Every train car in “La Bestia” – The Beast – is a world unto itself, with all the good and evil that entails. Ariel saw the worst of this world when he witnessed, helplessly, as eight people raped one of his fellow train passengers, a young girl, in July 2019. Ariel – not his real...
Amidst the flurry of social media updates about the COVID-19 pandemic, a chart illustrating the importance of flattening the curve has gone viral. The idea is that taking measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 lowers the chances of overwhelming hospitals and increases the chances that all of those who become ill will have access...
At its core, the United States Declaration of Independence argues that all human beings have “unalienable rights.” These include right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These rights apply to all human beings, and cannot be given away. What is more, the Declaration says that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among...
Fear and blame appear to be fast becoming Americans’ defining emotions around COVID-19. Headlines seem to offer either worst-case estimates or government leaders’ mutual accusations. Amid the bewildering figures and contradictory political narratives, it is important to recall that numbers and governments are abstractions – whereas people actually live with and through disease. By fixating...
Melbourne researchers have mapped immune responses from one of Australia’s first novel coronavirus (COVID-19) patients, showing the body’s ability to fight the virus and recover from the infection. Researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) – a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne hospital –...
The Diamond Princess cruise ship. A Georgetown church in Washington, D.C. A Latin American restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina. A hotel in Oklahoma City. Two Broadway theaters in New York City. All announced that they’ve undergone a “deep clean” in recent weeks after discovering that a person infected with the novel coronavirus had been there....
NIH-funded trial of Moderna mRNA vaccine is first of any for COVID-19 On March 16, 2020, Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI) gave the first-ever injection of an investigational vaccine for the 2019 novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, to 4 volunteers participating in a phase I federally sponsored clinical trial. To date, no other trial has been launched...
The virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is stable for several hours to days in aerosols and on surfaces, according to a new study from National Institutes of Health, CDC, UCLA and Princeton University scientists The New England Journal of Medicine. The scientists found that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was detectable in...
Life expectancy in the USA is no longer rising. This stagnation has long been largely attributed to increasing numbers of drug deaths due to the opioid crisis. But Mikko Myrskylä and colleagues have now shown that deaths due to cardiovascular diseases are in fact having a much larger impact on life expectancy. Over each decade...
The novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that emerged in the city of Wuhan, China, last year and has since caused a large scale COVID-19 epidemic and spread to more than 70 other countries is the product of natural evolution, according to findings published in the journal Nature Medicine. The analysis of public genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2...
