During the coronavirus pandemic, many people have grown accustomed to wearing face masks to protect themselves and others, but that doesn’t mean the masks are always comfortable — especially during exercise. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have developed a dynamic respirator that modulates its pore size in response to changing conditions, such as exercise or air pollution levels, allowing the wearer to breathe easier when the highest levels of filtration are not required.
Face masks protect against the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, but they are also worn by people with respiratory problems to filter out harmful pollutants. However, in some circumstances, high levels of filtration aren’t needed, such as when air pollution levels are low, or when someone is exercising outdoors alone — which is generally considered a low-risk activity for spreading COVID-19. But current masks can’t adjust to changing conditions. With time, the trapped, exhaled breath can create sensations of heat, humidity, bad breath and discomfort, especially as more breath gets exhaled during exercise. Seung Hwan Ko and colleagues wanted to make a respirator that could automatically adjust its filtration characteristics in response to changing conditions.
The researchers developed a dynamic air filter with micropores that expand when the filter is stretched, allowing more air to pass through. A large increase in the breathability of the filter, which was made of electrospun nanofibers, was achieved with only about a 6% loss in filtration efficiency. The team then placed a stretcher around the filter that was connected to a lightweight, portable device containing a sensor, air pump and microcontroller chip. The device communicates wirelessly with an external computer running artificial intelligence (AI) software that reacts to particulate matter in the air, as well as changes in the wearer’s respiratory patterns during exercise. Two of the filters were placed on each side of a face mask and tested on human volunteers. The stretcher correctly generated a smaller increase in pore size when a volunteer exercised in a polluted atmosphere than when they exercised in clean air. Notably, the AI software allows the respirator to adapt to individuals’ unique respiratory characteristics, which could be used to develop a personalized face mask, the researchers say. To make the system smaller, lighter and less cumbersome, the stretcher could eventually be redesigned to have a pump-free mechanism, they add.
The authors acknowledge funding from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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Materials provided by American Chemical Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Hundreds of sought-after nurses are leaving some U.S. hospitals that have established vaccine requirements for all employees, involving some protests and legal opposition. But most workers, especially at large hospital chains, appear to be complying with the policies.New York hospitals and nursing homes are grappling with the state’s Monday deadline for workers to have received at least one coronavirus vaccine dose, with thousands of workers remaining unvaccinated and at risk of being fired. Several other states and cities have also imposed mandates for health care workers, with deadlines approaching.All are also facing a looming federal vaccine mandate for hospital and nursing home staff that President Biden ordered, though its exact scope and timing has yet to be announced.The departures, especially of nurses, have compounded major staffing shortages over the course of the pandemic. The situation has become acutely difficult these past few months, particularly in regions where the Delta variant has overwhelmed hospitals and caused new spikes in Covid cases among nursing home staffs and residents. In one instance, a hospital in upstate New York said it briefly had to stop delivering babies after six of its employees left rather than get vaccinated.At Novant Health, a large hospital group based in North Carolina, 375 workers were suspended after not meeting the system’s vaccination deadline this month. Another 200 agreed to comply, increasing the vaccination rate to over 99 percent of its more than 35,000 employees, according to Novant.Yet the loss of some employees “is going to be the cost of doing business in a pandemic,” said Dr. Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, who has studied vaccine mandates. “I’m not seeing any widespread disruptive effect,” he said.Dr. David H. Priest, an infectious-disease specialist and senior executive at Novant, said he believed that the hospital would persuade most of its workers by addressing their concerns. The hospital has “been working on this for weeks on end,” he said, by holding webinars and sending emails to help educate employees about the benefits of being immunized.How the nation’s hospitals are handling the holdouts varies widely, and many facilities are waiting for federal guidelines. Others have set deadlines later this year.Many hospitals are not establishing sharp cutoffs for when they might eventually fire someone.UNC Health, another North Carolina group, said that it was confirming the status of about 900 employees. About 70 employees have left as a result of the system’s mandate, and the group has granted about 1,250 exemptions for medical or religious reasons. About 97 percent of its work force have complied. Those who still need to be vaccinated or qualify for an exemption have until Nov. 2, providing what UNC described as “a last chance to remain employed.”At Trinity Health, one of the first major hospital chains to announce a vaccine mandate, the percentage of its vaccinated staff has increased from 75 percent to 94 percent, said the group, which operates in 22 states..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}SSM Health, a Catholic hospital group based in St. Louis, also adopted a mandate but said that few of its workers had left because of its requirement.Hospitals and nursing homes have raised concerns about their ability to find workers if they impose strict requirements. The situation may be worse in rural areas, where limited numbers of workers are available. But healthy vaccinated workers may also ease staffing shortages.At Houston Methodist, where 150 employees left from a work force of about 26,000 people, the hospital said that there had been little lasting effect on its ability to hire people. And when Texas was hit with rising numbers of Covid cases over the summer, the hospital found that fewer of its workers were out sick.“The mandate has not only protected our employees, but kept more of them at work during the pandemic,” a hospital spokeswoman said in an email.ChristianaCare, a hospital group based in Wilmington, Del., said on Monday that it had fired 150 employees for not complying with its vaccine mandate. But the group emphasized that over the last month it had hired more than 200 employees, many of whom are more comfortable working where they knew their colleagues were vaccinated.

People typically lower their risks of heart disease and premature death far more by gaining fitness than by dropping weight.For better health and a longer life span, exercise is more important than weight loss, especially if you are overweight or obese, according to an interesting new review of the relationships between fitness, weight, heart health and longevity. The study, which analyzed the results of hundreds of previous studies of weight loss and workouts in men and women, found that obese people typically lower their risks of heart disease and premature death far more by gaining fitness than by dropping weight or dieting.The review adds to mounting evidence that most of us can be healthy at any weight, if we are also active enough.I have written frequently in this column about the science of exercise and weight loss, much of which is, frankly, dispiriting, if your goal is to be thinner. This past research overwhelmingly shows that people who start to exercise rarely lose much, if any, weight, unless they also cut back substantially on food intake. Exercise simply burns too few calories, in general, to aid in weight reduction. We also tend to compensate for some portion of the meager caloric outlay from exercise by eating more afterward or moving less or unconsciously dialing back on our bodies’ metabolic operations to reduce overall daily energy expenditure, as I wrote about in last week’s column. Glenn Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at Arizona State University in Phoenix, is well versed in the inadequacies of workouts for fat loss. For decades, he has been studying the effects of physical activity on people’s body compositions and metabolisms, as well as their endurance, with a particular focus on people who are obese. Much of his past research has underscored the futility of workouts for weight loss. In a 2015 experiment he oversaw, for instance, 81 sedentary, overweight women began a new routine of walking three times a week for 30 minutes. After 12 weeks, a few of them had shed some body fat, but 55 of them had gained weight.In other studies from Dr. Gaesser’s lab, though, overweight and obese people with significant health problems, including high blood pressure, poor cholesterol profiles or insulin resistance, a marker for Type 2 diabetes, showed considerable improvements in those conditions after they started exercising, whether they dropped any weight or not. Seeing these results, Dr. Gaesser began to wonder if fitness might enable overweight people to enjoy sound metabolic health, whatever their body mass numbers, and potentially live just as long as thinner people — or even longer, if the slender people happened to be out of shape.So, for the new study, which was published this month in iScience, he and his colleague Siddhartha Angadi, a professor of education and kinesiology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, began scouring research databases for past studies related to dieting, exercise, fitness, metabolic health and longevity. They were especially interested in meta-analyses, which pool and analyze data from multiple past studies, allowing researchers to look at results from far more people than in most individual studies of weight loss or exercise, which tend to be small-scale.They wound up with more than 200 relevant meta-analyses and individual studies. Then they set out to see what all of this research, involving tens of thousands of men and women, most of them obese, indicated about the relative benefits of losing weight or getting fit for improving metabolisms and longevity. In effect, they asked whether someone who is heavy gets more health bang from losing weight or getting up and moving.The contest, they found, was not close. “Compared head-to-head, the magnitude of benefit was far greater from improving fitness than from losing weight,” Dr. Gaesser said.As a whole, the studies they cite show that sedentary, obese men and women who begin to exercise and improve their fitness can lower their risk of premature death by as much as 30 percent or more, even if their weight does not budge. This improvement generally puts them at lower risk of early death than people who are considered to be of normal weight but out of shape, Dr. Gaesser said.On the other hand, if heavy people lose weight by dieting (not illness), their statistical risk of dying young typically drops by about 16 percent, but not in all studies. Some of the research cited in the new review finds that weight loss among obese people does not decrease mortality risks at all.The new review was not designed to determine precisely how exercise or weight loss affect longevity in people with obesity, though. But in many of the studies they looked at, Dr. Gaesser said, people who shed pounds by dieting regained them, then tried again, a yo-yo approach to weight loss that often contributes to metabolic problems like diabetes and high cholesterol and lower life expectancy.On the other hand, exercise combats those same conditions, he said. It may also, unexpectedly, remake people’s fat stores. “People with obesity usually lose some visceral fat when they exercise,” he said, even if their overall weight loss is negligible. Visceral fat, which collects deep inside our bodies, raises risks for Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other conditions.A few of the studies they cite find that exercise likewise alters molecular signaling inside other fat cells in ways that may improve insulin resistance, no matter how much weight someone carries. “It looks like exercise makes fat more fit,” Dr. Gaesser said.The primary takeaway of the new review, he concluded, is that you do not need to lose weight to be healthy. “You will be better off, in terms of mortality risk, by increasing your physical activity and fitness than by intentionally losing weight,” he said.

A commission appointed by the health agency found that women and girls had been promised jobs in exchange for relationships or had been sexually exploited in order to keep jobs.Doctors and other staff members working for the World Health Organization to render aid during an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo sexually abused or exploited women and girls there, a commission appointed by the head of the agency reported on Tuesday.Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the agency’s director general, apologized directly to the victims — reported to number in the dozens — and promised to undertake “wholesale reform of policies and processes” to address exploitation and abuse in the organization. He said the agency was terminating the contracts of four people identified as perpetrators who were still employed with the agency and would refer allegations of rape to the authorities in Congo and in the home countries of those accused of misconduct.The Ebola response from 2018 to 2020 “was a large and complex operation in a highly insecure region requiring large-scale recruitment of local and international personnel,” Dr. Tedros said. “But none of that is an excuse for sexual exploitation and abuse. We accept that we should have taken stronger measures to screen our candidates and ensure more effective human resources processes.”The commission’s investigators were able to identify 83 people believed to have been involved in the abuse, including both Congolese nationals and foreigners, the report said. In 21 cases, the investigators were able to establish with certainty that those suspected of abuse were W.H.O. employees.The 35-page report cited “clear structural failures” in how the agency responded to allegations of misconduct. It painted a picture of an organization obsessed with bureaucracy and ruminating over technicalities of abuse accusations such as who would qualify for legal protection against exploitation and whether an accusation should be investigated if a written complaint had not been filed.The commission found that women had been promised jobs in exchange for relationships or had been sexually exploited in order to keep jobs. The report cited the stories of women like one identified as Nadira, who worked in Beni as an archivist.“To get ahead in the job, you had to have sex,” she told investigators. “Everyone had sex in exchange for something. It was very common. I was even offered sex if I wanted to get a basin of water to wash myself in the base camp where we were staying.”The report underscored the power differential between employees of international organizations like the W.H.O. and the people they are serving. It stated that “the majority of the alleged victims were in a very precarious economic or social situation during the response.”It added, “Indeed, very few of them were able to complete their secondary education, and some had never set foot in school.”The investigation was opened after The New Humanitarian, a nonprofit news organization based in Geneva, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation, published in September 2020 the findings of a yearlong investigation in which 30 of 51 women interviewed reported exploitation by men identified as working for the W.H.O. on the Ebola outbreak starting in 2018.The exploitation and abuse reports brought fresh scrutiny to the United Nations’ struggles with the decades-old problem of sexual exploitation by peacekeeping troops, which surfaced in conflicts in Bosnia in the 1990s and in more recent emergencies in places like the Central African Republic and Haiti.The 51 women interviewed all told investigating journalists that they had been pressured to provide sex to employees of the W.H.O. and of other international aid organizations as well as of Congo’s Health Ministry. They faced pressure when they were seeking jobs, and on occasion, the men terminated the contracts of those who refused, the women said.Eight women said they had been exploited by employees of the Health Ministry. Others reported encounters with men from charity groups including World Vision, UNICEF and the medical organization ALIMA.Dr. Tedros was made aware of the allegations only when they were revealed in the news media, the report said. At a news conference Tuesday for the release of the report, he was asked whether, because of the severity of the allegations and because he was overseeing the response to the outbreak and was on site numerous times, he would consider resigning.“This issue was not raised to me,” he said. “Probably I should have asked questions. And the next steps, what we’re doing is, we have to ask questions.”Dr. Tedros said the agency was “taking immediate steps” to determine why the organization had not detected and stopped the abuse.One factor the commission cited as creating the conditions for exploitation and abuse was the lack of transparency in the recruitment process for new employees to combat the Ebola surge.The response to the virus, much like the coronavirus response in the United States and globally, created a need for a large number of new workers. This, the report noted, was a boon to the many young people seeking employment. But the recruitment process was not competitive.“Local workers — who made up more than half of the W.H.O. personnel serving in North Kivu province — were recruited without competitive bidding,” the report said, “thus opening the door to possible abuses, including incidents of exploitation and sexual abuse, which have unfortunately been witnessed.”The report also cited “late and insufficient” training on stemming sexual exploitation and abuse in the response to the Ebola crisis. The first such training session occurred in November 2019, five months after the outbreak had been declared an international public health emergency. The report also found that only a small number of the organization’s staff members — 371 of the more than 2,800 deployed during the outbreak — had participated in the training session.

A high-fat diet increases the incidence of colorectal cancer. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Fellow Semir Beyaz and collaborators from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that in mice, fat disrupts the relationship between intestinal cells and the immune cells that patrol them looking for emerging tumors. Reconfiguring the gut microbiome may be a way to heal the relationship.
The immune system patrols tissues looking for and eliminating threats. Certain immune cells look for tags that distinguish between normal and abnormal cells. One tag, called MHC-II, helps target cells for destruction. Cell-surface MHC-II activates the immune system to destroy that cell, whether it is just worn out or about to become cancerous. Beyaz and his colleagues found that when mice ate diets high in fat, MHC-II levels were suppressed in intestinal cells. Cells with reduced levels of these tags were not recognized as abnormal and thus could grow into tumors. Charlie Chung, a Stony Brook University graduate student-in-residence in Beyaz’s lab, says, “If we alter the level of these immune recognition molecules in a positive way, then the tumor will more likely be recognized by the immune cell. We hope this can be coupled with the existing strategies, such as immunotherapy, to eradicate tumors.”
The researchers found that a high-fat diet changed the mouse’s intestinal microbiome (the mixture of microbes in the gut). Several bacteria, including ones called Helicobacter, increase MHC-II, which may help immune cells locate abnormal cells. The team did a “dirty roommate” experiment where mice without these bacteria were housed with ones that had it. The “clean” mice became infected with the Helicobacter bacteria and produced more of the MHC-II tag.
The scientists’ findings suggest a new way to boost current immunotherapy treatments against cancer. Increasing the production of this MHC-II tag, either by diet, drugs, or changing the microbes in the body, can help the immune system recognize and eliminate cancer cells. Beyaz says:
“This interaction between diet, microbes, and immune recognition has the potential to help us explain how lifestyle factors can contribute to tumor initiation, progression, or response to therapy.”
Cancer cells use many tricks to avoid being recognized as abnormal by the immune system, but Beyaz hopes he’s found several ways to outwit them.
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Materials provided by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Original written by Luis Sandoval. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Chronic back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide. In the United States, patients spend up to $300 billion each year to treat the condition, according to a 2012 study published in the Journal of Pain. However, common therapies such as surgery and steroid injections intended to address physical origins of back pain have not been clearly proven to work in randomized clinical trials, and a growing body of evidence suggests that psychological factors may be associated with of some forms of back pain.
Physician-scientists from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) developed a 12-week mind-body program that takes a new approach to chronic back pain. The novel intervention — which is not yet available at BIDMC to the general public — is based on an idea pioneered by the late John Sarno, MD, a professor of rehabilitation medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. In a new publication appearing in journal PAIN, the team demonstrated that the mind-body intervention was highly beneficial for treating back pain when compared to standard care, with 64 percent of research volunteers reporting being 100 percent pain free six months later.
“The current paradigm of pain management focuses mostly on treatment of a physical origin of pain, however, in many cases of chronic back pain a physical source of pain cannot be identified,” said corresponding author Michael W. Donnino, MD, a physician in the Departments of Critical Care and Emergency Medicine at BIDMC. “Our group focused on the hypothesis that non-specific back pain is the symptomatic manifestation of a psychological process, substantively driven by stress, repressed emotions and other psychological processes. The exact mechanism remains unclear, but an analogy could be made to other known effects of acute emotional states on acute physiological changes, such as how the emotion of embarrassment may result in the capillary vasodilation we know as blushing.”
Donnino and colleagues’ experimental program, termed Psychophysiologic Symptom Relief Therapy (PSRT), is designed to address underlying stressors and psychological contributors to persistent pain as well as conditioned pain responses and fear avoidant behaviors. Treatment strategies include educating patients about the links between stressors and pain, as well as the relationship with emotions. Armed with this knowledge, participants learn healthier ways to process stress and express emotions. The program also focuses on desensitization or reverse conditioning to help patients break the associations that often are formed with triggers of pain such as bending or sitting.
“Often these triggers are assumed to be cause of pain, but they are perhaps better described as associations that can be unknowingly conditioned in a way that is similar to how Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate to a bell by pairing the bell with food,” Donnino noted. “Our program works to reverse these conditioned responses and thus improve pain and pain disability.”
The program’s final eight weeks focus on mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR, the goal of which is to provide the tools to better process current and future stressors, while allowing time to practice the techniques from the first portion of the program.
To assess whether PSRT can reduce symptoms and pain-related anxiety in patients with non-specific chronic back pain, Donnino and colleagues enrolled 35 participants, 18 to 67 years old with chronic back pain that lacked a clear physical origin. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either the novel 12-week PSRT intervention, eight weeks of MBSR only, or usual care under the guidance of their physicians without influence from the study team. All participants filled out pain-related questionnaires prior to the interventions and periodically up to six months after the interventions to assess changes in functional limitations or disability, back pain bothersomeness and pain-related anxiety.
After just four weeks, researchers saw an astonishing 83 percent decrease in reported pain disability in the PSRT group compared to 22 percent and 11 percent in the MBSR and usual care groups, respectively. With regard to pain bothersomeness over the same time period, the PSRT group had a 60 percent drop compared to 8 percent and 18 percent decreases in pain bothersomeness for the mindfulness and usual care groups, respectively.
The PSRT group was superior to both usual care and MBSR for the primary endpoint of pain disability at every interval and at the end of the six-month monitoring period. Moreover, at the end of the six-month period, 64 percent of patients with chronic back pain in the PSRT group were completely pain free (reporting 0 out 10 on a pain scale) whereas only 25 percent and 17 percent reported being pain free in the mindfulness and usual care arms, respectively.
“Within four weeks, differences between PSRT, MBSR, and usual care were apparent across multiple domains including the primary outcome measure of functional disability as well as pain bothersomeness,” Donnino said. “When patients recognize the relationship between the mind and their physical pain, this orientation sheds new light and provides them a basis to engage with the multifaceted program that works interchangeably to improve pain and disability. This study shows that our program has the potential to be highly beneficial when compared to both usual care as well as usual care plus additional treatments such as MBSR.”
Co-authors included Garrett S. Thompson, Shivani Mehta, Patricia Howard, Lakshman Balaji, Long H. Ngo, and Anne V. Grossestreuser of BIDMC; and Myrella Paschali, Robert Edwards, Sofie B. Antonsen and Suzanne M. Bertisch of Brigham & Women’s Hospital. This work was supported by a philanthropic donation from Adam D’Angelo. The authors have declared no conflicts.

Persistent gaps in life expectancy between Black and white Americans have been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, this gap has narrowed by nearly 50% in three decades, largely due to improvements among Black Americans, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Co-authored by researchers at Princeton University’s Center for Health and Wellbeing, the study analyzed data from 1990 to 2018 to compare mortality rates between Black and White Americans, through the lens of place. They also compared the United States with Europe to provide a benchmark comparison.
They found that in 1990, Black Americans lived seven years fewer than whites. But by 2018, that number dropped to 3.6 years. Life-expectancy improvements in the poorest counties particularly helped narrow the gap, largely because Black Americans are more likely to live in the poorest areas. Reductions in Black deaths caused by cancer, HIV, homicide, and fetal and neonatal conditions were especially important in closing the gaps.
Yet, life expectancy has stalled for all groups in the United States since 2012, and, white Americans have lost ground relative to Europeans in both rich and poor areas. The U.S. opioid epidemic is one important cause of these declines, but the researchers suggest that more work should be done to investigate additional factors. If improvements had continued at the earlier rate, the racial gap in life expectancy would have closed by 2036.
“It is important to recognize the very real gains that have occurred over the past 30 years, and to understand the reasons for them” said Janet M. Currie, the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and co-director of Princeton’s Center for Health and Wellbeing. “Improved access to health care and safety-net programs all contributed to improvements in life expectancy among Black Americans. Yet, there is this perplexing reversal of the positive trends for all groups since 2012 that we need to better understand.”
Both the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement highlighted the disproportionate health gap between Black and white Americans, but the researchers wanted to quantify these differences in terms of trends in life expectancy in the years before the pandemic struck. To do this, they analyzed data from the National Vital Statistics System and the National Center for Health Statistics run by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Starting decades ago as fashionable, high-value gourmet greens, today microgreens have gained popularity among consumers for their nutritional profile and high content of antioxidant compounds. Now, a new study suggests that the tiny plants have the potential to help provide global nutrition security.
As part of a project titled, “Food Resilience in the Face of Catastrophic Global Events,” an international team of researchers has found that these vegetables can be grown in a variety of soilless production systems in small spaces indoors, with or without artificial lighting. The findings are especially relevant amid a pandemic that has disrupted food supply chains.
With microgreens, people can produce fresh and nutritious vegetables even in areas that are considered food deserts, according to team leader Francesco Di Gioia, assistant professor of vegetable crop science, College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State.
“The current COVID-19 pandemic revealed the vulnerability of our food system and the need to address malnutrition issues and nutrition-security inequality, which could be exacerbated by potential future emergencies or catastrophes,” he said. “Nutrient-dense microgreens have great potential as an efficient food-resilience resource.”
Microgreens’ nutritional profile is associated with the rich variety of colors, shapes, textural properties and flavors obtained from sprouting a multitude of edible vegetable species, including herbs, herbaceous crops and wild edible species.
With a short growth cycle requiring only minimal inputs of fertilizer, microgreens have great potential to provide essential nutrients and antioxidants, Di Gioia noted. Using simple agronomic techniques, it is possible to produce microvegetables that could address specific dietary needs or micronutrient deficiencies, as well as nutrition-security issues in emergency situations or in challenging environmental conditions.
Consumers could produce microgreens at home using simple tools available in a kitchen, Di Gioia pointed out. A grower also would need seeds, growing trays and a growth medium — which could consist of a common peat or peat and perlite growth mix.
Given all the characteristics of microgreens, scientists at NASA and the European Space Agency also have proposed them as a source of fresh food and essential nutrients for astronauts engaged in long-term space missions. And because microgreens may be used as functional food to enhance nutrition security under current conditions and during future emergencies or catastrophes, Di Gioia suggested that microgreen production kits including seeds could be prepared and stored, then made available when needed.
“Under such circumstances, a variety of fresh and nutrient-rich microgreens could be grown providing a source of minerals, vitamins and antioxidants in a relatively short time,” he said. “Or alternatively, kits could be distributed to vulnerable segments of the population as a short-term nutrition-security resource.”
Di Gioia presented the study virtually during the International Symposium on Soilless Culture and Hydroponics sponsored by the International Society for Horticultural Science last spring. Originally scheduled to be held in Lemesos, Cyprus, the symposium took place online because of COVID concerns. The research paper was published recently in Acta Horticulturae, the journal of the International Society for Horticultural Science.
Also on the research team were Spyridon Petropoulos, Department of Agriculture, University of Thessaly, Magnissia, Greece; Isabel C.F.R. Ferreira, Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Centro de Investigaçã o de Montanha, Campus de Santa Apolónia, Bragança, Portugal; and Erin Rosskopf, Horticultural Research Laboratory, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service, Fort Pierce, Florida.
Open Philanthropy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture supported this research.
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When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020, the R rate became well-known shorthand for the reproduction of the disease. Yet a new study suggests it’s time for ‘A Farewell to R’ in favour of a different approach based on the growth rate of infection rather than contagiousness.
The study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface and led by researchers from the University of Cambridge, is based on time series models developed using classical statistical methods. The models produce nowcasts and forecasts of the daily number of new cases and deaths that have already proved successful in predicting new COVID-19 waves and spikes in Germany, Florida and several states in India.
The study is co-authored by Andrew Harvey and Paul Kattuman, whose time series model reflecting epidemic trajectories, known as the Harvey-Kattuman model, was introduced last year in a paper published in Harvard Data Science Review.
“The basic R rate quickly wanes in usefulness as soon as a pandemic begins,” said Kattuman, from Cambridge Judge Business School. “The basic R rate looks at the number of infections expected to result from a single infectious person in a completely susceptible population, and this changes as immunity builds up and measures such as social distancing are imposed.”
In later stages of a pandemic, the researchers conclude that use of the effective R rate which takes these factors into account is also not the best route: the focus should be not on contagiousness, but rather on the growth rate of new cases and deaths, examined alongside their predicted time path so a trajectory can be forecasted.
“These are the numbers that really help guide policymakers in making the crucial decisions that will hopefully save lives and prevent overcrowded hospitals as a pandemic plays out — which, as we have seen with COVID-19, can occur over months and even years,” said Kattuman. “The data generated through this time-series model has already proved accurate and effective in countries around the world.”
The study examines waves and spikes in tracking an epidemic, noting that after an epidemic has peaked, daily cases begin to fall as policymakers seek to prevent new spikes morphing into waves. The monitoring of waves and spikes raises different issues, primarily because a wave applies to a whole nation or a relatively large geographical area, whereas a spike is localised.
Therefore, a localised outbreak in a country with low national infection numbers can result in a jump in the national R rate, as occurred in the Westphalia area of Germany in June 2020 after an outbreak at a meat processing factory. However, this sort of jump does not indicate that there has been a sudden change in the way the infection spreads and so has few implications for overall policy.
The Harvey-Kattuman model has been adapted into two trackers. The two Cambridge academics worked with the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to produce a UK tracker which is published biweekly by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. In addition, they produce an India tracker which is published by the Centre for Health Leadership and Excellence at Cambridge Judge Business School. District-level pandemic trajectory forecasts using the model are used by public health policymakers in three states in India — Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Kerala — to identify regions at high risk and to frame containment and relaxation policies.
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Materials provided by University of Cambridge. The original text of this story is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage source, Getty ImagesVitamin A nasal drops might be able to treat the loss or altered sense of smell in some people who have had Covid, UK researchers say. The University of East Anglia is conducting a 12-week trial. Only some of the volunteer patients will receive the treatment but all will be asked to sniff powerful odours such as rotten eggs and roses. And brain scans will check if the vitamin has repaired injured olfactory pathways or “smell nerves”. Since I had Covid, food makes me want to vomitCovid smell loss made meat taste like petrolLoss or altered sense of smell is a common symptom of Covid, although many other viruses, such as flu, can also cause it.And while most people naturally regain it within a couple of weeks, many have been left with continuing smell disorders.image source, Lina AlnadiLina Alnadi, 29, from London, developed parosmia after Covid, which means the odour of many common things has changed for her. Tap water, for example, smells horrendous, the odour you or I might get from a swamp or sewer. The herb coriander has the whiff of deodorant. And eggs – one of Lina’s favourite foods – smell like burnt rubber.”You take your sense of smell for granted,” she says.”Losing it was devastating. It affected my diet dramatically. “There were lots of foods I just couldn’t face eating. It was really upsetting.”Life hacksSimple things such as showering or brushing her teeth are also unpleasant because of her skewed sense of smell. But the situation has improved gradually and Lina has found a few life hacks that help. “Adding lemon or chilli to foods can make them smell better,” she says.”I also experimented and made lists of safe foods that would not make me want to vomit. “I had to be creative about it to make sure I was eating enough of the right things to stay well.”Olfactory bulbLead researcher Prof Carl Philpott, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School and James Paget University Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “We want to find out whether there is an increase in the size and activity of damaged smell pathways in patients’ brains when they are treated with vitamin-A nasal drops. “We will look for changes in the size of the olfactory bulb – an area above the nose where the smell nerves join together and connect to the brain.”We will also look at activity in areas of the brain linked to recognising smells.”Vitamin A, or retinol, helps maintain:the immune system – the body’s defence against illness and infectioneyesight, particularly vision in dim lightthe skin and lining of some parts of the body, including the noseMany dairy foods, as well as some vegetables, contain this fat-soluble vitamin. But people taking vitamin-A supplements should be aware too much can be harmful. LOOK-UP TOOL: How many cases in your area?SYMPTOMS: What are they and how to guard against them?YOUR QUESTIONS: We answer your queriesTREATMENTS: What progress are we making to help people?NEW VARIANTS: How worried should we be?Related Internet LinksApollo Trial – Rhinology and ENT Research GroupVitamin A – NHSThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.