Month: April 2021

Image: Keki (Shutterstock) As it does every year, breast cancer awareness month starts in October. But officers at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department are getting a head start on the pink parade by using pink handcuffs, pink badges, and other pink uniform accessories to—uh, remind the people that they are arresting to get screened for breast cancer. I wish that I was making this up. Alex Villanueva, an actual sheriff in Los Angeles, tweeted about the pink initiative on Wednesday and included a photo of himself and two other officers holding their new pink cuffs. Sadly, their guns will not also be pink. Villanueva explains in the tweet that the pink gear is meant to “grab your attention” as the sheriff’s department raises awareness around breast cancer and prays for a cure. He a...

London — A study by researchers at Oxford University in England suggests the risks of experiencing dangerous, rare blood clots in the brain are far higher in those who catch the coronavirus than in those who get either the AstraZeneca vaccine, or the vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna in the U.S. The research shows that the number of people who experience clots after getting the vaccines made by the American pharmaceutical giants appears very similar to the number who get the rare condition after a shot of the AstraZeneca drug, which was developed in conjunction with Oxford's vaccine institute. A key finding of the research, revealed Thursday as a "pre-print" study which has yet to be reviewed by other scientists, was that the risk of experiencing a blood clot in the brain was abo...

The Seeker poured a strong cup of chai and lit a cigarette. He was onto something. Alternating between a smartphone and a laptop, the former science teacher from the northeast Indian city of Bhubaneswar punched keywords into the search bar of CNKI, one of China's foremost databases of scientific papers.  Coronavirus, SARS, horseshoe bat, Yunnan.  It was May 18, 2020. At the time, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, had infected fewer than 5 million people worldwide. Scientists were still attempting to unravel many of its mysteries. Chief among them was where, exactly, the virus had come from. The Seeker, too, was hooked on that mystery. After a lot of trial and error, the Seeker stumbled upon exactly what he was looking for: a master's thesis written by a Chinese doctor. The document ...

Beaumont hospitals have hit critical capacity levels as COVID-19 infections continue to soar throughout Michigan, officials said Thursday. Beaumont Health says its Metro Detroit hospitals and staff have reached critical capacity levels amid the virus surge. Officials announced Thursday morning that the number of COVID-19 patients at Beaumont hospitals has reached more than 800, exceeding the volume of patients seen during the state’s last virus surge in the fall. The health care system was reportedly only caring for 128 COVID-19 patients on Feb. 28. Beaumont officials and health care workers are pleading for Michigan residents to “personally take immediate steps to help stop the spread of the virus.” “Our COVID-19 numbers are climbing higher and faster and it’s very troubling and alarmin...

Last Updated Apr 14, 2021 9:05 PM EDT Millions of Americans are battling lingering symptoms of COVID-19 — months after being diagnosed with the disease. An estimated 5 to 10% of COVID patients are "long haulers" who feel endlessly trapped in the virus' grip. After enduring COVID-19 in December, 38-year-old Camille Hlavka, a dedicated marathon runner, now often gasps for breath. Her most cherished activities are a struggle, including story time with her 2-year-old son Reid. "This happens a lot when I try to speak for longer sentences," Hlavka said of gasping for breath. The hardest part for her, she said, is feeling like she's not herself. "I never realized what a gift it was to just be able to speak," she said. Dr. Diana Kirke, an ear...

“You could run into a situation where you just got unlucky with where you chose to target your test, and something popped up there that then made your test less effective,” said Nathan Grubaugh, a virologist at Yale University. The gene for the virus’s characteristic spike protein, known as the S gene, has been particularly prone to mutation, and tests that target this gene may miss certain variants. For instance, Thermo Fisher’s TaqPath test fails to detect the mutated S gene of the B.1.1.7 variant, which was first identified in Britain and is now spreading rapidly through the United States. But the test does not rely on the S gene alone; it has three targets and can still return accurate results by detecting two other stretches of the coronavirus genome. Just 1.3 percent of molecular te...