Latest healthcare news
Current Entry Requirements for Arriving into England
A traveller must either quarantine in the place they are staying or in a managed quarantine hotel for 10 days due to Coronavirus. This will depend on where the traveller has travelled from in the 10 days prior to arrival into England. Before leaving...
The Pfizer Vaccine in Adolescents and Children
How effective is it? According to a press release by Pfizer itself there was 100% efficacy against COVID-19 amongst those aged 12-15 years old in the United States without a prior history of infection. 18 cases of COVID-19 were observed in the placebo group and none...
Coronavirus Round up
The Scientific American looks at a few intriguing highlights. Children under 12 are now being tested by Pfizer with its COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna has also started COVID-19 vaccine studies in children under 12. Both companies have been testing their...
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...
