NSW Health is the latest Australian government entity to confirm being impacted by a vulnerability in the Accellion file transfer system.
Category: health – Page 271
The U.S. South may see a Covid surge this summer as vaccination rates lag
A dozen states — many of them in the Northeast, including Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut — have already reached a benchmark of at least 70 percent of adults with at least one vaccine dose, a goal President Biden has set for the nation to make by July 4. But in the South, that marker is nowhere in sight for several states.
In 15 states — including Arkansas, the Carolinas, Georgia and Louisiana — about half of adults or fewer have received a dose, according to a New York Times analysis. In two states, Alabama and Mississippi, it would take about a year to get one dose to 70 percent of the population at the current pace of distribution.
Public-health experts and officials in states with lower vaccination rates say the president’s benchmark will help reduce cases and deaths but is somewhat arbitrary — even if 70 percent of adults are vaccinated, the virus and its more contagious variants can spread among those who are not.
A new soft electronic material for human-machine interfacing
Researchers at DTU Health Tech have developed a new material that can facilitate a near-perfect merger between machines and the human body for diagnostics and treatment.
A DTU research team consisting of Malgorzata Gosia Pierchala, Firoz Babu Kadumundi, and Mehdi Mehrali from #TeamBioEngine headed by Alireza Dolatshahi-Pirouz, have developed a new material—CareGum—that among other things has potential for monitoring motor impairment associated with neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s.
Biden’s Proposed New Health Agency Would Emphasize Innovation. Here’s How It Might Work
The White House recently announced its vision for an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H. RAND researchers explain what it might take to ens… See More.
DARPA also maintains an extremely high tolerance for failure. The modest budgets of the NIH, combined with an enormous pool of applicants, force these institutions to bet on low-risk research that guarantees incremental progress. ARPA-H could take a different approach than NIH by accepting a much higher tolerance for failure, so that researchers are not discouraged from dreaming big.
The scientific methods behind the products of ARPA-H might gain public trust if the agency made a point of being transparent and accessible. Consider how the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine was met with incredulity and suspicion, slowing progress toward herd immunity. An investment in ARPA-H could accelerate the time it takes to get innovative ideas from “bench to bedside,” but it could benefit from informing the public about incremental advancements in a way that is easy to understand.
The president’s vision for ARPA-H could help get more medical treatments to market sooner. Building on lessons from DARPA and NIH, the proposed health agency has the potential to pursue the kind of high-risk research that can lead to high-reward results.
NIH scientists say they may have found a promising new oral antiviral drug for Covid
Scientists may have found a promising new treatment for Covid-19 after an experimental oral antiviral drug demonstrated the ability to prevent the coronavirus from replicating, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday, citing a new study.
The drug, called TEMPOL, can reduce Covid-19 infections by impairing an enzyme the virus needs to make copies of itself once it’s inside human cells, which could potentially limit the severity of the disease, researchers at the NIH said. The drug was tested in an experiment of cell cultures with live viruses.
“We urgently need additional effective, accessible treatments for COVID-19,” Dr. Diana W. Bianchi, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, wrote in a statement. “An oral drug that prevents SARS-CoV-2 from replicating would be an important tool for reducing the severity of the disease.”
Early Bird or Night Owl? Study Links Shift Worker Sleep to ‘Chronotype’
Summary: Findings of a new study could help to design better strategies to improve sleep in workers with atypical work schedules.
Source: McGill University.
Getting enough sleep can be a real challenge for shift workers affecting their overall health. But what role does being an early bird or night owl play in getting good rest? Researchers from McGill University find a link between chronotype and amount of sleep shift workers can get with their irregular schedules.
Synthetic SPECIES developed for use as a confinable gene drive
CRISPR-based technologies offer enormous potential to benefit human health and safety, from disease eradication to fortified food supplies. As one example, CRISPR-based gene drives, which are engineered to spread specific traits through targeted populations, are being developed to stop the transmission of devastating diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.
But many scientists and ethicists have raised concerns over the unchecked spread of gene drives. Once deployed in the wild, how can scientists prevent gene drives from uncontrollably spreading across populations like wildfire?
Now, scientists at the University of California San Diego and their colleagues have developed a gene drive with a built-in genetic barrier that is designed to keep the drive under control. Led by molecular geneticist Omar Akbari’s lab, the researchers engineered synthetic fly species that, upon release in sufficient numbers, act as gene drives that can spread locally and be reversed if desired.
NIH launches clinical trial of universal influenza vaccine candidate
A first-in-human, Phase 1 trial assessing the safety and immunogenicity of an investigational nanoparticle influenza vaccine designed to provide long-lasting protection against multiple flu virus strains has begun at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Healthy participants 18 to 50 years old will receive either a licensed seasonal influenza vaccine or the experimental vaccine, FluMos-v1. Scientists from NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) developed FluMos-v1 to stimulate antibodies against multiple influenza virus strains by displaying part of the influenza virus hemagglutinin (HA) protein on self-assembling nanoparticle scaffolds. Alicia T. Widge, M.D., of NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC), is the principal investigator of the NIAID-sponsored single-site trial.
“The health and economic burdens of influenza are substantial, and the world badly needs improved flu vaccines,” said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. “I am encouraged by the great promise of the VRC nanoparticle vaccine candidate, which so far has performed very well in pre-clinical testing.”
Standard influenza vaccines must be reformulated and administered annually to match changes in the HA protein in the viral strains predicted to dominate in the upcoming influenza season. If the vaccine is not well matched to dominant circulating virus strains, the antibodies elicited may provide sub-optimal protection. So-called universal influenza vaccines are being developed and tested by many research groups and could one day eliminate the need for annual vaccination by generating long-lasting antibodies to protect against many existing or emergent influenza virus strains, including those not represented in the vaccine.