Category: Health

Eli Lilly says other COVID-19 antibody drug trials ongoing after study halted for safety concern

By Carl O’Donnell and Michael Erman



a large building: FILE PHOTO: Eli Lilly logo is shown on one of their offices in San Diego

© Reuters/MIKE BLAKE
FILE PHOTO: Eli Lilly logo is shown on one of their offices in San Diego

(Reuters) – Eli Lilly & Co on Wednesday said other trials of its experimental coronavirus antibody therapy remain on track after a government-run study testing the treatment in hospitalized COVID-19 patients was paused due to safety concerns.

Lilly said on Tuesday that an independent safety monitoring board requested a pause in the trial, called ACTIV-3, due to a potential safety issue.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is collaborating with Lilly on the trial, said the advisory board paused the trial after seeing a “difference in clinical status” between patients on Lilly’s drug on those who received a placebo, without providing further detail.

“They’ve crossed the boundary” for an acceptable level of safety concerns in the trial, said Dr. Richard Chaisson, professor of medicine at

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COVID Cases Climbing in 36 States | Health News

By Robin Foster and E.J. Mundell
HealthDay Reporters

(HealthDay)

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 14, 2020 (HealthDay News) — Coronavirus outbreaks in the Midwest and Western United States have driven the national case count to its highest level since August, fueling fears of what the coming winter will mean for the country.

COVID-19 cases are starting to climb in 36 states, including parts of the Northeast, which is starting to backslide after months of progress, The New York Times reported. More than 820 new deaths and more than 54,500 new cases were announced across the country on Tuesday, the newspaper said. Idaho and Wisconsin set single-day records for new cases.

About 50,000 new cases are being reported each day in the United States for the week ending Monday, the Times reported. That is still less than in late July, when the country was seeing more than 66,000 cases each day.

But the trajectory

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How do pandemics end? History suggests diseases fade but are almost never truly gone

<span class="caption">The COVID-19 new normal might be here for quite some time.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="link rapid-noclick-resp" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/reflecting-on-her-day-royalty-free-image/1263884394" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-ylk="slk:SolStock/E+ via Getty Images">SolStock/E+ via Getty Images</a></span>
The COVID-19 new normal might be here for quite some time. SolStock/E+ via Getty Images

When will the pandemic end? All these months in, with over 37 million COVID-19 cases and more than 1 million deaths globally, you may be wondering, with increasing exasperation, how long this will continue.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, epidemiologists and public health specialists have been using mathematical models to forecast the future in an effort to curb the coronvirus’s spread. But infectious disease modeling is tricky. Epidemiologists warn that “[m]odels are not crystal balls,” and even sophisticated versions, like those that combine forecasts or use machine learning, can’t necessarily reveal when the pandemic will end or how many people will die.

As a historian who studies disease and public health, I suggest that instead of looking forward for clues, you can look back to see what brought past outbreaks to a close –

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U.K.’s Film and TV Charity Launches Two-Year Program For Better Mental Health in Film and TV

The U.K.’s Film and TV Charity has launched the Whole Picture Program, a two-year initiative designed to to improve the mental health and wellbeing of the 200,000 people who work behind the scenes in film, TV and cinema.

The Film and TV Charity has now secured £3 million ($3.87 million) in funding from Amazon Prime Video, Banijay U.K., BBC, BBC Studios, Channel 4, IMG, ITV, Sky, Sky Studios, Sony Pictures Entertainment, The Walt Disney Company, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia to deliver the program that is supported by the BFI and backed by U.K. mental health charity Mind. The charity estimates that mental health problems, including staff turnover, cost the sector at least £300 million ($387 million) in losses each year.

The program will deliver a toolkit for mentally healthy productions; enhanced professional and peer support for freelancers; people skills and training guides; industry actions to improve behavior; and anti-bullying services and

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Facebook to crack down on ads that discourage vaccines

The social media giant, however, stopped short of banning anti-vax content.

Catherine Thorbecke

October 14, 2020, 2:28 PM

3 min read

Facebook announced a new policy that prohibits advertisements on the platform that discourage people from getting vaccines, as part of a new effort to encourage people to get flu shots amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We don’t want these ads on our platform,” Kang-Xing Jin, the company’s head of health and Rob Leathern, the director of product management, said in a blog post Tuesday.

The post added that while they already don’t allow ads featuring vaccine hoaxes, “Now, if an ad explicitly discourages someone from getting a vaccine, we’ll reject it.”

Moreover, the social media giant announced the launch of a new campaign to provide information about flu vaccines to users, and pledged to work with “global health partners on campaigns to

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Northern Ireland to go into four-week partial lockdown



a person holding a sign: Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA

© Provided by The Guardian
Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA

Northern Ireland is to close schools, pubs and restaurants in a raft of new restrictions to try to contain exploding rates of Covid-19 infection.

Arlene Foster, the first minister, announced the partial lockdown on Wednesday at a special sitting of the Stormont assembly in response to what has become a pandemic hotspot.

The new rules start on Friday and are to last four weeks with the exception of schools, which will shut for two weeks.

The hospitality sector will close apart from deliveries and takeaways. Off-licences and supermarkets cannot sell alcohol after 8pm. There will be no indoor sport or organised contact sport involving mixing of households, other than at elite level.

Close-contact services, apart from essential health services, are to cease. Mobile hairdressers and make-up artists are banned from from working in homes. Gyms can remain open for individual training but

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Do Musical Instruments Spread the Coronavirus?

As with pretty much every other activity right now, having the quintet gather outdoors is a great idea. If any neighbors complain, explain that the backyard practices are part of a global effort to keep them from dying. If anyone happens to be infected, any virus that emanates in the heat of performance will likely fade into the sky and disperse like the music itself. Indoors, as any parent of a child who’s learning an instrument knows, everything is trapped and can echo around the room indefinitely.

Some instruments do seem to pose more risk than others. Obviously, string instruments can be played without even opening your mouth, but it sounds like your daughter’s quintet is too far along to take kindly to a suggestion that they all learn new instruments. Because the virus is sent into the air by

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Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio pledges $50 million for new health justice initiative

Ray Dalio, billionaire and founder of Bridgewater Associates LP, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., on Wednesday, May 1, 2019. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio is giving $50 million to NewYork-Presbyterian to fight health inequality at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the disproportionate access to health care in the U.S.

The grant, which is from Dalio Philanthropies, will establish the Dalio Center for Health Justice. The center will “address health disparities and health justice through research, education, advocacy and investment in communities,” a statement said. Other initiatives include tackling unconscious bias in medicine, including when it comes to clinical trials.

“Our goal is to contribute to equal healthcare and equal education because we believe that these are the most fundamental building blocks of equal opportunity and a

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Try High-Intensity Interval Training. You Might Like It.

Supervised lab sessions are not a good reflection of real-life exercise, however. So, as a final step in the study, the researchers asked the volunteers to go home and work out on their own for a month, keeping exercise logs, then return to the lab to talk at length with the researchers again.

This month of do-it-yourself workouts proved to be revealing. Almost everyone remained active, with most completing frequent, moderate exercise sessions, like the 45-minute bike rides at the lab. But many also threaded some sort of interval training into their weekly workouts, although few of these sessions replicated the structured intervals from the lab. Instead, people tended to sprint up and down stairs or grunted through some quick burpees and other body weight exercises.

Most interesting, during their subsequent, prolonged interviews with the researchers, the volunteers who interval trained on their own said they felt more engaged and

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World Bank approves $12B to finance virus vaccines, care

The World Bank has approved $12 billion in financing to help developing countries buy and distribute coronavirus vaccines, tests, and treatments, aiming to support the vaccination of up to 1 billion people.

The $12 billion “envelope” is part of a wider World Bank Group package of up to $160 billion to help developing countries fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the bank said in a statement late Tuesday.

The World Bank said its COVID-19 emergency response programs are already reaching 111 countries.

Citizens in developing countries also need access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, it said.


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“We are extending and expanding our fast-track approach to address the COVID emergency so that developing countries have fair and equal access to vaccines,” said the bank’s president, David Malpass, said in the statement.

“Access

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