New research suggests that digestive symptoms, including a loss of appetite and diarrhea, are more common in people with COVID-19 than doctors had thought.
Up-to-date Coronavirus COVID-19 guidance for physicians & pharmacists from Johns Hopkins ABX. Disease spectrum, testing, and clinical trials for vaccines, chloroquine, remdesivir, lopinavir / ritonavir discussed.
Covid-19 lasted for 17 days in the cabins of cruise ships:
Cruise ships are often settings for outbreaks of infectious diseases because of their closed environment and contact between travelers from many countries.
What is added by this report?
A new method to accurately record brain activity at scale has been developed by researchers at the Crick, Stanford University and UCL. The technique could lead to new medical devices to help amputees, people with paralysis or people with neurological conditions such as motor neurone disease.
The research in mice, published in Science Advances, developed an accurate and scalable method to record brain activity across large areas, including on the surface and in deeper regions simultaneously.
Coronavirus has claimed at least 10,447 lives with a total of 254,701 confirmed cases worldwide. A total of 89,071 people have recovered from the virus. The outbreak has led to panic and pandemonium. As we reported yesterday, there are only three major types of treatments: antiviral drug, antibody solution (including blood plasma) and vaccine.
Even though the need to develop new vaccines seems to be getting a lot of headlines, vaccine, however, does not provide the immediate relief for people who are already infected with the virus. In addition, experts are saying that it may take between 12 to 24 months before the vaccine becomes available. Some are going as far as saying it could be 2022 before we see a COVID-19 vaccine.
In the meantime, more companies are coming out with existing antiviral and experimental drugs that have proven to show promising results in treating COVID-19 patients. While there are no FDA-approved therapeutics or drugs to treat, cure or prevent COVID-19, there are several FDA-approved treatments that may help ease the symptoms from a supportive care perspective.
When metadata indicate that orally administered probiotic strains can help reduce the impact of colds and flu, does it make you wonder about how they might fare in fighting this current Coronavirus pandemic?
“Infusions of antibody-laden blood have been used with reported success in prior outbreaks, including the SARS epidemic and the 1918 flu pandemic.”
John Hopkins University
With a vaccine for COVID-19 still a long way from being realized, Johns Hopkins immunologist Arturo Casadevall is working to revive a century-old blood-derived treatment for use in the United States in hopes of slowing the spread of the disease.
How did Viruses evolve?
The evolutionary history of viruses remains unclear. Some researchers hypothesize that viruses evolved from mobile genetic elements that gained the ability to move between cells. Other researchers postulate that viruses evolved from more complex organisms that lost the ability to replicate independently. Still others hypothesize that DNA viruses gave rise to the eukaryotic nucleus or that viruses predate all cellular life-forms. Reasonable arguments can be made for all of these hypotheses. It may be that viruses arose multiple times, via each of these mechanisms. It may be that viruses arose from a mechanism yet to be described. Continuing studies of viruses and their hosts may provide us with clearer answers.
