Month: January 2022

As omicron cases explode in the United States, health officials have offered stark warnings about our collective future. The variant is so contagious, “most people are going to get COVID,” Janet Woodcock, the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, recently said. Two years into the pandemic, that’s not the news anyone wanted. So, many people are taking solace in emerging evidence suggesting omicron really does cause milder symptoms than previous variants. There’s a lot of talk about just getting omicron — and getting it over with . But that’s misguided for many reasons, not the least because there is still so much experts don’t know about this variant and how it works. It’s also problematic because many people’s sense of what it means to have a “mild” case of COVID-19 is really ....

Photo: BSIP/Universal Images Group (Getty Images) A man and his partner’s attempt at a treatment for erectile dysfunction went disastrously wrong, according to his doctors. In a recent case report, they detail how his partner accidentally shot insulation foam into the man’s penis and bladder while a straw connected to the spray had been inserted into his urethra. Afterward, he began to urinate blood. Though doctors were able to remove the hardened foam eventually, the man will require further procedures to repair his urethra. The unfortunate tale was published in the November issue of Urology Case Reports, though it only seems to have garnered media attention this week. According to the report, the 45-year-old man had been inserting various objects into his urethra for some time as an...

World Health Organization (WHO) Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan attends a press conference organised by the Geneva Association of United Nations Correspondents (ACANU) amid the COVID-19 outbreak, caused by the novel coronavirus, at the WHO headquarters in Geneva Switzerland July 3, 2020. Fabrice Coffrini | Reuters There's "no evidence right now" that suggests healthy children and adolescents need booster shots to supplement their Covid-19 vaccinations, World Health Organization Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said Tuesday. Swaminathan said the agency's advisory group, called Sage, or the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization, will meet later this week to consider how countries should think about giving booster shots. "The aim is to pr...

Losing your sense of taste or smell used to be the telltale sign that you weren’t sick with a cold or the flu – it was almost certainly COVID-19. It was also one of the symptoms found to last longest, often weeks or months after someone otherwise recovers. But the omicron variant seems to be setting itself apart from prior variants by sparing more people’s sense of taste and smell. One study released by the U.K. Health Security Agency Friday found that loss of smell or taste occurred in about 13% of omicron cases tracked by the country’s National Health Service. For people infected with the delta variant, the U.K. health agency found loss of smell or taste happened in about 34% of cases. How can you tell if your N95 or KN95 mask is fake? An earlier – a...