Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1779

WASHINGTON — Michael Fleming never got to say goodbye to his father. He didn’t know his dad was fading away on a ventilator, diagnosed with coronavirus at the federal prison where he was serving time for a drug charge.

His father, also named Michael, was held at FCI Terminal Island in Los Angeles and died April 19. At least half the population there has tested positive, the largest known hot spot in the federal prison system. But the first word the family received of the father’s illness was the day he died, from a prison chaplain asking if the body should be cremated and where the ashes should be sent.

“They just left us all in the dark,” Fleming said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We had to find out from the news what the actual cause of death was. It was kind of screwed up.”

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Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a current pandemic infection caused by a positive-sense RNA virus named the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The particularly infectious capacity of the virus, along with mortality rates ranging from 1% to above 5%, has raised concerns across the globe.1 Older patients with comorbid conditions including pulmonary disease, cardiac disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and hypertension have been associated with even higher mortality rates, suggesting particularly susceptible populations.

The increased mortality and morbidity of COVID-19 in patients with hypertension is an association that has been observed in a number of initial epidemiological studies outlining the characteristics of the COVID-19 epidemic in China. Wu et al2 found hypertension to have a hazard ratio of 1.70 for death and 1.82 for acute respiratory distress syndrome in 201 patients with COVID-19. Zhou et al3 found hypertension to have a hazard ratio of 3.05 for in-hospital mortality in 191 patients with COVID-19.

Neither of these studies2,3 adjusted for confounding variables and thus it remains unclear if this association is related to the pathogenesis of hypertension or another associated comorbidity or treatment. There has been a growing concern that this association with hypertension is confounded by treatment with specific antihypertensive medications: angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs) and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs).

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This is very surreal. A study was done to assess the safety of common drugs, and COVID, and whether taking them leads to severe symptoms. There has been concern as these drugs increase ACE2 receptors coronavirus binds to. So someone had the bright idea of going through over 12,000 digital patients records to come up with the conclusion the drugs are safe to take and they do not cause worse symptoms. No animal studies, no clinical trials, and this was actually published.

“For the study, the researchers identified patients in the NYU Langone Health electronic health record with COVID-19 test results. For each identified patient with COVID-19 test results, the team discretely extracted medical history needed for the analysis, which compared treated and untreated patients.”

First you do a mouse study at least to review how coronavirus behaves in mice who are given the drugs, and compare it to mice not given the drugs. If science has been reduced to just going over records and coming to a conclusion, with no experimentation I have officially lost my mind.

Despite concerns expressed by some experts, common high blood pressure drugs did not increase the risk of contracting COVID-19 — or of developing severe disease — in a study of 12,594 patients.

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To tackle this problem, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research identified a gel that closely mimics the physicochemical properties of organs that have undergone the tissue clearing process. Starting with computer simulations and following up with laboratory tests, the team optimized the soaking solution temperature, dye and antibody concentrations, chemical additives, and electrical properties to produce the best staining and imaging results. They then tested their method with more than two dozen commonly used dyes and antibodies on mouse and marmoset brains.

Scans of an entire mouse brain and one hemisphere of a marmoset brain—rendered into 3D using light sheet microscopy—revealed the similarity between the two animals’ neural vascular systems, showing the use of the system for comparative anatomy, the researchers report this week in. They also showed that they could simultaneously stain and image up to four molecular targets in a mouse brain, a feat that “has never been reported before,” says Ludovico Silvestri, of the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy, who was not involved in the research.

The team also used its technique to image an entire infant marmoset and a small human brain sample—something that could one day lead to new understandings of solid tumors and neurodegenerative diseases. The team says its approach to optimizing staining can be applied to other techniques to advance the entire field of 3D imaging.

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The small intestine is one of the most important interfaces between the environment and our body. It is responsible for nutrient absorption but also forms a barrier against potentially harmful environmental cues. A research team, led by researchers from the Leibniz Institute on Aging—Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena, Germany, investigated the effects of aging and diet on the intestinal epithelium of young and old mice. They were able to show region-specific effects on the proteome and age-related impairments in adaptation to nutrient availability. Their results provide a complete picture of the spatial organization of the small intestine proteome in the mouse. The results were published in the journal Cell Reports.

The small (SI) is one of the most important interfaces between the environment and our body. It has two major functions: it is responsible for absorbing nutrients from the food we eat and functions as a barrier to restrict the entry of harmful substances. The SI is a highly adaptive and dynamic organ, as it adapts to changes in nutrient intake or diet. The intestinal epithelium undergoes a process of continuous renewal, every 3–5 days.

Effects of aging and diet on the small intestine have already been investigated. It is known that aging leads to reduced absorption of nutrients by the epithelium thus contributing to malnutrition in elderly people. In addition, anatomical differences between different regions of the SI are well known, but so far, region-specific effects of aging and diet on the set of proteins that compose the intestinal epithelium had not been investigated.

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Well, every dark cloud does have a silver lining. Out of nearly three million confirmed cases of coronavirus, 1.77 million are mild cases, and more than 807,050 people have recovered as of the time of my writing this.

I think it is fair to say that a vast majority of human beings on planet Earth have one question in their minds: When will we have an actual vaccine?

Well, I have some good news.

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