SAN FRANCISCO, CA–December 4, 2020–Imagine swabbing your nostrils, putting the swab in a device, and getting a read-out on your phone in 15 to 30 minutes that tells you if you are infected with the COVID-19 virus. This has been the vision for a team of scientists at Gladstone Institutes, University of California, Berkeley (UC…
In March, April Abbott dragged a hospital bed into her office at Deaconess Hospital in Evansville, Ind. In the nine months since, she has slept in it a half-dozen times while working overnight in her clinical microbiology laboratory, where a team of some 40 scientists toils around the clock running coronavirus tests. These all-night stints…
“In a transient environment, like a hotel, motel or dormitory, you don’t know who was there before you and what their health was,” said Wes Davis, the director of technical services with the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, a trade association, adding that good housekeeping is a top priority in such places. “As for the…
That said, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. While pleasant distractions provide valuable mental and physiological breaks from stressful conditions, “my hesitation with recommending distraction,” Dr. Zoccola said, “is that while it can get people out of the moment, if it goes on too long, that might prevent folks from addressing…
Many boys and men I interviewed for my book assured me they didn’t need support networks, because they had a close friend or two in whom they confided. What these boys and men ultimately sought from male friends wasn’t emotional support; they used what I call “targeted transparency” for solutions to the few, carefully vetted…
But that strange walk, along with the symmetrical eye-muscle abnormality, suggested to Hoffman yet another diagnosis. The symptoms made up two-thirds of a triad that Hoffman had often observed and treated in his 20 years in the E.R. but had never seen quite so clearly. Called Wernicke’s encephalopathy, it is caused by a deficiency of…
For heavy (ex-)smokers, lung cancer screening using low-dose computed tomography (low-dose CT, LDCT) offers more benefit than harm: The procedure can save a number of people from dying of lung cancer; for some of them, it might also prolong overall survival. This is the conclusion drawn by IQWiG in its final report commissioned by the…
FAIRFAX, Va.– The final 2021 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) issued this week by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will result in reimbursement cuts in the range of 10% for neurointerventional procedures, according to a detailed analysis published last week in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery™, the leading international peer-reviewed journal for…
There are around 40 million blind people in the world. Many of them would not benefit from a treatment of the eyes, e.g. in cases with damage to the optical nerve, where the connection between eye and brain is lost. For these patients, direct stimulation of the visual areas in the back of the brain…
Chestnut Hill, Mass. (12/03/2020) – Ocean pollution is widespread and getting worse, and when toxins in the oceans make landfall they imperil the health and well-being of more than 3 billion people, according to a new report by an international coalition of scientists led by Boston College’s Global Observatory on Pollution on Health and the…