Public Health

More than a year after the pandemic, the looming question of the origins of COVID-19 is still on everyone’s mind. According to the previously undisclosed U.S intelligence report, three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of virology in November 2019 became sick enough to seek hospital care with…

Shortly after one of his students tested positive for COVID-19, Chris Hodges, the principal of Gaylord High School in Otsego County, found himself working closely with the local health department with contact tracing. The school-age population in Michigan has accounted for a growing share of recent…

Climate change has been a controversial topic for as long as one can remember, and it is possible that human-caused climate trends are playing a role in the severity of the drought we are currently facing. The rising temperatures within the country also play a role in water loss, which further…

As the world is slowly trying to get back up on its feet, organizers are scrambling to assure that the Olympic Games in Tokyo go ahead as planned without becoming a super-spreader event. One of the key elements to successful games remains the participation and hard work of volunteers. The…

A new vaccine for COVID-19, NDV-HXP-S is entering clinical trials in Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam and could potentially change how the world fights the pandemic. It is widely expected to be easier to make and create more potent antibodies than the current generation of vaccines. The new…

Two ingredients in the COVID-19 vaccines, polyethylene glycol and polysorbate 80 have been suggested as possible culprits in anaphylactic reactions. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna use polyethylene glycol in their vaccines as a protective coating for messenger RNA. Polysorbate 80 is ubiquitous in a…

Data from the CDC and reported by White House Office of National Drug Policy says that the number of deaths from drug overdose spiked up 27% compared to the year before the pandemic. As a result, the White House has released a seven-part plan designed to reduce the number of deaths from addictive…

In studies covering 17 countries, it fond that the number of maternal deaths and stillbirths increased by almost one-third, and the number of ectopic pregnancies increased sixfold from January 2020 to January 2021. These negative outcomes had greater significance in low and middle income countries.…

Dr. Avindra Nath at the National Institutes of Health spends his days surrounded by brains, hoping to shed light on why some people can't seem to recover. An estimated 10 to 30 percent of the 28 million COVID-19 cases in the United States could lead to long-term symptoms. The 30 brain samples in…

As Brazil is continuing to face a brutal coronavirus outbreak, preliminary studies suggest that the Brazilian coronavirus variant is reinfecting people who have already had the virus. The situation is worsened by the fact that Brazil has been unable to secure a large enough number of doses.…

As the coronavirus pandemic is slowly nearing an end, as many as 8.4 million people who have recovered from COVID-19 fall into the category commonly known as “long-haulers.” Despite the overwhelming number of patients struggling to bounce back to their former selves, there are currently no concrete…

The spread of coronavirus is undoubtedly intertwined with the spread of speculation around its origins. In the face of ambiguity and great uncertainty, the world turned to college professors with no evidence or training in virology and anonymous social media users, posing as high-level intelligence…

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, the supply and demand for N95 have been largely stabilized; however, there are still dramatic discrepancies in the allotted number of masks across different states. Why is that after a year of battling the virus, warehouses in Texas are drowning in…

Cigarette sales have been on the decline for decades, but recent trends have slowed that decline: sales in 2020 were flat compared to 2019. On one hand, people have had more opportunities to smoke and drink liquor during the pandemic. On the other, increases in e-cigarette taxes and confusion about…