Month: August 2021

Dust contains mostly skin cells, bits of bugs, your hair, bits of your clothing on the base level. "Dust carries a variety of products that can cause odd infections." Dusting with a wet mop is preferable to dry wiping dust. Sure, you may dust, but what about the top of the ceiling fan or behind the refrigerator? How bad is a dust bunny here and there anyway?  Bad, experts say.  Dust buildup can cause serious health problems, according to Johns Hopkins Hospital lung expert Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos, including serious lung infections and in rare cases, even death.  “A good inhalation of dust could be life threatening depending on someone’s asthma exacerbation,” Galiatsatos said.  Dust can enter our airways with each breath we take or dusty object we touch, but how much us too much?  Here'...

Canada threw open its border to vaccinated U.S. citizens on Monday after more than a year of only allowing essential travel. Detroit’s ports to Canada were not overwhelmed early Monday. Wait times for the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel hovered around 10 minutes. Americans must test negative for COVID-19 within three days to win passage across one of the world’s busiest land borders. Travelers also must fill out a detailed application on the "arriveCAN" app before crossing. The U.S. has extended its closure to all Canadians making nonessential trips until at least Aug. 21. The same date applies to the Mexican border. Some Americans were not going to wait a minute longer than necessary to get into Canada. Asawari Kaur of Indiana, along with her family, huddled together at ...

HOUSTON – A surge in COVID-19 patients, due to the highly contagious Delta variant, is creating problems for hospitals all across Texas. Locally, the Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital says they are overwhelmed and need more nurses. Just a week ago, the hospital reported patients waiting 24 hours in their emergency rooms before being transferred to in-patient rooms. And at one point, 130 people were waiting to be seen last Sunday. Earlier this week, an 11-month-old girl with COVID-19 who was initially admitted to the Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital had to be transported to a hospital 170 miles away in Temple. Officials said the transport was needed since LBJ doesn’t offer inpatient pediatric care and none of the major pediatric hospitals in the Houston area had beds available. Ad The hospital is unde...

The pandemic is not coming to an end soon — given that only a small proportion of the world population has been vaccinated against Covid-19, a well-known epidemiologist told CNBC. Dr. Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who was part of the World Health Organization's team that helped eradicate smallpox, said the delta variant is "maybe the most contagious virus" ever. In recent months, the U.S., India and China, as well as other countries in Europe, Africa and Asia have been grappling with a highly transmissible delta variant of the virus. WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic last March — after the disease, which first emerged in China in late 2019, spread throughout the world. The good news is that vaccines — particularly those using messenger RNA technology and the ...