COVID-19
Long COVID
⭐ This paper from Sweden (2024-10-16) reports that many Long COVID patients have cardiovascular problems. 41% had microvascular endothelial dysfunction — basically, messed up blood vessels. Another 20% had a poor reactive hyperemia index — IIUC, something that measures the ability of the cardiovascular system to self-regulate. In addition, the patients who were found to have problems using complicated tests were also found to have elevated levels of N-terminal prohormone of brain natriuretic peptide — a chemical which they usually use to screen for congestive heart failure (and much cheaper/easier to measure, IIUC).
AGAIN: This Research Letter from UK (2024-10-25) reports that the aftermaths of COVID-19 infections are different from the aftermaths of other lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs). Using data from the Biobank study, they found that people who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 had higher rates of specific symptoms compared to people with other LRTIs:
- +80% risk of smell dysfunction;
- +52% risk of taste dysfunction;
- +60% risk of postural tachycardia (POTS);
- +36% risk of brain fog;
- +33% risk of bone pain;
- +19% risk of mild fatigue;
- +49% risk of severe fatigue.
Interestingly, people who had COVID-19 were less likely to have a persistent cough than people with other LRTIs.
AGAIN ⭐ I mentioned this back in June, when the preprint (2024-06-06) came out, but this paper from USA (2024-10-25) is worth mentioning again: a quarter of Marines who get COVID-19 get Long COVID. That’s just insane!
I have heard anecdotes that say that coming back too fast or too hard increases the risk of Long COVID. Perhaps Marines are especially gung-ho (or coerced) and unwilling (and/or unable) to take it easy after an illness?
COVID-Related Excess Sickness and Death
⭐ This paper from China (2024-10-22) reports that getting COVID-19 while pregnant is bad for the fetus’ heart. They found that the risk of cardiac ultrasound abnormalities was 2.6 times higher in mothers who had gotten COVID-19 infections compared to those who had not. Most of the abnormalities were found in women whose COVID-19 infection was in the first eight weeks of pregnancy.
The rate of congenital heart disease was higher during the pandemic than pre-pandemic.
Vaccines
This paper from Belgium (2024-10-23) reports that if you get enough intramuscular vaccines, it can give you (some) mucousal immunity. They reported that the antibodies were made/lived in the spleen and bone marrow. (Other things I have seen say that it takes time — on the order of days, not minutes — for antibodies to move from elsewhere in the body to where they are needed.)
Alas, this other paper from USA (2024-10-23) says that intramuscular vaccines do NOT give you moucousal immunity, at least for the XBB 1.5 mRNA booster.
This press release from Novavax (2024-10-15) reports that the US FDA put a pause on the Novavax flu/COVID combo vaccine due to concerns about a case of damage to motor nerves in one of the vaccine recipients. This doesn’t mean that the vax flunks, just that the regulators want to investigate carefully to see if it’s a fluke, that it’s from something else which just happened to occur during the trial period.
Pathology
⭐ This paper from California (2024-10-21) reports that the very youngest children (under 6 months old) were the most likely of all unvaccinated children to be hospitalized. However, among hospitalized children, admission to ICU was highest for the oldest children (12 to 18 year-olds). 91.8% of the children admitted to ICU had no comorbidities.
⭐ This paper from Japan (2024-08-09) reports that SARS-CoV-2 is nasty in part because it messes with the immune system. A piece of the innate immune system normally puts a big PLEASE EAT ME sign (also called the ISG15 molecular tag) on viruses, helping the rest of the immune system figure out where dinner is. However, SARS-CoV-2 has figured out how to cut the sign off with an enzyme (the papain-like protease). SARS-1 and MERS also have an enzyme which can cut the tag off, but their enzyme isn’t as good at it as the SARS-CoV-2 enzyme.
The good news is that now that humans know which enzyme f’s with the tag, we can perhaps design drugs which f with SARS-CoV-2’s papain-like protease. We do keep making progress, folks!
Recommended Reading
This article (2024-10-21) discusses why people with mental illnesses are at higher risk of catching COVID-19. Tl;dr: it’s a combo of things like elevated stress hormones, medication side effects, brain inflammation, and external but correlated circumstances.
This article from USA (2024-10-23) compellingly calls for more willingness for physicians to prescribe off-label drugs for Long COVID.
H5N1
Question: If they kill all the poultry they find infected with H5N1, why don’t they kill all the infected cattle?
Transmission
As I have been reporting, there was a human H5N1 case in Missouri in someone who had no known connection to poultry or dairy farms, and there were seven people in that person’s orbit who had upper respiratory infections: one household member and six health care workers. This got people worried that the strain had mutated into a human-transmissible form.
⭐ This article (2024-10-24) reports that the six health care workers did NOT have H5N1, whew and yay. As for the household member, they did two kinds of tests on them: one came back positive, one came back negative. So they don’t know, and the article says they will never know. 🙁
⭐ However, this article (2024-10-24) seems to imply that the negative test for the housemate was a technicality; the article’s authors clearly think that the housemate had H5N1 also. The two housemates got sick and had disease progression consistent with them both catching it from the same source, so maybe one did not pass it to the other.
This article (2024-10-24) reports that they found three more H5N1-infected cattle herds in California and two more in Idaho. California now has 137 herds and Idaho has 36. Overall in the USA, there have been 339 dairy herds total in 14 states which have tested positive.
Note that the number of herds, states, and humans are all clearly undercounts: the US has had trouble getting farmers to cooperate, as this article (2024-10-24) describes.
⭐ This article (2024-10-21) reports that four poultry workers in Washington State are getting tested for bird flu. All had mild cases. All of them had been working on a cull of infected poultry.
This article (2024-10-24) reports that two of those four poultry workers have tested positive for H5N1 bird strain D1.1 — different from the B1.13 circulating in cows.
This article (2024-10-23) reports that two California dairy workers have tested positive for H5N1.
This article (2024-10-24) reports that a large Utah poultry farm has been infected with the cattle version of H5N1, and this press release (2024-10-24) says that bulk milk container testing is now mandatory for all dairies in that county.
Testing
This report (2024-10-16) from a conference says that they found H5N1 in Texas municipal wastewater days before they found the contaminated farm. (This article (2024-10-21) about the conference presentation says that it was two weeks, but I don’t see anything in the conference report which confirms that.)
There’s some confusing language which I think means that the wastewater was not directly from a farm, but from municipal water treatment plants. In other words, material from the farm (or an infected person?) got loose from the farm for two weeks before they shut things down.
Mpox
Transmission
This article (2024-10-25) reports that mpox cases are rising in Liberia, Kenya, and Uganda, but that Cameroon, Gabon, Guinea, Rwanda, and South Africa have not seen a case in four weeks. (Yay!)