Publisher Health

Europeans are willing to prioritise COVID-19 vaccines for individuals at risk in the Global South over those in their own countries, suggests a study published today in eLife.
The study of individuals from six countries finds that Europeans support transferring COVID-19 vaccines to poorer nations and prioritising those with the greatest need regardless of their country of residence.
Vaccine nationalism, in which countries secure vaccines for their populations without regard to global vaccine needs, has been widespread during the pandemic. This trend leads to disproportionate pandemic impacts in countries with limited health resources and aggravates global health inequity. In low-incomes countries, it is estimated that only around 20% of individuals have received a vaccine dose. The unchecked spread of the virus in some regions can also promote the emergence of new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that can spread globally and prolong the pandemic.
“Understanding public preferences for global COVID-19 vaccine distribution is paramount to driving more equitable vaccine policies,” says Janina Steinert, Assistant Professor at the School of Social Sciences and Technology at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. “Governments are not likely to donate vaccines to less wealthy countries or participate in global vaccine alliances if they think they will pay the price for it at the ballot box.” Steinert and Henrike Sternberg, a research associate and doctoral candidate at Technical University of Munich, were co-lead authors of the study.
To measure public sentiment about vaccine distribution in Europe, the team surveyed 6,030 individuals open to vaccination but not yet vaccinated against COVID-19 in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden. The surveys were completed in Germany in April 2021 amidst the third COVID-19 wave and in the other five countries during a relative pandemic lull in June 2021.
The survey included eight questions on whether participants would prioritise person A or B for a COVID-19 vaccine. In each scenario, the participants chose between a person in their country, with a robust health system, or a person in a low-income country with fewer healthcare resources. The prospective vaccine candidates varied by age, their risk of dying from COVID-19, and their employment status.

Researchers at Penn State have successfully 3D bioprinted breast cancer tumors and treated them in a breakthrough study to better understand the disease that is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide.
A scientific first, the achievement lays the foundation for precision fabrication of tumor models. The advancement will enable future study and development of anti-cancer therapies without the use of “in vivo” — or “in animal” — experimentation.
“This will help us understand how human immune cells interact with solid tumors,” said Ibrahim Ozbolat, professor of engineering science and mechanics, biomedical engineering and neurosurgery at Penn State and the senior author of the study. “We’ve developed a tool that serves as a clinical test platform to safety and accurately evaluate experimental therapies. It is also a research platform for immunologists and biologists to understand how the tumor grows, how it interacts with human cells, and how it metastasizes and spreads in the body.”
Ozbolat’s lab specializes in 3D printing to create a range of tissues for use in human health. Two journal articles about the lab’s work using 3D bioprinting to help in the study of breast cancer were recently published in Advanced Functional Materials and Biofabrication.
The researchers used a relatively new technique called aspiration-assisted bioprinting to precisely locate tumors in three dimensions and create the tissue. The researchers then formed the tissue into a multi-scale vascularized breast tumor model with blood vessels, which they discovered responded to chemotherapy and cell-based immunotherapeutics.
The team first validated the accuracy of its tumor model by treating it with doxorubicin, an anthracycline-based chemotherapeutic drug commonly used for treating breast cancer. Finding the bioprinted tumor responded to chemotherapy, the researchers went on to test a cell-based immunotherapeutic treatment on the tumor in collaboration with Dr. Derya Unutmaz, an immunologist at Jackson Laboratory.

A substantial proportion of ethnically diverse children from low-resource backgrounds with severe COVID-19 illness are reporting long-term complications from the virus, according to research from UTHealth Houston.
The study, published Monday in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that pediatric patients with private health insurance were 66% less likely to report long COVID symptoms versus those with government insurance.
Most pediatric COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic; however, a small number of children are diagnosed with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) — a rare but severe condition that is associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Persistent symptoms of COVID-19 illness in children diagnosed with and without MIS-C is largely unknown.
“Over 27% of patients diagnosed with MIS-C and 15% of patients not diagnosed with MIS-C reported symptoms lasting more than four months,” said Sarah Messiah, PhD, MPH, first author of the study and professor of epidemiology at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health Dallas Campus. “These findings suggest that COVID illness is impacting a significant proportion of children long-term and that we need to start thinking about this not only as an acute, but a chronic pediatric condition.”
Researchers, many of whom were School of Public Health graduate students, conducted survey interviews with over 300 families who had a child diagnosed with COVID-19 illness. Acute long COVID symptoms last less than 30 days, while chronic long COVID symptoms can last more than 120 days. Patients and caregivers then completed a follow-up survey from March 2021 to January 2022 to assess the presence of long COVID.
Key findings included: Children who were not diagnosed with MIS-C (54.49% Hispanic, 19.23% non-Hispanic Black, 79.49% on government insurance) were younger than children who were diagnosed with MIS-C (mean age 6.43 years versus 9.08 years). Approximately 11.5% of children with MIS-C and 37.8% without MIS-C reported acute long COVID, while 26.9% and 15.3% reported chronic long COVID, respectively. Female children were almost twice as likely to report long COVID symptoms versus male children.”Our research also highlighted the disparities of age, sex, and race/ethnicity in terms of risk for long COVID symptoms,” said Luyu Xie, PharmD, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow and lead data analyst of the study at the school’s Dallas campus. “Specifically, we found older age, being female, and identifying as an ethnic minority were all more likely to report long COVID symptoms. These findings can inform future tailored interventions.”

A new animal study from Katherine Lee, a researcher with the West Virginia University School of Medicine, investigates why individuals with obesity may have a particularly difficult time fending off SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Specifically, female obese mice experienced worse disease symptoms, showing the importance of both obesity and biological sex in COVID-19 outcomes.
Lee’s findings appear in iScience.
Obesity dramatically increases someone’s risk of being hospitalized, placed on a ventilator or dying due to COVID-19. Considering that about two out of every five Americans are obese, that risk is far from negligible.
“No human is 100% healthy in every respect,” said Lee, a doctoral student in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cell Biology. “There are always going to be little differences in the way our bodies function and those changes can ultimately affect the ways we respond to everything. So, I think as soon as we start incorporating those differences and changes — metabolic diseases and preexisting conditions — into our work, we can learn more about how vaccines and therapeutics might be more or less effective in these people.”
Lee, her colleague Brynnan Russ, a WVU postdoctoral fellow who co-led the study, and their research partners, exposed two groups of mice to SARS-CoV-2. One group ate a diet designed to induce obesity; the other stuck to a normal diet and maintained a healthy weight.
On average, the mice that developed obesity experienced more severe disease than their counterparts did. They also showed symptoms sooner.
But these disparities were more pronounced in the female mice than in the males. In addition, female mice in the obesity group experienced high viral burdens and the most inflammation in their lungs.
“Clinically, a lot of data shows that men are more predisposed to severe COVID-19 than women,” Lee said. “While we can’t translate our findings from female mice directly to female humans, they do indicate an area for future study. Why does sex play a role in outcomes of COVID-19? And how is obesity a confounding factor?”
Lee’s findings are especially relevant in West Virginia, which has the second-highest rate of obesity in the nation.
They’re also relevant to the development of new vaccines and treatments for COVID-19, as well as other respiratory diseases.
“These mice are a new preclinical model we developed to be used as another tool to measure the protection of vaccines and other therapeutics the Vaccine Development Center has in development,” Lee said. “What we see with SARS-CoV-2 in a host with metabolic disease here is potentially relevant to respiratory pathogens and diseases. Preexisting conditions and comorbidities are going to be really important to consider moving forward.”
Story Source:
Materials provided by West Virginia University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Wastewater surveillance of infectious diseases is expected work for just about every infectious disease that affects humans, including monkeypox and polio. But more research is needed to apply the science for public health benefit, according to a research team led by epidemiologist David Larsen from Syracuse University.
The team’s work published Oct. 13 in the American Journal of Epidemiology examined all peer-reviewed scientific articles of wastewater surveillance published through July 2020. The team identified a variety of pathogens that can be found in wastewater, including almost all infectious diseases that the World Health Organization has classified as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) such as Ebola virus and Zika virus.
But despite this positive finding, few studies relate what is found in the wastewater to public health and the amount of disease that is circulating.
“Testing the wastewater is only one component of this powerful science,” says Dr. Larsen, an associate professor of public health in the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics at Syracuse University. “Understanding the results and implications for public health is just as challenging. We need interdisciplinary teams working together to maximize the benefit of wastewater-based epidemiology.”
Wastewater-based epidemiology is the science of taking what is found in wastewater and using that information to understand population-level health trends. Most of the articles reviewed by Larsen and his colleagues looked at what they could find in the wastewater and omitted the second step of relating the findings to other measures of population-level health, such as numbers of cases, test positivity, or hospitalizations.
Wastewater-based epidemiology of COVID-19 has enjoyed substantial availability of clinical COVID-19 data, and results from wastewater surveillance are more easily understood in terms of COVID-19 transmission. However, the research team determined that more work is needed to be done for other pathogens, including monkeypox and polio, to increase the utility of wastewater surveillance to benefit public health.
At the outset of COVID in 2020, Larsen led an interdisciplinary team of experts in coordination with the New York Department of Health to create a wastewater surveillance system throughout New York State. Today, the New York State Wastewater Surveillance Network is testing for COVID in at least one wastewater treatment plan in 60 counties, covering a population of more than 15 million. The New York State Wastewater Surveillance Network dashboard provides the most recent statistics regarding the network.
“New York State’s wastewater surveillance network is continuing to provide estimates of COVID-19 transmission and has aided the response to polio and monkeypox,” Larsen says. “We are also working on modeling other seasonal infectious diseases in the future.”
The research team for the American Journal of Epidemiology study included Larsen; Pruthvi Kilaru, a medical student at Des Moines University and former project manager for wastewater surveillance at Syracuse University; Kathryn Anderson, assistant professor of medicine and assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at Upstate Medical Center and the new health commissioner for Onondaga County in New York State; Mary B. Collins, assistant professor of environmental studies at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF); Hyatt Green, assistant professor of environmental biology at SUNY ESF; and Brittany Kmush, associate professor of public health at Syracuse University.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Syracuse University. Original written by Matt Michael. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

 Researchers from the University of Rhode Island and Yale University have demonstrated a promising new approach to delivering immunotherapy agents to fight cancer.
The approach involves tethering an immunotherapy agent called a STING agonist to an acid-seeking molecule called pHLIP® (pH-low insertion peptide). The pHLIP molecules target the high acidity of cancerous tumors, delivering their immunotherapy cargo directly to cells in the tumor microenvironment. Once delivered, the STING agonists engage the body’s innate immune response to fight the tumor.
In a study published in Frontiers of Oncology, the team showed that just a single dose of the pHLIP-STING agonist combination eradicated colorectal tumors—even large, advanced tumors—in mice. The treated mice also developed lasting immunity, enabling their immune systems to recognize and fight cancer long after the initial tumors were gone. While the researchers caution that results in mice don’t always translate to humans, the findings do lay the groundwork for a potential clinical trial testing the safety and effectiveness in cancer patients.
“STING agonists are an important class of immuno-modulators, but research has clearly shown that they often don’t work on their own and need to be targeted in some way,” said Yana Reshetnyak, a physics professor at URI and a senior author of the new research. “What we show here is that using pHLIP to target tumors through their acidity, we can successfully go after a variety of different cell types within the tumor microenvironment and achieve synergistic and quite dramatic therapeutic effects.”
Targeted immunotherapy
Immunotherapy is an emerging approach to fighting cancer. For cancer to survive and spread, tumors need to hide from the immune system. In some cases, they do this by expressing proteins that act as immune cloaking devices—tricking the immune system into thinking tumor cells are normal, native cells. Immunotherapy aims to disable these cloaking devices.

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have developed a new, machine learning-based technique to accurately classify the state of macrophages, which are key immune cells. Classifying macrophages is important because they can modify their behaviour and act as pro- or anti-inflammatory agents in the immune response. As a result, the work has a suite of implications for research and has the potential to one day make major societal impact.
For example, this new approach could be of use to drug designers looking to create therapies targeting diseases and auto-immune conditions such as diabetes, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis — all of which are impacted by cellular metabolism and macrophage function.
Because classifying macrophages allows scientists to directly distinguish between macrophage states — based only on their metabolic response under certain conditions — this new information could be used as a diagnosis tool, or to highlight the role of a particular cell type in a disease environment.
The landmark research, which used human macrophages in experiments, was led by Michael Monaghan, Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Trinity. The work brought together biomedical engineers, computer scientists and immunologists and has just been published in leading journal eLife. Professor Monaghan comments:
“Currently, there are no other methods that employ artificial intelligence-based, machine learning approaches to macrophage classification. A number of different techniques are currently used to classify macrophages, but all of these have significant drawbacks.
“Our method uses a 2-photon fluorescence lifetime imaging microscope (2P-FLIM), which is unique to Trinity and to Ireland. 2P-FLIM does not require sample pre-treatment, can be used to follow changes in metabolism non-invasively and in real-time — which opens the door to tracking disease progression and/or physiological response to therapies — and it also requires a lower number of cells compared with conventional techniques.”
Nuno Neto, PhD Candidate in the School of Engineering, added:
“It is becoming increasingly clear that to solve many of society’s greatest problems, we need to take multi-disciplinary approaches to harness the expertise of people working in different fields.
“Trinity is rightly known as a leader in immunometabolism research, with many of our scientists focusing on how it regulates immune cell response, and how immune cell metabolism is impacted in diseases. This study benefits from that expertise, but also bridges the use of advanced computer science approaches and utilises an advanced microscope from the Biomedical Engineering Department with a regime never reported previously. It thus serves as a prime example of inter-departmental collaboration in a multidisciplinary field.”
Nuno Neto’s Doctoral Studies are supported by a Trinity College Dublin Provost’s PhD Award and Professor Monaghan is a Funded Investigator in the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Centres AMBER and CÚRAM. Trinity’s FLIM Core Unit directed by Professor Monaghan was established using an SFI Infrastructure Programme: Category D Opportunistic Funds Call.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Trinity College Dublin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Published1 hour agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Michelle RobertsDigital health editorA ban is urgently needed to stop people buying and misusing laughing gas, manufacturers say.The Psychoactive Substances Act already outlaws the knowing or reckless supply of nitrous oxide for inhalationBut the British Compressed Gases Association has now written to new Home Secretary Suella Braverman, asking for a ban on all direct consumer sales.After cannabis, nitrous oxide is the most commonly misused substance among 16- to 24-year-olds in England. ‘I showed son’s ashes to people using laughing gas”A 20-second high isn’t worth losing your life overWhat is laughing gas?Widely sold in small metal canisters, nitrous oxide is a colourless gas used as a propellant – for example, in whipped-cream dispensers. This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.Hospitals and dental practices also use big cannisters of it as an anaesthetic patients inhale. Some of those who misuse the substance – sometimes referred to as “hippy crack” – inhale it via a balloon or use a dispenser or “cracker”. Heavy regular use can lead to a vitamin deficiency that can cause serious permanent nerve damage and lasting paralysis. But inhaling the gas directly from a large canister is particularly dangerous and can be fatal because it is under such high pressure and comes out extremely cold, which can:damage the throat and lungshalt breathing slow the heart to a dangerous levelA Home Office official said: “It is unlawful to supply nitrous oxide for its psychoactive effects, with offenders potentially facing a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.”Given concerns about the use of nitrous oxide by young people, the former home secretary sought advice from the independent Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) last year. “When the ACMD responds, the government will consider the advice carefully.”The ACMD is considering whether the gas should fall under the Misuse of Drugs Act, which covers to substances such as cocaine, cannabis and sleeping pills. More on this story’I showed son’s ashes to people using laughing gas’3 October’A 20-second high isn’t worth losing your life over’5 SeptemberRelated Internet LinksGas Abuse – BCGANitrous Oxide – Laughing Gas – FRANKThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

To protect your sexual function, it’s vital to discuss your sex life, even if that feels awkward.Any medical procedure on the outer genitals carries some risk to sexual function. But so can other pelvic surgeries, including hysterectomies and surgeries to remove ovarian cysts or endometriosis tissue, in part because the clitoris is so interconnected with the nerve supply in that region.To understand the risks of pelvic surgery and protect your future sexual sensation, it’s vital to discuss your genitals and sexuality openly with your doctor first, even if doing so feels awkward. Here are four questions to ask during your surgical consultation.Can you show me the parts that will be affected?Your doctor should be able to walk you through the procedure using diagrams or three-dimensional computer models, or by showing you your own anatomy. You may want to ask how often the doctor performs this procedure; ideally, yours should not be a first. If your doctor is vague or appears uncomfortable talking about these topics, “get a new doctor,” said Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sexual health specialist outside Washington, D.C.What are the risks to my sexual sensation?It’s important to share your concerns about arousal, orgasm and pain, as well as your preferences, as specifically as possible. Dr. Rubin said, “If you never tell your doctor how you experience pleasure, how can they assess if the side effects are relevant to you?” This may include asking how the procedure could affect non-genital areas like the anus, nipples and cervix.Do your patients typically experience side effects?Make sure your doctor reviews with you the most common side effects, which should also be listed on your consent form or post-op document. If a medical term is confusing or unfamiliar — for example, dyspareunia (pain during intercourse) or anorgasmia (inability to achieve orgasm) — ask your doctor to slow down and put it into everyday language.If I do experience lasting sexual side effects, whom should I call?Side effects to look out for include numbness, scarring, difficulty with arousal, loss of sensation, hypersensitivity and pain that does not improve. “I usually tell patients, ‘Every day you should feel better,’” said Dr. Emily Von Bargen, a urogynecologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. If symptoms do not improve, ask your doctor to provide names of sexual health experts whom you can consult.