Month: March 2021

The race to find vaccines for COVID-19 has dominated the headlines, but there's been less news about how to keep people with COVID out of the hospital. Tonight, we're going to tell you a story about one possible treatment. It's called fluvoxamine. The generic drug was developed 40 years ago as an antidepressant and has been primarily used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. Now, a small but ingenious clinical trial and a series of coincidences have led scientists to look closely at fluvoxamine as a possible tool to keep newly diagnosed COVID-19 patients from becoming severely ill. So how did a pill that costs 60 cents become a dark horse to treat COVID? We went to a place that knows all about long shots to find out. Golden Gate Fields is in Berkeley, California. The stands have been e...

NEW YORK (WJW) — Medical researchers are testing a new medication that could be used to treat COVID-19. During a Sunday morning interview on FOX & Friends, Dr. Marc Siegel revealed that officials are in the first stage of testing an experimental COVID-19 pill called Molnupiravir. “It may be the holy grail on this because it was just studied in phase two trials and it literally stopped the virus in its tracks,” he said during the interview. “And there wasn’t any virus found in the patients that were studied.” Dr. Siegel told the news outlet that the drug has shown “promising signs of effectiveness” in reducing COVID-19. Molnupiravir reportedly functions as a five-day, at-home treatment. It would be used to stop the coronavirus from reproducing be...

Eating five servings a day of fruits and vegetables may help you achieve a healthier, longer life, according to new research published in the journal Circulation. The suggested dietary goal stems from researchers’ analysis of data from multiple studies involving more than 2 million people worldwide who were tracked for up to 30 years. In that time, those who ate five servings daily of fruits and vegetables were 13 percent less likely to have died than were people who ate two servings. That included lower risks for dying of cardiovascular disease (12 percent lower), cancer (10 percent) and respiratory disease (35 percent). People with the lowest risks consumed two servings of fruit and three of vegetables daily, but eating more than five servings a day total did not provide additional benef...

A new study just published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention contains some alarming information for cancer survivors who may take their daily constitutional at a deliberate pace or do not walk at all. Having analyzed detailed questionnaires of more than 233,000 study participants between the ages of 50 and 71, research teams from several top universities and the National Cancer Institute concluded that “those who walked at the slowest pace had more than twofold increased risk of death from any cause, compared with those reporting the fastest walking pace.” It’s the latest study to shed light on what appears to be a profound link between walking pace—or “gait speed”—and early death within the cont...

The Oregon Health Authority announced 211 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday and no new deaths. That’s well below the daily average reported over the past seven days, though reporting delays tend to result in lower case counts on weekends. Cases have been trending downward statewide since mid-January. The new numbers come as the vaccination effort continues and problems abound for Oregon seniors trying to snag coveted appointment slots to be inoculated against the coronavirus. Formal and informal volunteers around the state are helping sign up seniors struggling to navigate unfamiliar and often glitchy websites or those who do not have internet access. A new lottery-based vaccine waitlist system designed to reduce the stress of signing up for an appointment has been marred by uncertain...