Finally, researchers may have ways to combat a deadly respiratory illness.
The disease is not the flu or COVID-19, but respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.
The virus was first identified in 1957 in Baltimore, but it has probably been around for millennia, says Jim Boonyaratanakornkit, a virologist and transplant immunologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. “It’s always been a plague for the very young and the very old,” he says.
In Europe, people age 60 and older
The world has just seen the largest vaccination campaign in history. At least 13 billion COVID shots have been administered—more injections, by a sweeping margin, than there are human beings on the Earth. In the U.S. alone, millions of lives have been saved by a rollout of extraordinary scope. More than three-fifths of the population elected to receive the medicine even before it got its full approval from the FDA.
Yet the legacy of this achievement appears to be
Experts today cast doubts over the authenticity of a series of videos that claim to show patients violently shaking after a reaction to the Covid vaccine.
In one of the more shocking clips, an elderly female patient struggles to walk from the bathroom to her hospital bed while experiencing tremors. The video was shared more than 26,000 times and viewed by 11million people on Twitter.
Other videos show patients convulsing and struggling to move. But experts told DailyMail.com even though
Since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, a niche subset of experimental vaccines has offered the world a tantalizing promise: a sustained slowdown in the spread of disease. Formulated to spritz protection into the body via the nose or the mouth—the same portals of entry most accessible to the virus itself—mucosal vaccines could head SARS-CoV-2 off at the pass, stamping out infection to a degree that their injectable counterparts might never hope to achieve.
Now, nearly three years into
The COVID pandemic accelerated global research collaboration at an unprecedented scale2. In the race for a vaccine, scientists worked together across borders on genomic sequencing of variants3 and case reports to better understand and respond to the fast-evolving viral threat — highlighting the value of responsible data sharing4.
The European Health Data Space (EHDS), launched by the European Commission, aims to build on this momentum to transform access, use and sharing of health data within
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) — often regarded as the ‘silent pandemic’ — is the leading cause of death worldwide. In 2019 alone, it was responsible for 18.6 million deaths.
The same year marked the beginnings of the COVID-19 crisis, which revealed profound deficits and inequities in our health care policies and systems. Hospitals were not only overrun and under-resourced, but the prevention, screening and treatment of non-communicable diseases were also disrupted.2 This daunting global crisis, however, revealed something else: our
“Is that a direct threat? I don’t know.” The adviser to the Belgian prime minister spoke calmly as they recounted a lobbying phone call from 2021, but the contents of the conversation are extraordinary.
The call was from a spokesperson for Janssen, the Belgian-founded pharmaceutical arm of Johnson & Johnson (J&J) that developed the company’s single-shot COVID-19 vaccine. According to the adviser, the spokesperson warned them that if Belgium supported a radical proposal made by India and South Africa at
Life sciences are integral to the European economy and its people. Over two years ago, this ecosystem had to rapidly come together, forging strong partnerships to deploy treatments at unprecedented scale.
This precedent should continue and be considered to aid people suffering from rare diseases. “Around 30 million people across Europe live with a rare disease1. On average, it takes six to seven years to obtain a correct diagnosis2 and over 40% of rare disease patients are
In March, 2020, Chelsea Kay, a twentysomething music lover who lives in New York, went to see the Australian band Rüfüs Du Sol play a packed show at the Orpheum Theatre in the heart of New Orleans. At some point, a murmur rippled through the crowd: Tom Hanks had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Kay thought little of it until she learned, a few days later, that states were shutting down to slow the
Welcome back! After a scorching summer, Brussels people are trickling back into the office or, for many of you, the home office setup.
A word of warning: It’s going to be an intense rentrée.
From the war in Ukraine to spiking energy prices, EU officials will have their hands full keeping their policy agendas on track amid escalating geopolitical crises. The most obvious field to be disrupted is energy, as leaders scramble to fill up gas reserves and keep
