Kids getting winter viruses
Doctors are seeing a summer surge of children in ICUs with viruses that normally strike in winter, reports NBCNews.com.
The most worrying is respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which can be very dangerous in young children and babies. The Centers for Disease Control warned doctors in June that RSV was spreading, particularly in Southern states. “Normally, you just don’t see RSV in the summertime at all,” says David Kimberlin, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. But infections in June and July have “exceeded our worst winters in terms of RSV hospitalization.” Cases are starting to tail off in the South, but there are signs that RSV is spreading north. Doctors say they’re also seeing rises in other viruses, including enteroviruses and parainfluenza 3, which causes croup. Why these winter illnesses are spreading now isn’t clear, but it might be a result of lifting Covid-19 distancing and masking requirements and kids and families mixing again. The viruses, says Kimberlin, “thrive by social interactions.”
who had received either the J&J shot or two doses of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, reports BusinessInsider.com. Lab tests showed that the antibody response in J&J recipients was 5.4 times lower against Delta compared with that against the original strain. In the mRNA group, it was three times lower. Experts not involved in the study cautioned that the researchers looked only at antibodies and not at other elements of the immune response, and they say there is no real-world evidence that the shot fails to protect against serious illness in most Covid cases. Johnson & Johnson says its own research has found the vaccine to be effective against Delta. The study’s authors say they don’t want to deter people from getting the J&J vaccine, but they recommend that recipients consider getting a second J&J shot or a dose of Pfizer or Moderna when boosters become available.
shows. Like other drugs, meth enters sewage systems when it is excreted by users— and sewage treatment cannot filter it out. To see how this might affect fish, researchers in the Czech Republic put 60 brown trout in a holding tank and exposed them to 1 microgram of meth per liter of water—the concentration typically found downstream of Czech and Slovak wastewater plants. The trout were kept in the tank for two months, alongside a control group in a meth-free tank, and then all the fish were transferred to a freshwater tank containing areas of contaminated water. The results were striking, The Washington Post reports. The meth-exposed trout moved more slowly than the control fish and lingered in the parts of the tank dosed with meth, classic signs of addiction and withdrawal. While the effects wore off the longer they swam in freshwater, the drug was still in their brains after 10 days in the freshwater tank. Fish exposed to the drug “will develop addiction,” say the researchers, and may choose to “reside near wastewater treatment effluent discharges.”