Defies Heading Classification
This paper from China (2024-09-04) reports that animals farmed for fur carry a TON of nasty viruses. They looked at 461 fur animals that they found dead (412 from fur and/or livestock farms and 49 from wild settings) from all over China, and found seven coronaviruses, three types of influenza, Japanese encephalitis virus, mammalian orthoreovirus, paramyxoviruses (a family which includes measles and mumps) and sedoreoviriuses (a family which includes rotaviruses). (Not all of the viruses were currently human-compatible, but then, SARS-CoV-2’s ancestor was not human-compatible once upon a time.)
COVID-19
Long COVID
This paper from USA (2024-08-26) reports that 37% of Long COVID patients felt an internal tremors or vibrations.
This paper from Hungary (2024-08-29) reports that cognitive training can help older women with Long COVID quite a bit. Curiously, the same training didn’t seem to help older men with Long COVID as much.
This paper from China (2024-08-30) found that Long COVID patients used the motor function part of their brain less when walking than healthy controls. The amount varied with Long COVID impact: when walking, people with milder cases used their brain more (technically speaking, they had greater brain activation in motion centres), and people with more severe cases used their brain less.
I have no idea how this works / what this really means. I was expecting that there would be more activation in Long COVID patients because “it would be harder for them”. I guess this could be a diagnostic measure, but doing fMRIs while people are walking has got to be hugely difficult to do.
This paper from USA (2024-07-07) reports that people with pre-existing disabilities were 2.15x more likely to get Long COVID than the general population.
This paper from USA (2024-09-06) found that people with HIV were 2.2 times as likely to get Long COVID than people without HIV.
COVID-Related Excess Sickness and Death
Hey! Good news! This paper from Singapore (2024-08-30) reports that for most autoimmune diseases, there was not an increased chance of a new autoimmune diagnosis following a Delta or Omicron infection. This seems a little odd, given all the other studies that have found elevated risks, but let’s take good news where we can find it.
There were a few odd corner cases of increased risk:
- Subjects who had been hospitalized during Omicron had a 2.23x risk of inflammatory bowel disease and a 4.88x risk of blistering skin diseases.
- Subjects who had gotten vaccinated and then got an Omicron infection had a 5.74x higher risk of vasculitis, but not if they had gotten a booster.
Treatments
This paper from USA (2024-08-20) reports the discovery of SC27, an antibody which is really, really, really, really good. It is really good at jamming up the machinery SARS-CoV-2 uses to get into the cell and it is “highly conserved” — tech speak for “doesn’t change much across strains and even different viruses. SC27 is like a neutron bomb even against SARS-CoV-ONE, a few other bat coronaviruses, and even a pangolin coronavirus! (Sadly, it doesn’t work against MERS or even the “common cold” coronaviruses, darn.)
This could not only be a treatment after you get sick, but also could be given sort of like a vaccine (once they do the work to synthesize it, run clinical trials, blah blah blah). A shot of it in theory could keep COVID away for like six months. But alas, only for six months-ish.
They found this antibody in a human with hybrid immunity, but this (awesome, highly technical) blog post on SC27 blog post suggests that it is probably uncommon for people to generate this antibody. Probably partly it’s genetics: how the dice are loaded in that particular human’s particular body; probably it’s partly just plain luck. But that friend of yours who has never taken any precautions and has never gotten sick (that they know of)? Maybe they were one of the lucky ones who rolled an SC27.
It is not clear if we could use this knowledge about SC27 to make a better vaccine. The blog post (above) touched briefly on making better vaccines to elicit this antibody, but there were words and concepts in that section that I don’t understand.
Transmission
This press release from Finland (2024-09-10) reports that adding air purifiers to kindergartens where the ventilation was perfectly fine/normal reduced the number of child sicknesses by 18%. This article from Finland (2024-09-13) about the same research reported that parental absenteeism dropped by 16%. This article from Finland (2024-09-10) about the same research mentions that the cost of sick leave is 370 euros per person per day, so filtration saves sickness and money! (The research paper isn’t published yet, which is why there’s so many links to so many different articles.)
This paper from Finland (2024-08-14) reports that whispering produces more particles than speaking without whispering, and that speaking a sentence with lots of /k/s, /t/s, and open vowels produced more particles than a sentence with /k/s and /t/s but also /s/s, and mostly closed vowels.
Pathology
This paper from USA (2024-09-10) makes me so mad. It claims that lockdowns made teenage brains older, made them mature faster. BUT THEY DIDN’T SHOW IT WAS LOCKDOWNS. They showed that something was different between pre-pandemic and after the pandemic had run for a few years, but they didn’t do any sort of controls on what might have caused it: lockdowns, the stress of y’know, perhaps dying or carrying a disease that might kill granny, or maybe even getting COVID-19 itself (which has been shown over and over to do bad things to peoples’ health)?
Vaccines
Good news! This paper from USA (2024-07-23) reports that they have developed a strong, durable vaccine (in mice). The authors noticed that the mRNAs don’t cause an increase in a particular component of the immune system, IL-12p70, which seems to be related to the strength of the response to vaccination. They made an mRNA vax which, in addition to the SARS-CoV-2 spike, had some instructions for making IL-12p70 (with an extra bit to restrict which cells it can react with, probably reducing side effects). The resulting vax gave a much stronger immune response and it lasted for at least a year!
Recommended Reading
If you want to get depressed, read this article from Canada about kids getting bullied for masking.
Mpox
Transmission
This article from India (2024-09-11) reports that India has seen one case of Clade 2 mpox.
Vaccines
This World Health Organization press release (2024-09-13) reports that WHO has pre-approved the Bavarian Nordic mpox vaccine (Jynneos). They report that one dose of the vax (which they can do if supplies are short) is 76% effective against infection and two doses is 82% effective.
H5N1
Transmission
This article from USA (2024-09-12) says that the US CDC has not figured out where an isolated Missouri case caught an H5Nx flu from. They also are having trouble sequencing the N part, so it might not be H5N1.
This Letter from USA (2024-09-11) reports that they have found a lot of H5N1 in Texas city wastewater: 10 of 10 cities, 22 of 23 sites, and 100 of 399 samples between March 4 and July 15. They believe they are seeing 2.3.4.4b clade influenza, and it looks like those samples do not show mutations that would make it more transmissible in humans.
They don’t know where the rise in H5N1 levels is coming from, but importantly, there has not been a corresponding rise in hospitalized influenza cases.
This article from USA (2024-09-12) talks about various reasons why H5N1 might spread more in the fall than it did this summer:
- Demand for milk drops in the summers because school is out. (That surprised me!)
- Farmers move their herds around more in the fall, to feed on leftovers from harvested fields.
- More humans will be harbouring human influenza strains in the fall, increasing the chances of H5N1 combining with a human influenza strain and making H5N1 more transmissible (or the human strain more deadly!).
The article didn’t talk about the cold, but the conventional wisdom is that influenza transmits better in cold weather.
This press release (2024-09-12) reports that there have been 201 herds across 14 states which have tested positive for H5N1.