DR Congo health officials said Monday they were “keeping fingers crossed” to declare a deadly 19-month Ebola epidemic over next month, while monitoring former patients for signs of the virus.
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Israel will impose a two-week quarantine on all travellers entering the country, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday, toughening already significant travel restrictions.
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Romania and Slovenia on Monday banned big public gatherings, while Bulgaria ordered theatre and cinema shows cancelled in increasingly stringent measures to fight the spread of the novel coronavirus.
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Research shows higher continuity of care, meaning a care team cooperatively involved in ongoing healthcare, is better for health outcomes, but can there be too much of a good thing? New research in the INFORMS journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management finds the answer is “yes.”
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Misleading portrayals of the safety of tobacco use are widespread on YouTube, where the viewership of popular pro-tobacco videos has soared over the past half-dozen years, according to research by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania.
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Barth syndrome is a rare metabolic disease in boys caused by mutation of a gene called tafazzin or TAZ. It can cause life-threatening heart failure and also weakens the skeletal muscles, undercuts the immune response, and impairs overall growth. There is no cure or specific treatment, but new research at Boston Children’s Hospital suggests that gene therapy could prevent or reverse cardiac dysfunction.
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Among African adolescent girls and young women who took HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) daily, levels of the PrEP drug tenofovir were more than 30% lower in those who were pregnant than in those who had recently given birth. All 40 study participants took PrEP under direct observation, confirming their near-perfect adherence. PrEP drug levels were lower to a similar degree in the pregnant African adolescent girls and young women compared to American men and non-pregnant, non-lactating women who took PrEP daily under direct observation in an earlier study. These findings from the NIH-funded IMPAACT 2009 study were reported today at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).
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In parts of Africa, where the rate of HIV is high, researchers found that using mobile vans to dispense antiretroviral treatment and other care greatly increased viral suppression.
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Federal officials on Monday released groundbreaking rules that will let patients download their electronic health records and other health care data onto their smartphones.
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An analysis of publicly available data on infections from the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes the respiratory illness COVID-19 yielded an estimate of 5.1 days for the median disease incubation period, according to a new study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. This median time from exposure to onset of symptoms suggests that the 14-day quarantine period used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for individuals with likely exposure to the coronavirus is reasonable.
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