Influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and COVID-19 have come together to pose a serious health threat this holiday season, according to experts.
During a press conference, CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH, said the agency has documented at least 8.7 million influenza illnesses, 78,000 hospitalizations due to influenza and 4,500 influenza-associated deaths, as well as a 14 pediatric deaths caused by influenza. Read more from Healio.
After months in intensive care, Cesar Franco became the first person in Britain to have the operation because of the virus
“When I woke up I was confused. I remembered the doctors in St George’s hospital deciding to intubate me. But when I woke up from the intubation, I’d been transferred to another hospital, St Thomas’, and was on a machine that was keeping me alive. I wondered how things had gotten so bad and how I’d gone from being just ill to being, you know, very close to dying.”
Read the story in The Guardian here.
A life-saving treatment, solid organ transplantation (SOT) has transformed the survival and quality of life of patients with end-organ dysfunction. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted the practice of deceased and living donations worldwide by various resource shifting, including healthcare personnel and equipment such as ventilators and bed space. Read the full abstract in Nature.
Today, as with every third Thursday of November, the U.S. is celebrating National Rural Health Day, honoring the commitment of the health providers who steward the health of the one in five Americans who live in rural communities. At the same time, this occasion should remind us that over the past nearly 3 years, these hard-working professionals have been caring for rural communities in increasingly diminished health. Once a haven from cities devastated in the first months of the pandemic, rural areas have outpaced urban areas in COVID-19 mortality rates. And as the earlier surges of the pandemic recede, a new concern is emerging: a mismatch between the burden of long COVID in rural communities and the resources available to address this complex public health challenge. Read the full article in MedPage Today.
Purpose: Kidney transplant recipients (KTRs) are at an increased risk of severe disease and death caused by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection. There is a paucity of information on the evolution of graft function among hospitalized KTRs who overcome the infection.
Methods: The study included adult KTRs at a single transplant institute who were diagnosed with COVID-19 and needed hospitalization between March 15, 2020, and January 15, 2021. We analyzed patient demographics, comorbid risk factors, and inpatient clinical courses for patients who were able to recover from the infection. Kidney function was analyzed pre-infection, during initial hospitalization, and up to 12 months post-infection. Read the full study in Cureus.
Adults with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease using the nonsteroidal mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist finerenone have lower risks for pneumonia and COVID-19, according to findings published in JAMA Network Open. Read more in Healio.
Investigators have found evidence of reduced T cell immunity during COVID-19 illness followed by T cell recovery in kidney transplant recipients. Insufficient immunity appears to occur despite initial reduction of antirejection medications in these patients.
Most centers have empirically reduced anti-rejection immunosuppression in kidney transplant recipients with COVID-19 due to concerns that immunosuppressant use would hinder anti-COVID-19 immunity, Madhav C. Menon, MBBS, of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and colleagues explained in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. Read more in Renal & Urology News.
October 19, 2022 – Sue Ford
When Cory Yager was hospitalized with a severe case of Covid last year, he promised himself he would not give up. His care team had no intentions of giving up, either.
The 43-year-old father from Lewis County, north of Syracuse in the Adirondacks, spent nearly 80 days at Albany Medical Center, kept alive by extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), prior to receiving a double lung transplant. Read the story from Albany MED Health System.
During a television interview on September 18, everyone heard President Biden say “the pandemic is over.” Healthcare workers want this to be true as much as anyone else, but is it?
After 2 and a half years, we have certainly come a long way. First, we learned about how to best care for patients with COVID-19. Then, we developed multiple therapeutics to treat the infection. And perhaps most importantly, we have administered more than 12 billion COVID-19 vaccinations worldwide to prevent serious disease and death.
Read more in MedPage Today.
Recognizing the potential for vaccine administration errors with look-alike vials, CDC staff shared best practices for giving the right vaccine to the right person at the right dose, during a Clinician Outreach and Communication Activity (COCA) webinar earlier this week.
The most concerning possible vaccination error would be that a child might receive a higher dose of vaccine than indicated for his or her age, because of the potential for increased reactogenicity — for example an arm that is more sore than normal or a fever — Elisha Hall, PhD, Clinical Guidelines Lead and a Health Education Specialist for the CDC, told MedPage Today in a follow-up phone call. Read the full story in MedPage Today.