Month: July 2020

The last thing that Mayra Ramirez remembers from the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago is calling her family to say she had Covid, was about to be put on a ventilator and needed her mother to make medical decisions for her. Ms. Ramirez, 28, did not wake up for more than six weeks. And then she learned that on June 5, she had become the first Covid patient in the United States to receive a double-lung transplant. On Wednesday, she went home from the hospital. Ms. Ramirez is one of a small but growing number of patients whose lungs have been destroyed by the coronavirus, and whose only hope of survival is a lung transplant. “I’m pretty sure that if I had been at another center, they would have just ended care and let me die,” she said in an interview on Wednesday....

Doctors inject Botox to smooth facial wrinkles and treat health problems such as severe sweating, uncontrollable blinking, chronic migraines, overactive bladders and neurological disorders that cause muscle contractions and pain in the neck and shoulders. Botox, a drug made from a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, works by weakening or paralyzing specific muscles or by blocking certain nerves. More than 264 million people worldwide are suffering from depression. But common treatments for depression aren't effective for nearly one third of these people, even when they stick to their treatment plans and tolerate the medications, according to the study, which published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. This shortcoming has led doctors to explore alter...

As the new coronavirus continues to spread, patients who have recovered from Covid-19 still need to be careful, said doctors, scientists and public-health experts, who warn that no one is sure just how long immunity to the disease lasts. It’s a question scientists are still working on, and the answer has significant implications for vaccine development and public-health guidelines. For now, physicians are cautioning patients to continue following social-distancing and mask recommendations even after they have recovered from...

Johnson & Johnson JNJ, +0.08% said Thursday that its lead vaccine candidate protected against infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in pre-clinical studies. The vaccine provided a robust immune response as demonstrated by "neutralizing antibodies," successfully preventing subsequent infection and providing complete or near-complete protection in the lungs from the virus in non-human primates, the company said. Based on the strength of the data, a Phase 1/2a first-in-human clinical trial of the vaccine candidate, Ad26.COV2.S, in healthy volunteers, has now commenced in the United States and Belgium, the company said. Discussions are underway with partners with the objective to start a pivotal Phase 3 clinical trial of the singl...

The moment made Martinez feel like she wasn't alone, she said, and it helped her realize just how rapidly the virus was spreading through her community. "Pretty much everyone who I know has had coronavirus or has a family member who's been sick or is in the hospital," said Martinez, who by early this week could list 45 Hispanic friends, family members and acquaintances who've been sick with the virus in the Houston area — including four who had died. As the coronavirus tears disproportionately through Latino communities in Texas, data released this week by state health officials reveal that an outsize share of these residents are also suffering the worst outcomes. Hispanic Texans make up about 40 percent of the state's population but 48 percent of the state's 6,190 confirmed COVID-19 dea...

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO, July 30 (Reuters) - Johnson & Johnson on Thursday kicked off U.S. human safety trials for its COVID-19 vaccine after releasing details of a study in monkeys that showed its best-performing vaccine candidate offered strong protection in a single dose. When exposed to the virus, six out of six animals who got the candidate vaccine were completely protected from lung disease and five out of six were protected from infection as measured by the presence of virus in nasal swabs, according to the study published in the journal Nature. "This gives us confidence that we can test a single-shot vaccine in this epidemic and learn whether it has a protective effect in humans," Dr. Paul Stoffels, J&J's chief scientific officer, told Reuters in a telephone intervie...

A father and his teenage son with COVID-19 were forced to quarantine by authorities in Honolulu this week, authorities said. The teenager, allegedly "in violation of the COVID quarantine restriction," was spotted by a Honolulu Police Department officer on patrol Tuesday morning at a shopping center, police said in a statement Tuesday. "The teen's father came to [a] shopping center shortly thereafter, and both males were detained," the department said. Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings. The duo was then taken to a facility for a period of forced quarantine, police said. State of Hawaii Department of Health director Bruce Anderson told NBC affiliate Hawaii News Now that it was the first time in 20 years he had to use a special o...

Melissa Rein Lively's spiral in an Arizona Target was caught on video for all to see. She recorded herself destroying a mask display in early July – something she now says she regrets and is in treatment for mental illness.  In an exclusive interview with USA TODAY, Rein Lively, the CEO and founder of a public relations firm, said she lost all of her clients and her husband filed for divorce after the videos of her expletive-filled rants went viral. "I think mental illness has been really something that has not been addressed as a result of this pandemic," she said. "Because what happened to me was scary and it changed my life forever. I felt I had absolutely no control over my actions." After her manic meltdown in the store, Rein Lively said she was taken for a psychiatric evaluation...

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO, July 30 (Reuters) - Johnson & Johnson on Thursday kicked off U.S. human safety trials for its COVID-19 vaccine after releasing details of a study in monkeys that showed its best-performing vaccine candidate offered strong protection in a single dose. When exposed to the virus, six out of six animals who got the candidate vaccine were completely protected from lung disease and five out of six were protected from infection as measured by the presence of virus in nasal swabs, according to the study published in the journal Nature. "This gives us confidence that we can test a single-shot vaccine in this epidemic and learn whether it has a protective effect in humans," Dr. Paul Stoffels, J&J's chief scientific officer, told Reuters in a telephone intervie...