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SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBooster doses continue to provide high protection against severe disease from the Omicron variant of Covid among older adults meaning a fourth shot is not yet needed, say UK experts. UK Health Security Agency data show three months after boosting, protection against hospitalisation remains at about 90% for people aged 65 and over. Protection against mild symptomatic infection is more short-lived. That drops to around 30% by about three months. Figures also show why it is important to get a booster dose if you have only had two shots so far. How do I get my booster?Why do boosters work if two doses struggle?With just two vaccine doses, protection against severe disease drops to around 70% after three months and to 50% after six months.The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which advises on vaccine policy, says the priority therefore remains to get first, second and third doses to those who have not already had them. This is despite some countries such as Israel starting to give fourth Covid shots to manage the highly infectious Omicron variant that is causing rising numbers of infections around the globe. More than 35 million boosters and third doses have now been administered across the UK. Prof Wei Shen Lim, the JCVI’s chair of COVID-19 immunisation, said: “The current data show the booster dose is continuing to provide high levels of protection against severe disease, even for the most vulnerable older age groups. “This is highly encouraging and emphasises the value of a booster jab. “With Omicron continuing to spread widely, I encourage everyone to come forwards for their booster dose, or if unvaccinated, for their first two doses, to increase their protection against serious illness.”Extremely vulnerable patients with impaired immune systems are advised to have four shots overall, rather than the usual three, to be fully vaccinated. But the JCVI says there is no immediate need to introduce a second booster dose, or fourth jab, to the most vulnerable care home residents and those aged over 80. The timing and need for further booster doses will continue to be reviewed as the data evolves.Even though vaccines are working well, large numbers of infections still mean, unfortunately, some people will still get sick and need hospital care. Health Secretary Sajid Javid says he is concerned by rising Covid hospital admissions, particularly in older age groups in this Omicron wave. He said: “We are still seeing rising hospitalisations, particularly with the case rate rising with older age groups – that is of concern.”And I think we have to be honest when we look at the NHS and say it will be a rocky few weeks ahead.”UK Health Security AgencyJoint Committee on Vaccination and ImmunisationThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

It happens that, after lying for a while in a way that puts pressure on a nerve in your arm, you do not feel the arm anymore, you cannot perceive its location and size, and it feels like it does not belong to your own body. If this condition lasts for years, the representation of the upper limb in the brain is chronically distorted. This is body representation disorder is a neurological disorder and is one of the more prominent long-term consequences of stroke. It severely affects how people use their body in the environment to move, act and sense.
Stroke patients report a wide range of symptoms, like being unable to embody their own arm. They also report symptoms like being unable to control the muscles in their arms and hands, being unable to finely modulate grasp force while holding an object, and difficulty in perceiving their arms and hands in general.
If left untreated, sensory and body representation deficits may lead patients to perceive the affected limb as shorter, less sensitive, less responsive, and eventually even to ‘forget` it.
In the EU, stroke is the leading cause of adult disability according to a 2020 study, and Covid has worsened the scenario. The number of patients with stroke requiring long term assistance and rehabilitation has dramatically increased since the outbreak of Covid-19, as well as flu-related strokes in young people. While some stroke survivors will recover, impairment of the upper limbs can become chronic and seriously affect the behaviour of the patient in up to 75% of stroke patients.
Novel neuromuscular electrical stimulation for improved rehabilitation
Now, a consortium of neuroscientists, clinicians and neuroengineers, involving the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience of the EPFL (directed by Olaf Blanke), MySpace Lab at CHUV, (directed by Andrea Serino), Villa Beretta Hospital (directed by Franco Molteni), led by the EPFL Translational Neural Engineering laboratory (directed by Silvestro Micera), has shown that carefully tuned electrical stimulation of the neuromuscular system, combined with current rehabilitation practices are promising for recovering upper limb control and embodiment in stroke patients with long-term disabilities. The details of their neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) protocols tested on 45 chronic stroke patients are published today in MED, the new clinical and translational journal of the CELL editorial family. The project has been funded by CARIGEST and the CARIPLO foundation.

Yes, you can get “flurona.” But it’s probably not as bad as it sounds.Reports about dual infection with the flu virus and the coronavirus have been making sensational headlines recently. Last week Israel confirmed its first case of “flurona,” in an unvaccinated woman, followed by a growing number of cases in children in the United States. None were seriously ill, but the name “flurona” stuck.“It sounds like ‘sharknado,’” Dr. Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, said. “But it’s not a known medical term.”As flu season sets in and the Omicron variant continues to surge, how worried should we be? We spoke to experts to better understand what it could mean to test positive for both infections. Here’s what we learned.Why am I just hearing about this now?People have been testing positive for both Covid-19 and influenza, or flu, since the pandemic began.From late January to late March 2020, researchers in China found almost 100 cases of patients testing positive for both illnesses in Wuhan. The Atlantic reported on a family in Queens that tested positive for both infections that February. And researchers in Barcelona published a paper in May 2020 describing four people with both illnesses in the early months of the pandemic.At the time, before vaccines were available, such dual infections, or what infectious disease experts call co-infections, appeared to be uncommon. A spring 2020 study in New York City, for instance, found that after about 1,200 Covid-19 patients were tested for other respiratory viruses, such as those causing influenza or the common cold, just 36, or less than 3 percent, had simultaneous infections. Last winter was also a notably subdued cold and flu season, with fewer people socializing and many wearing masks.“The reason we haven’t talked about it much is that it’s not been clinically a challenge yet,” said Dr. Jonathan D. Grein, an infectious disease physician and the director of hospital epidemiology at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. “We anticipate that as flu becomes more prevalent, we will see more co-infections.” If it becomes a serious problem, experts expect to know a lot more about it in the coming months.Will co-infection make me twice as sick?A co-infection doesn’t immediately mean that a patient will be doubly sick. A strong immune response may actually help the body fight off pathogens of all types, so one infection could stimulate some additional protection.“An infection to one might help to aid your immune response to another,” Dr. Grein said, “because it’s activating that same immune response that’s going to be effective in fighting both.”Still, scientists don’t know for sure yet, because so few people have tested positive for both Covid-19 and influenza. But judging from past trends, doctors are not overly worried.“The majority of people who have influenza do just fine. The majority of people who have Covid do just fine, especially if they’re vaccinated,” said Dr. Andrew D. Badley, an infectious disease specialist and the chair of the SARS-CoV-2 Covid-19 Task Force at the Mayo Clinic. “It is hard to predict,” he continued, “but we expect that the majority of people who are co-infected with the two viruses will also do just fine.”But as Dr. Badley and other experts pointed out, it’s generally better to have one infection rather than two. There’s more chance for complications with two infections, and it’s a bigger strain on the body.“The human immune system can create antibodies for multiple pathogens simultaneously,” said Dr. Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist and associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, who studies influenza.“But given the choice between being infected with one or two, I would always choose one,” he continued, adding, “I can’t tell you that two is so much worse than one, but the less viral threats, the better.”Who is most susceptible?Dr. Omer, who is also a professor of infectious disease and epidemiology at Yale, identified two groups he thought could be most susceptible to co-infection.First: unvaccinated adults. “Based on previous work on vaccinations, people who refuse one vaccine might refuse others as well,” he said. He said he expected there to be a “significant overlap between people who refuse both vaccines.”Second: children, especially those under 5, who are too young to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Kids are also petri dishes, as any parent will tell you, and have lived through fewer cycles of the flu. So even if a child got a flu shot, Dr. Omer said, “their library of protection is narrow” against the many viral flu strains that can emerge each year.What are the risks for the frail or elderly?Experts agreed that a patient who is already vulnerable to severe disease from one illness may suffer even more if doubly infected.“It is probable that those people who would have had a bad outcome from flu will have a very bad outcome from the combination of flu and Covid,” Dr. Badley said.What are the risks for children?Pediatricians were optimistic that “flurona” would not overwhelm most children. That’s because kids may be more likely than adults to get multiple infections at the same time.“It’s not that surprising to most of the people who work in pediatrics,” said Dr. Frank Esper, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital. “We see co-infections all the time.”The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 6The global surge.

When elderly people stay active, their brains have more of a class of proteins that enhances the connections between neurons to maintain healthy cognition, a UC San Francisco study has found.
This protective impact was found even in people whose brains at autopsy were riddled with toxic proteins associated with Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
“Our work is the first that uses human data to show that synaptic protein regulation is related to physical activity and may drive the beneficial cognitive outcomes we see,” said Kaitlin Casaletto, PhD, an assistant professor of neurology and lead author on the study, which appears in the January 7 issue of Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
The beneficial effects of physical activity on cognition have been shown in mice but have been much harder to demonstrate in people.
Casaletto, a neuropsychologist and member of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences, worked with William Honer, MD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia and senior author of the study, to leverage data from the Memory and Aging Project at Rush University in Chicago. That project tracked the late-life physical activity of elderly participants, who also agreed to donate their brains when they died.
“Maintaining the integrity of these connections between neurons may be vital to fending off dementia, since the synapse is really the site where cognition happens,” Casaletto said. “Physical activity — a readily available tool — may help boost this synaptic functioning.”
More Proteins Mean Better Nerve Signals

A recent study links anxiety behavior in rats, as well as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in military veterans, to increased myelin — a substance that expedites communication between neurons — in areas of the brain associated with emotions and memory.
The results, reported by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Francisco (UCSF), provide a possible explanation for why some people are resilient and others vulnerable to traumatic stress, and for the varied symptoms — avoidance behavior, anxiety and fear, for example — triggered by the memory of such stress.
If, as the researchers suspect, extreme trauma causes the increased myelination, the findings could lead to treatments — drugs or behavioral interventions — that prevent or reverse the myelin production and lessen the aftereffects of extreme trauma.
Myelin is a layer of fatty substances and proteins that wraps around the axons of neurons — essentially, the insulation around the brain’s wiring — to facilitate long-distance transmission of signals and, thus, communication between distant areas of the brain. The inner regions of the brain look white — in fact, they are referred to as “white matter” — because of the myelin encasing the many large bundles of axons there.
But the new study finds increased myelination of axons in so-called “gray matter,” where most of the cell bodies of neurons reside and most of the wiring is less insulated with myelin. The extra myelination was found primarily in areas associated with memory.
Researchers at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center conducted brain MRI scans of 38 veterans — half with PTSD, half without — and found an increase in myelination in the gray matter of those with PTSD compared to that seen in the brains of those not suffering from PTSD.

Children conceived through medically assisted reproduction are more likely to be born premature and are at greater risk of being born small than naturally conceived babies, according to new research published today by the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies in collaboration with the University of Utah.
However, the study of almost 250,000 U.S. families finds that differences in birth weight and pregnancy term between medically assisted reproduction (MAR) — including techniques such as IVF treatment, artificial insemination and fertility-enhancing drugs — and naturally conceived children become insignificant once family circumstances are considered.
Co-author Alina Pelikh, PhD, a research fellow at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies, explained, “Rather than the infertility treatment itself, our new findings highlight the importance of parents’ underlying fertility problems and health conditions, and infants’ birth characteristics, such as their birth order and whether they are a twin, on birth weight and pregnancy term.”
The researchers analysed data on 248,000 babies born in Utah between 2009-2017 whose anonymized birth records are part of the Utah Population Database. They examined information to look at the effects of different types of infertility treatments on pregnancy term and children’s birth weight. The researchers analysed rich data on mothers’ health, including pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and blood pressure, parents’ age and education level, before examining information on infant birth order and multiple births.
Around 5% of infants were conceived using MAR, with fertility-enhancing drugs used by 60%, assisted reproduction (including IVF) by 26% and artificial insemination by 14%.
The study found that children who were conceived through MAR were 10% more likely to be born premature and had 9% greater odds of being born small than naturally conceived infants. More invasive treatments — such as assisted reproduction and artificial insemination — were more strongly associated with adverse birth outcomes, whereas infants conceived using fertility-enhancing drugs were more similar to those who were naturally conceived.
“This study was possible because of the Utah Population Database and the secure access it provides to anonymized data. This has allowed us to study births throughout the state to understand possible effects on newborns associated with mothers who conceived naturally or through medically assisted methods,” said co-author Ken Smith, PhD, distinguished professor of Family Studies and Population Science at the University of Utah. “By comparing births from the same mother we were able to better isolate the impact on these births of medically assisted technologies.”
Once the researchers considered mothers’ health, parents’ socioeconomic background, and infants’ birth characteristics, the differences in adverse birth outcomes were significantly reduced for all types of treatments.
The research then focused on a subgroup of mothers who had given birth to both MAR and naturally conceived children over the eight-year period. After accounting for mother’s age at birth, pre-pregnancy BMI, and infants’ birth characteristics, the differences in pregnancy term and children’s birth weight between siblings disappeared, suggesting that family circumstances and unobserved parental characteristics, such as genetic traits, are important factors in explaining the association between MAR and children’s adverse birth outcomes.
Pelikh added: “We found limited evidence of the effects of medically assisted reproduction treatments on pregnancy term and birth weight through comparing siblings’ birth outcomes, which is in line with existing studies from the Nordic countries.”
Co-author Alice Goisis, PhD, an associate professor at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies said, “Obtaining similar results in highly diverse contexts — in terms of demographics, fertility rates and access to the medically assisted reproduction treatments — strengthens the argument that adverse birth outcomes among medically assisted reproduction conceived infants are unlikely to be driven by the reproductive technology itself.”
“This new evidence can go on to enrich existing health guidance about the risks and benefits of infertility treatments, hopefully raising awareness among families who are thinking about using medically assisted reproduction to help them conceive.”

Interventions aimed at promoting physical activity in people with asthma could improve their symptoms and quality of life — according to new research from the University of East Anglia.
Researchers looked at whether interventions such as aerobic and strength or resistance training, had helped participants with asthma.
Although they found that these interventions worked, patients with asthma may have had difficulty undertaking them because of their difficulty travelling to fitness groups or because the interventions were not suitable for people with additional health conditions.
But the team say that digital interventions — such as video appointments, smartwatches and mobile apps — could remove some of these barriers and enable patients to carry out home-based programmes in future.
Prof Andrew Wilson, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said: “Being physically active is widely recommended for people with asthma. Doing more than 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity has extensive benefits including improved lung function and asthma control.
“But research has shown that people living with asthma engage in less physical activity and are more sedentary than people without asthma.

When it comes to extreme weather, climate change usually gets all the attention. But according to a study from The University of Texas at Austin and two universities in China, the unique effects of cities — which can intensify storms and influence where rain falls — need to be accounted for as well.
“In addition to cutting emissions we need to recognize that understanding the effects of urbanization is part of the solution,” said Dev Niyogi, a professor in the UT Jackson School of Geosciences and Cockrell School of Engineering.
Niyogi is a co-author on a study published in Geophysical Research Letters that used computer models to investigate how cities and climate change influenced the rainstorm that struck the Rotterdam-Brussels-Cologne metropolitan region on July 14, 2021.
The model found that the interplay of large-scale climate and local-scale urbanization intensified the storm, causing more rainfall than either climate or urbanization on its own.
The severe weather system was part of a storm complex that dropped heavy rain across Western Europe in the summer of 2021, causing destructive and deadly flooding that killed at least 242 people, making it one of the deadliest floods in European history.
The research team also included scientists from Nanjing University and Tsinghua University.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingAt least 13 passengers, who tested positive for Covid-19 upon their arrival in the Indian city of Amritsar, have escaped institutional quarantine. They were among 125 infected passengers on a chartered flight from Milan which landed on Wednesday afternoon. While nine of them escaped from the airport, four others ran away from a local hospital, city official Sherjang Singh told BBC Punjabi.Police said they would file complaints against all of them. India reported more than 100,000 cases on Friday – experts believe Omicron is causing the sharp jump in infections the country has seen in the last week. A total of 160 passengers were travelling on the Italy-India flight. Reports said that children and infants – about 19 of them – were exempt from testing.Covid-positive passengers escape from Indian airportTV footage showed ambulances lined up at the airport to take the infected passengers to hospital as crowds gathered outside the gates. All infected passengers were admitted to the city’s Guru Nanak Dev Hospital, officials said. It’s unclear how four of the passengers escaped from the airport, but authorities at the hospital told NDTV channel that the nine who fled the hospital allegedly “tricked the health officials”. Police said that they have initiated proceedings to cancel their passports. “If they don’t return by morning, we will publish their photos in the newspaper and register cases against them,” Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar Gurpreet Singh Khehra told NDTV.Punjab, where Amritsar is located, is among several states that have brought back curbs to fight the rise in Covid-19 infections. On Tuesday, the state imposed a temporary night curfew and shut all schools and colleges. India has so far recorded more than 35 million Covid cases and around 483,000 deaths from the virus.You might also be interested in:This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy 2050, more than 153 million people could have dementia, up from 57 million in 2019, experts are warning. The predicted rise is largely down to ageing and growing populations. But unhealthy lifestyles contribute too, the researchers say in The Lancet Public Health journal. Risk factors that urgently need addressing and account for more than six million of the projected increase include high rates of smoking, obesity and diabetes, they say.The study, which looks at 195 countries, aims to give governments an idea of what resources and support may be needed and what action might help. I’ve got dementia – dementia hasn’t got meDementia is already the seventh leading cause of death worldwide and one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people.But it is not an inevitability. The researchers point to the importance of improvements in access to education in countries around the world and say that their projected figure for 2050 has already been adjusted downwards by 6.2 million based on what is expected to happen in this area. They are less optimistic about the effects of obesity, high blood sugar and smoking and have already factored in an extra seven million cases in 2050 linked to those causes.Quitting smokingLead author Emma Nichols, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, at the University of Washington, in the US, said: “We need to focus more on prevention and control of risk factors before they result in dementia.”Even modest advances in preventing dementia or delaying its progression would pay remarkable dividends.”To have the greatest impact, we need to reduce exposure to the leading risk factors in each country.”For most, this means scaling up locally appropriate, low-cost programmes that support healthier diets, more exercise, quitting smoking and better access to education.”The study predicts cases will rise:in eastern sub-Saharan Africa, from nearly 660,000 to more than three million – mainly driven by population growthin North Africa and the Middle East, from almost three million to nearly 14 millionin the higher-income Asia Pacific region, from 4·8 million to 7·4 millionin Western Europe, from almost eight million to nearly 14 millionin the UK, from just over 907,000 to almost 1.6 millionThe Lancet Public HealthThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.