17 Burst results for "Tanya Lewis"
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"We discuss diseases, treatments, and some controversies. And we demystify the medical research in ways you can use to stay healthy. I'm Tonya Lewis. I'm Josh fishman. We are scientific American senior health editors. On the show today, we've got some surprising news about cholesterol. The so called good kind is supposed to protect your heart and arteries. But it actually makes things worse under certain circumstances. And doctors are just figuring this out. You go to the doctor for an annual check up, right? Tanya? Yeah, sure. As any good health editor would. Me too. You get asked a bunch of personal questions, a cold stethoscope on your skin and the doctor draws some blood for some standard lab tests. Among those tests, when you get them back, are two cholesterol numbers. Right. What is your level of low density lipoprotein cholesterol, or LDL? It's supposed to stay under a 130 milligrams per deciliter. The lower the better. And the other one is high density lipoprotein, or HDL. And that's supposed to stay above 40 milligrams per deciliter. The higher it is, the better we're told. And that's because LDL is the bad cholesterol. The one that leads to artery clogging plaques, heart disease, strokes, and other nasty stuff. We want less of it. HDL, on the other hand, is good cholesterol. We want more of it. HDL has this good reputation because it binds to LDL, carrying the bad stuff to the liver. From there it gets flushed out of your body, where it can't hurt you. But you know the old saying about having too much of a good thing, that seems to be true of good cholesterol. So is it possible to have too much HDL? It's totally possible. Turns out that too much HDL actually raises the chances of artery and heart disease the very things we're trying to avoid. Once you get above 80 for men and a hundred for women, and I'm going to stop saying milligrams per deciliter because it's a mouthful. You're in the danger zone. A bunch of recent studies have found this effect, but generally, that's not what doctors have told patients. The teaching has been up until recently that the higher the HDL, the lower the risk. So traditionally transitions have been using very high HDL levels as a marker of really healthy cholesterol profile. That's the researcher behind some of the newer studies. My name is Professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at Henry university school of medicine Atlanta, Georgia. He did a study of more than 400,000 people in the UK. People without other predisposing risk factors for heart disease. For men, cardiac and other disease risks went up if their HDL levels were under 40, or over 80. For women, the risk climbed once HDL levels topped 100. When you say climbed, how much of a risk are we talking about? A few percentage points, or much bigger increase. Excellent question. And I ask kayumi about the amount of extra risk that people face. If she just took them without any other evaluation of other risk factors like LDL cholesterol or blood pressure, diabetes, et cetera. It's almost too far higher compared to the lowest risk group which would have levels between 40 to 60. Even when he and his team took into account those other factors, those with very high HDL had a risk that was 80% higher than normal. And other studies back this up. One of them looked at more than 11,000 people with high blood pressure. It found a much higher rate of cardiovascular problems and people with HDL levels, both under 40 and over 80. Okay, let me run through the numbers. HDL is bad if it's under 40. It's good if it's 40 to 60. Possibly a risk in the 60 to 80 range and a pretty big risk if it's above 80 for men and a hundred for women. Is that right? Yep. Good cholesterol is really bad cholesterol over 80 or over 100, depending on your sex, and under 40. The middle zone is the safe zone. Now, it's a bit of a mystery why HDL should turn bad when it gets really high. Why should a molecule help you it? Level 45, for instance, but hurt you at level 85. It's possible that the shape of the molecule changes. So they don't latch on tightly to circulating cholesterol and help ferry it out of the body. Interesting. But I want to go back to something intriguing you mentioned. There's a difference between where men and women enter this HDL danger zone. You said it was over 80 for men, but over a hundred for women. Why is that? You're right. There was a 20 point difference between men and women. And honestly, neither kayumi team nor anyone else really knows why. Part of everything is taught to be just sex hormonal differences, estrogen, testosterone, differences between men and women. There are some genetic reasons for that as well. It's not really what worked out. I've read that estrogen can increase HDL in women, and that it can be protective. But once women reach menopause, their estrogen levels drop, and HDL becomes less protective. In any event, it sounds like women shouldn't freak out if their HDL is slightly over 80, according to these studies. Though men in that range should probably be aware that they are at risk. Yeah, and there shouldn't be a huge number of people freaking out, period. Overall, the research shows that about 7% of the general population reaches these scary HDL levels. But still, that's nothing to ignore. If a doctor sees 100 patients in a week, 7 of them will be in this HDL danger zone. So if people are in the danger zone, what should they do? I ask kayumi about that one too. Drinking a lot of alcohol drives HDL up. So he tell patients guzzling one or two glasses of wine or booze daily to cut it out. There aren't drugs that bring down high HDL. So the big thing he'd do is focus on treating LDL. Statins, for instance, are very effective at lowering LDL levels, and he'd use those. Baby aspirin used carefully can reduce blood clots that lead to heart attacks. Check with your doctor on that one. Aspirin can have side effects. And there's one more thing. If they are sedentary, they should be encouraged to exercise, exercise is helpful for everything. I guess I'm going to keep going for my morning runs then. And I'll try to keep my bad cholesterol low and good cholesterol in that happy middle zone. Our colleague, Lydia Denver, calls that the Goldilocks zone, not too low and not too high, but just right. You can read her new science of health column on HDL in the middle of May on Siam dot com. And now I'm going to call my doctor to schedule my yearly checkup. Your health quickly is produced and edited by Toledo bows, Jeff del vizio, Kelso Harper, and Alexa Lim. Our music is composed by Dominic Smith. Our show is part of scientific American's podcast science quickly. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to go to Siam dot com for updated and in depth health news. I'm Tanya Lewis. I'm Josh fishman. We'll be back in two weeks. Thanks for listening.
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"This is just obviously a chief multimedia editor here at scientific American. And this is to look at Bose, senior multimedia editor. Do you remember the year 2006? Sure, Jeff. A lot happened. The existence of dark matter was confirmed. The missing link between fish and stuffed with four eggs fossil of a creature called tiktaalik was found. Twitter launched, but Pluto also lost its planetary status. And we also lost crocodile venture Steve Irwin. A moment of silence. Yeah. And everyone believed that drinking wine would help you live longer. Do you remember? Yeah, and everyone also believed that our newly launched podcast, 62nd science would stay 60s seconds. But over those 15 plus years and thousands of episodes of our beloved science podcast later. It became very clear that 62nd science. It wasn't actually going to stay 60 seconds. And of those 3000 plus episodes, how many of them were actually 60 seconds? You know, I'm not sure, but I think we started to slide in the mid 2010s. Yeah, that's the number one piece of feedback I get from everyone who listens to the show and loves it. Her show is in 60 seconds. It's a lie. Including someone who's going to write for us listen to it on their school bus. Wow. Well, in their honor, we're not going to live the lie anymore. No more, no more. So because of that, we're going to be correcting this serial error in a big way. It's a new era and scientific American podcast history. Einstein might have written for us back in the 1950s, but you don't have to be an Einstein to listen to this podcast. It's a science pod for everyone. We'll be expanding our hosts our coverage and most importantly, the spacetime continuum of the podcast. Here's a little taste of the stories from their new hosts. We have coming. Hi, I'm Hamilton Morris, and I'll be talking about chemistry, pharmacology, and new research on psychoactive drugs for scientific Americans, science quickly. Hey, this is shayla love, and I'm going to take you inside the brain in love. This is Christopher and Tatiana, and I'm searching for the pools of life. I'm Allison partial, and I'm going to be taking you to a world where AI makes music. This is Jacob job and together we'll explore bird conservation via nocturnal migration. This is Kelso Harper and I'll be exploring the queerness of nature. This is Jason drakeford, and together, we'll track down the sounds of outer space. This is Meghan McDonough, and I'll be exploring the science of pleasure. My name is Shannon Leo and I'll be covering the science of video games that everything you might want to know about that. This is Tanya Lewis and Josh fishman and will be back with your health quickly. House news you can use on COVID. But now also on stuff beyond the pandemic. Medicine, neuroscience, nutrition, exercise, and a whole lot more. This sounds fascinating. And not one of these podcasts is 60 seconds. Oh, thank God. But we're still going to respect your time. Fascinating and fast. You might even say science quickly. You know what? That's great. Let's go with that. So join us. For science quickly coming to this podcast feed, this brand new refreshed podcast feed. Yes, indeed. Monday, February 13th. I prefer Tuesday, heartbreak. I know. But Monday it is, I'm not superstitious, I swear. See you all then..
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease we demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm Tanya Lewis. I'm Josh fishman. And we're scientific American senior health editors. Today we're going to talk about how COVID has driven a notable decline in U.S. life expectancy. And some new monoclonal antibodies that could protect us from variants. People in the U.S. have been living longer and longer during most of the past century. Then COVID hit, and all of a sudden we're going backwards. Why are we losing years of our lives? Life expectancy has only declined a few times in recent memory. During the 1918 pandemic, during World War II, and during the HIV aids crisis. But over the last two years, it's declined by almost three years. That's equivalent to the U.S. life expectancy in 1996. That's really astounding. It is. But while almost every demographic group saw a drop, some groups lost more years of lights than others. Which of those groups had the biggest declines? Native American and Alaska native populations lost a total of 6.6 years from 2019 to 2021. The Hispanic population lost 4.2 years. The non Hispanic black population lost four years, the white population lost 2.4 years and the Asian population lost 2.1 years. These data come from the CDC's national center for health statistics, which recently published provisional data for 2021. Elizabeth Arias and her NCHS colleagues calculated something called a life table. It basically takes a hypothetical group of infants born in 2021 and applies the real world death rates of ever group to those infants across their whole lives. The result is an estimate of the total population's life expectancy. So what are the reasons for all those lost years? Well, COVID was the primary cause. More than a million people in the U.S. have died from the disease. But unintentional injuries, mostly drug overdoses, were also a big reason for the decline. Deaths from heart disease, chronic liver disease, and suicide also contributed to this decline in life expectancy over the past year. Economists and case and Angus deaton first brought attention to these deaths of despair. Deaths from overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. They were already rising before the pandemic, which just accelerated the trend. In other words, COVID pushed people who were already struggling over the edge. Most likely, and this was especially true for the Native American population. Native American people have some of the poorest levels of housing, education, and healthcare in this country, and a lot of this stems from the U.S. government's colonialist policies. According to crystal Lee an assistant professor at the university of New Mexico's college of population health. Lee is DNA, a member of the Navajo Nation, and is also CEO of the nonprofit organization united natives and the company indigenous health. We need to hold the U.S. government accountable by honoring the existent treaties Lee says. Those treaties would improve healthcare, among other things. Exactly. I think the biggest take home message here is really that we weren't prepared for this pandemic, and that we really need to revamp our whole healthcare system and make it work for everyone in this country if we want to stop this backsliding and live longer, healthier lives. Josh, we've talked about the several hundred people who are getting severely sick and dying from COVID every day. And some of the medicines developed to treat sick people don't work well against the new variants. You've been hearing about some drugs that might work better though, right? I have. The new drugs are variants themselves. Versions of older medicines called monoclonal antibodies. They have usually got long difficult names, but they typically end in mab, so that's the giveaway. For COVID, those have been around for a year or so, haven't they? Yep, they were developed to glom onto the early 2020 form of the virus and prevent it from penetrating into a cell, and originally they did a pretty good job. Recently, not so much, right? I saw a study in which scientists tested 21 different mabs against the BA four and 5 variants, and only one was able to neutralize them. And that is precisely the problem. These mabs were configured to fit that early virus, like a key fitting into a lock. But now there are 5 or so newer variants making the rounds, BA 5 is still the dominant one. And those have mutations that essentially change the shape of the lock. So, most of the mabs don't fit anymore. One, called beetle ova mob, still does a pretty good job, but most of the others that have been authorized by the FDA do not. So what's the solution? To go abroad. Scientists used to pick these mabs based on how strongly they attached to a particular virus. But now they're looking for antibodies that are broadly neutralizing. They grab onto a wider range of variants, not just one. I've been talking about this with Bill haseltine, the molecular biologist who worked on some of the original aids therapies. He thinks this approach is very promising. Map developers are picking antibodies that take aim at what scientists call highly conserved regions of the virus, in plain English that means spots that don't mutate from variant to variant. So the mabs can still lock on. Can people use these now? Not yet. There are about ten of these mabs in various stages of testing. Some are now being tried on people and some are still in animal tests. But don't a lot of drugs that work well in animals actually fail when they get to humans? Not mabs in general. The antibodies are often developed in mice that have been genetically modified to have human like immune systems, a technique that goes back to the days of aids, drug development. Because of that, they generally translate well to people has says. Another advantage mabs have is they can be used to prevent infection in people who are in high risk situations. Some may be immunocompromised and don't get much benefit from vaccines, so mabs can play a prevention role for them. Others may work in nursing homes which have had high rates of outbreaks. I can see that. Look, I don't want to keep tossing out problems, but mabs aren't a pill like pax Logan. They have to be infused, or at least inject it. Doesn't that create an accessibility problem? You're right. It's not like you can easily use these at home. But the injection technology is getting easier. And just for instance, plenty of people with diabetes have learned to inject themselves with insulin. Now cost will be an issue too. Mab manufacturers can charge just over $2000 per dose. Right now the government picks up the tab for COVID patients. It turns out, though, that mabs are actually cheap to produce these days, just over one or $200 a pop. So there is a chance we'll be seeing new and affordable therapies. Able to handle the range of variants that COVID keeps tossing mass. Now you're up to speed, thanks for joining us. Our show is edited by Jeff del vizio and tulika Bose. Come back in two weeks for the next episode of COVID quickly and check out Siam dot com for updated and in depth COVID news.
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"We bring you up to speed on the science behind most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm Tanya Lewis. I'm Josh fishman. And we're scientific Americans, senior health editors. Today we're going to take a personal look at a moderate case of COVID. If Josh's voice holds up. And we'll talk about how we decide when pandemics are really over. Not just when presidents say they are. Can you hear me okay? Do I sound too rough? Actually, you sound fairly normal. Good, that's a change for the better yesterday I sounded like I was at the bottom of a well, but without that cool echoey effect and with a lot more gurgling. Because I have COVID. I started showing symptoms about two weeks ago, and I still have them. Oh man, that sucks. I'm so sorry. Thanks. I don't want to make this episode all about me, though. I don't either, but we do talk a lot about scientific studies, and we don't often talk about what it's like to actually have COVID. I didn't believe I caught it at first. I've spent two and a half years avoiding it. I'm vaccinated and I'm boosted and so to see that positive line on a rapid antigen test made me go, wait, what? That can't be right. So I took another test, and there was that line again. Do you know how you got infected? I'm pretty sure it was on a business trip to New York City. That meant trains and subways and sitting in a big meeting with about 200 other people, most of whom didn't wear masks. I wore a mask. But I did go to an outside bar with some friends from work, and there was a nice breeze and while you can't drink beer through a mask. So I took mine off. Let's understandable. When did you know there was a problem?
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"Hi, and welcome to COVID quickly, a scientific American podcast series. This is your fast track update on the COVID pandemic. We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm Tanya Lewis. I'm Josh fishman. And we're a scientific American senior health editor. Today we're going to discuss what we really know about BA 5 reinfection. And we'll talk about one factor worldwide that is kept infections low. Trust in people around you. I'm hearing more and more stories about people getting reinfected with COVID, just a month or two after recovering from an earlier bout. Are those just stories or is reinfection really more common now with the BA 5 variant running around? I've been hearing those stories too, and it's true that BA 5 is better at evading our immune responses from past infection or vaccination than any variant we've seen so far. But the truth is, a prior infection does still give you some immunity, especially a prior omicron infection, a preprint study done in Qatar that has not yet been peer reviewed, found that a prior infection with a non archon variant gave people about 15% protection from symptomatic BA 5 or BA four are related variant. And 28% protection against any infection with those variants. Okay, that's something. What help does a prior omicron infection give? Those people had significantly more protection against reinfection with BA four or 5. 76% against symptomatic infection, and nearly 80% against all infection. In other words, if you had omicron in the winter of the spring, you're fairly well protected against getting it again now. That's right. And while it's certainly possible you could have had an earlier version of omicron and still get unlucky enough to catch BA 5, you're unlikely to catch the exact same variant twice in a short span of time. Well, that's good news. What about vaccination? How well does that protect you? Well, we already know the vaccines do a great job of protecting against severe disease in all the variants we've seen so far. But the booster shots are also critically important. Antibodies from vaccination weighing over time, making us more susceptible to infection. Thankfully, boosters can top up that protection even against omicron. The CDC conducted a recent study when BA two and related variants were circulating. It found that people over 54 months after a first booster were just 55% protected against being hospitalized with COVID. But after a second booster, that protection jumped up to 80%. Sounds like you're telling us now is a good time to make sure you're up to date on your booster shots. Absolutely. The reason we're seeing more reinfections with BA 5 is partly due to its immune invasiveness, mutations in its spike protein that help its sidestep antibodies to prior variants. And it's partly due to the fact that more people have simply had COVID by now, and their immunity may have waned since they first got infected. So it's a bit hard to compare the risk of reinfection with different variants. But in general, if you've had COVID or gotten boosted recently, it is safe to say you probably have some protection against reinfection and especially against severe outcomes. Throughout the pandemic, we've all been wondering why some people get infected and others don't. Age, immune system reactions, mask wearing, they all make a difference. But you've been looking at another surprising factor. Trust. It's true, Tanya. All of the things you mentioned do affect risk on an individual level. But looking across countries, the ones that have done best during the pandemic, keeping infection rates and death rates down, are the ones in which people have the most trust in one another, and in their governments. Trust is more important than how rich a country is or how many hospital beds it has or whether it had a good pandemic preparedness plan. That's wild. Trust really makes that big a difference. It does. Trust me. You just had to go there, didn't you? Yep. But let me explain it. The info comes from a study published in February in the medical journal the lancet. The authors looked at a 177 different countries and made dozens of comparisons about populations, governments, and healthcare systems. They looked at the period from the very start of the pandemic in early 2020 to when the delta wave peaked in the fall of 2021. Most of the differences in COVID outcomes just couldn't be explained by typical factors. I mean, you know the U.S. had one of the highest infection and death rates in the world. But it also had high per person income, lots of hospitals, and healthcare workers, and a government that functions pretty well. Okay, some of the time, and at least when compared with a lot of other places. But that stuff didn't really matter. Not so much. Countries like the Philippines and the Dominican Republic and Vietnam, which don't have U.S. type resources, had much lower infection and death rates during the time of the study. What places like Vietnam did have the authors say, was a really high level of trust in their government and in the people down the street. When you say trust, what exactly do you mean? How did they measure it? Good question. It was through big surveys. Several years of them, all around the world, and in these surveys people were asked basically how much they trusted officials and everyone else to do the right thing. But couldn't those answers be skewed? I mean, people in countries with a third terran governments might be scared to give an honest answer, right? You are right. But there are places like Denmark without such fears where people said they had really high levels of trust. And then there are places like the U.S. where people aren't scared of surveys and still had much lower levels of trust. In fact, the researchers estimate that if every country on the planet had levels of interpersonal trust like Denmark, global infections would have been 40% lower. That's 440 million fewer infections. Wow. But trust is a social thing, part of a relationship. How does it fight a virus? In a few ways, trust makes it easier for officials to communicate with people about the best protective measures. Strategies that engage communities that involve them in solutions help build that trust. High levels are linked to high vaccination rates and also to people agreeing to restrictions on moving around. Low trust and you get the bad patchwork of behaviors and anger that we've seen here. Between people neighbor to neighbor, trust makes people confident everyone is trying to protect one another. Not to harp on Denmark, but Siam just reported on crowd behavior in that country during the pandemic. People said they were comfortable gathering because they believed their neighbors wouldn't go out if they felt ill. And were likely to be vaccinated, which, indeed, they were. That makes sense. But in several of those high trust countries, such as Denmark and Vietnam, infections have spiked recently. Well, new virus variants are highly transmissible wherever you go. Countries relax protective measures and infections have gone up. We're definitely going to need better coronavirus vaccines. But some injections of trust would help too. Now you're up to speed. Thanks for joining us. Our show is edited by Jeff del vicio and tulika Bose. Come back in two weeks for the next episode of COVID quickly. And check out Siam dot com for updated and in depth COVID news.
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"A scientific American podcast series. This is your fast track update on the COVID pandemic. We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm Tanya Lewis. I'm Josh fishman. And we're a scientific American senior health editor. Today, we're going to talk about reducing infections by improving indoor air quality. And how a lot of people approve of masks on planes and other precautions despite what you see on the news. You and I talk a lot about how COVID spreads through the air and the importance of masks. But when it comes to stopping airborne infections, there's a longer term solution that doesn't require a filter across your face, isn't there? Absolutely. It's time we started improving the quality of the air inside our buildings. We spend 90% of our time indoors, but we devote very little effort to making that air healthy for human beings. As Lindsay marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia tech put it, we don't rely on people to filter their water individually. We provide clean, safe, drinking water. Good point. Why don't we care as much about indoor air? It's not like we just realized that breathing is important for health. It's more of a recent building design issue. In the last 40 years or so, we started stealing things up more in the name of energy efficiency, but though tighter seals reduce AC or heating bills, they also make it easier for the virus that causes COVID and other germs to accumulate in the air, making us sick. So in solving one problem, we created another. Shouldn't there be standards for indoor air quality? Well, there are kind of a professional engineering society called ashrae set standards for all our buildings, including offices, schools, and restaurants. But these rules are mostly meant to protect equipment, not people. Okay, I'm less important than a refrigerator. It really sounds like it's time for an update. Yes, it is. In fact, the Biden administration recently launched a push to improve the quality of air inside buildings. It has three pillars, ventilation, filtration, and air disinfection. Ventilation is basically how much fresh air you can bring in. The more fresh air, the more it dilutes any virus hanging around. Good. And then pillar too is filtration. That's using high quality air filters to remove virus particles. The filters have names like hepa and myrrh and the E in both stands for efficiency. Right. And finally, there's air disinfection. For example, using UV light to kill or inactivate a virus in the air. The Biden administration put out a practical guide for building managers and anyone who owns a home or business and wants to upgrade the air quality. We'll put a link in the transcript. This all sounds good on paper, Tanya, but it also sounds expensive. If I owned a small business or a ran a school, I'd worry that I couldn't afford to do all these things. Would I have to foot the bill myself? That's a great question. The American rescue plan actually contains a $122 billion for schools and 350 billion for state, local and tribal governments to support some of these improvements. But Congress doesn't want to keep funding the pandemic response indefinitely. So it seems unlikely there will be a lot more federal money allocated for this. Fortunately, some businesses that have the resources are taking it upon themselves to upgrade the air quality. Okay, that gets us part of the way there. There's an argument too that this is not just good health. It's good business as well, right? Yeah. The benefits of fresh air go beyond COVID and even other respiratory diseases. Joseph Allen, director of the healthy buildings program at Harvard school of public health, says it's just good business sense. Studies have shown that poorly ventilated places actually affect cognition and mental performance. We all know how awful it feels to sit in a stuffy conference room. Exactly, and we all deserve to breathe clean, healthy air. Last week, a judge in Florida struck down the mask mandate for airplanes and public transportation. News and social media were filled with photos of people gleefully discarding their masks. I also saw news videos of people cheering on planes, but like many news stories during the pandemic, those videos give the wrong impression. They actually represent the minority of Americans, not the majority. Yeah, it turns out that most people want masks on planes, trains, and public transit. That's according to a poll by the national opinion research center and the AP. 59% of people, in fact, the poll sampled about a thousand Americans of various ideologies and backgrounds. They got the question right before the judge ruled against the mandate and before the Biden administration said that it would appeal the ruling. More than half, huh? The loudest people get the most attention, I guess. But the majority of people in this country actually do support taking some public health precautions. You hear about the people who don't trust vaccines, but if you look at the numbers, 66% of Americans have gotten fully vaccinated. That's 219 million. And the number of doses given out per day doubled this month compared to march to almost 500,000. Big name athletes get headlines for refusing shots, but in the NBA, more than 90% of players get them. In the airline industry, united said that 99.5% of employees did so. Videos captured the shouting, but the data showed the caring, and that's something to keep in mind..
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm Tanya Lewis. I'm Josh fishman. And we're scientific Americans, senior health editors. Today, we'll talk about the plan for a second vaccine booster shot. The prospects of a new COVID wave and whether people will put on masks to stop it. And how to think about COVID risk when it comes to everyday activities. This week, the FDA authorized a second booster shot on top of the ones given last year. That would be four shots total for me, Tanya. Why this new one. It happens sooner than I expected Josh, although the scientific community had been debating whether additional booster shots were needed for some time. Normally, the FDA holds a meeting of its advisory committee before deciding whether to authorize vaccines or boosters. But that didn't happen this time. The move makes boosters available to adults age 50 and older and anyone 12 and older who is immunocompromised, four months after their first booster shot. For people who had two shots and a booster, this would be their fourth shot. For some immunocompromised folks, this would be their 5th shot. That's a bunch of jabs. Why does the FDA think we need this new one? It was based on some evidence that immune protection against severe disease wanes over time in these groups. A recent CDC report found that protection against hospitalization waned from 91% to 78%, four months after a third dose. But some experts are not convinced that a second booster shot will significantly improve immunity. It may top up antibodies for a few months, but at a certain point with additional shots, we may see diminishing returns. For those who haven't gotten their first booster yet, that is important to do, and if you're older or higher risk, you might want to consider getting a second booster after four months to top up your protection. It seems like many people have ditched their masks and health officials are allowing it. But if a new COVID surge comes, Josh, will people put them on again? That's a really important question, because some kind of surge is coming, and we know masks stop infections. The effectiveness of a good mask like an N95 is beyond dispute, as you've pointed out, Tanya, and we will face more COVID, infections and hospitalizations have started to rise in Europe. The new BA two variant is becoming more common there and in the U.S., and like Europe we've cut back on masks and on restrictions. So we're likely to see something a spike a surge or whatever you want to call it. It's not clear how big it will be. But if it gets above a certain level, we should put masks back on, according to the CDC. If cases and hospitalizations per 100,000 people in your area jump up by 20 hospitalizations a week, if you're starting from a low level of cases, then put on a mask when you're indoors with other people. But masks aren't just health aids. During the pandemic, they've become political symbols. Some people are really pro mask and others are adamantly opposed to them. Exactly. So how's that going to play out in the future? I ask an expert on mask attitudes, Emily mendenhall, a medical anthropologist at Georgetown university. She just published a book called unmasked based on research and communities in Iowa and in California. Emily's talked with us about masks on an earlier episode. She says anti mask feelings stem partly from perceptions of low disease risk. People would unmask if they weren't worried about themselves. Maybe they were younger and didn't think the disease would make them sick, and partly it was political. People said they didn't want governments dictating their behavior. They had legitimate worries about business closures, and their ability to make a living. But it was also about making a public show of defiance. Masks got caught up in all that. Pro mask feelings come from an idea that we faced a collective risk. In the street, Emily says, people would talk about the need to work together and protect one another, and obviously they also felt they were in danger as individuals, and they trusted government guidelines. As the pandemic has worn on, these collective worries have faded in many places, and mask wearing is faded with them. Without actual rules such as mandates, people in those areas are unlikely to put masks back on. But Emily says there's another group that we overlook. The sometimes maskers. That's about one in three people in her research. They're all political moderates, sometimes government does a good job, they say, and sometimes not. Sometimes the media is trustable, other times not so much. And sometimes they wear a mask. There are huge swaths of Americans who would put on a mask if they were around someone with a weak immune system, or someone older, or at risk in some way. So the focus should be on sometimes maskers. That's who's willing to listen to mask promotion if COVID starts to peak in their communities. It's a sizable group, Emily says, they could be part of making mask wearing seem normal, especially in times of danger, and making it normal is key. Emily still thinks mandates are important, but she understands there's a lot of resistance. If these sometimes maskers put on N95s, they could start a whole surge of protection. Clearly, people are growing tired of restrictions as we head into pandemic year three. Many are eager to get back to doing things they enjoy again. Is there a smart way to evaluate any risks as we venture out more often? We're definitely getting to the point, Josh, where people are tired of wearing masks of social distancing and avoiding the people in places they enjoy. But the virus hasn't gone away, and it isn't likely to anytime soon. There will always be some level of risk, but as with everything in life, we have to find ways to balance risks with benefits. One of our freelancers, is working on a story for us about this. He asked a number of experts in epidemiology, risk assessment and related fields, how they make their own decisions about COVID risk. We can think about risk in three different ways, they said. There's personal risk, which is the risk of you or people in your household contracting COVID. There's community risk, which is the likelihood of encountering someone with COVID in your local community, and there's exposure risk, which accounts for the chances of getting COVID from a particular setting based on things like airflow and the behavior of other people. Caitlyn jetliner, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Houston, says that age is the biggest personal risk factor, followed by having certain comorbidities or being immunocompromised. She estimates that vaccinated and boosted people in their 60s have a ten times higher likelihood of dying from severe breakthrough cases than 18 to 49 year olds. People who are at higher risk should talk with their doctors about what risks or reasonable..
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm Tanya Lewis. I'm Josh fishman. And we're scientific Americans senior health editors. Today we'll explain the new official methods to determine if you're in a pandemic safe zone or danger area. Then we'll discuss what other pandemics look like when they were ending and whether this one at long last is heading down a similar path. The map of the U.S. shifted last week, or at least the map of COVID danger did. Suddenly, a lot of hazardous regions were deemed safer. What happened, Josh, did COVID disappear? It was a weird moment, Tanya, and no COVID hasn't gone away. But last Friday morning, people looked at an official Centers for Disease Control map showing much of the nation was in a high risk area, and the next day that map showed about 60% of the U.S. was really at low or medium risk. And people in those areas didn't need to wear a mask anymore. The agency said. What happened was three things. One, now we have more tools to keep people safer, such as vaccinations, and new antiviral drugs. We are seeing fewer infections as we slide down from the scary omicron wave, though about 2000 Americans are still dying every day, and none of us should tolerate that level of death. And three, because of the first two, the CDC decided to recalculate how it measured COVID risk. That's what changed the map. In the old scheme, the agency used only case counts in a particular county, 100 cases or more per 100,000 meant high risk of virus transmission, and the CDC said people in those places should wear masks. The new scheme shifts the calculation to measures of severe disease. It emphasizes the number of new hospital admissions and how much of a hospital is filled with existing COVID patients..
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm Josh fishman, scientific American senior health editor. Tanya Lewis usually here with me has the day off. Today, new research shows how old coal viruses may help protect you against the coronavirus causing the pandemic. And vaccine makers are not rushing out shots against the Akron variant, even though the original shots have lost some effectiveness. What's the hold up? We'll explain. From early in the pandemic, it's been clear that not everyone is equally vulnerable to SARS CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID. Some people get really sick while others have mild symptoms or none at all. And this was true before any of us were protected by vaccines. Overall, about 80% of infected people get a mild illness. The virus is so wildly infectious, though, that the 20% of serious cases have been a global catastrophe. 5 and a half million people dead, 850,000 of them in the U.S.. But in people who don't get very ill, what's protecting them? We hear a lot about neutralizing antibodies, but this is a new virus to us. You don't get antibodies until after you've been exposed or vaccinated. Well, it turns out that some people might be getting help from another part of the immune system. T cells, which were triggered years ago, by exposure to different but related coronaviruses. These microbes have been with us forever, and they cause sneezing and runny noses, a common cold. The cold coronavirus and the pandemic coronavirus are distantly related, but they do share similar proteins. Early in the pandemic, scientists noticed that T cells that reacted to the cold virus also reacted to the pandemic virus. These are called cross reactive T cells. But since researchers saw this in test tubes, they had no idea what this meant for immunity in real life. Ajit levonian infectious disease physician at imperial college London decided to find out. England has a really good contact tracing system. It allowed Lal vani and his colleagues to find 52 people who lived with individuals who tested positive for COVID. These 52 started out negative themselves. Within about three days, half of that group or 26 turned positive. The other 26 stayed negative. Taking a closer look at the negative people who didn't get COVID while vani's team found that 7 of them had a lot of these cross reactive T cells. None of the people who got COVID had such cells. Zero. Lalvani told me this is a very substantial protective effect, and his team just published the results in the journal nature communications. The T cells primed by that older cold virus recognized the new pandemic virus because it has those similar proteins, and they work to fight it off. Immunologist Alex city from the la Jolla institute for immunology told me he thinks this research is on the right track. Other studies have linked recent exposure to these cold viruses with less severe COVID, says SETI, who is not involved in la vani's work. Research has also tied preexisting T cells to a stronger immune response to a COVID vaccine. The important thing about the T cells is that they point to new targets to add to second generation vaccines. The proteins these T cells reacted to went beyond the well-known spike protein at the heart of the first gen shots. The cells respond to other proteins called N and ORF, for instance. Adding those to a new vaccine formula both lalvani and SETI suggest could widen the protection of vaccines against variance. The proteins do seem to trigger a broader immune response to different forms of the coronavirus. And a few companies have such T cell enhanced vaccines in the works. Grit stone and immunity bio BioTech firms in California are two that have started clinical trials, including more of these proteins in a shot could create a vaccine capable of boosting your immunity against whatever variant comes along. The variant that has come along right now is, of course, a, and it is exhibit a for the case that vaccines rolled out a year ago have lost a bit of their edge. Remember, the original vaccine trials showed that Pfizer and Moderna shots were 90 to 95% effective at stopping infection. Now, two shots of the Pfizer vaccine are only 33% effective at stopping a infection. Scientists looking at cases in South Africa found. A booster shot does increase the amount of Akron neutralizing antibodies, and the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines with that booster are tremendously effective at preventing hospitalization and serious illness. Still, I'm a crown's wild spread has many people asking why we don't have a specific shot to stop it. mRNA vaccine makers have been saying that they could roll out new formulas fast if needed. But my colleague Charlie Schmidt did some reporting on this for scientific American, and he found out that really fast may not be fast enough. Designing a variant vaccine then testing and mass producing it can take four to 6 months. But now we know that variants can burst out in shorter time periods, followed by other variants. That makes companies reluctant to change all of their production over to a shot that may be irrelevant by the time it reaches your arm. As long as the current shots keep hospitalizations down, we should stick with them, says Paul offit vaccine specialist at children's hospital in Philadelphia. Right now, hospitalizations are running at about 2% of cases. Office says that if that number climbs to 15%, then it's time to change to a new shot. Not everyone agrees. Ralph barrack of virologist at the university of North Carolina told Schmidt that aron could be the backbone for the next set of variants since it's so good at spreading. So vaccines designed around a could offer more protection against future waves. What barrack would really like to see is a more universal vaccine that covers more variants. So we're not constantly playing catch up. The T cell stimulating shots I mentioned are one way to get there. So are vaccines that incorporate proteins from several closely related coronaviruses. Researchers at the University of Washington are working on one of those, using proteins that don't mutate much, so they should work from variant to variant. Other groups are trying related approaches, but it might be two years before those are ready. So companies may have to bite the bullet and roll out.
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"Beyond to the world's largest professional network of over 770 million people. Focus on candidates with the skills and experience you need. You screening questions to get your role in front of only the most qualified people and then use the simple tools on LinkedIn jobs to quickly filter and prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. LinkedIn jobs helps you find the candidates worth interviewing faster. Did you know that every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn dot com slash 62nd pod. That's LinkedIn dot com slash 62nd pod to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, and welcome to COVID quickly, a scientific American podcast series. This is your fast track update on the COVID pandemic. We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm Josh fishman, scientific American senior health editor. Tanya Lewis usually right here with me is taking a well deserved day off. Today we'll be talking a particularly how vaccines and boosters protect against the new variant and will sum up what Americans have done this year to keep themselves and their communities safe. All right, you've been seeing headlines about Akron every day now for three weeks since it was first detected. It's scary stuff. It's now in 60 countries, travel has been restricted. School districts are seeing big outbreaks, and some colleges seeing sudden huge spikes in cases are ending their semesters with remote learning. Clearly this is not how we want it to end the year. People are really on edge. Now we're getting some real world data on what amaran does and what vaccines do against it. Maybe that can take a bit of the edge off. It is now clear, however, that the variant spreads very fast. In the United Kingdom, cases are doubling every three days, scientists at the UK's health security agency reported. In South Africa, it's become the dominant variant overtaking delta, that speed is going to mean high numbers of cases, and lots of cases mean that even if a higher portion of them are milder than we saw with other variants, some are going to be serious. If the overall acron caseload is high, the serious portion of those cases is going to be a big number. Scientists just don't know how big yet. Researchers do know that prior infection with the virus does not protect you very much. Studies by discovery health, South Africa's largest insurer show that people who contracted the delta variant faced a 40% risk of reinfection with a Macron. Now here's some good news. We've learned that three shots of a vaccine, the regular two shot routine plus a booster is the best way to stop the spread. The UK scientists found that the Pfizer vaccine at two shots was only about 30 to 40% effective at stopping a infection. But a third booster shot improved protection 70 to 80%. That is a big deal. The clear message here is to get a booster. The Pfizer shots also do a really good job of keeping you from getting seriously ill. The research from discovery health found the vaccines were about 70% effective at keeping people out of the hospital. That number held up pretty well across all age groups, though it did drop to 60% for people aged 70 to 79. Why is Akron speeding through the population? It does appear that the heavily mutated variant is evading the body's initial defenses called neutralizing antibodies, a team at the Africa health research institute in durban, South Africa, looked at them. Such antibodies in people who got the Pfizer vaccine were roughly 40 times less potent against Akron than they were against other variants. But the vaccines do trigger a second type of protection. It comes from immune cells called T cells. They search for and destroy cells in your body that are infected with the virus, and T cells from vaccinated people respond aggressively to a crime. Researcher Wendy burgers from the university of Cape Town reported this week. That was a study of cells in a lab, not in people. So scientists want to be cautious, but it is a hopeful sign that vaccines can still offer a broad umbrella of safety as this variant keeps spreading. Despite aron and what seems like a whole parade of other scary variants, people in the U.S. have been trying hard to keep themselves in their communities safe in this pandemic. About 203 million people are fully vaccinated now. That's 65% of all eligible people aged 5 and up. This month, every day, about 2 million people are getting shots. 56 million people have received an additional booster shot, and those have only been available for a short time. By the end of November, 79% of adults across the country said they already got will definitely get or will probably get a booster, according to a national survey by the Kaiser family foundation. In the military, 97% of active duty members have had at least one vaccine dose. In private industry, when companies told workers they had to get vaccinated, the majority did. United Airlines says 99.5% of employees did so. At Tyson Foods and the NBA, vaccination rates top 90%. The numbers show that most people in America are taking COVID very seriously and are taking action. After a long year, that's a hopeful sign. Now you're up to speed, thanks for joining us. We're taking a short holiday break to recharge and refresh and spend time with our families and friends. I hope you do that too. We'll be back.
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"Hi and welcome to combine quickly. Scientific american podcast series. This is your fast track update on the kovin. Pandemic we bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease we demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm tanya lewis. I'm josh fishman. Rear scientific american senior health editors today. We're going to talk about why vaccines are safe for. Pregnant people who are at higher risk of severe cohen and the arrival of a new. Covert antiviral pill. That could cut the risk of severe illness. The cds strongly recommends that pregnant people get vaccinated against kovic yet here in the us. Few of them have and that's creating dangerous situation for both parents in babies. That's right josh. Only about a third of pregnant people in the country have gotten their kovic shots despite a growing pile of evidence that they are not only safe during pregnancy but may save the parents and baby's life freelancer mariana. Lenora reported on some of this research for siam earlier this week studies. Now show that pregnant people who get kovin are more likely to be hospitalized. One study that compared pregnant people with and without cova found that those with the disease had a higher risk of pre eclampsia a form of high blood pressure and preterm birth. Furthermore pregnant people with covert were five times. More likely to be admitted to an icu. And twenty two times more likely to die than those without cova. The risk increases with the number of underlying health conditions such as obesity or high blood pressure and the delta variant. Makes things worse. The cdc reported that a total of one hundred sixty one. Kobe deaths had occurred in pregnant women as of late september. Twenty two of them in august alone lenora talked to romeo galangue and obstetrician-gynecologist. At the cdc he said that this number represents the highest number of deaths in pregnant individuals in a single month of the pandemic. The good news is the vaccines are safe. For pregnant people and analysis of more than thirty nine hundred pregnant people who got vaccinated found that they did not have higher rates miscarriages birth defects or preterm birth than those who were unvaccinated. Another study of more than two thousand vaccinated pregnant people also showed that they had no increased risk to their babies and contrary to some claims. The vaccines do not affect fertility. Although kobe itself might the. Cdc now strongly recommends vaccination either before or during pregnancy saying the benefits outweigh the risks for both the parent and the baby. So if you're pregnant or thinking about getting pregnant now is the time to roll up the sleeves. Now we're at the part of the show. When every few episodes i get josh to pronounce a complicated drug name. Or any josh. Bring it on tanya. Okay go for it. It's mal new pure of your this time. Mal new pure aveer. How did i do ten pretty good to me now. Can you explain what it does against cova. It's a pill and it may keep some at risk people from getting severely sick and dying if they take it soon after their infected there was a cascade of headlines about the drug last weekend. Merck the drug company that owns rights to the pill. Put out a press release. It said that in people with at least one covered risk factor such as being over sixty five mall nuclear cut the likelihood of hospitalization and death from about fourteen percent to about seven percent. Basically it cut that danger in half now. This was a press release in the fda has to review the data in a will. Because the company said it's going to apply for emergency. fda authorization for use. What could be a big deal is that this is a pill into the mouth and swallowed twice a day for five days other treatments like monoclonal. Antibodies have to be infused into your veins or injected. Which makes them hard to give outside of a hospital. Appeal will be easier to give to sick people all over the world or easier to get at your local. Cvs i wanna point out. One thing merck and collaborator ridgeback bio therapeutics didn't invent this pill it came from university researchers were working on an nih grant scientists at emory university vanderbilt university and the university of north carolina. Were the ones who figured out that. The drug could muck up the viruses ability to make copies of itself that stops an infection from getting worse in lab experiments. The drug appears to work against several variants too. So if the drug does end up helping people it's a win not just patients. It also shows the power of basic research and the tax dollars that support..
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm tanya lewis. I'm josh fishman. We're scientific american. Senior health editors today. We're going to talk about masks. I why people resist wearing them despite all the evidence that they work. Then we'll explain. Why the kind of mask you wear matters and how to find a good one and president biden's latest update it's been baffling to watch. How angry some people get about wearing masks. They refused and some politicians back them up. It's a simple piece of fabric or material that stops the spread of kobe. So where does the pushback come from. Josh you've spoken to an expert on mask attitudes any explanation. Well like many strong reactions mask. Backlash combines a bunch of different causes and personal values emily mendenhall. A medical anthropologist at georgetown university has spent many months talking with anti mask people in an iowa town called oko boji for her book called unmasked which is coming out next year. I talked with emily this week about what she's found out. Oh kabbage is a small town on a lake in northwestern iowa. It's also where. Emily grew up so she knows a lot of people there. She knows steelworkers grocery store managers and her father's on the city council. The town sits in clay county which has about seventeen thousand residents but it balloons up to about one hundred thousand during the summer because the lake is a big local vacation spot and the economy depends on summer. People going to restaurants and amusement parks marinas the need to make money was partly why people resisted activity restrictions. Emily says and mask wearing got caught up in all that people push back. When local health agencies wanted to limit occupancy at businesses that was expressed as we don't want government telling us what to do the attitude extended to mask mandates to many people it was another example of pushy government overreach. Emily says this view is very much a part of a midwestern value of rugged individualism. You're tough enough to make it on your own and you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It's a fiction. She says and it ignores the history of agricultural subsidies and other government help that dominates the region. yet it's a very powerful fiction that people really believe all of that made for very fertile ground in twenty twenty when donald trump repeatedly said the virus was no big deal. His message was echoed by the iowa. Governor and at the time there were not many cova cases in this area so trump's falsehoods really worm their way into the thinking of many people in clay county. Who felt that. Since the virus wasn't a threat there was little benefit to wearing a mask. They were tough enough to deal with the disease and government. Safety measures simply took away their freedoms for no good reason. Finally mask rejection is very public act. In clay county and oko boji it gives people legitimacy among their community. Emily says it shows your neighbors that you're knowledgeable that you're smart enough not to buy into the line that liberals and scientists and the government or push it that public stance increases your standing in the eyes of many people around you now privately. Some people told emily they worried about a child getting sick or their father falling ill but publicly so many of these different anti mass cultural values came together that they became an overwhelming force. Tanya we often talk about face masks or coverings as if they're all the same but you've been looking into it. I know and you've found some masks or better than others. Can the public at their hands on and their faces into the better ones. Yes in fact the masks that work the best are those that fit well and filter the air you breathe adequately a type of mass known as respirator. Such as an end ninety five provide some of the best protection early in the pandemic health agencies including the cdc h. o. Told the general public not to wear ninety five's or other medical grade masks because they were in short supply and healthcare workers needed them. But now these masks as well as similar masks made in china or korea are much more available we also know that the virus that causes. Kobe is spread through aerosols tiny droplets float in the air and can get around a loose-fitting cloth or surgical mask. I spoke to several experts in aerosol science including lindsay mar of virginia tech and kimberly author of uc. San diego. who say that it's high time experts start recommending that people wear these high filtration better fitting masks especially with the extremely transmissible delta variant circulating and kids going back to school. These masks include ninety. Five chinese made k. And ninety five and korean made kf ninety four us. They're pretty easy to find. Nowadays online and many of them are affordable. Less than one dollar mask. I talked to a guy named aaron collins who calls himself the mass nerd. He's a mechanical engineer. With a background in aerosol science and he has converted his home bathroom into our facility where he tests different masks and reviews them on youtube he measures three parameters filtration fit and comfort which is important filtration refers to the amount of particles that get through the mask or through gaps around the edges of the mask fit is how well it fits on your face and he measures comfort in part based on the pressure drop of air entering the mask. Basically how hard it is to breathe on. The mask nerds youtube channel. You can find videos of his top mask. Picks including mass for kids for ninety five. He recommends ones made by well known brands. Such as three m mold-ex honeywell. He also recommends several types of kf ninety four's and cayenne ninety five's many of which filter upwards of ninety eight percent of particles and are often more comfortable to wear. These fit a lot better than most cloth or surgical masks and are more likely to protect both you and others counterfeit masks are concerned but you can find reputable brands through sites like project and ninety. Five dot org. You can't access these types of masks. You can still get some pretty good protection if you wear surgical mask with a well fitting cloth mask over it. But it's time to ditch those loose bandannas and gaping me masks. That hang off your nose. The dvd my fellow americans talk about where we are in the battle against cove. Nineteen the progress. We've made new work. We have left to do president. Joe biden made tens of millions of jobs contingent on vaccinations. This week in a speech biden said he'll require millions of federal workers to get vaccinated. He also said companies with one hundred or more employees will have to give workers the shots or test them. weekly one trick will be enforcement. It's not clear whether the labor department which is in charge of workplace safety as a way to make sure companies are really doing this. He's also requiring that healthcare workers at hospitals and other providers receive federal funding be vaccinated. And that's not all. He aims to make rapid testing more widely available by enacting. The defense production act to make more tests and having walmart amazon and kroger seldom and amid the anxiety over school starting and some elected officials obstructing basic safety measures. He said that the government would compensate any educator who faced retaliation biden admitted that these measures will take time. But it's clear. His approach is moving from carrots to sticks..
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"This is your fast track update pandemic we bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease we de mystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm tanya lewis. I'm josh fishman scientific. American senior health editors today. We're going to talk about the fda approval of the pfizer vaccine whether new reports of breakthrough infections mean. Vaccines are losing power. And what you need to know about vaccine booster shots this week. The food and drug administration granted full approval to the pfizer vaccine for people ages. Sixteen and older that moves the shot past. Its initial emergency use status and makes it like any approved. Drug or vaccine will the solid endorsement affect vaccination rates tanya. It could affect them in a couple of ways. A growing number of government agencies cities and businesses have already started implementing vaccine mandates for example the us military instituted a mandate for all active duty servicemembers. New york city is requiring all department of education teachers and staff to get vaccinated and lots of colleges and universities are implementing mandates to the other. Big question is whether the fda approval will sway any people who are vaccine hesitant on that front. It may be a big uphill battle while some people say that the lack of fda approval was their main reason for not getting vaccinated others cite mistrust of government and other concerns which are not likely to magically disappear now that the fda has given it its formal stamp of approval time will tell if the approval will have a big impact on vaccination rates right now though the delta various rapid spread is what appears to be driving an increase in vaccinations in many of the hardest hit states. We keep hearing more about breakthrough infections. When the virus infects people who are fully vaccinated. That doesn't mean the vaccines don't work anymore. Though right josh the vaccine still work really well tanya and we have some new numbers to back that up there have been headlines about prominent people who tested positive even though they were vaccinated three. Us senators last week. For example and when these stories appear in such cluster. It gives the impression that vaccines are losing protective power. The real story however is different. These vaccines never gave perfect protection. Even in clinical trials for instance visor reported eight vaccinated. People got infected out of about twenty thousand people got the shots but one hundred sixty two people in the unvaccinated trial group got the disease and that's a lot more with the highly transmissible delta variant. That's dominating new cases now. These numbers have changed a bit. But the pattern of good vaccine protection still holds this week. The cdc reported on forty three thousand infections in los angeles county between may and the end of july about seventy percent of them were an unvaccinated people about twenty five percent were in fully vaccinated folks so while. That's more infections than we saw. In the clinical trials vaccinated people. Were still almost three times more likely to repel the virus. Then where people without the vaccine when it came to people who got sick enough to need a hospital in intensive care the power of the vaccines was clear. Seven point five percent of the unvaccinated had to be hospitalized that was true of about three percent of the vaccinated people so the vaccines are twice as likely to keep you out of the hospital and hold the virus to just a mild illness. Oregon just reported on its co vid infections. In july eighty-one percent were an unvaccinated people. So that makes nineteen percent of them in breakthrough cases again. A big advantage for vaccines. That's also true. For the most serious consequences of cogut forty two of oregon's fifty five deaths wherein and people who did not get vaccinated the us has now vaccinated nearly one hundred and seventy two million people. The virus has now spread much more widely through the country. Both of these trends are going to run into one another more often and that means more vaccinated people will get infected but clearly a lot. Fewer of them will get the virus then unvaccinated people even more clearly. The vaccine will keep the huge majority of them from getting seriously ill and really. That's what any vaccine is supposed to do. The big debate now is about cova booster shots. The biden administration said it plans to offer boosters to all eligible americans eight months after their second shot of an mri. A vaccine are these needed and needed by whom those are important questions. And we don't have all the answers yet. What we do know is that some data from israel as well as the cdc's own studies in the us suggests that vaccinated people may be more susceptible to mild or moderate infections now than previously. This may be the result of waning immunity over time the effect of the delta variant or some combination of the two. The good news though. Is that the vaccine still appear to provide excellent protection against severe disease death as you mentioned. The vast majority of people hospitalized for kobe right now are unvaccinated as for who needs boosters. I spoke with some experts for a story earlier this week including selene bounder of nyu and shane. Crotty of the la hoya institute of immunology. They said it was clear that people who are immuno-compromised or the very elderly especially those living in nursing homes may benefit from an additional dose of vaccines. But there's not much evidence yet that healthy people will need to booster anytime soon. Both counter crotty agreed that the bigger focus right now should be on getting unvaccinated people their first and second shots because the benefits of doing so far outweigh the benefits of giving a subset of people. Booster shots vaccinating. The rest of the country and the world is really the key to ending this pandemic..
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"Welcome to covered quickly. Scientific american podcast series. This is your fast track update on the kobe. Pandemic we bring you up to speed on the science behind most urgent questions about the virus and the disease we demystify the research and help you understand what it really means. I'm tanya lewis. I'm josh fishman. Scientific american senior health editors today. We'll explain why the cdc now wants vaccinated people to wear masks indoors again and we'll discuss one big reason why some people still refuse to get vaccinated. Just a few months ago. The cdc said vaccinated. People didn't have to wear masks in most settings but this week the agency reversed course saying vaccinated. People should wear masks at times. What do the recommendations actually say tania and why the sudden shift in position so in its latest guidance the c. d. c. says vaccinated people should once again wear masks in public indoor settings under certain circumstances for example if you live in an area with high levels of kobe transmission which includes people who live in places with more than fifty cases per one hundred thousand people in the last week the agency also recommended universal. Masking all k. Through twelve schools including all students teachers and staff. The cdc says the reason for the shift is new data about the delta variant and breakthrough infections. Delta's known to be much more transmissible than previous strains and appears to produce about a thousand times as much virus in the body as the original strain there have been reports of breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated people and in rare cases they may be able to transmit it to others so the reason behind vaccinated people wearing masks is to prevent them from transmitting the virus people who cannot get vaccinated such as children under twelve. Or those who are immuno-compromised breakthrough infections are expected as no vaccine is one hundred percent effective and they may be more common than we thought with the delta variant according to data from the uk in israel the vaccines are still extremely good at preventing severe disease and death. The vast majority of those hospitalized with kobe right now are unvaccinated. If you're vaccinated and you get co bid it doesn't mean the vaccine didn't work as former surgeon general jerome atoms. Put it in a tweet. Think of the virus like the ocean the vaccine like a life vest. You may still get wet but your life vest vaccine significantly lessens. The chance you'll drown and getting wet doesn't mean the life vest didn't work over the past. Several weeks cases deaths in hospitalizations. All been rising in the us. We have defenses against the disease but some people won't use them. Vaccinations have stalled and some unvaccinated people. Still refuse to wear masks. Most of us are baffled by all this. Why are people so resistant josh. I think there are lots of reasons. But there's one big one. Many people still do not think. Kovic is a serious and deadly disease. There are two factors that contribute to this one has to do with numbers. The other has to do with who we listened to. Let's look at the numbers. I we have three hundred thirty million people in this country. Cdc data shows that during the eighteen months of the pandemic two point three million have been admitted to the hospital and indication of serious illness. Now imagine a bowl of three hundred million marbles and then drop into million more. They'd be hard to spot so there's a good chance that out of hundreds of millions of americans. Somebody might not know another person who's had a severe kobe. 'bout it's easier to dismiss it as a mile illness. If severe disease is not part of your personal experience and that appears to be what. Unvaccinated people believe in june the kaiser family foundation polled people about getting the vaccine fifty seven percent of unvaccinated. Adults said. what's in the news about. Kovic is generally exaggerated only twenty two percent of vaccinated adult say this and seventy one percent of unvaccinated adults. Say they're not at all worried or not too worried about getting sick from the virus. That's pretty mind boggling. Who are taking their kids from that. Belief has been reinforced by lot of people over the past year and a half. Who have said that cove isn't serious. Psychologist robert shell dini of arizona. State university studies how people form beliefs and what influences them. So he and. I talked about this. People pay a lot of attention to what others around them. Friends family neighbors political leaders. Say or do shall dini says if others who share your values have a particular attitude that makes it more legit. The local patterns of low vaccine rates certain counties in alabama or missouri for instance are examples of neighbors influencing neighbors. In this way. Then there are the big national influencers. We all heard donald trump. Say that cova does not a big deal no worse than the flu. A lot of republican congress people governors railed against mask wearing and refused to wear masks. Themselves shall points out. These leaders were sewing uncertainty and uncertainty about what to do amplify their social influence. Now we're seeing the results as deaths in hospitalizations race higher and higher among unvaccinated. People but attitudes can change shall dini says social disapproval changes them not yelling or finger-pointing but if local leaders say that shunning vaccines hurts the community and hurts people themselves that can be surprisingly effective these notions ripple around neighborhoods the vaccines. He hopes will follow those ripples..
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"Just a few months ago. The cdc said vaccinated. People didn't have to wear masks in most settings but this week the agency reversed course saying vaccinated. People should wear masks at times. What do the recommendations actually say tania and why the sudden shift in position so in its latest guidance the c. d. c. says vaccinated people should once again wear masks in public indoor settings under certain circumstances for example if you live in an area with high levels of kobe transmission which includes people who live in places with more than fifty cases per one hundred thousand people in the last week the agency also recommended universal. Masking all k. Through twelve schools including all students teachers and staff. The cdc says the reason for the shift is new data about the delta variant and breakthrough infections. Delta's known to be much more transmissible than previous strains and appears to produce about a thousand times as much virus in the body as the original strain there have been reports of breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated people and in rare cases they may be able to transmit it to others so the reason behind vaccinated people wearing masks is to prevent them from transmitting the virus people who cannot get vaccinated such as children under twelve. Or those who are immuno-compromised breakthrough infections are expected as no vaccine is one hundred percent effective and they may be more common than we thought with the delta variant according to data from the uk in israel the vaccines are still extremely good at preventing severe disease and death. The vast majority of those hospitalized with kobe right now are unvaccinated. If you're vaccinated and you get co bid it doesn't mean the vaccine didn't work as former surgeon general jerome atoms. Put it in a tweet. Think of the virus like the ocean the vaccine like a life vest. You may still get wet but your life vest vaccine significantly lessens. The chance you'll drown and getting wet doesn't mean the life vest didn't work
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"Pandemic bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease we this defy research and you understand what it really means. I'm tanya lewis. I'm josh fishman. And where scientific. American senior health editors. Today we'll talk about clinics for long-haul cova patients the rise of the delta vary. And what you knew about it and using barbershops to get vaccines to communities. That need them most early. In the pandemic there were some reports of people with odd symptoms such as fatigue and memory issues that continued long after their acute infection. Now these long haulers are getting some specialized help more and more. Data's coming out about long cohen. That's serious physical and mental effects that can last half the year after people. I get infected. The latest study came out last week in the journal. Nature medicine researchers looked at health records for a few hundred people in bergen norway. That was almost everyone in the city. Diagnosed with cohen. During several months in twenty twenty overall sixty one percent of the group had symptoms six months after they were first infected. Their most common problem was fatigue followed by difficulty concentrating. Disturb smell or taste memory trouble and a hard time breathing to striking things about these patients. One was that many had just a mild or moderate case of kobe at the star. The other was that a were young age. Sixteen to thirty other. Studies have reported similar symptom cluster. Such as one by university washington. Researchers that found about thirty percent of people was covered. Had these lingering troubles to doctors know what's causing these problems. That still a mystery. Tanya some people have organ damage related to the virus infection but some do not doctors are trying to figure out how best to treat them. Siam contributor melville newsome wrote this week about new covered recovery clinics that treat the whole patient rather than making people run from a lung doctor to a neurologist to an immunologist patients say the coordinated care helps and they feel more hopeful since they're being taken seriously and not dismissed as crank cases the nih is also taking it seriously spending about a billion dollars to study the disease. It now has an official job breaker of name post acute so calais of sars kobe to infection melba notes. However there's racial imbalance showing up at these clinics overwhelmingly. The people referred there are white but people of color are more likely to get cove it so access barriers. Such as lack of health insurance are likely keeping care away from many people who need it. It's yet another burden added to the healthy body. that's already hurting people. In the pandemic. Let's talk about the delta variant. It's red for more than seventy countries and it's now the dominant variant in the us. How worried should we be. The delta variant is definitely concerning particularly for unvaccinated people. It's already causing another surge in the uk where it makes up the vast majority of cases and a company that's been tracking virus sequences in the us estimates this variant now counts for about forty percent of cases. Here making it more than twice as prevalent as the alpha variant. That was previously the most common. As you've noted before josh research from the uk suggests delta is at least forty percent more transmissible than alpha and almost twice as likely to result in hospitalization. The data are a bit murky on whether it actually causes more severe disease or not though so far it hasn't actually caused a huge uptick in hospitalizations or deaths in the uk. Still it's spreading widely in the us. Where only about half. The population is fully vaccinated far less in some areas experts. Say it's not likely to cause another devastating nationwide surge like the one. We had last winter but it will probably lead to flare ups in some states. Where fewer people have been vaccinated such as alabama or mississippi and the risk could increase in places where hotter temperatures or more people to spend time in air conditioned indoor settings where the corona virus can easily spread. The sounds pretty grim. What can we do about it. The good news is that the vaccines work. More data from the uk show that two doses of the pfizer vaccine were ninety six percent effective at preventing hospitalization and two doses of the astrazeneca vaccine were ninety two percent effective but need both shots. A single dose of astrazeneca was only seventy one percent effective at preventing hospitalization and one dose of both vaccines was only around thirty four percent effective at preventing infection. We don't know yet how. Well the johnson and johnson vaccine works against the delta variant but it's likely to provide some protection meanwhile the world health organization is urging even vaccinated people to keep wearing masks and practicing social distancing just to be on the safe side given how much viruses still circulating. Cdc has not changed. Its guidance. Though it's still says vaccinated people don't need a mask unless they want to but with the delta being so transmissible it couldn't hurt to err on the side of caution. There are still plenty of people who are skeptical about getting vaccinated sometimes for valid reasons. Now some efforts are trying to build trust by reaching people in their neighbourhoods. The rate of cova. Vaccinations among people of color. Lags behind that of white people access barriers are one reason for this and so are negative experiences with the medical profession that we distrust lack run. Barber shops and hair salons may be able to counter. Some of this says stephen. Thomas who directs the university of maryland center for health equity for the last fifteen years hamas has been researching the trust placed in barbers and stylus by their communities. And he says it's a powerful thing he's been training these people to help educate their clients about ways to prevent diseases such as diabetes. Now this expertise is helping with co vaccines thomas's group is part of a white house shots at the shop campaign. Barbers and stylus are getting trained to talk to people about the benefits of vaccines versus the risks building on long relationships these conversations which can happen while snipping and combing are not lectures. And they're not magic and they don't convince all downers but they do have an effect on many people. Some shops have become up vaccination sites staffed by local health clinics solving access problems by bringing free vaccines into the neighborhood. Thomas's project is called the health advocates in reach and research and that rebates naturally to pay..
60-Second Science
"tanya lewis" Discussed on 60-Second Science
"Early. In the pandemic there were some reports of people with odd symptoms such as fatigue and memory issues that continued long after their acute infection. Now these long haulers are getting some specialized help more and more. Data's coming out about long cohen. That's serious physical and mental effects that can last half the year after people. I get infected. The latest study came out last week in the journal. Nature medicine researchers looked at health records for a few hundred people in bergen norway. That was almost everyone in the city. Diagnosed with cohen. During several months in twenty twenty overall sixty one percent of the group had symptoms six months after they were first infected. Their most common problem was fatigue followed by difficulty concentrating. Disturb smell or taste memory trouble and a hard time breathing to striking things about these patients. One was that many had just a mild or moderate case of kobe at the star. The other was that a were young age. Sixteen to thirty other. Studies have reported similar symptom cluster. Such as one by university washington. Researchers that found about thirty percent of people was covered. Had these lingering troubles to doctors know what's causing these problems. That still a mystery. Tanya some people have organ damage related to the virus infection but some do not doctors are trying to figure out how best to treat them. Siam contributor melville newsome wrote this week about new covered recovery clinics that treat the whole patient rather than making people run from a lung doctor to a neurologist to an immunologist patients say the coordinated care helps and they feel more hopeful since they're being taken seriously and not dismissed as crank cases the nih is also taking it seriously spending about a billion dollars to study the disease. It now has an official job breaker of name post acute so calais of sars kobe to infection melba notes. However there's racial imbalance showing up at these clinics overwhelmingly. The people referred there are white but people of color are more likely to get cove it so access barriers. Such as lack of health insurance are likely keeping care away from many people who need it.