COVID-19
Pandemic Side Effects
It’s not a surprise that a lot of cancer diagnoses didn’t get made in 2020 — everything was hectic. The strange thing that this paper from USA (2024-10-14) shows is that those missing cases never showed up again! 127,931 cancer cases are still missing and they aren’t sure why. Some of it might be that the people who would have died of cancer died of COVID-19 or heart attacks or other things, but almost 128K missing cancer patients is a lot.
Long COVID
⭐ This paper from China (2024-10-10) reports on the effects of multiple infections.
Later acute infections are milder than earlier infections:
However, the likelihood of getting persistent symptoms and their severity gets worse with each reinfection:
Vaccination helped, reducing persistent symptoms by 30-70%, depending on the symptom and type of vaccine. (Caveat: China uses very different vaccines than Canada does.)
AGAIN: This paper from Spain (2024-09-27) reports that the incidence of erectile dysfunction was 26% higher in men with a documented infection of COVID-19 than those without.
Vaccines
This paper from South Korea (2024-10-08) reports that there was a 12% increase in the risk of facial palsy after a COVID-19 vaccination, working out to about four cases of facial palsy per million doses given.
⭐ This paper from Australia (2024-09-19) reports that some of the mRNA vax — which is supposed to stay in the lymph system — gets into the blood. It looks like the lipid nanoparticles and their payload of mRNA just float around for a while before eventually getting cleared by the body. The little lipid envelopes peak at one or two days after vaccination, but can stick around for up to a month. They speculate (but don’t show an association) that that the vax in the blood might account for some of those annoying side effects.
Something that they are a little concerned about is that they saw antibodies to one of the ingredients (polyethylene glycol (PEG)) in some people’s blood. They are concerned that maybe people who develop anti-PEG antibodies would develop an immunity to mRNA vaccines — which seems like a bad idea, given how incredibly useful mRNA vaccines look like they are going to be come for everything from viruses to cancer. :-/
Note: the amount of vax in the blood is very very small, and billions of people have gotten vaccinated with mRNA vaccines. The mRNAs still appear to be very, very safe.
Recommended Reading
This blog post (2024-10-16) does a very deep, technical dive into whether you should follow US CDC’s guidelines for exiting isolation (after five days if you don’t have a fever, but wear a mask for the subsequent five days) or test-to-exit. The blog author makes a good case that RATs aren’t actually that accurate near the end of an infection, and that seven days isolation plus five days masking is actually a good way to do it.
Mpox
Diagnoses
⭐ This paper (2024-10-14) reports that mpox is vastly underdiagnosed in men who have sex with men in Berlin. About 1100 men completed a survey and had their blood examined for mpox antibodies. 7.4% had been diagnosed, but an additional 9.6% had mpox antibodies without ever getting a diagnosis. In other words, 56% of the mpox cases never got diagnosed!
Marburg
Transmission
This article (2024-10-17) says that the Marburg outbreak in Rwanda is easing, with half the new infections this week as there were two weeks ago, as they continue to vaccinate people with an experimental vax. Also, 38 of the 62 cases have fully recovered. Yay!
H5N1
Transmission
This article (2024-10-16) says that Michigan found another herd with bird flu. If confirmed as H5N1, the detection would push the number of US outbreaks in dairy cattle to 306 from 14 states.
Recommended Reading
This article (2024-10-16) talks (from a US-centric point of view) about how difficult it is to know how concerned we should be about bird flu. Tl;dr: it’s a low-risk issue right now but could turn into a huge problem very fast — or not.