Health & Fitness

Heartland virus is circulating in ticks in Georgia, according to new research. People can get the Heartland virus after being bitten by an infected tick. There is no vaccine to prevent the Heartland virus. The Heartland virus is circulating in ticks in Georgia, researchers warned in a study published last week.   The findings, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases and led by researchers from Emory University, analyzed virus samples from ticks collected in central Georgia. But the Heartland virus, first identified in Missouri in 2009, has been documented in multiple states across the Midwest and Southeast.  But what does that mean for your next hiking or camping trip? Is it time to be on the lookout for ticks that could carry the virus?    Jonathan Larson, an extension en...

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Rising temperatures, increased CO2 will drive trees, grasses, weeds to produce more pollen. Allergy seasons are likely to become longer and grow more intense as a result of increasing temperatures caused by manmade climate change, according to new research from the University of Michigan. By the end of this century, pollen emissions could begin 40 days earlier in the spring than we saw between 1995 and 2014. Allergy sufferers could see that season last an additional 19 days before high pollen counts may subside. In addition, thanks to rising temperatures and increasing CO2 levels, the annual amount of pollen emitted each year could increase up to 200%. “Pollen-induced respiratory allergies are getting worse with climate change,” said Yingxiao Zhang, a U-M graduate student ...

Studies continue to show that mRNA vaccines and boosters for COVID-19 are very successful at preventing hospitalization and death, but there has been some data to suggest their overall effectiveness against coronavirus infections is waning — especially when confronted with the omicron variant. Notably, one recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine analyzed data from 2,239,193 people in Qatar who had received at least 2 doses of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Researchers found that for those who were fully vaccinated and boosted, protection against the delta variant was 86.1 percent; but against symptomatic illness from the omicron variant, protection was only 49.4 percent. A separate study from the United Kingdom determined the effectiveness o...

People who recovered from COVID-19 had a higher risk of developing diabetes, according to new research. Why it matters: This would add to the growing body of ramifications from a COVID-19 infection, showing the long-term damage of the virus. Driving the news: A new large study found that those who recovered from COVID-19 within the last year had a 40% higher chance of being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes compared to those who didn’t catch COVID-19, per The Wall Street Journal. Overall, about 1% of people who had COVID-19 developed diabetes when they otherwise likely wouldn’t have developed it, per The Journal. Worth noting: Type 2 diabetes is a condition where the pancreas does not produce enough insulin and cells respond poorly to insuli...

In 2020 Ujwal Chaudhary, a biomedical engineer then at the University of Tübingen and the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, watched his computer with amazement as an experiment that he had spent years on revealed itself. A 34-year-old paralyzed man lay on his back in the laboratory, his head connected by a cable to a computer. A synthetic voice pronounced letters in German: “E, A, D…” The patient had been diagnosed a few years earlier with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which leads to the progressive degeneration of brain cells involved in motion. The man had lost the ability to move even his eyeballs and was entirely unable to communicate; in medical terms, he was in a completely locked-in state. Or so it seemed. Through Dr. Chaudhary’s experiment, the man had learned ...

From the very beginning of the pandemic, it has been clear that COVID can have as profound an impact on mental health as it does on physical well-being. Rates of depression and anxiety have spiked around the globe, even among those who’ve never been sick. For those who have been infected, the risk is higher. People who’ve had COVID-19 and have recovered are more likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety in the year after their illness, and they’re more susceptible to sleep problems and substance abuse, too. For a small subset of those patients, the connection can be especially sudden and severe. For more than two years, doctors around the world have published case reports describing COVID-related psychosis, telling stories of previously healthy individuals who suddenly develop s...

COVID-19 survivors are at increased risk of being newly diagnosed with diabetes up to one year after recovering, a new study suggests. Researchers from VA Saint Louis Health Care System found people who recovered from COVID were 40% more likely to develop a new case of diabetes compared to a control group. This translates to 1 in 100 people at increased risk of developing diabetes after a COVID-19 infection. As of Monday, 79.5 million people have been infected with COVID-19 in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meaning there could 795,000 new diabetes diagnosis as a result. "That's hard for me to swallow," Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at VA Saint Louis Health Care System, and lead author of the study, told ABC News. "COVID-19 is...

In its final stages, the neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can bring extreme isolation. People lose control of their muscles, and communication may become impossible. But with the help of an implanted device that reads his brain signals, a man in this “complete” locked-in state could select letters and form sentences, researchers report this week. “People have really doubted whether this was even feasible,” says Mariska Vansteensel, a brain-computer interface researcher at the University Medical Center Utrecht who was not involved in the study, published in Nature Communications. If the new spelling system proves reliable for all people who are completely locked in—and if it can be made more efficient and affordable—it might allow thousands of peopl...

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