Sept. 6, 2022 – Don’t rely on a runny nostril.

Young youngsters with COVID-19 typically don’t have any signs in any respect, even after they have a excessive quantity of the virus in them, based on a brand new examine.

Just 14% of adults who examined constructive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, had no signs of the illness, versus 37% of kids as much as age 4, the researchers discovered.

This raises concern that folks, childcare suppliers, and preschools might not be seeing the extent of an infection in seemingly wholesome younger youngsters who’ve been uncovered to COVID-19, wrote lead creator Ruth A. Karron, MD, and colleagues within the Journal of the American Medical Association Open.

The examine concerned 690 individuals from 175 households in Maryland who had been monitored carefully between November 2020 and October 2021. Every week for 8 months, they accomplished on-line symptom checks and had PCR testing – which detects the presence of the virus inflicting COVID-19 – achieved with nasal swabs. Those with signs submitted extra swabs for evaluation.

“What was different about our study [compared with previous studies] was the intensity of our collection, and the fact that we [tested those who did not have COVID symptoms],” Karron, a pediatrician and professor within the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, mentioned in an interview. “The fact that we were sampling every single week meant that we could pick up those early infections.”

The examine additionally stands out for its deal with younger kids, Karron mentioned. All households that took half within the examine had at the very least one youngster as much as 4 years outdated, with 256 out of the 690 individuals (37.1%) on this youngest age group. The different individuals within the examine had been 100 kids ages 5 to 17 (14.5%) and 334 adults ages 18 to 74 (48.4%).

Youngest Were Most Likely to Not Have Symptoms

By the top of the examine, 51 individuals had examined constructive for the coronavirus, together with 14 who had no signs. A more in-depth look confirmed that kids ages 4 and youthful who bought COVID-19 had been greater than twice as more likely to not have signs as contaminated adults (36.8% vs. 14.3%).

The relationship between signs and viral load – the quantity of the virus that causes COVID in an individual – additionally differed between adults and younger kids.

While adults with excessive viral hundreds – suggesting they had been extra contagious – usually had extra extreme COVID-19 signs, that was not the case with younger youngsters. This means that kids with delicate or no signs may nonetheless be extremely contagious.

Karron says these findings ought to assist dad and mom and others make higher choices. She says that even when younger kids don’t have signs, they need to be examined for COVID-19 if they’ve been uncovered to others with the illness. And she recommends appearing on the outcomes.

“If a family is infected with the virus, and the 2-year-old [has no symptoms], and people are thinking about a visit to elderly grandparents … one shouldn’t assume that the 2-year-old is uninfected,” Karron says. “That child should be tested along with other family members.”

Testing also needs to be thought of for younger kids uncovered to COVID-19 at childcare services, she says.

But different specialists didn’t essentially agree.

“I question whether that effort is worth it,” says Dean Blumberg, MD, a professor and chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at UC Davis Health in Sacramento, CA.

He notes that current FDA steerage for COVID-19 testing calls for 3 unfavorable at-home antigen checks – which detect proteins, referred to as antigens, from the virus that causes COVID-19 – to substantiate lack of illness.

“That would take 4 days to get those tests done,” he says. “So, it’s a lot of testing. It’s a lot of record keeping, it’s inconvenient, it’s uncomfortable to be tested, and I just question whether it’s worth that effort.”

Do the Findings Still Apply?

Blumberg additionally questions whether or not the examine, which was accomplished nearly a yr in the past, displays the present pandemic panorama.

Although the specialists interviewed had completely different opinions of the findings, they shared related views on vaccination.

“The most important thing that parents can do is get their kids vaccinated, be vaccinated themselves, and have everybody in the household vaccinated and up to date for all doses that are indicated,” Blumberg says.

Karron notes that vaccination might be extra vital within the coming months.

“Summer is ending; school is starting,” she says. “We’re going to be in large groups indoors again very soon. To keep young children safe, I think it’s really important for them to get vaccinated.”

The post Many Young Kids With COVID Show No Symptoms of the Disease appeared first on Healthy and Slim Life.

Aug. 26, 2022 – Listen up, all people: If you’ve ever thought your favourite track made your complete physique really feel higher, new science means that wasn’t simply your creativeness.

In truth, it’s not solely music that has an analgesic, or pain-reducing, impact. Many varieties of sounds or noises might help, researchers have discovered – in the event that they’re performed on the proper quantity, that’s.

Doctors and researchers have lengthy identified a couple of connection between sound and the physique. Music remedy has been used for many years to assist handle ache after an operation, throughout labor and after childbirth, and through most cancers remedy.

But why this occurs isn’t properly understood. Some theories counsel the analgesic results of sound are psychological – that’s, they calm, or distract, an individual from the ache.

This new analysis means that one thing deeper is at work. And the paper, printed in Science, might make clear the interior workings of the mind, revealing the circuitry working behind this ache aid.

Want to Hear More?

Yuanyuan (Kevin) Liu, PhD, is a sensory biology and ache researcher for the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and a co-author of the research.

“Relative sound intensity might play a role in helping reduce pain,” he says. “Low-intensity sound is able to inactivate the audio-somatosensory pathway and thus the activation of the somatosensory thalamus.” That means a noise performed at low quantity seems to blunt exercise in components of the mind answerable for signaling ache.

In the research, scientists injected mice with an answer that induced discomfort of their paw. They then placed on quite a lot of sounds at totally different intensities, starting from nice music to white noise, and watched for any adjustments within the rodents’ conduct.

What they noticed, in line with Liu, steered that the sounds “reduced reflexive paw withdrawal and aversion to painful stimuli – indicators of analgesia for rodents.” In different phrases, the sounds appeared to assist scale back ache within the mice.

The supreme quantity for ache aid was simply 5 decibels above room noise, the researchers discovered.

“The 5-decibel low-intensity sound is related to the background sound,” Liu explains. “It is not an absolute but rather a relative value.” So, you’d wish to elevate the amount only a bit louder than the background noise wherever you’re.

And in what could be excellent news for sludge metallic followers, the varieties of sound performed made no distinction. Even when noises had been adjusted to be “unpleasant,” taking part in them on the proper quantity nonetheless offered a pain-relieving impact.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re into Mozart or Metallica, in line with the findings, no less than. Either can work – as long as the tunes are performed on the proper quantity.

The Future of Sound and Pain Management

Liu cautions that relating to transcribing the symphony of how physique and thoughts reply to sound, we’re solely within the opening measures.

“There’s still a long way to translate these findings in mice to the human context,” he says.

We can’t say for positive that human brains work the identical as mouse brains when uncovered to sound. But the findings in mice can provide clues about how our brains may function – and due to this fact present us with one piece of the puzzle in understanding how sound influences the notion of ache.

“We hope our study opens up new directions for the field of sound-induced analgesia,” Liu says. But rather more analysis must be executed for that to occur.

The post New Science May Show Why Sound Can Ease Pain appeared first on Healthy and Slim Life.

Nov. 8, 2021 — A leaked trove of papers from inside Facebook reveals that the social media large’s inner analysis uncovered a bunch of issues on the platform associated to public well being and different points, however did just about nothing about it.

The information had been leaked by a whistleblower, former Facebook worker Frances Haugen, who shared tens of hundreds of paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Congress, and a consortium of stories organizations. She has since testified earlier than the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and European lawmakers.

Amplifying ‘Anti-Vaxxers’ and Other Misinformation

President Joe Biden brought on a stir in July when he mentioned that due to rampant misinformation in regards to the COVID-19 vaccine, social media platforms like Facebook are “killing people — I mean they’re really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” he said. “And they’re killing people.”

While he was compelled to stroll again the assertion, the leaked papers recommend he wasn’t essentially fallacious.

According to the papers, in March — a time when the White House was getting ready a $1.5 billion marketing campaign towards vaccine misinformation — some Facebook staff thought they’d discovered a method to counter these lies on the platform, and on the similar time prioritize professional sources just like the World Health Organization.

“Given these results, I’m assuming we’re hoping to launch ASAP,” an worker wrote.

But Facebook ignored among the options and executives dragged their heels implementing others. Another proposal, geared toward curbing anti-vaccine feedback, was additionally ignored.

“Why would you not remove comments? Because engagement is the only thing that matters,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an web watchdog group, informed The Associated Press. “It drives attention and attention equals eyeballs and eyeballs equal ad revenue.”

Facebook’s algorithms — which decide the content material you see in your feed — additionally assist to unfold misinformation.

“It’s not like the anti-vax contingent was created by Facebook,” says Dean Schillinger, MD, director of the Health Communications Research Program on the University of California-San Francisco. “The algorithm said, ‘OK, let’s find certain people with certain political beliefs and let’s link them to anti-vaxxers,’” amplifying the misinformation. “That is certainly something that’s novel.”

If that weren’t sufficient, it seems Facebook might have misled Congress in regards to the firm’s understanding of how COVID misinformation unfold on the platform. In July, two prime House Democrats wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg requesting particulars about what number of customers had seen COVID misinformation and the way a lot cash the corporate produced from these posts.

“At this time, we have nothing to share in response to the questions you have raised, outside of what Mark has said publicly,” the corporate mentioned in response.

But the leaked papers present that by that time, Facebook’s researchers had run a number of research on COVID misinformation and produced massive inner stories. Employees had been in a position to calculate the variety of views garnered by a extensively shared piece of misinformation. But the corporate didn’t acknowledge that to Congress.

Keeping this data secret was an enormous missed alternative to make sure science-backed data reached most of the people, says Sherry Pagoto, PhD, director of the UConn Center for mHealth and Social Media.

“We know how misinformation spreads, so how can we think more about disseminating good information?” she says. “They have all kinds of data on the characteristics of messages that go far. How can we use what they know in the field of health communication to come up with a plan?”

In an emailed assertion, a spokesperson for Meta (within the midst of the uproar, Facebook introduced a brand new company title) mentioned, “There’s no silver bullet to fighting misinformation, which is why we take a comprehensive approach, which includes removing more than 20 million pieces of content that break our COVID misinformation policies, permanently banning thousands of repeat offenders from our services, connecting more than 2 billion people to reliable information about COVID-19 and vaccines, and partnering with independent fact-checkers.”

Ignoring Instagram’s Effect on Vulnerable Teens’ Mental Health

Combating misinformation isn’t the one method Facebook and its subsidiaries may have acted to guard public well being. The firm was additionally conscious of its adverse affect on younger individuals’s psychological well being, however publicly denied it.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is extraordinarily widespread amongst teenage women. But the photo-sharing app exposes them repeatedly to pictures of idealized our bodies and faces, which might result in adverse self-comparisons and stress to look good.

Pro-eating dysfunction content material can also be extensively obtainable on the platform. For years, social science and psychological well being researchers have been social media’s impact on psychological well being, notably for adolescents. Studies have discovered hyperlinks between Instagram use and despair, nervousness, low vanity, and consuming issues.

The Facebook papers revealed what Instagram researchers referred to as a “teen mental health deep dive.” And there have been severe issues: The inner analysis confirmed that the platform made physique picture points worse for 1 in 3 teenage women, and 14% of teenage boys mentioned Instagram made them really feel worse about themselves. The information linked use of the app with nervousness and despair. And amongst teenagers who reported ideas of suicide, 6% of American customers and 13% of British ones tied that impulse on to Instagram.

Jean Twenge, PhD, writer of iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, has been learning social media’s results on younger individuals for nearly a decade.

“I was not surprised that Facebook was finding social media could have significant links to depression and self-harm. The academic research has been showing that for years,” she says. “I was surprised how in-depth their research was into exactly the mindset of teen girls using Instagram. Their research really built on what we already knew.”

As with Facebook’s findings on misinformation, the corporate publicly downplayed Instagram’s adverse results — together with in feedback to Congress — and did little to regulate teen customers’ expertise on the app.

“I think that given what they knew about Instagram and mental health, it certainly would’ve been the right thing to do to make changes to the platform,” Twenge says.

In their e-mail, the Meta spokesperson mentioned, “Our research doesn’t conclude that Instagram is inherently bad for teens. While some teens told us Instagram made them feel worse when they were struggling with issues like loneliness, anxiety, and sadness, more teens told us that Instagram made them feel better when experiencing these same issues.”

A Responsibility to the Public Good?

While Facebook customers could also be shocked to find out how the corporate usually put income forward of its prospects’ well being, those that research public well being are something however.

“This is not a problem in any way unique to social media platforms,” Schillinger says.
“Corporate entities frequently pursue policies that engage the public to participate in activities, to purchase or consume products, to implement behaviors that are unhealthy to themselves or others or the planet. … Do you think Facebook is acting differently than any other company in that space?”

Which is the place the potential for regulation is available in, Haugen, the whistleblower, mentioned. She has referred to as for it, as have many lawmakers within the wake of her revelations.

“Large organizations that have influence and access to lots of people need to be accountable to the well-being of that population, just as a matter of principle,” says sociologist Damon Centola, PhD, writer of Change: How to Make Big Things Happen.

He likens the explosion of social media to the historical past of tv, which has been regulated in quite a few methods for many years.

“I think that provides us with a parallel of social media and the capacity of the medium to influence the population,” he says. “It seems to me that organizations can’t get away with saying they won’t take public welfare into account.”

The so-called Facebook Papers are most damning, some consultants say, as a result of the corporate’s protection claims their analysis was solely meant for product improvement, so it doesn’t show something.

This disregards all of the peer-reviewed papers, printed in revered journals, that reinforce the findings of their inner analysis. Taken collectively, the 2 sorts of analysis depart little room for doubt, and little doubt that one thing wants to vary.

“Think of it like environmental polluting,” Centola says. “Companies can know they’re polluting, but they can also say it didn’t actually matter, it didn’t cause any harm. But then you get the documentation saying no, that has huge effects. That’s when it really does matter.”

Social Media as a Force for Good

But there may be one potential upside of the Facebook papers, in keeping with the consultants: It’s clear that the corporate is aware of rather a lot about how you can unfold messages successfully. With sufficient stress, Facebook and different social media platforms might now start to make use of these insights in a constructive course.

“Facebook should be developing a strong collaboration with trustworthy entities to develop content that’s both true and promotes public health, while also engaging and algorithmically driven,” Schillinger says. “If we can use the platform and the reach and the [artificial intelligence] Facebook has for health-promoting content, the sky’s the limit.”

And efforts like that could be on the horizon.

“We’re focused on building new features to help people struggling with negative social comparison or negative body image,” the Meta spokesperson wrote within the e-mail. “We’re also continuing to look for opportunities to work with more partners to publish independent studies in this area, and we’re working through how we can allow external researchers more access to our data in a way that respects people’s privacy.”

Which is to not say that Facebook will voluntarily put public well being earlier than the corporate’s must generate income, with out laws forcing them to take action.

“I do think Facebook is interested in making their platform better for users. But their first interest is always going to be having as many users as possible spending as much time as possible on the platform,” Twenge says. “Those two desires are often at cross-purposes.”

The post Leaked Documents Show Facebook Put Profit Before Public Good appeared first on Healthy and Slim Life.