Jun 30th, 2022 - SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea approved its first domestically developed COVID-19 vaccine, manufactured by SK bioscience Co Ltd, for general public use following positive clinical data, authorities said on Wednesday. The SKYCovione vaccine was authorised for a two-dose regimen on people aged 18 or older, with shots given four weeks apart, according to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. In a p...

Jun 30th, 2022 - Not surprisingly for an RNA virus, SARS-CoV-2 is proving its propensity for mutation. In swabs from infected patients, the proportion of the Omicron subvariant BA.4 is 2.1% (calendar week 21) compared with 1.2% in the previous week. In the same period of time, the frequency of subvariant BA.5 jumped up to 10.0%compared with 5.0% in the previous week. This dynamic leads to a crucial question: Wh...

Jun 30th, 2022 - NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Severe COVID-19 increases the risk for cholestasis and secondary sclerosing cholangitis (SSC) in patients with chronic liver disease (CLD), researchers say. Among 65 patients with preexisting CLD who were hospitalized for COVID-19, 23% developed cholestatic liver failure (cholestasis plus bilirubin at least 6mg/dL) and 15.4% developed SSC on the basis of cross-sectio...

Jun 30th, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. Ask the sibling of any celebrity and they'll tell you they don't get anywhere near the same attention. The same is true for coronaviruses – the one that causes COVID-19 has been in the spotlight for more than 2 years now, while the others at the moment circulate in relative obscurity. With the k...

Jun 28th, 2022 - As a long-standing HIV doctor (where we use harm reduction messaging as a matter of course), I have watched with interest the excellent messaging by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on monkeypox and contrasted that with the "abstinence only" messaging that occurred with COVID-19. Harm reduction messaging — which incorporates the needs of individuals while working to minimize...

Jun 27th, 2022 - (Reuters) - Some cases of long COVID may be the immune system's response to a SARS-CoV-2 infection lurking somewhere in the body, new findings from a small study suggest. Researchers analyzed multiple plasma samples collected over time from 63 patients with COVID-19, including 37 who went on to develop long COVID. In the majority of those with long COVID, the spike protein from the surface of t...

Jun 27th, 2022 - The American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) have jointly issued a comprehensive set of data standards to help clarify definitions of the cardiovascular (CV) and non-CV complications of COVID-19. It's the work of the ACC/AHA Task Force on Clinical Data Standards and has been endorsed by the Heart Failure Society of America and Society for Cardiac Angiography...

Jun 24th, 2022 - (Reuters) - Advisers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday unanimously voted to recommend use of Moderna Inc's COVID-19 vaccine for children and adolescents aged 6 to 17. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is expected to sign off on the recommendations soon, which would allow the U.S. government to start rolling out the Moderna vaccine for these age groups. That w...

Jun 23rd, 2022 - I previously reported on the history of the current outbreak of monkeypox among mainly men who have sex with men (MSM) in this Medscape blog. As we discussed, there is a large monkeypox outbreak going on across the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, Canada, the United States, and other countries. Prior to this outbreak, monkeypox had usually been reported from West and Central Africa (regions i...

Jun 21st, 2022 - The social behavior associated with the COVID-19 pandemic may have reduced the incidence of Kawasaki disease, according to results of a cohort study of nearly 4,000 children. The incidence of Kawasaki disease in the United States declined by 28.2% between 2018 and 2020, possibly as a result of factors including school closures, mask mandates, and reduced ambient pollution that might reduce expo...

Jun 21st, 2022 - NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland ― The latest updates on COVID-19 vaccination response among patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) who are treated with disease-modifying therapy (DMT) show that if patients do contract the virus, cases are mild, and serious infections are rare. However, vaccine antibody response remains lower with anti-CD20 therapies. One of several late-breaking studies on these issue...

Jun 21st, 2022 - The study covered in this summary was published on Medrxiv.org as a preprint and has not yet been peer reviewed. Key Takeaways Patients with a history of acute COVID-19 showed elevated inflammatory markers associated with reduced exercise capacity more than a year later in a prospective cohort study. Cardiopulmonary symptoms and reduced exercise capacity in such cases are associated with impair...

Jun 21st, 2022 - A rapid, saliva-based test for COVID-19 could enable testing, diagnosis, and prescribing to take place in a single office visit by immediately confirming whether a patient has the infection and needs to be treated, researchers say. The test has sparked commercial interest and earned additional funding from the Canadian government. The test uses a DNA aptamer — a short, synthetic oligonucleotide...

Jun 20th, 2022 - NEW YORK (Reuters) - People infected with the earliest version of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, first identified in South Africa in November, may be vulnerable to reinfection with later versions of Omicron even if they have been vaccinated and boosted, new findings suggest. Vaccinated patients with Omicron BA.1 breakthrough infections developed antibodies that could neutralize that vi...

Jun 20th, 2022 - North Korean officials have reported a major outbreak of another infectious disease, which is affecting at least 800 families so far. Medical crews and disease investigators were sent to Haeju City in South Hwanghae province for an "acute enteric epidemic," which refers to a digestive illness. South Korean officials have said the outbreak may be cholera or typhoid, Reuters reported. The new out...

Jun 17th, 2022 - Editor's Note: The information in this quiz is current as of 6/17/2022. For the most recent COVID information, see https://www.medscape.com/resource/coronavirus As of June 2022, there have been 527,211,631 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 6,289,371 COVID-19–related deaths worldwide according to the World Health Organization (though they recently reported that the actual number of COVID-19–relate...

Jun 16th, 2022 - The study covered in this summary was published on medRxiv.org as a preprint and has not yet been peer reviewed. Key Takeaways This study demonstrated that participants with previous SARS-CoV-2 infections had mild to moderate cognitive impairment up to 4 months after diagnosis, independently of baseline cognitive function. Mild cognitive decline is associated with kynurenine pathway (KP) activa...

Jun 16th, 2022 - June 16, 2022 – There may be a link between the recent unexplained cases of hepatitis in children and prior coronavirus infections, according to new research from Israel. A new study details five children in Israel who had mild cases of COVID-19 who went on to develop hepatitis; two of these children required liver transplants. But clinicians are cautious about drawing conclusions from such a s...

Jun 16th, 2022 - Editor's Note: The information in this quiz is current as of 6/16/2022. For the most recent COVID information, see https://www.medscape.com/resource/coronavirus As of June 2022, nearly 6.3 million deaths worldwide were directly attributed to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that the full mortality associated directly or indirectly with the C...

Jun 15th, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. A small blood sample and 24 hours might be all that's needed to find out how strong your immune system is against a first or repeat coronavirus infection. Scientists created a test that indirectly measures your T-cell response — an important, long-term component of immunity that can last long af...