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Eby and her colleagues have found that bats shed more Hendra virus after being stressed by food shortages, which have increased as people cut down native trees that once provided the nectar the bats like to eat. Emily Gurley, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, succeeded in winning government funding to piece together how the Nipah virus jumped from bats to people in Bangladesh. [Extracted from the article]

"I think most people that are developing these vaccines feel like the vaccine is not going to trigger MIS-C, but it's something that will be monitored for very closely both in the trials and more importantly, postlicensure", added O'Leary, from the University of Colorado. Children as young as first graders may be able to get the coronavirus vaccine by the time school starts in September, presuming trials are successful in those age groups, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with ProPublica. [Extracted from the article]

The state agency has tried to give local health providers consistent information about how many doses they'll receive at their clinics and hospitals, but Avula said state officials will have to instead explain the erratic allocations. "For the past three weeks, jurisdiction allocations have remained relatively steady around 4.3 million total doses (or just over 2 million first doses) of both Pfizer and Moderna, which has provided additional predictability", the HHS spokesperson said. Hospitals and clinics across the country are canceling vaccine appointments because the Trump administration tells states how many doses they'll receive only one week at a time, making it all but impossible to plan a comprehensive vaccination campaign. [Extracted from the article]

"The majority of discarded vaccine is related to vials broken in handling and syringe issues, such as bent or broken needles or clients refusing after the vaccine dose was drawn", said Department of Health spokesman Barry Ciccocioppo. In Washington, a health facility allegedly threw out some COVID-19 vaccine doses at the end of workers' shifts because staff believed state guidelines blocked them from giving unused shots to people below the top priority tier. "The state is aware that Pueblo Local Public Health rendered 300 doses of the Pfizer vaccine unusable after a portable vaccine storage unit malfunction", a spokesperson from the state's Joint Information Center said. [Extracted from the article]

Internal Documents Show Fauci Plays a Key Role That puts Fauci in the room with the companies - including Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca - in deciding whether the vaccines are ready to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration. "When AstraZeneca had an adverse side effect, we have a DSMB looking at our trial - the fact that it's the same DSMB means that there's not one DSMB that has to go educate another DSMB", Zaks said. [Extracted from the article]

Dr. Mark Zucker, director of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center's heart transplant center, is departing after a yearlong administrative leave, the New Jersey hospital said Friday. Newark Beth Israel's one-year rate for heart transplants had dipped below the national average, and Zucker was concerned that the program might attract scrutiny from federal regulators. [Extracted from the article]

Dr. Mark Zucker, director of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center's heart transplant center, is departing after a yearlong administrative leave, the New Jersey hospital said Friday. Newark Beth Israel's one-year rate for heart transplants had dipped below the national average, and Zucker was concerned that the program might attract scrutiny from federal regulators. [Extracted from the article]

Those bats turned out to be the carriers of the deadly Hendra virus, which can jump from bats to horses and then to humans. Wildlife ecologist Peggy Eby fell in love with flying foxes when she moved to Australia from Kansas. [Extracted from the article]

Ebola is a disease that would typically rank highly using the U.S.CDC's tool because it gives more points to pathogens with ahigher fatality rate. We also asked it to compare the outbreak sites to a set of placesthat were in the area where Ebola-carrying animals could livebut had not seen an Ebola spillover. Why Nigeria's Deforestation May Increase Its Risk We were initially surprised to see the cluster of flaggedlocations in the southwest region of Nigeria, since the nationhas never been the starting point for an Ebola outbreak. [Extracted from the article]

The Group That Governs U.S. Transplant Policies Voted to Require Testing of At-Risk Organ Donors for Chagas Disease: Bob Naedele died in 2018 after receiving a heart infected with the parasite that causes Chagas disease. Experts said that any testing requirement can still improve outcomes even if results arrive after a transplant because medical teams could begin treating an infection promptly, rather than discovering the disease after symptoms appear. The organization that governs U.S. organ transplant policies voted unanimously on Monday to require that donors be tested for a parasitic disease called Chagas. [Extracted from the article]

Health In Harmony uses the cups to hold tree seedlings in its 11 nurseries. He works for Health In Harmony as a paid "forest guardian", trekking barefoot through the reserve to collect seedlings and deter loggers, people harvesting wild yams and hunters poaching lemurs. Madagascar We're investigating the cause of viruses spilling over from animals to humans -- and what can be done to stop it. "I have learned that the forest, humans and animals are interdependent", Jocelyn said, "and if the forest is sick, then the animals will be sick, and animals will surely impact humans' health too.". [Extracted from the article]

For months, parents have been told COVID vaccines for their little ones are coming. Creech, who is also a principal investigator for Moderna's pediatric vaccine trials, and Spearman both told me they expect authorization by April or, in a worst-case scenario, May. Parents, again confused by the supposed age de-escalation policy, have speculated that Moderna could not ask the FDA for authorization for the youngest kids before the teens had access to the vaccine. What's Holding Up the COVID Vaccines for Children Under 5?. [Extracted from the article]

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. The percentage of all ProPublica staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 59%, the same as last year. [Extracted from the article]

"The CDC needs to have more money and more flexible money", former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden told me. The 2014 Ebola epidemic was supposed to be a "global wakeup call", yet in 2018, the CDC scaled back its epidemic prevention work as money ran out. Is influenced by both politics and shifts in public attention. [Extracted from the article]

Yang noted that Angelica was wearing a wig; hair loss is a symptom of syphilis. Credit:Photos provided by Solidad Odunuga PHOTO (COLOR): Yang has taken multiple trips to Huron to try and get Angelica into treatment. Angelica sat silently in the back seat as Yang drove to the clinic. She asked Sevilla if he would be OK if they drove Angelica to the clinic; they technically weren't supposed to because of coronavirus precautions, but Yang wasn't sure she could convince Angelica to walk. [Extracted from the article]

Largo doesn't speak English, and medical providers don'talways have Spanish-speaking staff, so she's not confidentthat she'll be able to ask questions about billing andother details once she gets to a vaccination site. Your Immigration Status DoesNot Matter, Either Camille lives in Baltimore with her 77-year-old mother.(She asked to be identified only by her first name forprivacy reasons.) When a nonprofit organization helped hermother get a vaccination appointment an hour away inCollege Park, Maryland, Camille took time off from work todrive her there. Many vaccination sites askfor insurance and Social Security information so they cancharge administrative fees to insurance companies or thefederal government, but those aren't requirements for beingable to get vaccinated. April 1, 5 a.m. EDT Our New Look Vaccines Vaccinating America Vaccinations for the coronavirus are supposed to befree and available to all Americans regardless of insuranceor immigration status. [Extracted from the article]

Research is beginning to suggest that differences in immuneresponse may be due to the type of medication a patient ison, said Dr. Alfred Kim, assistant professor of medicine atthe Washington University School of Medicine and co-directorof the university's Lupus Clinic. Furthermore, as the coronavirus continues tomutate, breakthrough cases may be the leading indicator ofa new variant that is more resistant to a vaccine, whichcould necessitate manufacturers adapting their vaccines ordeveloping booster shots. Nash, from the CUNY's public health school, said it's notalways possible to go back to a patient to get a new sample-- even patients who remain hospitalized may no longer beshedding enough virus after a while. TheLong Island doctor stressed that even patients who finishedrituximab treatment months ago should be aware that theirbodies may not respond to the COVID-19 vaccine. [Extracted from the article]

How Inequity Gets Built Into America's Vaccination System: People eligible for the coronavirus vaccine tell us they are running up against barriers that are designed into the very systems meant to serve those most at risk of dying of the disease. Nebraska's Spanish-language vaccine website offers a hotline to schedule appointments by phone. Say thank you for your registration?" Virginia's initial vaccine registration system indeed provided no email confirmation, but the new system, implemented on Feb. 16, now provides "an immediate acknowledgement on the screen" as well as an email or text message, according to health department spokesperson Melissa Gordon. New York state has a vaccination hotline for scheduling appointments by phone, but only for vaccines administered at state-run sites. [Extracted from the article]

Para las personas con discapacidades, puede ser un reto simplemente poder acudir a citas Desde el momento en que su padre de 69 años de edad, José Balboa, cumplió los requisitos para vacunarse, Kristine Mathason ha pasado parte de cada día en el teléfono o en internet tratando de obtener una vacuna. Cómo se incorpora la inequidad en el sistema de vacunación de Estados Unidos: Las personas que reúnen los requisitos para recibir la vacuna contra el coronavirus nos dicen que se están topando con barreras que están diseñadas en los mismos sistemas destinados a atender a las personas con mayor riesgo de morir por la enfermedad. "Mi pesadilla es que tengamos un sistema de salud de dos niveles en el que hay personas ricas, privilegiadas o conectadas, y luego queden todos los demás", dijo el Dr. Jonathan Jackson, director del Centro de Investigación sobre Acceso, Reclutamiento y Participación Comunitaria del Hospital General de Massachusetts y de la Facultad de Medicina de Harvard. Algunas áreas únicamente ofrecen la opción de vacunarse en centros que solo atienden a personas en automóvil, lo cual excluye a personas que carecen de un vehículo o que no cuentan con alguien que los lleve. [Extracted from the article]

This form requires JavaScript to complete. Trabajemos juntos para identificar las historias importantes y darlas a conocer. Ayúdenos a entender lo que debemos cubrir, o participe como experto, para garantizar que informemos lo correcto. [Extracted from the article]

In state vaccination registries, race and ethnicity fields are simplyconsidered "nice to have", explained Mitchel Rothholz, chief ofgovernance and state affiliates for the American PharmacistsAssociation. California's state plan includes "a public information campaign to support vaccine confidence", but does not provide details apartfrom the state's intention to use social media, broadcast outlets andword of mouth. The politicization of the pandemic has mobilized the Black andbrown medical scientific community to dig into the research andhow the vaccines work, Money said, "so that they can feel assuredthat the vaccine's safe and it's effective and they can convey themessage to their patients and to their community constituents." Black residents in Virginia have expressed concerns about howrapidly the early vaccines were developed, said Dr. NormanOliver, Virginia's state health commissioner. [Extracted from the article]

Dec. 18, 2020, 4:23 p.m. EST CORONAVIRUS Stanford Medicine officials relied on a faulty algorithm todetermine who should get vaccinated first, and it prioritizedsome high-ranking doctors over patient-facing medicalresidents. Dr. Sarah Johnson, a Stanford Medicine resident who had yetto receive a COVID-19 vaccine. [Extracted from the article]

La información errónea, especialmente en los medios de comunicación social, tenía como objetivo intimidar a la gente para que no fuera a las urnas, mientras que el número de lugares de votación en algunas ciudades no estuvo a la par del ritmo del aumento del registro de votantes, lo que estimuló las expectativas de largas filas en los barrios de minorías y de bajos ingresos donde los residentes votan predominantemente en persona. Los Centros para el Control y la Prevención de Enfermedades dijeron en un artículo el lunes que las personas con el coronavirus "tienen derecho a votar, independientemente de si están enfermos o en cuarentena". Un estudio de 2019 para National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER por sus siglas en inglés, Oficina Nacional de Investigación Económica) usó datos de localización de celulares para estimar que los residentes de los barrios negros esperaron 29 % más para votar en las elecciones de 2016 y fueron 74 % más propensos a pasar más de 30 minutos en el centro de votación. Más de 3 millones de votantes en Pennsylvania solicitaron una boleta por correo para la elección, una novedad en un estado que en años anteriores ha votado casi totalmente en persona el día de las elecciones. [Extracted from the article]

How -- and When -- Can the Coronavirus Vaccine Become a Reality? It is likely we'll eventually have a coronavirus vaccine -- but perhaps not as quickly as some expect. At least for Moderna's vaccine trial, here's how they're going to tell the difference: Moderna's vaccine is what's known as an mRNA vaccine. "The FDA will thoroughly evaluate the data submitted in support of a vaccine's safety and effectiveness, and will approve a vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19 only if the FDA determines that it is safe and effective for its intended use.". [Extracted from the article]

"Fast-Tracking" a Coronavirus Vaccine Sounds Great. It's Not That Simple: Among the many ways to shorten the vaccine development timeline, approving a treatment based on antibody data -- without completing a phase 3 trial -- could be contentious. No matter what happens, Moderna is committed to completing its phase 3 trial, Zaks said, even if the FDA allows its vaccine on the market based on antibody data before the trial is complete. [Extracted from the article]

What Parents Should Know About Coronavirus as Kids Return to Babysitters, Day Cares and Camps: You never planned on raising kids during a pandemic, and there are no easy decisions. ProPublica scoured the latest research and talked to seven infectious disease and public health experts to help think through the issues facing parents For example, one study of 105 confirmed COVID-19 patients and the 392 people they came in contact with in their households found that the infection rate among adults in the households was "dramatically higher" than that of children, with 20.5% of adults falling sick, compared with 4% of those younger than 18. Experts say, and studies show, child care workers should follow the CDC guidelines to reduce the risk of exposure as much as possible: Caregivers and kids should be regularly screened for coughing, difficulty breathing, fever and other symptoms. [Extracted from the article]

You Don't Need Invasive Tech for Successful Contact Tracing. Here's How It Works.: While most discussions have focused on countries' use of surveillance technology, contact tracing is actually a fairly manual process. The same study found that contacts who lived with the patient or who had traveled with the patient were at higher risk of infection than other close contacts, which included people who had shared a meal or interacted socially. Beyond traditional manual contact tracing, there's been considerable buzz about the potential use of phone apps for contact tracing, particularly after Apple and Google announced last month that they would work together to create a contact tracing system. [Extracted from the article]

Do I Know Enough to Get a Job as a Contact Tracer? Though requirements vary from state to state, many of them are hiring thousands of contact tracers in an effort to curb coronavirus spread. Indeed, this could be an opportunity for the U.S. to provide employment for thousands of people who have recently lost their jobs. [Extracted from the article]

100,000 Lives Lost to COVID-19. Help Us Report on Coronavirus Are you a public health worker, medical provider, elected official, patient or other COVID-19 expert? COVID-19 has also laid bare many long-standing inequities and failings in America's health care system. Frontline health care workers were not given adequate PPE and were sometimes fired for speaking up about i While health workers have not, thankfully, been dying at conspicuously higher rates, they continue to be susceptible to the virus due to their work. [Extracted from the article]

If we're going to beat this nefarious virus together A study of 94 patients in Guangzhou, China, found "the highest viral load in throat swabs at the time of symptom onset" and concluded that meant that patients would be most infectious right before or at the time when symptoms started appearing. The high viral load early on in the course of disease for COVID-19 patients "suggests that [the virus] can be transmitted easily, even when symptoms are relatively mild", wrote the authors of the Lancet paper. It's pretty much impossible for the CDC to weigh in all the possible symptoms that this coronavirus might cause, especially the more subjective ones like mild headaches or fatigue, even if they could turn out to be early COVID-19 symptoms for some. [Extracted from the article]

ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as of the journalism community more broadly, and each year we publish a report of what we're doing about it. Outreach Trips: A team coordinates visits by ProPublica journalists to schools across the country, especially historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions with journalism programs. [Extracted from the article]

What Antibody Studies Can Tell You -- and More Importantly, What They Can't: Coronavirus antibody studies and what they allegedly show have triggered fierce debates, further confusing public understanding. Antibody studies can be used to answer more questions than you might think When the coronavirus emerged, the first type of diagnostic that scientists raced to produce was a test that could detect an active infection. Test accuracy can skew results in some pretty surprising ways Another key question for any sero-survey is how accurate the test was. There has never been an abundance of diagnostic tests in New York, which means mostly very sick patients are the ones who've been tested. [Extracted from the article]

Here's What They Can Do: Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, ventilators have been a key focus of the media, politicians and the president. If a patient needs more help, doctors can move up to what's called a non-rebreather mask, which still requires a patient to be able to breathe unassisted but can deliver much higher concentrations of oxygen -- up to 100%. ARDS looks different in COVID-19 patients, according to a doctor at a Long Island hospital that's now treated more than 1,700 COVID-19 patients. Typically, he said, influenza patients stay on a ventilator for less than two weeks -- that's the point at which they'd transition a patient from the breathing tube to a tracheostomy tube, a hollow tube placed in the neck, which provides a more permanent connection to a ventilator. [Extracted from the article]

Coronavirus Tests Are Being Fast-Tracked by the FDA, but It's Unclear How Accurate They Are. Abbott and the testing firms LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics all told ProPublica that tests should be used by physicians along with other information to form a diagnosis. Even Good Tests Can Give Inaccurate Results Clinicians and researchers said that a number of factors could cause inaccurate results on COVID-19 tests, and many of them have nothing to do with the test's design. Instead, a test shortage caused doctors to limit tests to only the sickest patients, at a time when the virus had probably moved out of the back of the nasal cavity and into their lungs. [Extracted from the article]

Coronavirus Advice From Abroad: 7 Lessons America's Governors Should Not Ignore as They Reopen Their Economies: We spoke to frontline experts from around the globe and have compiled a list of recommendations for reopening U.S. states. You may borrow ideas from Asia and Europe that would have been unimaginable a few months ago: Isolating infected people from their families in hotels, requiring masks for everyone on a bus or subway, ordering restaurants to seat people at every other table, limiting certain jobs to people who have proven immunity to the virus. Soon, Korean authorities noticed that new cases were being seeded by international travelers, so they instituted a system in which people arriving from certain countries were met at the gate, tested and told to begin quarantine. Romagnani noted that authorities in Tuscany had begun putting infected people in hotels, which would ordinarily be filled with people visiting one of the world's most beautiful tourist destinations. [Extracted from the article]

But infection control has been a recurring problem at some of the very hospitals that would likely be called upon to treat COVID-19 patients, a ProPublica review of hundreds of hospital inspection reports found. American hospitals, overall, are so bad at preventing infections that hospital-acquired infections are considered a leading cause of death in the United States. Another nurse, at a high-level hospital in western New York that is likely to handle severely ill patients, said the only information he's received is via the hospital's internal newsletter. [Extracted from the article]

The FDA Is Forcing the CDC to Waste Time Double Testing Some Coronavirus Cases: The FDA's strict guidance on test confirmations is one of several obstacles that has slowed the federal government's response to COVID-19. Because of the requirement that the CDC rerun tests conducted by public health labs, as of two weeks ago the CDC's website was lagging in its tally because it was only reporting confirmed cases. The FDA initially required private labs to copy the CDC's test design and have the agency review their tests before allowing them to begin testing. [Extracted from the article]