Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

Poor sleep quality and very little or a lot of sleep were found to be associated with greater odds of having had COVID-19, and poor sleep quality was associated with an increased need of hospitalization for severe COVID-19, found a study in The American Journal of Medicine . This study was conducted because medical comorbidities increase the risk of severe COVID-19, and even though sleep problems are common after COVID-19 infection, whether insomnia, poor sleep quality, and extremely long or short sleep duration increased the risk of developing COVID-19 or hospitalization was not clear. Researchers were trying to understand if sleep problems increase the risk of contracting COVID-19 or requiring hospitalization. Disease burden of COVID-19 remains high, and it is known that older individuals and those with several common medical conditions are at greater jeopardy for COVID-19 related hospitalization and death. "However, with the exception of several studies implicating obstructive ...

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios As the federal government continues to wrestle with a response to long COVID, Food and Drug Administration officials are turning to patients who've experimented with unproven treatments for clues about how to manage the condition and design clinical trials. The big picture: More than three years into the pandemic, there's still no standard protocol for diagnosing or treating the neurological issues, cognitive difficulties, breathing problems and other health problems that plague millions of people after they fell ill with the virus. The FDA is hoping "patient-focused drug development" can deliver feedback on drug development and evaluation — an approach it also took to chronic fatigue syndrome, which similarly has no cure. Government efforts have so far yielded little for the more than 20 million Americans experiencing ongoing symptoms, with questions particularly swirling around a $1 billion National Institutes of Health effort calle...

[unable to retrieve full-text content] Belmont County CARES Program expanding    WTOV Steubenville

Abstract Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is among the most frequent causes of death due to antimicrobial resistance. Although only 3% of global TB cases are MDR, geographical hotspots with up to 40% of MDR-TB have been observed in countries of the former Soviet Union. While the quality of TB control and patient-related factors are known contributors to such hotspots, the role of the pathogen remains unclear. Here we show that in the country of Georgia, a known hotspot of MDR-TB, MDR Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains of lineage 4 (L4) transmit less than their drug-susceptible counterparts, whereas most MDR strains of L2 suffer no such defect. Our findings further indicate that the high transmission fitness of these L2 strains results from epistatic interactions between the rifampicin resistance-conferring mutation RpoB S450L, compensatory mutations in the RNA polymerase, and other pre-existing genetic features of L2/Beijing clones that circulate in Georgia. We conclude that ...

The Sloan Program in Health Administration in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy has risen in U.S. News rankings released today. The Sloan Program has moved up to the No. 8 program out of 90 U.S. universities ranked in the category of Best Grad Schools in Health Care Management. It was ranked No. 9 in the previous assessment, published in 2019. "This ranking reflects the enormous skill and care of the faculty and staff in our Sloan Program in Health Administration, as well as the accomplishments of our students and alumni," said Brooks School Dean Colleen Barry. "The ranking also serves as motivation to continue the crucial work of improving the management and administration of health care in the U.S. and globally." The rankings are based on surveys of directors of and faculty at health care management or administration programs accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME). Thanking those academic lead...

If you are one of the millions who are in need of health care insurance coverage, and need help navigating the system, look to The Family Healthcare Foundation for help. It provides health care navigator services for free to all residents of Hillsborough County. Finding and maintaining health insurance for individuals and families can be a daunting task. Thankfully, there is The Family Healthcare Foundation, an affordable nonprofit that helps you navigate difficult terrain and find insurance coverage that fits your needs. For 25 years, The Family Healthcare Foundation has been helping residents of Hillsborough County as well as Pinellas, Pasco and Polk counties. Its mission is to ensure that all residents have equitable access to quality health care coverage, and its services are free to anyone, regardless of income. Its services have never been more needed than they are today, as Medicaid coverage for millions, which was mandated and paid for by the federal governmen...

W hen the first AIDS cases were reported to the CDC in 1981, the pursuit of individual freedom and sexual expression was peaking—wearing a condom seemed archaic to many. At the same time, the public health machinery for responding to sudden, deadly epidemics was rusty.  Early in the AIDS crisis, hospital personnel who feared infection refused to enter AIDS patients' hospital rooms. With no blood test until 1985, no one knew who had the disease until they developed symptoms. And HIV's long incubation period of up to 10 years, combined with the intense social stigma against AIDS patients, undercut case-finding and prevention efforts. (The School contributed critical research on all these issues and more through the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, the world's longest study of its kind.) Within a decade of its emergence, HIV would infect more than 1 million and cause more than 100,000 deaths. If AIDS was a sudden shock with few answers, child mortality in LMICs was ...