access to mental health services worsened trends in alcohol-related disease, according to lead author Sasha Deutsch-Link, MD, a gastroenterology fellow at the University of North Ca...

Aug 11th, 2022 - SAN DIEGO – Even after recovery of an acute COVID-19 infection, some patients experience extended or even long-term symptoms that can range from mild to debilitating. Some of these symptoms are neurological: headaches, brain fog, cognitive impairment, loss of taste or smell, and even cerebrovascular complications such stroke. There are even hints that COVID-19 infection could lead to future neu...

Aug 11th, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. Using immune profiling, a small but intense study found that people with long COVID have increased antibody responses to other non-COVID viruses, like Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), as well as significantly lowered cortisol levels compared with people without long COVID. The study — which is still a ...

Aug 10th, 2022 - SAN DIEGO – Even after recovery of an acute COVID-19 infection, some patients experience extended or even long-term symptoms that can range from mild to debilitating. Some of these symptoms are neurological: headaches, brain fog, cognitive impairment, loss of taste or smell, and even cerebrovascular complications such stroke.

Aug 10th, 2022 - The incidence of lice and scabies decreased significantly among children and adults in North Carolina during the confinement period of the COVID-19 pandemic, between March 2020 and February 2021, according to a report in Pediatric Dermatology. When COVID-19 was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization in March 2020, many countries including the United States enacted l.

Aug 10th, 2022 - Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines for COVID-19 have demonstrated outstanding short-term immunogenicity and protective efficacy.1,2 However, neutralizing antibody (NAb) responses have been reported to wane by 3 to 6 months after primary immunization.3-7 Following a third mRNA dose, Omicron-specific NAbs were induced,8-11 but these antibody responses and clinical effectiveness also declined after 3 t...

Aug 10th, 2022 - Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I'm Dr F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine. Toward the end of 2019, we all took a crash course in virology and infectious disease epidemiology as we struggled with what was, for many of us, the first major pandemic of our lifetimes. We've learned a lot since then — we've upped our game when it comes to t...

Aug 10th, 2022 - LONDON (Reuters) -The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has started a rolling review of a variant-adapted COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech, it said on Tuesday. The so-called bivalent vaccine targets two strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus behind COVID - the original strain first identified in China, and the Omicron offshoots BA.4/5 that are currently behind most cases in Europe. A rolling re...