Month: June 2020

The claim: Doctors warn COVID-19 may trigger diabetes in otherwise healthy people  ScienceAlert, an independent online site covering scientific research, posted an essay that Julian Hamilton-Shield, of the University of Bristol, wrote for The Conversation, exploring the possibility that "COVID-19 is not just a risk for people with diabetes — it may actually cause diabetes." People with diabetes — a disease of the pancreas that limits the body’s ability to process blood glucose — run an increased risk of dying from COVID-19, the disease the coronavirus causes. But COVID-19 also could be causing diabetes, wrote Hamilton-Shield, a professor of diabetes and metabolic endocrinology. What are scientists finding? Hamilton-Shield in his essay pointed to a new case report about a young man in ...

How, exactly, does the coronavirus hijack and reprogram human cells to sicken and kill? This question has obsessed Nevan Krogan since February, when the UCSF virus expert and his colleagues realized, before many did, that things in America would get very bad very fast. Since then, the question has only grown more urgent, and for the past four months, Krogan and an ever-expanding team of scientific collaborators in San Francisco and around the world have turned their labs upside down, prying out secrets of the virus that might point to a cure. ...

Maxwell Posner/NPR YouTube I like to run. And bike. And go for walks. Especially during the pandemic. It's a time I can almost forget about the novel coronavirus. But some people are trying to make me feel guilty about outdoor exercise. My own nephew said, "Uncle Marc, if you're infected and don't know it, you could be huffing and puffing out virus." Does he have a point? I talked to a half-dozen experts to see about the risks of outdoor exercise for the exerciser and for others — and whether masks are helpful. And let me clarify: I mean solo exercise. Going out shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of pals is not a good idea d...

Then he spends most of the next 14 hours leading dozens of fellow researchers and volunteers in a systematic review of all the drugs that physicians and researchers have used so far to treat Covid-19. His team has already pored over more than 8,000 papers on how to treat coronavirus patients. The 35-year-old associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine leads the school's Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory. For the last few years, he has dedicated his life to studying Castleman disease, a rare condition that nearly claimed his life. But after seeing how the same types of flares of immune-signaling cells, called cytokine storms, kill both Castleman and Covid-19 patients alike, his lab has devoted nearly all of its resources to aiding doc...

At least five states reported their highest single day record of COVID-19 cases Friday, adding to the growing concern of case increases that has sent many states backpedaling on their reopening plans. Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Tennessee and Utah all reported record daily cases, according to their state’s health departments. And for Florida, which has been eyed as the possible next epicenter, that number reached 8,938 new cases in just one day. And it is not just those states seeing rising numbers. The national number of daily coronavirus case reports reached a new high Friday as well at almost 40,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, and 33 states are currently seeing the number of new cases grow from the week before. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told re...

Suddenly 60 is the new 65. At 62, I believe I speak for many other late-stage boomers when I say: Wait, what? “I turn 60 later this year so I noticed that acutely,” said Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy, which he calls the world’s first midlife wisdom school. “It was all of a sudden: I’m in a high-risk group? I’m perceived as elderly?” I don’t mean to reject any help that might keep me and my graying cohort alive. Bring on those peaceful senior shopping hours. Nor would I ever argue that policing these linguistic limits should be a top priority when thousands of Americans have died, tens of millions are out of work and our democracy is floundering. All the same, this sudden downward pressure on the boundary of old age strikes me as un-American. The Centers for Disease C...