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Investment in PPE for health care workers saves lives, provides substantial economic return

Providing adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) for all health care workers around the world requires an initial investment of billions of dollars, but the returns on that investment could be close to 8000% in productivity gains, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Nicholas Risko of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues.

9 Oct 2020

Mologic launches its first crop pathogen diagnostic test

Mologic Ltd, a leading developer of lateral flow and rapid diagnostic technologies, today announced the launch of its first crop pathogen diagnostic test, BotrytisAlert.

9 Oct 2020

New aerosol field data can help improve global climate models

Smoke from the many wildfires burning in the West have made air quality hazardous for millions of people in the United States. And it is the very tiniest of the aerosol particles in that air that make it particularly harmful to human health. But for decades, we haven't known how long these particles actually stay aloft.

7 Oct 2020

Tufts University to lead $100 million program to address threats posed by zoonotic viral diseases

Tufts University will lead a $100 million, five-year program to understand and address threats posed by zoonotic viral diseases that can "spill over" from animals to humans, such as SARS-CoV-2, in an effort to reduce risk of infection, amplification, and spread, the United States Agency for International Development announced today.

30 Sep 2020

Intra-CREATE grants awarded to support research on personalized medicine and cell therapy

Researchers from Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine, an interdisciplinary research group at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, have been awarded Intra-CREATE grants from the National Research Foundation Singapore to help support research on retinal biometrics for glaucoma progression and neural cell implantation therapy for spinal cord injuries.

22 Sep 2020

Machine learning system can predict bipolar disorder 4 years before it manifests in young people

An international team of doctors have developed a machine learning system which can predict the development of Bipolar Disorder up to 4 years before onset in young people: at age 18 it was able to predict which individuals would develop the condition at age 22.

15 Sep 2020

Long-term brain monitoring technologies can benefit epilepsy patients

Today, the way a physician gets an idea of how many seizures a person with epilepsy has had is through the patient's own record of seizure activity in his day-to-day life.

27 Aug 2020

Researchers find statistical relationship between COVID-19 hospital use and mortality

Researchers at the University of Minnesota and University of Washington found a statistical relationship between the number of hospital beds (ICU and non-ICU) occupied by COVID-19 patients in a state and reported mortality.

20 Aug 2020

Ambient air pollution increases carbon emissions

A study conducted by Associate Professor Alberto Salvo from the Department of Economics at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences revealed that households respond to ambient air pollution by increasing electricity consumption, which in turn increases the carbon emissions that are co-produced in supplying the electricity.

17 Aug 2020

UW team receives $33,000 grant to develop model to help lower COVID-19 infections in King County

Policymakers continue to have uncertainties on how to answer important questions about the novel coronavirus -- such as when and how to reopen businesses and schools, and how to distribute a vaccine once one becomes available.

15 Aug 2020

New system monitors, forecasts outbreak risk of dengue, Zika and other Aedes-borne diseases

Researchers led by Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the Pan-American Health Organization have developed a system to monitor and forecast the environmental suitability of transmission of Zika, dengue fever, chikungunya and other diseases carried by species of Aedes mosquitos in the U.S. and neighboring regions.

4 Aug 2020

COVID-19: Models highlight the dangers of relaxing public health measures

If physical distancing measures in the United States are relaxed while there is still no COVID-19 vaccine or treatment and while personal protective equipment remains in short supply, the number of resulting infections could be about the same as if distancing had never been implemented to begin with, according to a UCLA-led team of mathematicians and scientists.

24 Jul 2020

An abundance of biomolecules linked to COVID-19 status and severity

Tapping into the potential of the multi-omic method to uncover functional connections between various classes of biomolecules, researchers from notable institutions in the United States have discovered sets of co-varying molecules that shed light on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pathophysiology and provide treatment opportunities.

20 Jul 2020

Early life exposure to influenza shapes our susceptibility to future infections

Early infections of influenza A can help predict how the virus will affect people across different ages in the future and could impact the effectiveness of flu vaccines, says a new study published today in eLife.

7 Jul 2020

Researchers detect "biologically relevant" AMH levels in human hair samples

The prospect of a non-invasive test of ovarian reserve is a little closer following results from a study showing that measurement of a fertility hormone can be accurately taken from a sample of human hair.

6 Jul 2020

UMass Amherst biostatistician awarded federal grants to support research on pandemic forecasting

University of Massachusetts Amherst biostatistician Nicholas Reich has been awarded grants from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support innovation and expansion in his groundbreaking pandemic forecasting work.

1 Jul 2020

Cremation numbers reveal possible suppression of true COVID-19 data in China

A potentially explosive new study published on the preprint server medRxiv in June 2020 suggests that the official Chinese statistics on COVID-19 cases or mortality are neither reliable nor credible. If true, such unreliable data during a crucial period of the pandemic in February and March 2020 could have seriously skewed the response and preparation of the rest of the world and altered the future course of the viral pneumonic illness.

8 Jun 2020

New strategy may facilitate development of multi-epitope peptide vaccine against SARS-CoV-2

By combining T and B lymphocyte analysis with manufacturability heuristic, researchers from the US and Germany proposed a set of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine peptides to use in subsequent animal studies and clinical trials. Their paper is currently available on the bioRxiv preprint server.

7 Jun 2020

Computer modeling reveals necessary vaccine efficacy threshold to prevent SARS-CoV-2 spread

A recent US study showed that in order to prevent or largely extinguish the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak without social distancing or any other measures, any vaccine would have to have an efficacy of at least 70%. The research paper is currently available on the medRxiv* preprint server.

1 Jun 2020

COVID-19 is more deadly than flu, concludes new study

Is COVID-19 more deadly than the flu? It's a lot more deadly, concludes a new study by the University of Washington published May 7 in the journal Health Affairs.

19 May 2020