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The findings of a major study suggests that the increased risks of blood clotting disorders from Covid vaccines is “far smaller” than the risks associated with getting the virus. The University of Oxford-led review looked at 29 million people who’d had their first dose of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccine.Prof Julia Hippisley-Cox told the BBC’s Today programme that the “reassuring” results “underscore the safety of the vaccine and the benefits of the vaccine compared with getting an infection”.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage sourceGetty ImagesMore than half of India’s eligible population – some 473 million people – have received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine, official data says.India has been ramping up its vaccination drive as it races to stave off a third wave of infections.It has so far given more than 610 million doses of three approved vaccines – Covishield, Covaxin and Sputnik V. The government aims to vaccinate all Indians by the end of this year.India took 19 days to administer the last 100 million doses, compared to 85 days to give the first 100 million jabs, the government said. But only about 15% of eligible adults have been fully vaccinated since the beginning of the drive in January.Regional disparities persist as well with larger and poorer states lagging behind smaller and richer states. How India’s vaccine drive went horribly wrongA visual guide to the Covid crisis in IndiaIndia has reported more than 32 million Covid cases, second only to the US. The country is also only the third in the world to record more than 400,000 deaths – behind the US and Brazil.How is India’s rollout going?Since 16 January, India has administered more than 610 million doses.Some 473 million people have received the first dose and another 138 million or so have received both doses so far. image sourceGetty ImagesIndia has been giving 5.3 million jabs daily on an average for about a month now, according to Dr Rijo M John, a health economist.”This daily average is far from what is required to finish the drive off this year. I don’t see the target of vaccinating all adults by this year-end materialising,” Dr John told the BBC.Experts say India needs to administer more than 10 million doses a day to fully inoculate all eligible adults by the end of this year. Much will depend on levels of vaccine hesitancy and the availability of doses in the coming months.”The major roadblock will continue to be supply itself for the foreseeable future,” Dr John said.India’s daily case count has been dropping – it has been reporting less than 40,000 new daily cases in the past month and most of them from the southern state of Kerala. But doctors say that a third wave is likely given that the country has fully reopened even as the threat of new variants looms large. While the vaccination drive has gained momentum, experts worry about a gender gap – government data shows 6% fewer women are getting vaccinated. This is especially true in rural India where women have limited access to the internet and are hesitant or scared to take the vaccine.Although a higher number of doses are being administered daily in rural areas, the share of population being vaccinated in urban areas is still greater.image sourceGetty ImagesMost countries, especially those in the developing world, have struggled to access vaccines – a challenge that India, as the world’s largest vaccine maker, didn’t expect to face. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government didn’t place orders from vaccine makers early enough – and a devastating second wave in April pushed them to expand the drive too quickly to the entire adult population, which is nearly a billion.In June, the government told the Supreme Court that 1.35 billion doses will become available between August and December. It would take about 1.8 billion doses to vaccinate all eligible adults in India.Which vaccines is India using?India is using three vaccines – the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab, known locally as Covishield; Covaxin by Indian firm Bharat Biotech; and Russian-made Sputnik V. image sourceEPAIndia recently gave boost to its vaccination programme by approving its first vaccine for those under 18.The three-dose ZyCoV-D vaccine prevented symptomatic disease in 66% of those vaccinated, according to an interim study quoted by the vaccine maker Cadila Healthcare. The ZyCoV-D vaccine is also the world’s first DNA vaccine against Covid-19.The government has also authorised Indian pharma company Cipla to import Moderna’s vaccine, which has shown nearly 95% efficacy against Covid-19. But it’s not clear yet how many doses will be made available to India. Several more vaccines are in various stages of approval. Vaccination is voluntary. More than 57,000 centres, mostly state-run, are offering jabs, but people can also pay for a dose at private facilities.The government is spending around $5bn to provide free doses at state-run clinics, public health centres and hospitalsHave there been ‘adverse events’ after vaccination?People can experience side effects from vaccines. India has a 34-year-old surveillance programme for monitoring “adverse events” following immunisation. Experts say a failure to transparently report such incidents could lead to fear-mongering around vaccines.image sourceEPAIndia has reported more than 23,000 “adverse events” after vaccination as of 17 May. Most of them were classified as “minor” – anxiety, vertigo, giddiness, dizziness, fever and pain. It also examined 700 cases of “severe adverse events” and reported 488 deaths until mid-June. But the government said the this did not mean they were due to vaccination, adding that “the risk of dying following vaccination is negligible compared to the known risk of dying due to Covid-19 disease”.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage sourceGetty ImagesA major review of vaccines suggests the AstraZeneca jab does raise the risk of blood clots and another serious condition that can cause bleeding.But the study found the risk of such problems following a coronavirus infection was still much higher.The University of Oxford-led team also found an increased risk of stroke after the Pfizer jab – but again at a much lower rate than after infection.The team said it once again showed the “substantial” benefit of vaccination.It comes after a coroner ruled on Thursday that BBC Radio Newcastle presenter Lisa Shaw died because of complications from the AstraZeneca jab.The 44-year-old died in May after developing headaches a week after getting her first dose. She suffered blood clots in the brain.Child jabs halted in trial as adult clot link probedAstraZeneca: Is there a blood clot risk?The research team looked at records from more than 29 million people who received a first dose of a Covid vaccine between December and April, as well as nearly 1.8 million who were infected with the virus.The study, published in the British Medical Journal, looked for complications up to 28 days after being jabbed or infected.It found that for every 10 million people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine:an extra 107 would be hospitalised or die from thrombocytopenia, which can cause internal bleeding and haemorrhages, but that was nearly nine times lower than the risk of the same condition following an infectionan extra 66 would be hospitalised or die from blood clots in the veins, but that was nearly 200 times lower than the risk following an infectionFor every 10 million people vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine, it found:143 extra strokes would be seen, but that was nearly 12 times lower than the risk following an infectionLead author Prof Julia Hippisley-Cox said it was important people were aware of the risks, but that they were kept in context given the higher risk from being infected.Fellow author Prof Aziz Sheikh added the findings “clearly underscore” the importance of getting vaccinated to reduce the risk of these clotting and bleeding outcomes.Vaccinations, he said, offer a “substantial public health benefit”.

Campaigners say autistic people are being left to “fall through the cracks” by the social care system.Analysis carried out by the Health Foundation for BBC News suggests around 10 per cent of social care staff have had any training in how to support people with autism.And the National Autistic Society say more than 300,000 people are not getting their needs met by their local social services. That’s despite 5.6 billion pounds – 40% of local authority spending on social care – being spent on people with learning disabilities and autism.The BBC’s Jeremy Cooke has been to meet one family who feel completely failed by the health and social care system.Producer: Ruth CleggCamera and editor: Phillip EdwardsIf you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this video, there is information and support at BBC Action Line.

Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are using the precision targeting of monoclonal antibodies for a new type of female contraception.
Monoclonal antibodies are known for their ability to fight off invading germs and are used to treat and prevent everything from cancer to COVID-19. Scientists are now looking at a new mission for antibodies: immobilizing sperm before it can reach an egg.
Carolina researchers have engineered ultra-potent antibodies that, during animal testing, effectively trapped and blocked more than 99.9% of human sperm. The promising study results published in Science Translational Medicine suggest contraceptives based on antibodies may offer women a non-hormonal option to prevent pregnancy.
“Many women avoid hormonal contraception because of real and perceived side effects,” said Samuel Lai, professor in the Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
These effects can include irregular bleeding, nausea, depression, weight gain and migraines. And for some women estrogen-based hormonal contraception can be harmful.
“There’s a major unmet need for alternative, non-hormonal contraceptives for women,” said Lai.

In lifesaving situations, expedient and accurate diagnostic tools are critical to aid pathologists in examining biopsied tissue samples looking for signs of diseases. UCLA engineers found a new path to achieve that with virtual re-staining of tissue images that is both faster than human-performed special stains and just as accurate.
Under a microscope, pathologists inspect tissue samples from biopsies that have been stained with special dyes to enhance contrast and color. The most common stain used is the hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stain. However, in many clinical cases, additional special stains are needed to provide added contrast and color to different tissue components. This allows pathologists to get a clearer diagnostic picture. These special stains often require significantly longer time for tissue preparation, along with added effort and monitoring by expert histotechnologists, all of which increase the costs and time for disease diagnosis.
To speed up this process exponentially, UCLA researchers have developed a computational technique, powered by artificial intelligence, which transforms images of tissue previously stained with H&E into new ones with added special stains. The process takes less than one minute per tissue sample, as opposed to several hours or even more than a day when performed by human experts. This speed differential enables faster preliminary diagnoses that require special stains, while also providing significant savings in costs. Nature Communications recently published the research study outlining the new technique and its impact.
“We developed a deep learning-based technique that eliminates the need for special stains to be performed by histotechnologists,” said research lead Aydogan Ozcan, UCLA’s Volgenau Professor for Engineering Innovation at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the Samueli School of Engineering and an associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). “The enhanced speed and accuracy are particularly important when diagnosing medical conditions such as organ transplant rejection cases, where a fast and accurate diagnosis enables rapid treatment, which may lead to greatly improved clinical outcomes.”
Ozcan’s team demonstrated the AI-based technique by generating a full panel of special stains used for kidney tissue — Periodic Acid-Schiff (PAS), Jones silver stain and Masson’s Trichrome. Using specialized deep neural networks trained on existing images of H&E-stained tissue biopsies, the researchers were able to virtually generate these special stains on a variety of clinical samples, covering a broad range of kidney diseases. A multi-institution team of board-certified renal pathologists then performed a clinical evaluation to ascertain the efficacy of the virtual, stain-to-stain transformation technique. They found a statistically significant improvement in the diagnoses achieved by using the virtually generated special stains over the use of only the H&E-stained images of biopsies. An additional study also showed that the quality of the virtually re-stained images is statistically equivalent to those processed with special stains by human experts.
Furthermore, since the technique is applied to existing H&E-stained images, the researchers emphasized that it would be easy to adopt, as it does not require any changes to the current tissue processing workflow used in pathology labs.
In addition to Ozcan, who also holds a faculty appointment in the Bioengineering Department, the research team consists of W. Dean Wallace, a professor of pathology at the USC Keck School of Medicine; and Yair Rivenson, an adjunct professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCLA; as well as UCLA Samueli graduate students Kevin de Haan, Yijie Zhang and Tairan Liu. Clinical validation of this virtual re-staining method was advised by Dr. Jonathan Zuckerman of the UCLA Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation’s Biophotonics Program.
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Individuals with COVID-19 are most likely to spread the virus to close contacts two days before the onset of symptoms to three days after symptoms appear, and the risk of transmission is highest when patients had mild or moderate disease severity, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Georgia.
The study, which was published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, supports the idea that if a person with COVID-19 is sicker, they are more contagious compared to asymptomatic cases.
The findings provide further evidence for interventions like contact tracing, masking and vaccines, says lead author Yang Ge, a doctoral student in UGA’s College of Public Health.
“We found asymptomatic cases had lower transmissibility compared to symptomatic cases and were less likely to infect their contacts. In addition, we found that contacts that developed COVID-19 infections were more likely to be asymptomatic if they were exposed to an asymptomatic case,” said Ge.
“This suggests interventions like vaccines and masking should continue to be encouraged.”
Vaccines not only protect the vaccinated individual, but they also work to suppress the amount of virus that close contacts could be exposed to, and masking reduces the spread of aerosolized particles that could contain the virus.
The research team drew its findings from a large cohort study of 730 individuals who received a COVID-19 diagnosis in Zhejiang Province, China, between Jan. 8, 2020, and July 30, 2020.
Using detailed health records and contact tracing, the team was able to apply state-of-the-art analytical approaches to determine how the timing of exposure and disease severity impacted the risk of transmission.
The cohort included 8,852 close contacts, defined as members of a household, coworkers, and those exposed in a health care setting or shared transit.
To date, this is one of the largest contact tracing studies of its kind, said corresponding author Ye Shen, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in public health.
Though Shen says that these results need to be repeated in vaccinated populations, the study identifies a high-risk transmission window to help local municipal and public health officials target contact tracing efforts.
The study was co-authored by researchers at UGA, Boston University School of Public Health, Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, University of Texas School of Public Health, and Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
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Materials provided by University of Georgia. Original written by Lauren Baggett. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A new laboratory study from Oregon Health & Science University finds that blood serum drawn from people previously vaccinated or naturally infected show “significantly reduced” defense against two widely circulating variants of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.
The study published today in the journal Nature Communications.
Researchers said that their findings emphasize the importance of vaccinations combined with maintaining public health measures to cut off the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“We know that the virus continues to evolve for its own advantage,” said co-senior author Fikadu Tafesse, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular microbiology and immunology in the OHSU School of Medicine.
Researchers found two variants of concern — B.1.1.7 originating in the U.K., and B.1.351 originating in South Africa — show reduced neutralization by antibodies in the blood of almost 100 people who were vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine or previously infected by the virus. In the case of the B.1.351 variant, researchers measured a nine-fold reduction in effectiveness compared to the original SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Even so, researchers took it as a positive development that vaccination and earlier infections still mustered some residual protection against the two variants of concern. That finding appears to be consistent with a general reduction in the rate of hospitalizations and deaths worldwide, despite the increasing prevalence of the variants.

People often get sicker as they grow older, but new research from Gil McVean of the University of Oxford and colleagues finds that the impact of a person’s genes on their risk of getting sick actually wanes with age. The researchers published their new findings August 26thin the journal PLOS Genetics.
The genes we inherit from our parents influence our risk for almost all diseases, from cancer to heart disease to autoimmune disorders. With new genomic technologies, scientists can now use a person’s genome to predict their future disease risk. However, recent work has shown that the predictive power of a person’s genetics can depend on their age, sex and ethnicity.
In the new study, McVean’s team investigated whether the risk of developing a disease posed by carrying certain genes changes as a person gets older. In other words, they wanted to know if there are windows when people are more or less likely to develop diseases linked to genetics. They used genomic data from 500,000 people in the UK Biobank to look at how their genetics impact their risk of developing 24 common diseases. While different diseases had different risk patterns, the researchers showed that a person’s genetic risk is highest early in life and then drops off for many diseases, including high blood pressure, skin cancer and underactive thyroids.
Currently, the reasons why the risk posed by a person’s genes decreases with age are not clear. The researchers suspect that there may be unknown processes at work, such interactions between a person’s genes and their environment that lead to disease. A better understanding of how age impacts a person’s risk of developing a disease linked to their genes may help researchers make more accurate predictions about whether an individual will ultimately become sick with that condition.
McVean adds, “Our work shows that the way in which genetics affects your risk of getting a disease change throughout life. For many diseases, genetic factors are most important in determining whether you will get a disease early in life, while — as you age — other factors come to dominate risk.”
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Determining the 3D shapes of biological molecules is one of the hardest problems in modern biology and medical discovery. Companies and research institutions often spend millions of dollars to determine a molecular structure — and even such massive efforts are frequently unsuccessful.
Using clever, new machine learning techniques, Stanford University PhD students Stephan Eismann and Raphael Townshend, under the guidance of Ron Dror, associate professor of computer science, have developed an approach that overcomes this problem by predicting accurate structures computationally.
Most notably, their approach succeeds even when learning from only a few known structures, making it applicable to the types of molecules whose structures are most difficult to determine experimentally.
Their work is demonstrated in two papers detailing applications for RNA molecules and multi-protein complexes, published in Science on Aug. 27, 2021, and in Proteins in December 2020, respectively. The paper in Science is a collaboration with the Stanford laboratory of Rhiju Das, associate professor of biochemistry.
“Structural biology, which is the study of the shapes of molecules, has this mantra that structure determines function,” said Townshend.
The algorithm designed by the researchers predicts accurate molecular structures and, in doing so, can allow scientists to explain how different molecules work, with applications ranging from fundamental biological research to informed drug design practices.