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Published23 minutes agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesPresident Xi Jinping and other top politicians have been given domestically produced Covid vaccines, China has said. The news was released as part of a campaign to increase vaccination rates, especially of boosters.The deputy head of China’s National Health Commission, Zeng Yixin, said it showed the leadership’s confidence in the Chinese vaccines.Health information about these figures is not usually shared with the public. Mr Zeng said the country’s leaders had “all taken the home-grown Covid-19 vaccination jabs”.He added: “This has fully displayed that they attach great importance to the epidemic prevention and control work and highly trust the home-grown Covid-19 vaccines.”Officials are trying to increase vaccination rates, which are considered too low for the country to reopen safely. China continues to follow a “zero Covid” strategy, including mass testing, strict isolation rules and local lockdowns. While there have been far fewer deaths than in many other countries, this approach is facing growing opposition as people and businesses continue to face the strain of restrictions. President Xi has repeatedly said that there is no alternative to zero Covid. China has seen 2,167,619 cases and 14,647 deaths since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University. This compares with 23,088,074 cases and 181,398 deaths in the UK. An outbreak of Covid in Shanghai in April saw the city placed into lockdown for more than two months. During the outbreak, concerns were raised over low vaccination rates. Officials said just 38% of those over 60 had received a booster, while only 15% of over-80s had been given two doses. Recent figures show that across the country, 90% of people have now had two jabs. This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.More on this storyZero Covid holds danger for China’s Xi8 JulyChinese officials sorry for Covid-19 break-ins4 days agoTourists stuck in China resort city after lockdown4 days ago

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Published26 minutes agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, AFPA Chinese court has ruled against an unmarried woman seeking the right to freeze her eggs.Teresa Xu took legal action in 2019 after the Beijing Obstetrics and Gynaecology Hospital refused to perform the procedure, only available to married women with fertility problems. But the court found that the hospital had not violated her rights. Ms Xu labelled the judgement a “setback” for women’s reproductive rights, and promised to appeal.According to the judgement the hospital said it “understood” the complaint but had to follow the law. When Ms Xu first launched the case, Chao Wei, a spokesperson for the hospital, said staff had complied with government regulations on assisted reproductive technologies, the New York Times reported.Then 30, Ms Xu attempted to freeze her eggs in 2018 in order to focus on her career as a freelance editor.But she said hospital staff had encouraged her to have a child at that time instead.She was later told the treatment was only available to women who could not become pregnant without intervention, AFP news agency reports. The hospital also said pregnancies in older women were more risky, and noted challenges faced by single mothers. Women’s eggs deteriorate with ageing, making it more difficult to have a child. There is high demand for egg freezing in China, with many women who can afford to do so travelling abroad for the procedure. Ms Xu said she had considered going abroad, but it was too expensive. Her case has been widely followed in China, where there are strict controls on birth control and reproductive rights.In a video posted on the social network WeChat, Ms Xu said she was “not going to let it end like this.””We can’t say that this is a blow to the reproductive rights of single women,” she said, “but it may be a small temporary setback.”In 2019 Ms Xu said she had experienced societal pressure to have a child rather than focus on her career.Referring to her visits to the hospital, she said: “I came here for a professional service, but instead I got someone who was urging me to put aside my work and to have a child first. “I have already received a lot of this pressure in this society, this culture.”You may also be interested inThis video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.

Published19 minutes agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesThe monkeypox outbreak has been declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organization.The classification is the highest alert that the WHO can issue and follows a worldwide upsurge in cases.It came at the end of the second meeting of the WHO’s emergency committee on the virus.More than 16,000 cases have now been reported from 75 countries, said WHO director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.There had been five deaths so far as a result of the outbreak, he added.There are only two other such health emergencies at present – the coronavirus pandemic and the continuing effort to eradicate polio.Dr Tedros said the emergency committee had been unable to reach a consensus on whether the monkeypox outbreak should be classified as a global health emergency.However, he said the outbreak had spread around the world rapidly and he had decided that it was indeed of international concern.Too little was understood about the new modes of transmission which had allowed it to spread, said Dr Tedros.”The WHO’s assessment is that the risk of monkeypox is moderate globally and in all regions, except in the European region, where we assess the risk as high,” he added.There was also a clear risk of further international spread, although the risk of interference with international traffic remained low for the moment, he said.Dr Tedros said the declaration would help speed up the development of vaccines and the implementation of measures to limit the spread of the virus. The WHO is also issuing recommendations which it hopes will spur countries to take action to stop transmission of the virus and protect those most at risk.”This is an outbreak that can be stopped with the right strategies in the right groups,” Dr Tedros said. Monkeypox was first discovered in central Africa in the 1950s.

There have been more 16,000 cases outside Africa, and the virus has reached 75 countries and territories.For the second time in two years, the World Health Organization has taken the extraordinary step of declaring a global emergency. This time the cause is monkeypox, which has spread in just a few weeks to dozens of countries and infected tens of thousands of people.Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, on Saturday overruled a panel of advisers, who could not come to a consensus, to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” a designation the W.H.O. currently uses to describe only two other diseases, Covid-19 and polio.“We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission, about which we understand too little, and which meets the criteria” for a public health emergency, Dr. Tedros told reporters.The committee’s inability to come a consensus also highlights the need for a better process to decide which events represent public health emergencies. It is apparently the first time that the director general has overruled his advisers to declare a public health emergency. “This process demonstrates once again that this vital tool needs to be sharpened to make it more effective,” Dr. Tedros said, referring to the W.H.O.’s deliberations. Member countries are considering ways to improve the process, he added.The W.H.O.’s declaration signals a public health risk requiring a coordinated international response. The designation can lead member countries to invest significant resources in controlling an outbreak, draw more funding to the response, and encourage nations to share vaccines, treatments and other key resources for containing the outbreak.It is the seventh public health emergency since 2007; the Covid pandemic, of course, was the most recent. Some global health experts have criticized the W.H.O.’s criteria for declaring such emergencies as opaque and inconsistent.At a meeting in June, the W.H.O.’s advisers concluded that while monkeypox was a growing threat, it was not yet an international emergency. On Thursday, the panel could not reach a decision, Dr. Tedros said. Many experts roundly criticized the process as shortsighted and overly cautious.There are more than 16,000 cases of monkeypox outside Africa, roughly five times the number when the advisers met in June. Nearly all the infections have occurred among men who have sex with men.The W.H.O.’s declaration is “better late than never,” said Dr. Boghuma Titanji, an infectious diseases physician at Emory University in Atlanta.What to Know About the Monkeypox VirusCard 1 of 5What is monkeypox?

Urgent questions arise about how care of pregnant women with cancer will change in states where women are unable to terminate pregnanciesIn April of last year, Rachel Brown’s oncologist called with bad news — at age 36, she had an aggressive form of breast cancer. The very next day, she found out she was pregnant after nearly a year of trying with her fiancé to have a baby.She had always said she would never have an abortion. But the choices she faced were wrenching. If she had the chemotherapy that she needed to prevent the spread of her cancer, she could harm her baby. If she didn’t have it, the cancer could spread and kill her. She had two children, ages 2 and 11, who could lose their mother.For Ms. Brown and others in the unlucky sorority of women who receive a cancer diagnosis when they are pregnant, the Supreme Court decision in June, ending the constitutional right to an abortion, can seem like a slap in the face. If the life of a fetus is paramount, a pregnancy can mean a woman cannot get effective treatment for her cancer. One in a thousand women who gets pregnant each year is diagnosed with cancer, meaning thousands of women are facing a serious and possibly fatal disease while they are expecting a baby.Before the Supreme Court decision, a pregnant woman with cancer was already “entering a world with tremendous unknowns,” said Dr. Clifford Hudis, the chief executive officer at the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Now, patients as well as the doctors and hospitals that treat them, are caught up in the added complications of abortion bans.“If a doctor can’t give a drug without fear of damaging a fetus, is that going to compromise outcomes?” Dr. Hudis asked. “It’s a whole new world.”Cancer drugs are dangerous for fetuses in the first trimester. Although older chemotherapy drugs are safe in the second and third trimesters, the safety of the newer and more effective drugs is unknown and doctors are reluctant to give them to pregnant women.About 40 percent of women who are pregnant and have cancer have breast cancer. But other cancers also occur in pregnant women, including blood cancers, cervical and ovarian cancer, gastrointestinal cancer, melanoma, brain cancer, thyroid cancer and pancreatic cancer.Women with some types of cancer, like acute leukemia, often can’t continue with a pregnancy if the cancer is diagnosed in the first trimester. They need to be treated immediately, within days, and the necessary drugs are toxic to a fetus.“In my view, the only medically acceptable option is termination of the pregnancy so that lifesaving treatment can be administered to the mother,” said Dr. Eric Winer, the director of the Yale Cancer Center.Some oncologists say they are not sure what is allowed if a woman lives in a state like Michigan, which has criminalized most abortions but permits them to save the life of the mother. Does leukemia qualify as a reason for an abortion to save her life?“It’s so early we don’t know the answer,” said Dr. N. Lynn Henry, an oncologist at the University of Michigan. “We can’t prove that the drugs caused a problem for the baby, and we can’t prove that withholding the drugs would have a negative outcome.”Cancer drugs are dangerous for fetuses in the first trimester. Though older chemotherapy drugs are safe in the second and third trimesters, the safety of newer drugs is unknown and doctors are reluctant to give them to pregnant women.Bella West/AlamyIn other words, doctors say, complications from a pregnancy — a miscarriage, a premature birth, birth defects or death — can occur whether or not a woman with cancer takes the drugs. If she is not treated and her cancer gallops into a malignancy that kills her, that too might have happened even if she had been given the cancer drugs.Administrators of the University of Michigan’s medical system are not intervening in cancer treatment decisions about how to treat cancers in pregnant women, saying “medical decision making and management is between doctors and patients.”I. Glenn Cohen, a law professor and bioethicist at Harvard, is gravely concerned.“We are putting physicians in a terrible position,” Mr. Cohen said. “I don’t think signing up to be a physician should mean signing up to do jail time,” he added.Oncologists usually are part of a hospital system, Mr. Cohen said, which adds a further complication for doctors who treat cancers in states that ban abortions. “Whatever their personal feelings,” he asked, “what are the risks the hospital system is going to face?”“I don’t think oncologists ever thought this day was coming for them,” Mr. Cohen said.Behind the confusion and concern from doctors are the stories of women like Ms. Brown.She had a large tumor in her left breast and cancer cells in her underarm lymph nodes. The cancer was HER2 positive. Such cancers can spread quickly without treatment. About 15 years ago, the prognosis for women with HER2 positive cancers was among the worst breast cancer prognosis. Then a targeted treatment, trastuzumab, or Herceptin, completely changed the picture. Now women with HER2 tumors have among the best prognoses compared with other breast cancers.But trastuzumab cannot be given during pregnancy.Ms. Brown’s first visit was with a surgical oncologist who, she said, “made it clear that my life would be in danger if I kept my pregnancy because I wouldn’t be able to be treated until the second trimester.” He told her that if she waited for those months passed, her cancer could spread to distant organs and would become fatal.Her treatment in the second trimester would be a mastectomy with removal of all of the lymph nodes in her left armpit, which would have raised her risk of lymphedema, an incurable fluid buildup in her arm. She could start chemotherapy in her second trimester but could not have trastuzumab or radiation treatment.Her next consult was with Dr. Lisa Carey, a breast cancer specialist at the University of North Carolina, who told her that while she could have a mastectomy in the first trimester, before chemotherapy, it was not optimal. Ordinarily, oncologists would give cancer drugs before a mastectomy to shrink the tumor, allowing for a less invasive surgery. If the treatment did not eradicate the tumor, oncologists would try a more aggressive drug treatment after the operation.But if she had a mastectomy before having chemotherapy, it would be impossible to know if the treatment was helping. And what if the drugs were not working? She worried that her cancer could become fatal without her knowing it.She feared that if she tried to keep her pregnancy, she might sacrifice her own life and destroy the lives of her children. And if she delayed making her decision and then had an abortion later in the pregnancy, she feared that the fetus might feel pain.She and her fiancé discussed her options. This pregnancy would be his first biological child.With enormous sadness, they made their decision — she would have a medication abortion. She took the pills one morning when she was six weeks and one day pregnant, and cried all day. She wrote a eulogy for the baby who might have been. She was convinced the baby was going to be a girl, and had named her Hope. She saved the ultrasound of Hope’s heartbeat.“I don’t take that little life lightly,” Ms. Brown said.After she terminated her pregnancy, Ms. Brown was able to start treatment with trastuzumab, along with a cocktail of chemotherapy drugs and radiation. She had a mastectomy, and there was no evidence of cancer at the time of her surgery — a great prognostic sign, Dr. Carey said. She did not need to have all of her lymph nodes removed and did not develop lymphedema.“I feel like it has taken a lot of courage to do what I did,” Ms. Brown said. “As a mother your first instinct is to protect the baby.”But having gone through that grueling treatment, she also wondered how she could ever have handled having a newborn baby and her two other children to care for.“My bones ached. I couldn’t walk more than a few steps without being out of breath. It was hard to get nutrients because of the nausea and vomiting,” she said.The Supreme Court decision hit her hard.“I felt like the reason I did what I did didn’t matter,” she said. “My life didn’t matter, and my children’s lives didn’t matter.”“It didn’t matter if I lost my life because I was being forced to be pregnant,” she said.

Health officials in Rockland County offered pop-up polio vaccinations and urged the public to get shots as they investigated whether the disease had spread to others.The scene in Rockland County on Friday morning might well have been from a time capsule: residents rolling up their sleeves and getting vaccinated for polio, the highly infectious and sometimes fatal disease that has made an unexpected appearance in New York City’s suburbs.The sudden interest in such inoculations came a day after the county authorities announced that a local adult, unvaccinated, had tested positive for the disease. The case prompted alarm from local officials and residents, some of whom couldn’t remember whether or not they had received the vaccine, which has been widely available since the 1950s.Among them was Todd Messler, 64. He was one of 18 people who received shots at a pop-up clinic set up by the county health department in Pomona, N.Y., about 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.“It hurt like hell, but I feel better,” he said. “It’s definitely the way to go.”Todd Messler arrived for a polio vaccination clinic on Friday, a day after the discovery of a case of the disease in Rockland County.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesOn Friday, state and county health officials were investigating the case, interviewing immediate family members of the patient and urging immunizations for anyone among the general public who had not received one.Bryon Backenson, the director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control at the state Health Department, said that there was no indication yet of additional cases, though he noted that the state was trying to acquire as many samples as possible to test and was checking wastewater for signs of the virus.Officials were also trying to spread the word about the seriousness of infection, as “people are not familiar with polio,” Mr. Backenson said, noting that he himself was not exactly conversant with it.“The last real polio case I saw in a person is probably pictures of F.D.R.,” he said, referring to the Depression-era President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “I think for a lot of people, they don’t necessarily understand the gravity of what polio actually is.”It was still not clear exactly when or where the patient had contracted the disease, though health officials believe the person was infected by someone who had received the oral polio vaccine, which contains weakened live virus.Such vaccines have not been administered in the United States since 2000, suggesting that the virus may have “originated in a location outside of the U.S. where O.P.V. is administered,” according to county officials. The oral vaccine is safe, but people who are unvaccinated can become infected if vaccine-derived virus is circulating in a community.The Progress Against PolioThe highly contagious virus was one of the most feared diseases until the 1950s, when the first vaccine was developed.A Multibillion-Dollar Effort: A partnership of national governments and health organizations has a plan to rid the world of polio by 2026, which is now endemic in just two countries.Major Obstacles: Two of the three strains of polio have been eliminated from the Earth. But new barriers to full eradication keep cropping up.Childhood Vaccinations Drop: A sharp decline in childhood vaccinations around the world during the coronavirus pandemic — including those for polio — could threaten the lives of millions of children.Remembering the Polio Era: For Americans of a certain generation, the rollout of the Covid shot evoked memories of receiving the polio vaccine.County officials said the strain in question could be spread by those “who come in contact with stool or respiratory secretions, such as from a sneeze, of an infected person.”The person exhibited symptoms about a month ago, according to Rockland County’s health commissioner, who said on Thursday that the patient had suffered from “weakness and paralysis.”Mr. Backenson noted that only a tiny percentage of cases would develop into severe paralysis but that many of those infected with the polio virus would remain asymptomatic, which could make it difficult to detect to what degree the disease had spread.“That’s probably the biggest concern: You may have a lot of people out there who may never have severe paralytic polio but could potentially be spreading it to others,” he said. “That’s the reason for the urgency.”On Friday, Rockland County officials said that “the person did not travel outside the country during what would have been the transmission window,” adding that “up to 95 percent of people infected have no symptoms, which makes tracking down the transmission difficult.”Mr. Backenson said the Rockland case had been discovered after state officials had raised the alarm about a different neurological disease — acute flaccid myelitis — which can cause polio-like symptoms in children and can lead to paralysis. In June, the department had distributed a notice about the disease to clinicians, asking them to be on the lookout for cases. The patient’s doctor then sent a sample to the state authorities, who — rather than finding A.F.M. — discovered polio.Polio vaccines, typically administered in childhood, were made available to anyone who was unvaccinated.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesVictor J. Blue for The New York TimesCounty officials were alerted to the positive identification of polio by state officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday night. The county is disclosing little personal information about the patient, though several local officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of patient privacy concerns, said that he was a man in his 20s and a member of the county’s large Orthodox Jewish community.That community was also a nexus of a measles outbreak in 2018 and 2019, with hundreds of cases in the county and in Brooklyn, which is also home to many Orthodox residents. Rockland County’s rate of polio vaccination for small children is significantly lower than the rate for other counties outside of New York City, according to state data. (Misinformation about vaccines has circulated in the Orthodox community, although most Orthodox rabbis encourage vaccination among their congregants.)The measles outbreak led to a new law, passed in June 2019, that ended religious exemptions for immunizations amid a heated debate in Albany, a dispute that presaged even broader fights nationwide over Covid vaccinations after the pandemic began in 2020.In Monsey, Yechiel Teichman, 27, an Orthodox father of two young daughters, said he was alarmed by the news of the polio resurgence even though he and his daughters were vaccinated.“It reminded me of elderly family members who are still suffering from the polio they had as children,” Mr. Teichman said, as he walked his girls, ages 2 and 4, home from getting a pizza. “I advise everyone to get vaccinated.”Like other residents, Mr. Teichman also confessed to a sense of exhaustion and a lack of patience with talk of diseases, including the coronavirus and recent cases of monkeypox. Still, he said, “I worry a lot more about polio than Covid — polio could do a lot more damage.”Layla Deutsch, 21, said that though she had grown up ultra-Orthodox, her parents had been sufficiently terrified of polio to have her vaccinated. However, many of her friends had not been vaccinated, leaving her worried and anxious.“It’s a little bit freaky,” she said. “Anything could come up. We don’t know what’s next.”Likewise, local elected officials said that the community and government response to polio should be as aggressive as possible.“This can’t wait,” said Assemblyman Kenneth Zebrowski, a Democrat from Rockland, who said that he had been shocked to be informed of the polio case. “They need to be attacking this on white boards in a war room.”Yechiel Teichman said that he and his children had been vaccinated against polio but that the news of a case in the community was still alarming.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesMr. Zebrowski, who has three children, seemed frustrated that his district was once again dealing with a disease, like the measles, that had seemingly been conquered by modern medicine, only to flare up again in an unvaccinated person.“Are you going to be at risk if you take your kids to the mall?” he said. “We honestly haven’t had to worry about this for decades.”Aron B. Wieder, a member of the Rockland County Legislature who is a Hasidic Jew, said he had been encouraged by the response of residents in his community, and he encouraged unvaccinated people to be inoculated as soon as possible. “This can save lives,” he said.Once one of the world’s most feared diseases, polio was largely tamed using vaccines developed in the 1950s. The last known case of polio in the United States was in 2013, believed to have been brought in from abroad. The last case that originated in the U.S. was in 1979, according to the C.D.C.For Mr. Messler, the immunization on Friday morning helped settle his mind, though he said the ongoing threat of various diseases had left him a little weary.“It’s a drag, isn’t it?” he said. “I’m not alarmed personally to any extent. But these things are going to keep coming back and coming back and coming back.”Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.

New research led by scientists at Arizona State University has revealed some of the first detailed molecular clues associated with one of the leading causes of death and disability, a condition known as traumatic brain injury (TBI).
TBI is a growing public health concern, affecting more than 1.7 million Americans at an estimated annual cost of $76.5 billion dollars. It is a leading cause of death and disability for children and young adults in industrialized countries, and people who experience TBI are more likely to develop severe, long-term cognitive and behavioral deficits.
“Unfortunately, the molecular and cellular mechanisms of TBI injury progression are multifaceted and have yet to be fully elucidated,” said Sarah Stabenfeldt, an ASU professor and the leader and corresponding author of the study, which appears in the journal Science Advances. “Consequently, this complexity affects the development of diagnostic and treatment options for TBI; the goal of our research was to address these current limitations.”
Their research approach was to perform a “biopanning” search to reveal several key molecular signatures, called biomarkers, identified directly after immediately after the injury event (the acute phase), and also the long-term consequences (the chronic phase) of TBI.
“For TBI, the pathology evolves and changes over time, meaning that a single protein or receptor may be upregulated at one phase of the injury, but not two weeks later,” said Sarah Stabenfeldt. “This dynamic environment makes developing a successful targeting strategy complicated.”
To overcome these limitations, The ASU scientists, led by Sarah Stabenfeldt utilize a mouse model for their study to begin to study the root causes of TBI by identifying biomarkers — unique molecular fingerprints found with a given injury or disease.

The president’s symptoms improved somewhat, a day after he tested positive for Covid-19.WASHINGTON — One after another, President Biden hugged and kissed them.At a packed ceremony in the East Room of the White House on July 7, Mr. Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, on 16 Americans, some in their 80s or 90s. After reaching around to hang the medal on their necks, the president embraced most of them, shook hands with a few and gave three a smooch on the cheek.It is highly unlikely that Mr. Biden — who tested positive for Covid-19 on Thursday — became infected with the coronavirus during that event. But the fact that the celebration happened at all underscores how much the White House has dropped most of the extraordinary measures it once employed to protect the commander in chief from a disease that has killed more than 1 million Americans.In the early days, Mr. Biden was a president in a bubble, governing the country mostly by Zoom inside the Oval Office. He rarely traveled. He held few in-person meetings. And most of the ceremonial trappings of the office — like the medal ceremony — were canceled or postponed, victims of the lockdowns that were deemed necessary to stop the spread.But like many other Americans, Mr. Biden has loosened up in recent months. Protected by multiple doses of the vaccine, the president and his aides have changed their risk assessments and have begun to live with the coronavirus.“Whatever your thing is — whether it’s being the president of the United States, going to school, going to work, doing the things you enjoy, being with who we love — it can’t be put off forever,” said Andy Slavitt, who advised the White House on its Covid-19 response early in the Biden administration.Mr. Slavitt said Covid-19 has become a disease that “comes around as frequently as a common cold but with much more severe consequences. It’s a much more uncomfortable middle state for people to adjust to.”Inside the West Wing, there was never much doubt that Mr. Biden would eventually contract the disease. By this week, many of the people around him already had: Vice President Kamala Harris; Jen O’Malley Dillon, his deputy chief of staff; Karine Jean-Pierre, his press secretary; several cabinet members, including the attorney general; Douglas Emhoff, the second gentleman; and Jen Psaki, his former press secretary — twice.On Friday, Mr. Biden’s physician said his symptoms had improved. The president had a temperature of 99.4 degrees late Thursday evening, according to Dr. Kevin O’Connor, in a letter released on Friday. He wrote that Mr. Biden was still experiencing a runny nose and fatigue, and that he had an “occasional nonproductive, now ‘loose’ cough.”“His voice is deeper this morning,” Dr. O’Connor wrote. “His pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation remain entirely normal, on room air.”The deeper tone in Mr. Biden’s voice was noticeable on Friday, when he participated by video in a briefing on declining gas prices. Mr. Biden cleared his throat multiple times during his remarks and could be heard coughing.Dr. Ashish Jha, the coordinator for the administration’s Covid-19 response, said that Mr. Biden’s temperature of 99.4 on Thursday was not considered a low-grade fever by the White House and that it fell “within the normal range.” He added, however, that he was unaware of Mr. Biden’s temperature recorded Friday morning. The White House referred to guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that states a person is considered to have a fever “when he or she has a measured temperature of 100.4 degrees” or feels warm to touch.Mr. Biden called into a video meeting with economic advisers on Friday, after testing positive for Covid-19 the day before.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesBut in his letter, Dr. O’Connor indicated that he did not feel that the president’s temperature of 99.4 was normal until after it responded to Mr. Biden taking Tylenol. Mr. Jha later on Friday said it was routine for doctors to report the highest temperature of their patients, even if it is not a fever.“He did mount a temperature yesterday evening to 99.4°F, which responded favorably to acetaminophen (Tylenol),” Dr. O’Connor wrote. “His temperature has remained normal since then.”Dr. Jha said Dr. O’Connor did not prescribe the Tylenol for the temperature, but rather for Mr. Biden’s “discomfort.” Dr. Jha declined to say what discomfort the president was experiencing. Officials have said he does not have a sore throat or a headache and have not indicated he has other aches and pains.The White House went to great lengths this week to show that Mr. Biden’s work life has not been dramatically affected by his diagnosis.The White House Twitter account posted three photos of the president working at a desk in the White House residence. In one, he can be seen talking on the phone. In another, he is signing a law designed to give people more access to baby formula.Mr. Bide was elected in no small measure because he convinced voters to trust that he could bring the pandemic under control and reopen the country.In the last 18 months, Mr. Biden has achieved much of that goal. Because of the widespread availability of vaccines and treatments, most communities have reopened stores, bars, sporting venues and schools. There are few mask mandates still in place.Mr. Biden now travels abroad (he shook hands with numerous world leaders during a trip last week to Israel and Saudi Arabia.) He holds political events around the country, flying on Air Force One and riding in the motorcade. And in-person events at the White House are a weekly occurrence again.But the pandemic is not over.According to the C.D.C., most of the country is now classified as areas with high community transmission. The latest Omicron subvariant, Ba.5, is vastly more contagious than the original coronavirus, though doctors say the vaccines remain effective at preventing hospitalization and death.So Mr. Biden has to walk a careful line, demonstrating that he is just like every other American eager to be done with Covid-19, even as he keeps his eye on the possibility that the pandemic could come roaring back.The White House tried to do that on Friday by using the president’s diagnosis as an case study for why Americans should get vaccinated and boosted. “We’re in a much, much better place than where we were 18 months ago, when the president took office,” Dr. Jha said, adding that the current level of about 400 Covid-19 deaths per day was “unacceptable.” He also added a grim warning.“This virus,” he said, “is going to be with us forever.”

A new study published in PNAS highlights a newly identified mechanism of how auditory sensitivity is regulated that could temporarily reduce sensitivity of the auditory system to protect itself from loud sounds that can cause irreversible damage.
The study, led by CU Anschutz researchers Andrew Mecca and Giusy Caprara in the laboratory of Anthony Peng, tested a decades-old hypothesis which proposed that the gating spring, a tiny, nanometer-scale protein structure which mechanically opens and closes an ion channel in sensory hair cell cells in response to sound vibrations, can act directly as a controller of the channel’s activity.
Previous work in the auditory field has focused mostly on understanding mechanisms which target the ion channel. This study provides the first evidence that the gating spring itself has the capacity to modulate the sensitivity of the channel.
“This study documents the first time we understand a mechanism that regulates auditory sensitivity on both the molecular and mechanical levels,” says Peng, Ph.D., associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and senior author of the study. “We uncovered a new mechanism of modulating sensitivity, which opens the door to discovering more about how the auditory system functions generally and uses this to both maximize the range of sounds that we can detect and protect the vital sensory cells from potential damage.”
The mechanism discussed in the study works by modifying a physical property of the gating spring, its stiffness, which is responsible for controlling how much the channel opens and closes in response to sound vibrations that enter the inner ear. The researchers studied the properties of the gating spring and the resulting activity of the channel in single sensory hair cells, and found that cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP), a specific type of signaling molecule, reduced the stiffness of the gating spring and decreased the channel’s sensitivity — which is the first time a physiological mechanism for controlling gating spring stiffness has been identified.
“Identifying the underlying mechanism of this process — how it works physiologically and mechanically, provides an avenue for future research and provides an opportunity for the field to develop a new type of drug that can be used to prevent a type of hearing loss that occurs from exposure to very loud sound,” says Peng. Ultimately, they aim to learn more about how the ear can detect such a large range of sounds and how the system protects itself, and this represents a huge step forward for the field.
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Materials provided by University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Original written by Kelsea Pieters. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.