Articles related to PUBLIC HEALTH

The story of David Ho, MD, who contracted the COVID-19 virus after attending a conference on the virus(!), but who lived COVID-free for two years beforehand. The Paxlovid he took eliminated the symptoms and he was free from the virus after testing. However, a few days later, he felt sick again and tested himself. Lo and behold, COVID returned. Is it the drug or is it the virus causing this phenomenon?

Burkholderia pseudomallei bacteria showed up in four patients in Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas in 2021, despite the bacterium typically associated with travel to tropical and subtropical areas like Thailand and Malaysia. The case was cracked when researchers found an essential oil spray that contained B. pseudomallei in the home of a 4-year-old boy who died from complications of the melioidosis outbreak.

With fast symptom relief and reinforcing effects, benzodiazepines were once the gold standard for treating insomnia and anxiety. As opioids dominate headlines along with the public health crisis of drug overdose deaths, is it time to reconsider benzodiazepines as a course of treatment?

In a 7-year study of 171,000 individuals with a mean age of 56 years, these researchers elucidate the hazard ratio for death from CVD or cancer and levels of daily coffee consumption.

Monkeypox has never before appeared more or less simultaneously across different countries and now continents. So this current outbreak is both puzzling and concerning public health workers. Unlike the previous cases discovered outside Africa, the current outbreaks have occurred in people with no travel history, suggesting that human-to-human transmission is driving the spread. And in the current outbreak, the illness appears to be presenting atypically, without its normal prodrome. Read more about the hypothesized connection with smallpox eradication, available vaccinations, and public health response from the outbreak.

The CDC continue to recommend Paxlovid for early-stage treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 among individuals at high risk of progression to severe disease. Recent case reports suggest that some patients treated with Paxlovid may have a recurrence of COVID-19 symptoms two to eight days after completing the five-day course of treatment. Both the illness and the positive test results resolved, on average, three days later without the need for additional treatment.