Lifeboat Foundation

While Hokkaido was not covered in the state’s declaration of an emergency, the prefectural government and the municipal government of Sapporo, the prefectural capital, issued a joint emergency declaration following reports of double-digit increases in infections for the fifth straight day.

“We are facing a crisis of a second wave in the spread of (the coronavirus) infections,” Hokkaido Gov. Naomichi Suzuki told reporters, asking residents to refrain from making nonessential outings.

Hokkaido had declared its own state of emergency on Feb. 28 ahead of the government and lifted it on March 19, citing signs that the coronavirus spread was abating in the prefecture, a popular area for both Japanese and foreign tourists.

Talk of a universal basic income (UBI), or regular cash payments with minimal or no requirements for receiving the money, has been brought to the forefront as social distancing and economic concerns have put millions of people out of work.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic Pope Francis says it might be time for some sort of universal basic income.

“This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage” to “acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks” and to “achieve the ideal … of no worker without rights,” Pope Francis said in a letter to the World Meeting of Popular Movements, an organization representing global grassroots organizations, published on Sunday via the Vatican.

Continue reading “Pope Francis: ‘This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage’” »

The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people across the globe. It is also causing huge damage to the global economy. According to the predictions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), 2020 could be the worst year since the Great Depression in the 1930s, with more than 170 countries likely to experience negative per capita income growth due to the pandemic. Countries are taking different measures to mitigate that economic impact, depending on the situations in their countries. However, the process of overcoming economic crisis is going to be extremely difficult. Few businesses would find it hard even to sustain and there is going to be a significant upsurge in unemployment rates.

Like much of the rest of the world, India is under lockdown. It is bit premature to predict the exact impact of coronavirus crisis on the Indian economy since the situation is still evolving. However, it is clear at this stage that the country will be facing major economic downturn and levels of unemployment will steeply rise. The government has already offered an economic package of 1.7 trillion rupees ($22.3 billion) in the last month for providing food security and money to the poor. It is expected that the government would shortly announce the next economic stimulus package.

All this would require the government of India to undertake a ruthless review of existing patterns of expenditure. The government budgeting caters to the requirements of various segments of the society, including agriculture, health, education, and railways. The budget has two other important areas of attention: defense and science & technology.

Scientists at the University of Alberta have shown that the drug remdesivir is highly effective in stopping the replication mechanism of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, according to new research published today in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The paper follows closely on research published by the same lab in late February that demonstrated how the drug worked against the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus, a related coronavirus.

“We were optimistic that we would see the same results against the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” said Matthias Götte, chair of medical microbiology and immunology at U of A.

Interventions that may slow ageing include drugs (e.g., rapamycin, metformin), supplements (e.g., nicotinamide riboside, nicotinamide mononucleotide), lifestyle interventions (e.g., exercise) and diets (e.g., fasting)

Thanks to advances in modern medicine over the past century, the world’s population has experienced a marked increase in longevity. However, disparities exist that lead to groups with both shorter lifespan and significantly diminished health, especially in the aged. Unequal access to proper nutrition, healthcare services, and information to make informed health and nutrition decisions all contribute to these concerns. This in turn has hastened the ageing process in some and adversely affected others’ ability to age healthfully. Many in developing as well as developed societies are plagued with the dichotomy of simultaneous calorie excess and nutrient inadequacy. This has resulted in mental and physical deterioration, increased non-communicable disease rates, lost productivity and quality of life, and increased medical costs. While adequate nutrition is fundamental to good health, it remains unclear what impact various dietary interventions may have on improving healthspan and quality of life with age. With a rapidly ageing global population, there is an urgent need for innovative approaches to health promotion as individual’s age. Successful research, education, and interventions should include the development of both qualitative and quantitative biomarkers and other tools which can measure improvements in physiological integrity throughout life. Data-driven health policy shifts should be aimed at reducing the socio-economic inequalities that lead to premature ageing. A framework for progress has been proposed and published by the World Health Organization in its Global Strategy and Action Plan on Ageing and Health. This symposium focused on the impact of nutrition on this framework, stressing the need to better understand an individual’s balance of intrinsic capacity and functional abilities at various life stages, and the impact this balance has on their mental and physical health in the environments they inhabit.

Whooping cough has made an astonishing comeback, with 2012 seeing nearly 50,000 infections in the U.S. (the most since 1955), and a death rate in infants three times that of the rest of the population. The dramatic resurgence has puzzled public health officials, who have pointed to the waning effectiveness of the current vaccine and growing anti-vaccine sentiment as the most likely culprits.

But that might not be the whole story, suggests a new study published in BMC Medicine by Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellows Ben Althouse and Sam Scarpino. Their research points to a different, but related, source of the outbreak — vaccinated people who are infectious but who do not display the symptoms of whooping cough, suggesting that the number of people transmitting without symptoms may be many times greater than those transmitting with symptoms.

In the 1950s, highly successful vaccines based on inactivated pertussis cells (the bacteria that causes whooping cough) drove infection rates in the U.S. below one case per 100,000 people. But adverse side effects of those vaccines led to the development and introduction in the 1990s of acellular pertussis vaccines, which use just a handful of the bacteria’s proteins and bypass most of the side effects. (Currently given to children as part of the Tdap vaccine.)

Circa 2013

These patents form part of Regeneron’s global patent portfolio, which together protect fundamental inventions behind Regeneron’s VelocImmune humanized mice. The two patents listed above specifically contain claims covering genetically modified mice that have unrearranged human immunoglobulin variable region gene segments at endogenous mouse immunoglobulin loci. The VelocImmune mice contain the full repertoire of human heavy chain immunoglobulin genes and kappa light chain genes, each linked to endogenous mouse constant regions. As a result, VelocImmune mice generate a normal and robust immune response which many believe is becoming the gold standard for making human antibody therapeutics. VelocImmune is also proving to be one of the most valuable technologies in biotechnology history, in terms of the licensing and collaboration revenues it has helped generate.

TARRYTOWN, N.Y., Aug. 7, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN) today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted U.S. Patent No. 8,502,018 relating to methods of genetically modifying a mouse to make human antibodies. A similar European.

Can you be reinfected with Covid-19?

I’m skeptical as to whether reinfection is possible or not from Covid-19. However studies have shown that the virus lasts longer than 2 weeks within the human body:

10 days: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.05.

More than 2 weeks: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762452

Continue reading “Clinical presentation and virological assessment of hospitalized cases of coronavirus disease 2019 in a travel-associated transmission cluster” »

“Our hope is that the unique mechanism of action of Opaganib, with both anti-viral and anti-inflammatory activity, will help COVID-19 patients by reducing lung inflammation, and thus preventing the disease from progressing to a stage which requires mechanical ventilation,” said Mark L. Levitt, RedHill’s medical director.