Month: May 2021

By Amanda Lamb, WRAL reporter Raleigh, N.C. — As people start to drop their masks and return to normal, we'll be dealing with more coughs, colds and flus, health experts say. Face masks protect us from nearly every disease. Now, as we drop the mask, we will be vulnerable again. Doctors say the right thing to do will be to wear a mask when you are sick, even with a cold, to protect others. The percentage of people testing positive for the flu across the US in the week ending on May 15 remained "unusually low," the CDC reports. “If there was a silver lining to COVID, it was the masking that we were doing and we saw that during our traditional kind of flu season, there were virtually no cases of flu because of all the...

Health officials are looking into reports of heart problems occurring in young adults and teenagers who have received the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, according to a vaccine safety group with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a May 17 meeting, the group presented reports of the heart condition, called myocarditis, to the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices from safety data collected by the Department of Defense, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), and Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD). The news comes a few weeks after the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for minors 12 and older. Moderna's vaccine is currently authorized for people 18 and older. The safety group did not specify which vaccine was given in these cases.  ...

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigates rare reports of heart issues among adolescents and young adults who received COVID-19 vaccinations, a former acting head of the agency says there is no clear link yet to the vaccines, and encourages parents to keep getting kids vaccinated. Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, made multiple media appearances Monday morning, telling ABC and NBC co-hosts that the CDC is investigating reports of myocarditis — or unusual inflammation of the heart muscle — but so far, the agency has not found reported cases to exceed expected baseline rates. Besser explained that a CDC advisory committee on vaccine safety analyzes data each week for potential red flags, and though reports of myocardit...

One of the study’s researchers demonstrating the set-up used to confirm the success of the gene therapy treatment, including the use of specialized goggles seen above. Image: Sahel, et al., Nature Medicine Researchers say their experimental gene therapy was able to partially restore a man’s eyesight 40 years after he lost most of his vision. The findings are exciting, but the authors of the new study caution that more research will be needed to confirm the effectiveness of this treatment. Gene therapy has emerged as a promising approach for largely incurable ailments that are often caused by defective genetic mutations. It can include editing the genes of cells collected from the body in the lab, then putting them back in (CAR T-cell therapy for cancer is one example of this) or editi...

What can you learn from the heart-rate metrics on your fitness tracker? The bottom line You may use your fitness tracker mostly to count steps, but don’t ignore your heart-rate metrics—they can tell you a lot about your health. Devices now deliver a variety of heart-rate measurements, including resting rate, walking rate and variability (the variation of time between beats). Some can be programmed to notify you of a possible problem, such as a heart rate that is unusually high, low or irregular. Without getting fancy, however, your basic heart rate alone can be revealing.