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NPR (via Goats and Soda)
July 27, 2024
Happy dog days of summer, readers!
Heat waves continue and worsen in parts of the world, and temperature records have been breaking all season. Beating the heat is on many people’s minds — including ours. We published Dr. Gulrez Shah Azhar’s suggestions for how to stay cool in the absence of air conditioning – as he did growing up in a part of India where temperatures soared into the 100s. And we asked for your tips and tricks. You send us a heat-relief wave, involving ice, chilled pickles and an Arctic immersion — via TV.
Read More…CDC
July 16, 2024
The CDC released the annual update to the Disability and Health Data System (DHDS), providing quick and easy online access to state-level health data on adults with disabilities. The latest data, from the 2022 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), reveal that more than 1 in 4—over 70 million—adults in the United States reported having a disability in 2022.
For the first time, the 2022 BRFSS collected data on experiences with Long COVID, defined as symptoms lasting three months or longer that the person did not have before COVID, to help us better understand the relationship between disabilities and Long COVID. Of particular concern is the finding that Long COVID symptoms were more prevalent among people with disabilities (10.8%) than among those without disabilities (6.6%).
Read More…Nature
July 12, 2024
Experts say the bird flu virus infecting dairy herds and some farmworkers is just “a single mutation” from becoming a human pandemic. Read how countries are preparing.
University of Minnesota
June 26, 202
A new study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases uses data from 1,988 SARS-CoV-2–positive US Military Health System beneficiaries to define the characteristics and clinical patterns observed in patients with long COVID, or post-COVID condition (PCC), grouping patients into three phenotypes based on clusters of symptoms.
AP News
June 21, 2024
As temperatures and humidity soar outside, what’s happening inside the human body can become a life-or-death battle decided by just a few degrees. The critical danger point outdoors for illness and death from relentless heat is several degrees lower than experts once thought, say researchers who put people in hot boxes to see what happens to them. With much of the United States, Mexico, India and the Middle East suffering through blistering heat waves, worsened by human-caused climate change, several doctors, physiologists and other experts explained to The Associated Press what happens to the human body in such heat.
MedicalNewsToday
June 20, 2024
A study published today in the journal JAMA Network Open reports that living a healthy lifestyle, even after the age of 80, can help people live to be 100. Researchers in China evaluated 1,454 centenarians and 3,768 people who died before reaching 100 years old. They reported that the participants with the highest healthy lifestyle scores – based on smoking history, exercise routines, and dietary diversity – had a significantly higher likelihood of living to 100 compared to those with the least healthy lifestyle behaviors.
