Latest news with #pandemic
Forbes
3 hours ago
- Health
- Forbes
Should We Be Worried About Bird Flu? Public Health Experts Say Yes
Battery hens sit in a chicken shed in Suffolk, England. (Photo by) You don't need me to tell you Covid-19 changed the world. While the pandemic did help expose structural inequalities and disparities, especially in the food system, the loss of life and livelihood has been one of the greatest tragedies of our lifetimes. I'm bringing this up because, if we ignore the lessons we should've learned from this pandemic, future disease outbreaks will be much, much worse. And I'm deeply concerned that, when it comes to avian flu—a.k.a. Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (HPAI) H5N1—we're on a dangerously wrong path. This virus typically affects birds, including poultry, and there's a current outbreak that has affected close to 150 million birds and devastated farms since 2022. Also concerningly, scientists have detected the virus in mammals in recent years—including dairy cows and humans—and learned it can spread between mammals, which significantly raises the outbreak risk. And since 2024, 102 cases of avian flu and 10 deaths have been reported in humans globally, a potentially staggering fatality rate. Many of these global cases over the past year and a half—about 70—have been in the U.S., which means the world's eyes are watching. And so far, this country's response has been nearly the polar opposite of what scientists call for, which puts everyone around the world in greater danger. 'We have so many tools, but they're not being used optimally—and they're not being used optimally by choice,' says Dr. Amesh Adalja, a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an expert in global public health. 'We can change the trajectory of this if we actually take those best practices, take those tools, and use them optimally.' To be perfectly clear, there is currently no known person-to-person spread of avian flu and experts say the current public health risk is low, per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What this means, though, is that the time to prevent and contain this virus is right now. There's a very real possibility that avian flu could pose a greater threat in the future, and we can't be caught unprepared. The correct course of action involves vaccination, investments in public health, and global collaboration—all of which appear to be under threat given recent U.S. policy developments. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins' original plan to combat avian flu included US$100 million in research and vaccine development. But shortly after announcing it, she reversed course and told right-wing site Breitbart that vaccines were 'off the table.' Meanwhile, in May, the Trump-Vance Administration cancelled a massive contract with Moderna to develop a vaccination for humans against bird flu, and this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of the advisory committee that helps develop vaccine policy and recommendations for the CDC. 'I'm optimistic that they will continue to support the development of these vaccines. It would be a crime right now to stop it,' said Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who worked on an avian flu vaccine for cattle. Vaccines save lives. Just last month, early results from that experimental bird flu vaccine for cattle came back promising. The U.S. Department of Agriculture conditionally approved a vaccine for poultry this spring, and some countries, like China and France, already vaccinate poultry against H5N1. Even in humans, Finland last year became the first country to roll out bird flu vaccines among its population. Alternative courses of action, rather than vaccines, are devastating: In March, Kennedy suggested farmers 'should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that are immune to it.' This, as former Kansas state veterinarian Dr. Gail Hansen put it, is a 'terrible idea' and a 'recipe for disaster.' Dr. Adalja did not mince words. If the past year has been a trial run for how the government might respond to the actual emergence of an avian flu pandemic, he says, 'we've failed this trial run.' Optimistically, on a global level, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been taking positive steps toward international collaboration: WHO's Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System closely monitors avian and other animal influenza viruses, and in May, member states approved an agreement to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to outbreaks and learn from mistakes made at the height of the Covid pandemic. But remember, the Trump-Vance Administration pulled the U.S. out of the WHO effective in 2026, and has revoked a variety of investments in global and domestic health programs. These decisions are not abstract, Dr. Adalja says: they 'make these types of events much harder to prepare for and much harder to control.' As Covid-19 made abundantly clear, viruses don't stop at national borders. Keeping the public healthy and preparing for pandemic risks simply must be more important than politicking. And when we're heading in the wrong direction, there is a moral obligation to sound the alarm—and to illuminate a better path forward.
Forbes
3 hours ago
- General
- Forbes
1 Powerful Way To Keep Your Relationship Strong During Uncertain Times
The world may feel messy, but your relationship doesn't have to feel the same way. Here's why, ... More according to new research. Wars are raging. The economy is teetering. The world is spinning faster than we could ever keep up with. And, unfortunately, it's not slowing down. Recessions, pandemics, conflict and social unrest have historically been associated with steep declines in romantic relationship satisfaction. People usually expect love to be a shelter of sorts in times like these — but when both partners are completely overwhelmed, that shelter can start to cave inwards. However, new research suggests our relationships don't have to be collateral damage in the midst of worldly chaos. In fact, they might be our best chance at staying grounded. Global uncertainty can deplete emotional bandwidth in ways that few people are consciously aware of. And, too often, this exhaustion gets mistaken as just a sign of the times. As an unfortunate result, this tension usually goes unchecked. Unfortunately, relationships are often first to bear the brunt of this. A 2021 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships tracked couples throughout the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the months that followed. These months (if not years) were defined by ambiguity in almost every aspect of life: health, career, family, finances and daily routines. The researchers found that this chronic sense of uncertainty led to significantly elevated levels of psychological distress for the participants. Naturally, when we're this burned out from stress, our capacities for even the most basic forms of relationship maintenance run thin. Practicing patience and empathy is difficult when we can barely offer it to ourselves. Unsurprisingly, the study found that higher levels of individual stress were linked to lower relationship satisfaction. Instead of being a source of comfort during trying times, relationships became just another source of emotional strain. This is just one of many symptoms of systemic stress. When one or both partners feel overwhelmed, they lack the necessary emotional resources to truly look after one another in the ways they otherwise would. Importantly, these declines aren't necessarily due to resentment or a lack of love. In uncertain times, individuals simply can't afford to divert their gaze away from everything happening globally. Consequently, they lose sight of what's happening internally — for both themselves and those close to them. While prior studies like these may give cause to be cynical, February 2025 research from McGill University gives us reason to be hopeful. Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the study found that couples who co-create a 'shared reality' experience much less uncertainty during times of doubt. More importantly, they report experiencing much more meaning in their lives, too. In simple terms, this refers to the understanding partners share regarding what's happening in their lives. They see events unfold around them, and interpret them in similar ways. Regardless of whether these events are terrifying, chaotic, joyous or even just neutral, they unpack it — and make sense of it — together. These shared realities can be formed in countless ways. Today, it might look like a couple venting to each other after a long day. Maybe they've been doomscrolling, watching footage of families in Gaza displaced by war, families being torn apart by deportation or seeing another climate disaster unfold. One puts their phone down, sighs and says, 'It's just headline after headline. I feel like all I can do is just sit here and watch it happen, doing nothing.' Like so many people right now, this partner is experiencing what can only be described as helpless dissonance: the feeling that the world is unraveling, and they're powerless to do anything about it. In moments like these, we often talk about the importance of 'feeling heard' or 'feeling seen' in relationships. But when distress reaches this level of extremity, saying 'Yeah, that sucks,' or, 'I'm sorry you're feeling that way,' just isn't enough. Instead, what matters most is knowing that you aren't alone in these feelings, nor in coping with them. In this case, their partner doesn't dismiss their concerns, nor do they try to fix it. Instead, they meet them where they are. They say something like, 'I've been feeling that, too. It's like the world is on fire, and all I can do is watch it burn from the couch.' They talk more. They unpack their fear, their anger, their guilt. They sit with their discomfort together. Maybe in the days that follow, they find small things they can do. They donate to a cause. They join a protest. They talk to their friends. They take breaks from the news when they need to. They remind each other that, even though they can't solve every world problem single-handedly, they can at least see them through the same lens together. This is their greatest buffer. Their rituals in empathy remind them that even when the world feels shaky, they can still hold each other steady inside it. As the lead author of the 2025 study, M. Catalina Enestrom, explains in McGill University's press release, 'Shared reality doesn't necessarily require shared experiences.' She continues, 'One partner can describe a stressful event they experienced, and if the other partner sees it the same way, this too can foster shared reality. As couples accumulate these shared reality experiences, they come to develop a sense of shared understanding about the world in general.' The power of shared reality was especially clear in high-stress, high-stakes contexts. Specifically, frontline healthcare workers during the pandemic and Black Americans during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement reported significantly more meaning in life, and significantly less uncertainty, when they shared a worldview with their partner. In other words, uncertainty becomes much less destabilizing if you're not holding it alone. Your version of reality starts to feel more real if you have a partner who validates your interpretations of events. Even if nothing around you has actually changed — and even if there's nothing you could actually do to change it — you can still find meaning and control, together, in your situation. While a shared reality is particularly important during times of upheaval, Enestrom and her colleagues argue that these benefits can be reaped even in normal, everyday life. That is, knowing you aren't experiencing daily life in complete isolation makes you feel more coherent, more connected and less alone in your own head. Importantly, this doesn't mean you and your partner necessarily have to agree on everything. You don't need to merge your identities or parrot your ideas and feelings back at one another. Otherwise, it's simply an affirmation for the sake of affirmation. Saying the right words means very little if they aren't backed with genuine empathy; it only works if you truly care about how the other person sees the world. The single most important part of it is that you form a framework for understanding the world. In doing so, you can rely at the very least on your shared sense of direction — even when everything outside your relationship feels completely unpredictable. Is your relationship a safe space for expressing your true thoughts and feelings about the world? Take this science-backed test to find out: Authenticity In Relationships Scale
Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Health
- Irish Times
Nurses risked everything for us during the pandemic. Now many are abandoned to its awful legacy
It's not a question of if, but when. Scientists are warning that a new pandemic is lurking over the horizon poised to pounce on us. 'It's an epidemiological certainty,' says WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. 'Are we ready for the next one?' asks everyone from Boston College and Johns Hopkins University to the Economist and the United Nations. 'No,' is the straight answer for this country. READ MORE Ireland's grubby treatment of its Covid-19 heroes will cause some frontline workers to think twice the next time before they risk their lives for the greater good. Specifically, the nurses – those people who did not have the luxury of working from home, who imperilled themselves by caring for the infected, who self-isolated while off duty and eschewed public transport to avoid transmitting the virus, who hesitated to touch their own children but held the hands of the dying when their families could not be with them in the final days of their lives and who then zipped them inside body bags and phoned their kin to inform them the one they loved had gone. They did it in terrifying circumstances under the claustrophobic weight of protective gowns, hairnets, shoe covers, gloves, face shields and masks. In the early days, the masks were the standard surgical type and sorely inadequate. There were no vaccines for the first 10 months. Nurses and other hospital workers saw colleagues fall ill and be taken away to ICU to be put on ventilators. More than 20 healthcare workers died from Covid. What thanks have they got for all that? A €1,000 crisis bonus that their union representatives had to beg for before it was eventually paid. [ My battle with long Covid: I was in disbelief. Was I making it up? How could I not stand up while the kettle boiled? Opens in new window ] To this day, there is a cohort of forgotten heroes whose abandonment brings shame on us all. They are the ones who went out and defended the barriers for the rest of us and now they are living with that awful legacy called long Covid. While normal life of honking traffic, construction sites, children in school uniforms, packed restaurants and pubs and big weddings has resumed outside their front door, they remain trapped in a post-pandemic freeze frame. Extreme fatigue, brain fog, weakened immunity, headaches, muscular pain, palpitations and shortness of breath have left them unable to go back to work. Some days, they cannot even get out of bed. One young nurse who was assigned to a Covid ward in a big Dublin hospital told me she has cardiac complications and has been on antibiotics four times in the past seven months. Another said she contracted Covid in January 2021, that zero hour following the Government's 'meaningful Christmas'. Four and a half years later, she is attending a long Covid clinic and is being treated by an infectious diseases consultant, a cardiac consultant, a GP and an occupational therapist. She is on daily medication for tachycardia (fast heart rate) as well as low-dose naltrexone (LDN), aspirin for micro-clots, painkillers and numerous supplements. [ The healthcare workers with long Covid: 'I'm living with the consequences of a 'meaningful Christmas'' Opens in new window ] She is one of 20 nurses with long Covid who are suing the HSE, the Department of Health and their employer hospitals for compensation. They issued the High Court proceedings two years ago. The State is fighting them. Simultaneously, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) was in the Labour Court last week seeking to extend a long Covid special payment scheme for public health workers who are still suffering the consequences. The scheme, which has been extended three times already following public controversy, is scheduled to expire on June 30th. Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has told the Dáil it will definitely be terminated this time. The departments of Social Protection and Public Expenditure maintain it is not possible to definitively identify the source of infection for each of the 120 nurses affected. The last time the State was so ruthlessly parsimonious was when Charlie Haughey precipitated the 1989 general election rather than sanction £400,000 compensation for 106 individuals who had been infected with the Aids virus by State-supplied blood. It's an attitude that brings to mind Oscar Wilde's definition of a fool as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. An asinine State is one willing to pay €335,000 for a politicians' bike shelter but repays its true champions with the threat of impoverishment. Ireland and Greece are the only EU countries that do not recognise Covid and long Covid as an occupational illness for patient-facing workers If the special long Covid payment scheme ends in two weeks, its current recipients will be switched to the normal public service sick leave scheme. It means that for the first three months they will receive their basic wage – with no allowance made for the night-duty premiums and overtime many nurses rely on. They will get half their wage for the subsequent three months. With rents or mortgages to pay, their worry amid a national homelessness crisis raises the stress levels long Covid thrives on. During the pandemic, our cocooned communities gathered outside our homes in the grim lockdown evenings to applaud the country's frontline workers for caring for us. Even TDs stood in the Dáil chamber to clap. How would we have reacted had we known then that this would be the thanks they would get? 'It's gone from a round of applause to a middle finger from the Government,' said a nurse identified as Siobhán on RTÉ radio last year. Ireland and Greece are the only EU countries that do not recognise Covid and, ergo, long Covid as an occupational illness for patient-facing workers. That anomaly means nurses, doctors, porters, caterers, paramedics, fire fighters, gardaí and everyone else who contracted long Covid while protecting the rest of us are ineligible for occupational injury benefit payments. A Department of Social Protection report in November 2023 suggested that uncertainty about the condition's longevity in individual cases was a prohibitive factor. What a callous calculation that must be to ponder if you cannot get out of bed and don't know when you ever will. Our culture takes nurses for granted. We'll pat them on the head and call them our angels of mercy, because tokenism works when you are dealing with people motivated by a vocational duty to the greater good. They deserve better.
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Health
- Daily Mail
BREAKING NEWS Covid alert: Catchy Nimbus variant DOUBLES in just one month, as total infections reach highest level this year
A highly contagious Covid variant is on the rise in the UK, with official data suggesting rates have doubled in a month. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) reported that 8 per cent of Covid tests analysed at the start of June were positive for the new 'Nimbus' strain. This is up from just 4 per cent in mid-May. Nimbus, known scientifically as N.B.1.8.1, is thought to be the most contagious variant of the virus yet with experts warning it could drive a wave of new cases this summer. Other data collected by the agency shows the total number of tests coming back positive for any type of Covid has increased to 6.8 per cent as of June 15, the latest available data. This is up from 5.6 per cent last month and represents the highest figure recorded so far this year. Both figures are likely to be an underestimate of how far Nimbus and Covid in general is spreading given how testing has been massively reduced from the height of the pandemic. In its weekly report UKHSA laso said there had also been a slight increase in hospital admissions for Covid to just over 1.5 admissions per 100,000 people.
Free Malaysia Today
a day ago
- Health
- Free Malaysia Today
First Covid-19 related death recorded for this year
The number of Covid-19 infections also rose by 68% to 3,379 in the 24th epidemiological week, the health ministry said. (Bernama pic) PETALING JAYA : A Covid-19 related death has been recorded in the 24th epidemiological week, which also saw the number of Covid-19 infections rise by 68% to 3,379, says the health ministry. In a statement, the ministry said the patient was a diabetic and suffered from heart disease. The victim also did not take the second booster shot, the ministry said. 'It is the first Covid-19 death to be recorded this year.' 'This shows a significant drop from the number of Covid-19 related deaths in 2024 which totalled 57,' the ministry said in a statement. The last Covid-related death was recorded on May 26, 2024. The ministry also said that six of the 3,379 Covid-19 patients in the 24th epidemiological week were initially warded in the intensive care unit. All six suffered from comorbidities such as hypertension, diabetes and heart diseases. Four were later allowed to return home and the remaining two transferred to regular wards. The ministry said that some 2,011 cases were recorded in the 23rd epidemiological week. 'Despite the slight increase, the Covid-19 situation in the country remains under control and is still below the national alert level.' The ministry said a total of 21,738 cases had been reported so far this year.
