Month: August 2020

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Eleven children in Washington state have been diagnosed with a rare condition that is thought to have been triggered by COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Four children were diagnosed with the rare disorder — known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) — in May, and seven have developed the illness since then. Not much is known about MIS-C, but it has been reported to affect the heart, kidneys and gut. Symptoms can include high fever, rash, swelling, abdominal pain, diarrhea and vomiting, John McGuire, chief of critical care at Seattle Children’s told The Seattle Times. McGuire explained that the condition seems to stem from a haywire immune response after COVID-19 is contracted. “These kids feel terrible,” the doctor said. “They’re tired, wea...

For weeks, frontline nurse Sette Buenaventura ignored the pain in her leg in order to focus on caring for coronavirus patients. But, doctors eventually discovered a tumor, and now, her leg has been amputated.  Buenaventura, a 26-year-old nurse at Salford Royal Hospital in Greater Manchester, told BBC News that she ignored a cramp in her right calf for two months while working on the virus frontlines. The pain made it difficult to walk, but Buenaventura assumed it was just a side effect of the long hours spent on her feet at the hospital.  "We were there every hour to help anyone who needed us, I got a real taste for that level of commitment," she told the BBC. "That is what working in hospitals is like — you forget about your own pains because you're busy helping other people, whic...

The nation’s foremost public health agency is learning that it is not immune to the complex effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told employees that some office space it leases in the Atlanta area would be closed again after property managers of the buildings discovered Legionella, the bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease, in water sources at the sites. No employees were sickened. The announcement was reported on Friday by CNN. That the C.D.C. is contending with this problem highlights the seriousness of Legionella in the aftermath of coronavirus lockdowns, and how complicated it can be to prevent it. The C.D.C. itself warns that Legionnaires’ disease, a respiratory illness, can be fatal in 1 in 10 cases. Since various jurisd...

During its seven-month global rampage, the coronavirus has claimed more than 700,000 lives. But Gandhi began to think the bigger mystery might be why it has left so many more practically unscathed. What was it about these asymptomatic people, who lived or worked so closely to others who fell severely ill, she wondered, that protected them? Did the “dose” of their viral exposure make a difference? Was it genetics? Or might some people already have partial resistance to the virus, contrary to our initial understanding? Efforts to understand the diversity in the illness are finally beginning to yield results, raising hope the knowledge will help accelerate development of vaccines and therapies — or possibly even create new pathways toward herd immunity in which enough of the population de...