Plague

[unable to retrieve full-text content] Why Independent Home Health Providers Can Blossom With the Right Home Health Care Consultant    Home Health Care News

A woman receives a free meal distributed by the community service center on Apr. 6, 2021. SOPA Images/Getty Images Millions of children in Nepal are now at greater risk of suffering from malnutrition, as the socio-economic fallout brought about by the COVID-19 crisis causes more harm to the country's younger population than the disease itself. Nepali children, like children everywhere, have so far largely been spared acute health effects from the novel coronavirus. But, in this country of almost 30 million people, a battered economy and lockdowns triggered by the pandemic are disrupting essential health services and much-needed food supplies. Those setbacks have in turn reversed progress in combatting childhood malnutrition – a national epidemic that authorities here have struggled with for decades. "We are barely surviving amid this pandemic by doing household chores," said Ambika Kafle, a domestic worker in the Nepali capital of Kathmandu and a mother...

Hartford HealthCare Cancer Institute in Hartford, Connecticut, has 33,000 workers, $4.3 billion in operating revenue and a medical staff of 4,000 providers.  It offers the full continuum of care with seven acute-care hospitals, the state's longest-running air-ambulance service, behavioral health and rehabilitation services, a physician group and clinical integration organization, skilled-nursing and home health services, and a comprehensive range of services for seniors, including senior-living facilities. THE PROBLEM Over the years one of the biggest problems facing infusion centers has been the challenge of adequately scheduling appointments for patients receiving chemotherapy. Historically, this always has been a manual process, usually determined by nurses and driven by the schedules of providers. The manual approach to scheduling often would cause many logistical problems. For example, infusion centers might be slow in the mornings and late afternoons, ...

Staphylococcus bacteria cause staph infections. There are many types of staph infections, and, depending on the cause, doctors may use antibiotics, surgery, or other methods to treat them. Most staph infections clear up quickly with treatment, but people with a weakened immune system are at higher risk and may take longer to recover. A staph infection is an infection with the bacteria Staphylococcus , which people often refer to by the abbreviation "staph." There are more than 30 types of Staphylococcus bacteria. Staphylococcus aureus , which lives on the skin and in the nose of some people, is responsible for most infections. These bacteria are usually harmless, but if they enter the body through a wound, scrape, or cut, they can cause infection and serious illness. This article examines the causes, types, symptoms, and treatment of staph infections. It also discusses the risk factors and the recovery time for people with these infections. Approximately 1 in 4 people carry ...

N ot long ago, a New York City data analyst who had been laid off shortly after the pandemic hit told me she had filed for unemployment-insurance payments and then spent the next six months calling, emailing, and using social media to try to figure out why the state's Labor Department would not send her the money she was owed. A mother in Philadelphia living below the poverty line told me about her struggle to maintain government aid. Disabled herself and caring for a disabled daughter, she had not gotten all of her stimulus checks and, because she does not regularly file taxes or use a computer, needed help from a legal-aid group to make sure she would get the newly expanded child-tax-credit payments. A Colorado systems administrator with a chronic medical condition told me that switching jobs had caused an accidental lapse in his health coverage, which led to a cascade of paperwork over responsibility for a medical bill. He estimated that he had spent 100 hours resolving the iss...

In an effort to shore up some emergency room uncertainty in the future, Memorial Regional Health announced a partnership with CarePoint Health, Friday, allowing the health organization to take over staffing the MRH Emergency Department full-time beginning this May. "The CarePoint Health team is excited to partner with the Memorial Hospital in Craig," said Dr. Mark Kozlowski, COO for CarePoint Health. "While we have been serving the Denver metro area for over 20 years, we are pleased to now deliver outstanding care to the northwest Colorado region." CarePoint Health will partner with the existing team at MRH, as the four additional CarePoint Health physicians will be intermittently staffing the emergency department at MRH through April, with full-time, 24 hour-a-day staffing starting in May. Until CarePoint assumes all staffing in May, other board-certified physicians will continue staffing the MRH em...

Facing down the more transmissible Delta variant, it seems wise to equip oneself with as much protection against COVID-19 as possible -- especially in a nation with robust vaccine supply. But legitimate scientific questions have been raised as to whether people who've been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 need just one dose of an mRNA vaccine, and some supply-constrained countries -- including Germany, Italy, and France -- have made it official policy that this group needs just one dose. So what does the science say about the protection conferred by just one dose in this population? Early work does seem to suggest that one shot in a previously infected person provides immunity that's comparable to two doses in an infection-naive patient. But it's indeed early work. Does that protection last as long as that from a two-dose series? Is it enough to stand up to Delta? Those are just some of the questions that remain, but more researchers are becoming convinced ...

An analysis of six-weekly (official) covid deaths since the pandemic began around March 2020 indicates that mortality is declining, albeit at a varying pace, almost across the board after having peaked in April-June 2021. The inference is that the pandemic is either petering out, or the expected third wave is still to materialize. The third wave hypothesis has its origins in the pattern of the Spanish Flu a century ago that covid has broadly tracked. It is possible that a third wave might be averted, or at least moderated, on account of the global vaccination drive, the spread of the virus's Delta variant notwithstanding. This is the big picture, based on aggregated data from 32 major countries in Europe, the Americas and Asia that together account for about 70% of the global population and 87% of covid deaths (see table). Regional patterns differ, and some countries have bucked the regional trend. View Ful...

Share on Pinterest This is the partial skull of a man who died of the bubonic plague about 5,000 years ago. Dominik Göldner, BGAEU, Berlin Researchers have found the oldest strain of Yersinia pestis , the bacteria behind the plague that caused the Black Death, in the remains of a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer. This finding pushes the appearance of Y. pestis back 2,000 years further than previously thought. According to genetic analysis, this ancient strain was likely less contagious and not as deadly as its medieval version. The hunter-gatherer who carried the plague was one of two people whose skeletons researchers excavated in the late 1800s in present-day Latvia. The remains of the two individuals then went missing until 2011, when they were located in the collection of German physician and anthropologist Rudolph Virchow. Researchers conducting a genetic analysis of a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer have found the oldest strain of Y. pestis, the bacteria behind the plague. Their wo...

[unable to retrieve full-text content] Health Matters 7/14/21 | Health | leadertelegram.com    Leader-Telegram

[unable to retrieve full-text content] NC doctor sought 2 hours of sex a month with nurse in blackmail plot, lawsuit says    Charlotte Observer

An interesting study led by scientists in the U.S. has recently revealed that the microbial community in the gut is directly affected by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and that virus-mediated gut microbiome dysbiosis may cause severe secondary infections in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients. The study is currently available on the bioRxiv * preprint server. Background A potential connection between gut microbiome dysbiosis and COVID-19 severity has recently been established. In this context, studies have found that SARS-CoV-2 infection may disrupt the microbial populations present in the gut. Gut microbiome dysbiosis is defined as a reduction in microbial diversity, as well as an imbalance between beneficial and pathogenic microbial populations in the gut. In a significant proportion of COVID-19 patients, gastrointestinal complications along with loss of commensal gut microbes have frequently been observed. Commensal microbes...

A Social Security Administration office in New York. Photo: John Nacion/Zuma Press The name of the Social Security Administration's commissioner isn't one most Americans would recognize. This is largely by design. Congress, presidents from both parties, and previous commissioners have made it a point to ensure the commissioner's role remains nonpartisan. That is why President Biden's decision to fire me is so unsettling. I was only two years into my six-year term as SSA commissioner. By targeting me, the administration has politicized the SSA. The Social Security Independence and Program Improvements Act of 1994 brought the SSA out from under the Department of Health and Human...

The resistance to Covid vaccinations is eerily familiar to those who lived through the early days of the AIDS crisis. This week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that workers in the city hospital system would be required to get the Covid vaccine or submit to weekly testing. If you were surprised by the development, it was almost certainly because you assumed that nurses and doctors and orderlies and administrators — those with such an intimate connection to so much devastation — had been vaccinated already for months. In fact, the immunization rate for public hospital workers is lower than the citywide average, and if that weren't concerning enough, the Police Department revealed on Wednesday that it had administered vaccines to just 43 percent of its staff. Its "newest internal messaging," the department said in a statement, was centered on addressing "rumors, misinformation and concerns with vaccination," the area where the discourse might have begun a long time...