Month: September 2020

Even before you bid your 30s adieu, you might start noticing that things with your body aren’t quite the same as they used to be. Why? Hormones that have been steady since puberty begin to drop, laying the groundwork for an end to ovulation and some pretty major side effects. Welcome to the beginning of menopause. Here’s what to expect — and what you can do to feel your best each step of the way. In Your 30s and 40s “Perimenopause, or the years before your period fully stops, can start as early as 35, but most women will experience it in their mid-40s,” says Toni Mueller, M.D., a gynecologist with Complete Women Care in southern California. This transition ...

A grieving mother who lost her 12-year-old son to a brain tumour was devastated to discover his twin brother had leukaemia just two weeks after his funeral.  Julie Parton's son Ben was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour, which has a prognosis of around 15 months, in March last year.  Despite undergoing 30 sessions of radiotherapy and two cycles of chemotherapy and having brain surgery, Ben, from Cannock in the West Midlands, died eight months later in December 2019.  Shortly after Ben's death, his identical twin brother Jack began suffering from back pain and sickness.  His symptoms were initially put down to post traumatic stress disorder after the trauma of losing his brother.  But a fortnight after Ben's funeral, Jack was diagnosed with leukaemia, according to the Birmingham Mai...

Hours before the United States surpassed 6 million coronavirus cases and reached a death toll of 183,000, President Donald Trump and his defenders seized on an amateurish misreading of federal data to claim that the COVID-19 pandemic has killed hardly anyone at all.  It started Sunday, when Trump retweeted a QAnon conspiracist who claimed that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “quietly” “admit[ted] that only 6%” of coronavirus casualties “actually died from Covid.” Twitter removed the tweet, saying it violated the platform’s rules. But it quickly became the party line. Gateway Pundit, a far-right conspiracist website, accused the CDC of releasing its data “quietly,” while Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing polemicist, called it “a brewing scandal of epic proportions. T...

In April, more than three months before any coronavirus vaccine would enter large clinical trials, the mayor of a picturesque island town in the Pacific Northwest invited a microbiologist friend to vaccinate him. The exchange occurred on the mayor’s Facebook page, to the horror of several Friday Harbor residents following it. “Should I pop up and get your vaccine started?????,” wrote Johnny Stine, who runs North Coast Biologics, a Seattle biotech company with a focus on antibodies. “Don’t worry — I’m immune — I have boosted myself five times with my vaccine.” “Sounds good,” Farhad Ghatan, the mayor, wrote after a few follow-up questions. Several residents interjected skepticism in the exchange. They were swatted down by the mayor, who defended his friend of 25 years as a “pharmaceut...

At the beginning of March, Andrew Noymer felt a familiar twinge of doubt. He was watching countries across Europe and North America begin to record their first deaths from COVID-19, and he knew there could be problems with the data. Even in a normal winter, some deaths caused by influenza get misclassified as pneumonia. If that can happen with a well-known disease, there were bound to be deaths from COVID-19 going unreported, thought Noymer, a demographer at the University of California, Irvine. “I just remember thinking, ‘this is going to be really difficult to explain to people’,” he recalls. And in March and April, when national statistics offices began to release tallies of the number of deaths, it confirmed his suspicions: the pandemic was killing a lot more peo...