Latest healthcare news
Can We Expect a COVID Vaccine Spray and Will This Be More Effective Than Injections?
The Independent newspaper reviewed this and suggested that researchers at MIT favour that their Trojan horse delivery system will activate a strong immune response in the cells lining the airways to attack the virus as soon as it lands. The team have...
COVID-19 Rapid Lateral Flow Tests, the Rapid Antigen Test as a Diagnostic Test
A comment by Peeling and Olliaro published March 25th in The Lancet Infectious Diseases suggests that scaling up testing in tandem with appropriate public health measures and vaccine rollout might effectively contribute to all our lives returning to some level of...
Airline Travel: Does Routine Asymptomatic Testing Help Prevent the Transmission of SARS-CoV-2?
An interesting study by Kiang and others in the Lancet Infectious Diseases published March 22nd reviewed this question. Routine viral testing strategies for SARS-CoV-2 infection might facilitate safe airline travel during the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigate...
SARS-CoV-2 Variants, How Could They Be Detected?
An interesting preprint by Smyth and others in medRxiv suggested that waste-water based epidemiology may provide an alternative and complimentary approach for monitoring communities for the novel variants. Given that SARS-CoV-2 can infect the cells of the...
Return to School and Will This Increase the Transmission of SARS-CoV-2?
An interesting study published as a preprint in medRxiv.org looked at this in17 schools in Wisconsin, America. The study by Falk and others looked at the specific mitigation strategies employed at these schools during a time of exceptionally high COVID-19...
Incubation and Transmission of SARS-CoV-2
A research paper published in BMC infectious diseases on 11th March reviewed this issue. It is essential to understand the epidemiological parameters that determine the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 for public health intervention. Globally, a number of...
Ebola Virus and the Current Outbreak in Guinea
A new genetic analysis appears to suggest that a survivor of the 2014 to 2016 West African Ebola outbreak has continued to harbour the virus some five years after being infected and eventually now has transmitted it to someone. The previous known longest Ebola...
Does Having the Pneumococcal Pneumonia Vaccination Help Against COVID-19?
An interesting, manuscript accepted in the Journal of Infectious Diseases Oxford Academic by Lewnard and others published 9th March 2021 investigated the association. They investigated Kaiser Permanente Healthcare members who were aged 65 or over as of 1st March 2020...
Coronavirus Variants and Mutations
This is neatly defined by Corum and Zimmer in the New York Times. Each coronavirus contains nearly 30,000 letters of RNA. This genetic information allows the virus to infect cells and hijack them to make new viruses. As an infected cell builds new...
Antibody Tests and Their Experience Within UK Healthcare Workers
A study published in the Clinical Medicine Journal of the Royal College of Physicians in the United Kingdom by Robinson and others in March 2021 compared the use of the Roche and Abbott assay for antibodies amongst a large cohort of healthcare workers in Southern...
