Month: January 2022

A Yorkshire teenager has just months to try and save her life due to a rare brain condition that could internally decapitate her at any moment. 17-year-old Allesha Barnfield from Highfields in Doncaster was diagnosed with multiple conditions including chiari malformation after first developing symptoms back in 2019. But now she is in a race against time with just months to save money to fund vital surgery. For more Doncaster news, click here. The condition, which causes ligaments in the spine to be tense and tighter than usual, sees the brain tissue of its victims pulled into their spinal cord and can eventually lead to paralysis, or internal decapitation when these spinal ligaments rupture. But she cannot afford the thousands of pounds she says she urgently needs for an ope...

Antibiotic resistance is often seen as a 'future problem', but newly published data have revealed it's affecting far, far more lives than you might imagine. In fact, the new estimates show that in 2019, there were 4.95 million deaths associated with bacterial antimicrobial resistance, making it the third leading cause of death worldwide.   Drugs that kill bacteria are undeniably one of humanity's greatest discoveries. Since Alexander Fleming discovered antibacterial activity in the fungi Penicillium all the way back in 1928, we no longer have to worry about death from rose bush scratches or gonorrhea. In the decades following, antibiotics have saved millions and millions of lives worldwide. But bacteria have been developing resistance to antibiotics long before we started using them...

Researchers in Sweden are trying to learn more about the long-term impact that the first wave of COVID-19 infections had on individuals who lost their sense of smell when they first learned they had the virus. Scientists at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute studied 100 people who came down with the virus in 2020 and found that nearly half had a level of distortion in their sense of smell, 18 months after recovering, the Guardian reported. A woman gets tested at a mobile COVID-19 testing van on 14th street in Manhattan on January 4, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images) (Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images) About 4% did not regain their smell at all and about a third said they lost some ability to distinguish between sce...