SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage copyrightGetty ImagesThe US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced that fully vaccinated Americans do not need to wear a mask when they are outdoors.Those who have received all required jabs can ditch their face coverings if alone or in small groups of vaccinated people, the new guidelines say.But the CDC left in place its guidance to don a mask indoors and in crowded settings or venues.Over 95 million Americans have been fully vaccinated thus far.Following the CDC announcement on Tuesday, President Joe Biden celebrated the new guidance as “extraordinary progress”.US says vaccinated people can meet without masksWhy are Americans so angry about masks?The mask-wearing city that bucked the trend “Our scientists are convinced by the data that the odds of getting or giving the virus to others is very, very low,” Mr Biden said. “The bottom line is clear: if you’re vaccinated you can do more.” The president also urged Americans who have not yet received their shot to do so, calling it a “patriotic” act. “Vaccines are about saving your life but also the lives of the people around you – but they’re also about helping us get back closer to more normal living.”Health officials presented the new safety guidelines at Tuesday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing.”Small- and medium-sized gatherings for people who are outside and vaccinated can safely be done without a mask,” said CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky. This includes exercising or dining outdoors.She said that determining whether to wear a mask in larger outdoor gatherings would depend on other concerns like how well-ventilated a venue is and how much space is left between people.The guidelines are for the fully vaccinated – which means two weeks after a person’s final vaccine jab.image copyrightBRENDAN SMIALOWSKIEvidence suggests that, although Covid-19 infections can happen outdoors, the risks of transmission are very low. Early studies also indicate that fully vaccinated people are much less likely to spread the virus.Dr Walensky said mask guidance for the fully vaccinated was intended largely “to protect the unvaccinated”.”We really do want people who are unvaccinated to limit interactions with people, to go back to the basic principles of increased ventilation, spacing,” she said.Health officials have noted that the case count in the US is stabilising as the rate of vaccinations continues to grow, and on Tuesday, they called for more people to sign up for vaccinations. Nearly 141 million Americans – about 42% of the total population – have received at least one vaccine dose as of 26 April, according to the CDC.

The Marcellus Formation straddles the New York State and Pennsylvania border, a region that shares similar geography and population demographics. However, on one side of the state line unconventional natural gas development — or fracking — is banned, while on the other side it represents a multi-billion dollar industry. New research takes advantage of this ‘natural experiment’ to examine the health impacts of fracking and found that people who live in areas with a high concentration of wells are at higher risk for heart attacks.
“Fracking is associated with increased acute myocardial infarction hospitalization rates among middle-aged men, older men and older women as well as with increased heart attack-related mortality among middle-aged men,” said Elaine Hill, Ph.D., an associate professor in the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) Department of Public Health Sciences, and senior author of the study that appears in the journal Environmental Research. “Our findings lend support for increased awareness about cardiovascular risks of unconventional natural gas development and scaled-up heart attack prevention, as well as suggest that bans on hydraulic fracturing can be protective for public health.”
Natural gas extraction, including hydraulic fracking, is a well-known contributor to air pollution. Fracking wells operate around the clock and the process of drilling, gas extraction, and flaring — the burning off of natural gas byproducts — release organic compounds, nitrogen oxide, and other chemicals and particulates into the air. Additionally, each well requires the constant transportation of equipment, water, and chemicals, as well as the removal of waste water from the fracking process, further contributing to air pollution levels. Fracking wells remain in operation for several years, prolonging exposure to people who work at the wells sites and those who live nearby.
Instead of the typical single source of industrial air pollution, such as a factory or power plant, fracking entails multiple well sites spread across a large, and often rural, geographic area. In 2014, there were more than 8,000 fracking well sites in Pennsylvania. Some areas of the state have a dense population of fracking wells — three Pennsylvania counties have more than 1,000 sites. Contrast that with New York State, which has essentially banned the process of hydraulic fracking since 2010.
Exposure to air pollution is recognized as a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Other research has shown that the intensity of oil and gas development and production is positively associated with diminished vascular function, blood pressure, and inflammatory markers associated with stress and short-term air pollution exposure. Light and noise pollution from the continuous operation of the wells are also associated with increasing stress, which is another contributor to cardiovascular disease.
The research team decided to measure the impact of fracking on cardiovascular health by studying heart attack hospitalization and death rates in 47 counties on either side of the New York and Pennsylvania state line. Using data from 2005 to 2014, they observed that heart attack rates were 1.4 to 2.8 percent higher in Pennsylvania, depending upon the age group and level of fracking activity in a given county.
The associations between fracking and heart attack hospitalization and death were most consistent among men aged 45-54, a group most likely to be in the unconventional gas industry workforce and probably the most exposed to fracking-related air pollutants and stressors. Heart attack deaths also increase in this age group by 5.4 percent or more in counties with high concentrations of well sites. Hospitalization and mortality rates also jumped significantly in women over the age of 65.
Fracking is more concentrated in rural communities, which the authors speculate may further compromise cardiovascular heath due to the trend of rural hospital closures. People who suffer from cardiovascular disease in these areas may be at increased risk of adverse health outcomes, including death, due to less access to care. The authors suggest that more should be done to raise awareness about fracking-related risks for cardiovascular disease and physicians should keep a closer eye on high risk patients who reside in areas with fracking activity. They also contend that the study should inform policymakers about the tradeoffs between public health and the economic activity generated by the industry.
“These findings contribute to the growing body of evidence on the adverse health impact of fracking,” said Alina Denham, a Ph.D. candidate in Health Policy at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and first author of the study. “Several states, including New York, have taken the precaution of prohibiting hydraulic fracturing until more is known about the health and environmental consequences. If causal mechanisms behind our findings are ascertained, our findings would suggest that bans on hydraulic fracturing can be protective for human health.”
The study was funded with support from the National Institutes of Health Office of the Director.
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Materials provided by University of Rochester Medical Center. Original written by Mark Michaud. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Aerosol products used in the home now emit more harmful volatile organic compound (VOC) air pollution than all the vehicles in the UK, new research shows.
A new study by the University of York and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science reveals that the picture is damaging globally with the world’s population now using huge numbers of disposable aerosols — more than 25 billion cans per year.
This is estimated to lead to the release of more than 1.3 million tonnes of VOC air pollution each year, and could rise to 2.2 million tonnes by 2050.
The chemicals now used in compressed aerosols are predominantly volatile organic compounds (VOCs), chemicals which are also released from cars and fuels. The report says the VOCs currently being used in aerosols are less damaging than the ozone-depleting CFCs they replaced in the 1980’s. However, in the 80’s when key international policy decisions were made, no-one foresaw such a large rise in global consumption.
In the presence of sunlight, VOCs combine with a second pollutant, nitrogen oxides, to cause photochemical smog which is harmful to human health and damages crops and plants.
In the 1990s and 2000s by far the largest source of VOC pollution in the UK was gasoline cars and fuel, but these emissions have reduced dramatically in recent years through controls such as catalytic converters on vehicles and fuel vapour recovery at filling stations.

Arum Han, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, and his collaborators have designed an experimental system that shows exposure of SARS-CoV-2 to a very high temperature, even if applied for less than a second, can be sufficient to neutralize the virus so that it can no longer infect another human host.
Applying heat to neutralize COVID-19 has been demonstrated before, but in previous studies temperatures were applied from anywhere from one to 20 minutes. This length of time is not a practical solution, as applying heat for a long period of time is both difficult and costly. Han and his team have now demonstrated that heat treatment for less than a second completely inactivates the coronavirus — providing a possible solution to mitigating the ongoing spread of COVID-19, particularly through long-range airborne transmission.
The Medistar Corporation approached leadership and researchers from the College of Engineering in the spring of 2020 to collaborate and explore the possibility of applying heat for a short amount of time to kill COVID-19. Soon after, Han and his team got to work, and built a system to investigate the feasibility of such a procedure.
Their process works by heating one section of a stainless-steel tube, through which the coronavirus-containing solution is run, to a high temperature and then cooling the section immediately afterward. This experimental setup allows the coronavirus running through the tube to be heated only for a very short period of time. Through this rapid thermal process, the team found the virus to be completely neutralized in a significantly shorter time than previously thought possible. Their initial results were released within two months of proof-of-concept experiments.
Han said if the solution is heated to nearly 72 degrees Celsius for about half a second, it can reduce the virus titer, or quantity of the virus in the solution, by 100,000 times which is sufficient to neutralize the virus and prevent transmission.
“The potential impact is huge,” Han said. “I was curious of how high of temperatures we can apply in how short of a time frame and to see whether we can indeed heat-inactivate the coronavirus with only a very short time. And, whether such a temperature-based coronavirus neutralization strategy would work or not from a practical standpoint. The biggest driver was, ‘Can we do something that can mitigate the situation with the coronavirus?'”
Their research was featured on the cover of the May issue of the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering.

Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago have designed a completely novel potential treatment for COVID-19: nanoparticles that capture SARS-CoV-2 viruses within the body and then use the body’s own immune system to destroy it.
These “Nanotraps” attract the virus by mimicking the target cells the virus infects. When the virus binds to the Nanotraps, the traps then sequester the virus from other cells and target it for destruction by the immune system.
In theory, these Nanotraps could also be used on variants of the virus, leading to a potential new way to inhibit the virus going forward. Though the therapy remains in early stages of testing, the researchers envision it could be administered via a nasal spray as a treatment for COVID-19.
The results were published April 19 in the journal Matter.
“Since the pandemic began, our research team has been developing this new way to treat COVID-19,” said Asst. Prof. Jun Huang, whose lab led the research. “We have done rigorous testing to prove that these Nanotraps work, and we are excited about their potential.”
Designing the perfect trap
To design the Nanotrap, the research team — led by postdoctoral scholar Min Chen and graduate student Jill Rosenberg — looked into the mechanism SARS-CoV-2 uses to bind to cells: a spike-like protein on its surface that binds to a human cell’s ACE2 receptor protein.

In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers from Surrey investigated whether the daily consumption of a prebiotic food supplement could improve overall wellbeing in a group of 18 to 25 year-olds. The study found that those who received a daily dose of prebiotics improved mental wellbeing by reducing anxiety levels and had better gut health than the control group.
Researchers studied a group of 64 healthy female participants with no current or previous clinical diagnoses of anxiety. Participants received either a daily dose of the prebiotic galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS) or a placebo for 28 days.
All those involved in the trial completed surveys about their health experiences, including mood, anxiety and sleep quality and provided a stool sample for gut microbiome sequencing analysis.
Dr Kathrin Cohen Kadosh, Reader in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Surrey and Head of the Social Brain and Development Lab, said:
“This new research marks a significant step forward in that we were able to show that we can use a simple and safe food supplement such as prebiotics to improve both the abundance of beneficial gut bacteria in the gut and to improve mental health and wellbeing in young women.”
Dr Nicola Johnstone, Research Fellow from the University of Surrey, said:
“This is an exciting study that brings together different dimensions in mental health research; finding prebiotic effects in a sub-clinical group shows promise for translational clinical research on multiple markers of mental health.”
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Materials provided by University of Surrey. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus no longer need to wear masks outdoors if they’re walking, running, hiking or biking alone, with members of their household, or if they attend small outdoor gatherings, federal health officials announced on Tuesday.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped short of telling those people that they could shed their masks altogether in outdoor settings — citing the worrying risk that remains for transmitting the coronavirus, unknown vaccination levels among people in crowds and the still high-caseloads in some regions of the country.Federal health officials and President Biden were announcing the updated advice on Tuesday, linking the news with the administration’s public campaign to get most American adults vaccinated by summer and trying to offer reassurances that some semblance of normal life can return.But the C.D.C. is maintaining advice on other safety measures, saying vaccinated adults should continue wearing masks and staying six feet apart in large public spaces, like outdoor performance or sports events, indoor shopping malls and movie theaters, where the vaccination and health status of others would be unknown. And they still should avoid medium and large gatherings, crowds and poorly ventilated spaces, officials said.“I welcome less restrictive guidelines about masking outdoors,” said Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech. “We know that transmission outdoors is much less likely to occur than indoors, because the virus cannot accumulate in the air outdoors. It’ll become rapidly diluted.”But the guidelines themselves, which outline different masking recommendations for a variety of scenarios, seem overly complex, she said. “I can’t remember this. I would have to carry around a sheet of paper — a cheat sheet with all these different stipulations.” She added: “I worry that this is not as helpful as it could be.”Americans have been whipsawed on the issue of mask-wearing advice since the beginning of the pandemic, when top health officials said people did not need them — in part because of severe shortages of protective gear for health care workers on the front lines.And mask restrictions since then have been a patchwork from state to state, despite growing evidence of a mask’s protection for individuals and those around them. Many states have already lifted restrictions they had put in place for indoor and outdoor activities. Others like New York, however, have maintained mask-wearing requirements even for outdoor spaces, citing the threat of potentially more contagious variants.But the pace of vaccinations has helped influence some easing of those limits. So far, about 42 percent of Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, and 29 percent have received both doses of the two vaccines requiring double shots.Centers for Disease Control and PreventionThe vaccines are highly effective at preventing people from becoming seriously ill from the coronavirus.“Scientifically the vaccines are good enough that it’s highly unlikely that someone who’s vaccinated is going to be exposed to enough virus outdoors to have a breakthrough infection,” Dr. Marr said.Early evidence also suggests that vaccinated people may be significantly less likely to transmit the virus, but the exact risks are not yet known.Some experts also wondered if the new directives were confusing, by establishing different standards for those who are vaccinated and those who are not, even though it is impossible to know who is who.“It’s not like you can go up to someone in public and say, ‘You don’t have a mask on – are you vaccinated?’” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “Those who aren’t vaccinated will promptly take their mask off outdoors because no one can check.”But, she said, that is probably fine, since the risk of transmission in outdoor settings is very low, absent close or prolonged contact with someone.Dr. Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University, said the relaxed guidelines signal that “if you’re outside in a group of individuals who you know well, then it is safe to be without a mask if you were vaccinated. I don’t think that it goes so far as to change what our behavior needs to be in outdoor settings where we don’t know people, and we can’t distance.”Masking and distancing are still generally recommended when gathering with unvaccinated people from more than one other household or with an unvaccinated person who is at high risk of severe illness from Covid, or who lives with a vulnerable person.And there are scenarios in which wearing a mask outdoors can still be an important social signal, Dr. Carnethon said. For instance, no vaccine has yet been authorized for children under 16. “And when we’re going to require children to wear masks, at school and on the playground when they’re at school,” she said, “I think that it is responsible for the adults in the situation to model that behavior and normalize mask wearing even when outside.”A growing body of research indicates that the risk of spreading the virus is far lower outdoors than indoors. Viral particles disperse quickly outdoors, experts say, meaning brief encounters with a passing walker or jogger pose very little risk of transmission.But most if not all of the research about viral transmission outside was done before the vaccine was available.A recent systematic review of studies that examined the transmission of the coronavirus and other respiratory viruses among unvaccinated individuals concluded that fewer than 10 percent of infections occurred outdoors and that the odds for indoor transmission were 18.7 times higher than outdoors. (The odds of super-spreading events were 33 times higher indoors.)

Despite the prevalence of Alzheimer’s, there are still no treatments, in part because it has been challenging to study how the disease develops. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute have uncovered new insights into what goes awry during Alzheimer’s by growing neurons that resemble — more accurately than ever before — brain cells in older patients. And like patients themselves, the afflicted neurons appear to lose their cellular identity.
The findings, published April 27, 2021, in the journal Cell Stem Cell, showed that these brain cells are characterized by markers of stress as well as changes in which the cells become less specialized. Interestingly, many of the alterations seen in these cells are similar to what’s been observed in cancer cells — another disease linked to aging.
“We know the risk of Alzheimer’s increases exponentially with age, but due to an incomplete understanding of age-dependent pathogenesis, it’s been difficult to develop effective treatments,” says Professor and Salk President Rusty Gage, the paper’s senior author. “Better models of the disease are vital for getting at the underlying drivers of this relationship.”
In an earlier study, the Gage lab had shown a new way that skin samples can be used to create brain cells. These induced neurons more accurately reflect the age of the person they came from (unlike neurons made from the more commonly used induced pluripotent stem cells). The new study builds on that finding and is the first to use skin cells from people with Alzheimer’s to create induced neurons that have the characteristics of neurons found in patients’ brains.
“The vast majority of Alzheimer’s cases occur sporadically and have no known genetic cause,” says Jerome Mertens, an assistant adjunct professor at Salk and first author of the paper, who was also involved in that earlier work. “Our goal here was to see if induced neurons that we generated from Alzheimer’s patients could teach us anything new about the changes that take place in these cells when the disease develops.”
In the current research, the investigators collected skin cells from 13 patients with sporadic, age-related Alzheimer’s. They also used cells from three people who have the more rare, inherited form of the disease. As a control, they collected skin cells from 19 people who were matched for age but did not have Alzheimer’s. Using a specialized type of skin cells called fibroblasts, they generated induced neurons from each of the cell donors. They then compared the molecular differences in the cells among those who had Alzheimer’s to the cells of those who didn’t.
The investigators found that the induced neurons made from the cells of people with Alzheimer’s had distinct characteristics that were different from the healthy control subjects’ cells. For one thing, the Alzheimer’s cells had a lack of synaptic structures, which are important for sending signals to each other. They also had changes in their signaling pathways, which control cell function, indicating that the cells were stressed. Additionally, when the researchers analyzed the cells’ transcriptomes — a type of analysis that shows what proteins the cells are making — they found the induced Alzheimer’s neurons had very similar molecular signatures to immature nerve cells found in the developing brain.
According to Mertens, who is also an assistant professor at the University of Innsbruck in Tyrol, Austria, the neurons seem to have lost their mature identity, and this de-differentiation, in which cells lose their specialized characteristics, has also been described in cancer cells. He suggests the finding opens up the door for new studies.
“While more research is needed, the changes associated with the transformation of these cells represent potential targets for therapeutics,” Gage adds.
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Materials provided by Salk Institute. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A combination of remdesivir, a drug currently approved in the United States for treating COVID-19 patients, and repurposed drugs for hepatitis C virus (HCV) was 10 times more effective at inhibiting SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The combination therapy points a way toward a treatment for unvaccinated people who become infected, as well as for vaccinated people whose immunity has waned, for example due to the emergence of virus variants that escape this immune protection.
Four HCV drugs — simeprevir, vaniprevir, paritaprevir, and grazoprevir — in combination with remdesivir boosted the efficacy of remdesivir by as much as 10-fold, the researchers reported today in Cell Reports. The research team included scientists from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the University of Texas at Austin, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
Remdesivir targets a range of viruses and was originally developed over a decade ago to treat hepatitis C and a cold-like virus called respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). During the Ebola outbreak, Remdesivir was tested in clinical trials and found to be safe and effective for patients. Early in the pandemic, it was seen as a good therapy for COVID-19 but did not live up to its early promise in studies.
The research team performed protein binding and viral replication studies on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, using remdesivir and 10 hepatitis C drugs, some of which are already approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
RPI team had previously identified “striking similarity” between protease structures, or enzymes that are essential for coronaviral replication, in SARS-CoV-2 and HCV. The similarity raised the possibility that existing drugs which bind to and block the hepatitis C protease would have the same effect against SARS-CoV-2.

The COVID-19 vaccine isn’t having any trouble attracting suitors.
But there’s another, older model that’s been mostly ignored by the young men of America: the HPV vaccine.
Using data from the 2010-2018 National Health Interview Surveys, Michigan Medicine researchers found that just 16% of men who were 18 to 21 years old had received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine at any age. In comparison, 42% of women in the same age bracket had gotten at least one shot of the vaccine.
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends two doses of the vaccine at 11 or 12 years old, but Americans can still benefit from the HPV vaccine if they receive it later, as long as they get three doses by age 26.
In the U-M study, however — even among those who were vaccinated after turning 18 — less than a third of men received all three vaccine doses, and about half of women did.
“Eighteen- to 21-year-olds are at this age where they’re making health care decisions on their own for the first time,” says Michelle M. Chen, M.D., a clinical lecturer in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the first author of the study. “They’re in a period of a lot of transition, but young adult men especially, who are less likely to have a primary care doctor, are often not getting health education about things like cancer prevention vaccines.”
The HPV vaccine was designed to prevent reproductive warts and cancers caused by the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States. The FDA approved the vaccine for women in 2006 and expanded it to men in 2009.
Preventing cervical cancer was the primary focus at that time, so girls and women were more likely to hear about it from their pediatricians or OBGYNs. Yet oropharyngeal cancer, which occurs in the throat, tonsils, and back of the tongue, has now surpassed cervical cancer as the leading cancer caused by HPV — and 80% of those diagnosed with it are men.
“I don’t think that a lot of people, both providers and patients, are aware that this vaccine is actually a cancer-prevention vaccine for men as well as women,” Chen says. “But HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancer can impact anyone — and there’s no good screening for it, which makes vaccination even more important.”
Chen believes a dual-prong approach is necessary to up the HPV vaccination rate for those who are male, with renewed pushes from pediatricians to target kids and outreach from university health services and fraternity houses for the young adult population who may have missed getting the vaccine when they were younger. Pharmacists as well as urgent care and emergency room providers could also be helpful allies.
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Materials provided by Michigan Medicine – University of Michigan. Original written by Mary Clare Fischer. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.