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A wave of health concern is sweeping across Europe, echoing similar patterns of pediatric pneumonia seen in China. This concern stems from the increasing prevalence of a rather understated yet potent bacterium – Mycoplasma pneumonia, known for causing “walking pneumonia,” particularly for children.

Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a unique bacterium with the capability of triggering a spectrum of respiratory infections, ranging from mild to severe pneumonia. This pathogen predominantly targets school-aged children, with Public Health France indicating it accounts for 30–50% of community-acquired pneumonia infections in this demographic.

Pneumonia, as it stands, is a condition where the lungs’ air sacs become inflamed, potentially filling with fluid or pus. This results in symptoms that include coughing and difficulty breathing.

Takeaways:

• Barry Young, a public health worker in New Zealand, was arrested for allegedly accessing and leaking personal information from work databases. Young claims the data shows that COVID-19 vaccines are causing deaths.

• Young leaked the data to Steve Kirsch, a vaccine critic, who anonymized the data and uploaded it to his Wasabi file storage account. Kirsch claims the data proves that the COVID-19 vaccines have caused more than 10 million deaths worldwide.

The model expects to generate $203 million in revenue by 2030 from its new health promotion business.


How would you feel if someone offered you a stay at a hotel, but with a catch: they would watch you sleep and collect data from your body? Would you be curious, excited, or creeped out? Well, that’s exactly what a Japanese IT company plans to do as part of its new health promotion business.

NTT’s bold plan

NTT Data, a Japanese IT services company, has revealed its plan to open a capsule hotel that will monitor and analyze the sleep patterns of its guests, with their consent. The company aims to use sleep data to provide personalized health and wellness services and sell anonymized data to various industries.

An international team led by researchers at the University of Toronto has uncovered over 100 genes that are common to primate brains but have undergone evolutionary divergence only in humans—and which could be a source of our unique cognitive ability.

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Jesse Gillis from the Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research and the department of physiology at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, found the genes are expressed differently in the brains of humans compared to four of our relatives—chimpanzees, gorillas, macaques and marmosets.

The findings, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, suggest that reduced , or tolerance to loss-of-function mutations, may have allowed the genes to take on higher-level cognitive capacity. The study is part of the Human Cell Atlas, a global initiative to map all to better understand health and disease.

Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), manufactured chemicals used in products such as food packaging and cosmetics, can lead to reproductive problems, increased cancer risk and other health issues. A growing body of research has also linked the chemicals to lower bone mineral density, which can lead to osteoporosis and other bone diseases. But most of those studies have focused on older, non-Hispanic white participants and only collected data at a single point in time.

Now, researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have replicated those results in a of two groups of young participants, primarily Hispanics, a group that faces a heightened risk of disease in adulthood.

“This is a population completely understudied in this area of research, despite having an increased risk for bone disease and osteoporosis,” said Vaia Lida Chatzi, MD, Ph.D., a professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and the study’s senior author.

So our experiences or how we handle those experiences may have an effect on the expression of genes in our body.


A surprising thing happened when researchers began exploring whether early-life stress compounds the effects of a childhood head injury on health and behavior later in life: In an animal study, stress changed the activation level of many more genes in the brain than were changed by a bump to the head.

It’s already known that head injuries are common in young kids, especially from falling, and can be linked to mood disorders and social difficulties that emerge later in life. Adverse childhood experiences are also very common, and can raise risk for disease, mental illness and substance misuse in adulthood.

“But we don’t know how those two things can interact,” said senior study author Kathryn Lenz, associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. “We wanted to understand whether experiencing a traumatic brain injury in the context of early life stress circumstances could modulate the response to the brain injury. And using an animal model allows us to really get into the mechanisms through which these two things might be impacting brain development as it’s occurring.”

A new study in mice, published recently in the journal Cell Metabolism, shows that cutting down the amount of a single amino acid called isoleucine can, among other benefits, extend their lifespan, make them leaner and less frail as they age and reduce cancer and prostate problems, all while the mice ate more calories.

There’s a popular saying in some circles that “a calorie is a calorie,” but science shows that it may not be true. In fact, it may be possible to eat more of some kinds of calories while also improving your health.

“We like to say a calorie is not just a calorie,” says Dudley Lamming, a professor and metabolism researcher at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “Different components of your diet have value and impact beyond their function as a calorie, and we’ve been digging in on one component that many people may be eating too much of.”