Publisher Health

Have you been “zombie eating” during the pandemic? If you put down your phone or turn off the TV, you might enjoy your food a bit more.If you have found yourself over the past year increasingly eating dinner in front of the TV, or scrolling endlessly through your phone over breakfast, you certainly are not alone.“Quarantine permissiveness” is what Susan Albers, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic and a best-selling author who focuses on mindful eating, calls the nearly universal phenomenon of allowing yourself bad habits during the pandemic.But it may be time to consider a return to the table.It doesn’t have to be fancy or elaborate, but setting a nice table can encourage you to sit down and eat with your family, roommates or even solo with a good book.“Eating should be an experience and something you enjoy,” Dr. Albers said. “You don’t have to take a lot of time to eat, but when you do it, give it your full attention.” That means putting your phone away and sitting at the table.“Your phone should not be your dining companion,” said Dr. Albers, who calls that familiar habit of eating with one hand and scrolling with the other “zombie eating.” But she acknowledges that sitting at the table instead of in front of the TV, or eating without scrolling on your phone can feel like daunting tasks, because “it’s hard to unlink those two behaviors when you’ve done them day after day.” This can be especially difficult if you’re working from home during the pandemic, or if you feel that eating on the sofa while binge-watching a show is a sort of reward for making it through another hard day.The good news is that sitting down and eating meals at the table doesn’t have to be a chore. When you reframe mealtimes as special parts of the day, a time to connect with loved ones or to unwind alone, they become something to look forward to.Fallon Carter, an event planner based in New York City, recently bought a new dining table. She has found that sitting down to proper meals during the pandemic has been a great way to connect with herself. “When you set the space and set the zone,” she said, “you can turn any place into something special,” she said.Nothing about dining at a table has to be fussy, but a little effort can go a long way toward making the experience enjoyable. Ms. Carter added a floral arrangement to her dining table, with flowers she bought at Trader Joe’s. “It wasn’t a big lift,” she said, laughing, but it made the space feel more inviting. She also suggests using cloth napkins and proper glassware and acquiring a set of dishes that you really love.Many people have leaned into cooking during the pandemic, and setting the table is a great way to honor the work that goes into preparing a meal. Even if you prefer takeout or microwave dinners, the advantages of setting a table still apply. No matter how you get your meal, you can always transfer it to proper dishes.There are lots of good reasons to sit at the table for meals, but don’t stress yourself out. Meals are meant to be enjoyed. Ms. Fallon suggests even getting a little fancy with your table if you want.“Don’t save the good stuff! You deserve the good stuff. We’ve been in a pandemic!”5 easy steps to make mealtimes special:Set the table with cloth napkins, flatware, glassware and dishes that you love.Add candles, flowers or something decorativeKeep the TV off and your phone and laptop in another room.Sit with your feet on the floor and your back against the chair (as you would in a restaurant).Relax and enjoy your food!

After a year spent social distancing, mask wearing and sheltering in place, the prospect of readjusting to in-person social engagements can be a daunting one.As the days grow warmer and vaccination shots reach more arms, you may be looking ahead to getting out and about. An Axios-Ipsos poll released this month found that “the number of Americans engaging in social interactions outside the home is increasing.” And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued new recommendations that individuals who have been vaccinated against the coronavirus can start to gather in small groups, without masks, offering a measure of hope in particular to those who have missed the intimacy of double dates and dinner parties.But after a year spent internalizing public health precautions for social distancing and mask-wearing, the prospect of readjusting to in-person social engagements may be a daunting one. For many, it provokes a sense of profound discomfort, apprehension or ambivalence.“It’s a new version of anxiety,” said Dr. Lucy McBride, an internist in Washington who writes a newsletter about managing the coronavirus crisis. You may discover that your continuing concerns about the virus are colliding with a new set of worries about seeing others more regularly: What am I comfortable with? How do I act? What do I say?“There’s two feelings that are continuing to exist for me,” said Allison Harris-Turk, 46, an events and communications consultant and mother of three in San Diego. Mrs. Harris-Turk created the Facebook group Learning in the Time of Corona, where many among the roughly 16,700 members are discussing the pros and cons of re-entry. “There’s the excitement and the optimism and the hope, and then there’s also the grief and the trauma and ‘oh, my goodness, how are we going to recover from this?’”Here’s how some individuals and experts are starting to think about closing the social distance.Start small.Though you may be chafing at the confines of the lockdown, remember that it’s still not entirely safe to resume social activities as before. Across most of the country, the risk of coronavirus transmission remains high.If you’re wary of re-entry, begin with a lower-stakes outing. “It’s like little baby steps getting back into it,” said Dr. David Hilden, a Minneapolis-based internist who hosts a weekly radio show during which he answers listeners’ pandemic questions. He’s observed this firsthand: Earlier this month, he met up with a friend to share a beer for the first time since the onset of the pandemic. “Now that we’ve dipped our toe in the water, a lot of Zoom meetings end with, ‘Hey, I think we can get together now,’” he said.Understand that hanging out might take more effort.After receiving her first shot of a coronavirus vaccine, Aditi Juneja, a New York-based lawyer, expected to feel the same flood of relief that some of her peers had described after getting theirs. While on the phone with a friend, she started to consider future late nights and travel to far-off destinations. “I was like, ‘Man, I want to dance on bars,’” Ms. Juneja, 30, said. “There was a euphoria about imagining the possibilities.”But after 10 minutes, she found even the fantasy versions of these scenarios exhausting. The reality can be, too; she described the sensory overload and disorientation she felt while dining outdoors with a friend for the first time in months. “I think our ability to take inputs has really lowered,” Ms. Juneja said.This is especially true for individuals suffering from social anxiety, for whom the lockdowns have offered some relief, and for whom reopening presents new stressors. But even extroverts may experience an adjustment period as our brains adapt to planning and monitoring responses to unfamiliar situations. At the beginning of the pandemic, people had to change their behaviors to comply with social distancing, mask-wearing and sheltering in place. But learning those new behaviors — and now, relearning old ones — can take a cognitive toll.“Social settings are particularly demanding,” said David Badre, the author of the book “On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done” and a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University. “When we have to really focus and plan what we’re doing, that comes with an experience of mental effort,” he continued. “It feels like a mental fatigue.”There is good news, however: You’ll most likely find it easier to relearn old behaviors than learn entirely new ones. “The key is to not avoid that effort,” Dr. Badre said. “By re-engaging, you will get used to it again.”Set boundaries for yourself.Though the past month has seen a spate of reopenings across the country, some scenarios might still set off a siren in your head. And because these facilities are open, doesn’t mean you need to go.But what if a friend or family member does want to see a movie, or dine out? If you express disagreement over what is safe, you might feel as though you are implying your companions are less responsible or unethical.Sunita Sah, a professor at University of Cambridge and Cornell University has researched this phenomenon, which she calls “insinuation anxiety.” In studies, Dr. Sah has found that patients frequently follow medical advice from their doctor even if they believe their doctor to have a conflict of interest, and that job candidates often answer interview questions they know are illegal to ask. These reactions come partly out of concern that to disagree would suggest the other person — the doctor or the job interviewer — is not trustworthy.A similar situation can play out if you’re confronted with someone whose attitude toward public-health protocols differs from your own. Dr. Sah’s research has shown that when individuals have the opportunity to weigh their decisions in private, they are less likely to experience this anxiety and do something that makes them uncomfortable. She recommended writing down the boundaries that you would like to adhere to and taking time before agreeing to someone else’s plan.“Assess your own risk level and comfort,” Dr. Sah said, “so you’re very clear about what you would and would not like to do.” This will also provide you with a clear document of how your comfort levels are changing over time as you readjust.Brace for tough conversations.Over the past year, public-health guidance often wildly varied on federal, state and even city levels, with some areas flinging open their doors while experts still advised caution. This has also been reflected in interpersonal relationships. It’s created friction between couples, families and friends, and prompted individuals to ask challenging, sometimes seemingly intrusive questions. Now, you may be adding “Are you vaccinated?” to that list. (On Twitter, one woman recently proposed “re-entry doulas” to help families navigate conversations about setting boundaries.)Still, it will continue to be important to have these conversations in the coming months. “This isn’t abstract,” said Marci Gleason, an associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin whose lab has been surveying relationships in quarantine. “It comes directly to the question of whether we can socialize with others or not, in the way that they want to.” Sometimes, it can feel like a proxy battle over how much you value each other’s friendship. Be open about your own fears and vulnerabilities, and make it clear that when you disagree, you’re expressing your own preference and not rejecting the other person. Keep it simple, too, especially with friends or relatives with whom you don’t frequently have emotional, candid talks.This empathy and candor will also be an asset if you find that your friends and peers have developed the tendency to over share, either out of anxiety or being starved for conversation. (You may be doing it yourself, too.) If a conversation subject makes you uncomfortable or anxious, say so.“Being really open and direct is the best way,” said Dr. Danesh Alam, a psychiatrist and the medical director of behavior health services at Northwestern Medicine Central Dupage Hospital. Dr. Alam suggested studying up for conversations, preparing some questions and topics in order to chat with more intention and keep things on topic.Take your time.It’s OK if you don’t feel ready to see people socially again. Through the challenges of the lockdown period, you may have found that “your mental health is served best when you have time for calm and rest and introspection,” Dr. McBride said. So pace yourself while considering the benefits of getting back out there: Even casual interactions have shown to foster a sense of belonging and community. “Social interaction is critical to our existence,” Dr. Alam said. Remember, too, that there are bound to be some weird moments as you start seeing others more regularly and your pandemic instincts (no hugging) and before-times instincts (“Do you want a bite of this?”) collide. “If you’re comfortable going to a dinner at a small family restaurant, you can do that,” Dr. Hilden said. “If you want to wait a month or two, that’s OK, too.”

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage copyrightGetty ImagesScientists believe they have worked out why biting down on ice or drinking something really cold causes excruciating pain for some people. They have located the cells and signals in sensitive teeth that detect big temperature drops and trigger toothache and brain freeze. People with dental decay are prone to it because the pathway is exposed.It provides a target for new treatments, such as toothpastes, dental patches or chewing gum, they say.Prof Katharina Zimmermann is lead investigator of the work, published in the journal Science Advances. “Once you have a molecule to target, there is a possibility of treatment,” she explained.The target is called TRPC5, and Prof Zimmermann’s team at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany traced its location to a specific cell type – the odontoblast – that resides between the soft inner pulp and the hard outer layer of teeth composed of dentine, then enamel. image copyrightL. Bernal et al./Science Advances 2021Enamel has no feeling, unlike the next layer dentine. The dentine connects to the innermost pulp, where nerve cells live. If the dentine becomes exposed, following tooth decay or gum disease for example, painful stimuli such as temperature or certain liquids will cause pain.The researchers studied mice and humans to understand how the pain arises, recording what was happening in cells and nerves. Dr Zimmermann said: “In human teeth with pits and dental caries we found a much upregulated number of TRPC5 channels, and therefore we believe that engineering a TRPC5 blocker that can be locally applied to teeth via strips or chewing gum would probably be a great help in treating tooth pain or dentine hypersensitivity.”One common home remedy – clove oil – contains a chemical that blocks this TRPC5 pathway. The scientists are not recommending DIY treatments though. People who are experiencing any worrying toothache should still see a dentist, they stress. Prof Damien Walmsley from the British Dental Association (BDA) said blocking the pain might provide temporary relief, but it was vital to treat and prevent the cause. Brushing regularly could stop tooth and gum disease, he advised.”The research is interesting but we can’t ignore the underlying causes of tooth sensitivity, nor people’s perception of pain. Dentists can treat the cause by removing the tooth decay, and advise on toothpaste for sensitive teeth.”He said that in the future, TRPC5 blocking agents might be included in toothpastes or similar to prevent the pain of sensitivity. Prof Zimmermann’s team did not receive any commercial financing for the work. It was funded by government. Tooth decay happens when the enamel and dentine of a tooth become softened by acid attacks after eating or drinking anything containing sugars, says the BDA. Over time, the acid makes a cavity (hole) in the tooth. Your risk of tooth decay is increased by how often you have sugary or acidic foods or drinks, so it is best to limit them to mealtimes.

His death leaves only one family physician in Greenfield, Mo. He died of complications of Covid-19.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.For the past 15 years, there were only two family physicians in Greenfield, Mo., a town with 1,371 residents about 40 miles northwest of Springfield. One of them was Dr. Michael Bennett, who opened his practice, the Greenfield Medical Center, in 2005.He was a vigorous proponent of wearing masks and of social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, though he faced resistance to his calls from some townspeople, and he offered free Covid-19 testing to his patients with funding help from the federal C.A.R.E.S. Act.Dr. Bennet took precautions in treating infected patients but nevertheless tested positive for the coronavirus in late December. He was soon hospitalized in St. Louis and spent 50 days connected to a ventilator and an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation), a machine that acts as an artificial lung. He died of Covid-19 on March 6, his former wife, Teresa Bennett, said. He was 52.Since the start of the pandemic, Dade County, Mo., where Greenfield is situated, has recorded 715 positive tests and 31 deaths, most of the fatalities nursing home residents, according to Pamela Cramer, the administrator of the county health department. “It’s really hit us, but not as hard as other areas,” she said on Wednesday.Nationwide, 452,706 health care workers have tested positive for the coronavirus, and 1,505 have died as of March 26, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Michael Keith Bennett was born on Feb. 15, 1969, in New London, Mo., in the northeast part of the state. His father, Bob, was a farmer; his mother, Meredith (Arnold) Bennett, most recently helped manage her son’s clinic.A head injury from a car accident when he was in high school changed Dr. Bennett’s career path.“He was hurt pretty badly, and during that stay in the hospital he decided he wanted to be a doctor,” Ms. Bennett said by phone. “He was into auto mechanics before that.”After earning a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Missouri in Columbia, he received his medical degree from its medical school. And after finishing his residency at Cox Medical Center South in Springfield, he worked at St John’s Hospital in nearby Willard, Mo.In addition to his medical practice, which has been shuttered, Dr. Bennett had a 500-acre farm with beef cattle, and he enjoyed fishing and hunting.“I think one of the reasons his patients loved him is he was a good old boy,” said Ms. Bennett, who managed her former husband’s practice until 2012, when they divorced.In addition to his parents, he is survived by his son, Austin; his daughter, Shelby Bennett; his sister, Veronica Bennett; his brother, Damon; and his girlfriend, Haley Hendrixson.Dr. Bennett worked closely with Ms. Cramer, the county official, and suggested to her last year that the town adopt a mask-wearing mandate after several Covid-related nursing home deaths. But the idea did not advance.After learning that Dr. Bennett had tested positive for Covid-19, Ms. Cramer tried to stay in contact. In his final text to her from the hospital, on Jan. 8, he wrote: “I’m hanging in there. Will stay in touch.”

With case numbers still high, coronavirus testing remains essential, experts say, but the goals and approach will change as vaccines roll out.Last May, the city of Los Angeles turned a fabled baseball park into a mass testing site for the coronavirus. At its peak, Dodger Stadium was testing 16,000 people a day for the virus, making it the biggest testing site in the world, said Dr. Clemens Hong, who oversees coronavirus testing in Los Angeles County.But in January, the city pivoted, converting the stadium into an enormous, drive-through vaccination site. Local demand for coronavirus testing has plummeted, Dr. Hong said. He said that he saw the evidence firsthand recently when he visited a community hospital: “The testing site had three people and the vaccine site had a line around the block.”Los Angeles is not an anomaly. Across the nation, attention has largely shifted from testing to vaccination. The United States is now conducting an average of 1.3 million coronavirus tests a day, down from a peak of 2 million a day in mid-January, according to data provided by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.In some ways, the decline is good news, and can be attributed, in part, to falling case numbers and the increasing pace of vaccination. But the drop-off also worries many public health experts, who note that the prevalence of Covid-19 remains stubbornly high. More than 50,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths are being tallied every day and just 14 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated.“We are very much worried about resurgence,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. “Everybody mentally moved on to vaccines. Obviously, vaccines are quite important. But as long as the majority of us are not protected, then testing remains essential.”The $1.9 trillion stimulus package signed into law this month includes $47.8 billion earmarked for testing, tracing and monitoring the virus.But as society begins to reopen and vaccines roll out more widely, testing strategies are evolving. Here are four reasons that testing still matters, and how officials see the next months, and years, playing out.Diagnosing people who are sickCase numbers remain high, and clinicians still need to identify individuals who have contracted the virus so that these people can receive proper treatment and care. The gold standard for diagnosing Covid-19 is the polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., test, which can identify even small traces of genetic material from the coronavirus.This kind of testing will be needed as long as there are Covid-19 cases, but as the disease becomes less common, diagnostic testing is likely to become less centralized.Testing at a site by the 24th Mission Bart Station in San Francisco in early March.Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times“The game has changed a little bit,” Dr. Hong said. “Before, we just had infection popping up everywhere, and we just needed broad, blanket testing access. Now we need to be much more targeted.”Diagnostic testing is shifting from large, government-run sites to smaller, more distributed sites that are spread across local communities, Dr. Hong said. Ultimately, when vaccination rates are high enough and cases are low enough, dedicated testing sites will not be needed at all. “Then we just return testing to the health care system,” he said, and coronavirus tests will simply be one of many options on the menu at the doctor’s office.Slowing the spreadTesting is important not just for identifying individual patients who need treatment but also for public health. When the system is working, a timely Covid-19 diagnosis is what triggers contact tracing and quarantining and can stop virus transmission in its tracks.“The vaccine — marvelous, miraculous as it is — is not in and of itself going to contain this pandemic,” said A. David Paltiel, a professor of health policy and management at Yale School of Public Health.Slowing transmission means fewer people will get sick but it also gives the virus fewer opportunities to mutate. And that reduces the odds that dangerous new variants — some of which may be able to evade vaccine-induced immunity — will emerge.Keeping community spread low will help give vaccines “a fighting chance,” Dr. Paltiel said. “The less work we give the vaccine to do, the better.”As schools and offices reopen, routine screening of asymptomatic people will help minimize viral spread. These screening programs are now beginning to ramp up. Many will rely on rapid antigen tests, which are less sensitive than P.C.R. tests but are cheaper and can return results in 15 minutes. (Antigens are molecules, like the well-known spike protein, that are present on the surface of the coronavirus and trigger the immune system to produce antibodies.) When antigen tests are used routinely and frequently, they can be effective in identifying infectious individuals and reducing viral transmission, several analyses suggest.As vaccination rates increase, these screening programs may become more targeted. If 70 percent to 80 percent of Americans are vaccinated, the prevalence of Covid-19 plummets, and outbreaks are not emerging in group settings, then it may be possible to ease up on widespread screening, said Dr. Mary K. Hayden, an infectious disease specialist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “Then, yes, I think we could relax surveillance testing,” she said before adding, “But it’s a lot of ‘ifs.’”.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1cz6wm{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1cz6wm{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1cz6wm:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1cz6wm{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}Frequently Asked Questions About the New Stimulus PackageThe stimulus payments would be $1,400 for most recipients. Those who are eligible would also receive an identical payment for each of their children. To qualify for the full $1,400, a single person would need an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or below. For heads of household, adjusted gross income would need to be $112,500 or below, and for married couples filing jointly that number would need to be $150,000 or below. To be eligible for a payment, a person must have a Social Security number. Read more. Buying insurance through the government program known as COBRA would temporarily become a lot cheaper. COBRA, for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, generally lets someone who loses a job buy coverage via the former employer. But it’s expensive: Under normal circumstances, a person may have to pay at least 102 percent of the cost of the premium. Under the relief bill, the government would pay the entire COBRA premium from April 1 through Sept. 30. A person who qualified for new, employer-based health insurance someplace else before Sept. 30 would lose eligibility for the no-cost coverage. And someone who left a job voluntarily would not be eligible, either. Read moreThis credit, which helps working families offset the cost of care for children under 13 and other dependents, would be significantly expanded for a single year. More people would be eligible, and many recipients would get a bigger break. The bill would also make the credit fully refundable, which means you could collect the money as a refund even if your tax bill was zero. “That will be helpful to people at the lower end” of the income scale, said Mark Luscombe, principal federal tax analyst at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting. Read more.There would be a big one for people who already have debt. You wouldn’t have to pay income taxes on forgiven debt if you qualify for loan forgiveness or cancellation — for example, if you’ve been in an income-driven repayment plan for the requisite number of years, if your school defrauded you or if Congress or the president wipes away $10,000 of debt for large numbers of people. This would be the case for debt forgiven between Jan. 1, 2021, and the end of 2025. Read more.The bill would provide billions of dollars in rental and utility assistance to people who are struggling and in danger of being evicted from their homes. About $27 billion would go toward emergency rental assistance. The vast majority of it would replenish the so-called Coronavirus Relief Fund, created by the CARES Act and distributed through state, local and tribal governments, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That’s on top of the $25 billion in assistance provided by the relief package passed in December. To receive financial assistance — which could be used for rent, utilities and other housing expenses — households would have to meet several conditions. Household income could not exceed 80 percent of the area median income, at least one household member must be at risk of homelessness or housing instability, and individuals would have to qualify for unemployment benefits or have experienced financial hardship (directly or indirectly) because of the pandemic. Assistance could be provided for up to 18 months, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Lower-income families that have been unemployed for three months or more would be given priority for assistance. Read more.Even then, however, officials may want to maintain some level of surveillance testing in high-risk settings, like nursing homes, or of high-risk individuals, like travelers, she said.Assessing our progressTesting can help public health officials gauge whether efforts to end the pandemic are paying dividends.A line of cars waiting for a turn at testing at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in December.David Walter Banks for The New York Times“Do we want to know how well vaccines are working? We’re going to have to test,” said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “How are we going to know whether the variants are more contagious? We’re going to have to test. How are we going to know if the vaccines are effectively controlling the variants? We’re going to have to test.”Large screening programs may also help institutions assess the effectiveness of their risk-reduction strategies. If cases begin to rise, schools and offices may find they need to change their mask policies, enforce greater social distancing or boost their ventilation rates.Testing might also help uncover worrisome case clusters, which can signal that a community has not yet reached herd immunity and might benefit from targeted a vaccination campaign.Preventing the next pandemicMany experts now believe that the coronavirus is unlikely to ever disappear completely. But even if the virus continues to circulate only at very low levels, it will be important to keep tabs on it.“It becomes less about trying to interrupt the transmission of the disease and more to understand, Where is the virus?” Dr. Nuzzo said. “What are we missing? And, you know, what could be coming down the road?”The virus will continue to mutate, and new genetic variants will emerge. Some level of continued testing, even years down the line, could help scientists catch worrisome variants early.Tests aren’t perfect, of course, and can produce false negatives and positives. But they provide a critical window into the activity of a pathogen too small to see.“We’re going to want to make sure that after people are vaccinated, it’s not going to bubble up in some other unpredictable way that’s going to put us back where we started,” Dr. O’Connor said.

A machine that acted as an artificial lung kept her eligible for a transplant as she dealt with cystic fibrosis. She went on to compete again in marathons.Liesbeth Stoeffler’s doctors had a bold decision to make in 2009. Ms. Stoeffler was on a ventilator and deeply sedated after cystic fibrosis had destroyed the lungs that had once given her the ability to run and hike.She needed a double-lung transplant, but doctors worried that prolonged time on the respirator might render her too weak or malnourished to stay eligible for one.So doctors at Columbia University Irving Medical Center took her off the ventilator after about a day and hooked her to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, or ECMO, which pumped blood from her body, removed carbon dioxide from it and sent oxygen-rich blood flowing back into her. In effect, it acted as an artificial lung.It was a rarely known and risky deployment of the machine, but not only did it allow Ms. Stoeffler to awaken from sedation; it also allowed her to eat, speak on her smartphone, exercise in bed and walk in place while she was connected to it — for an unusually long 18 days, until the transplant took place.“The ECMO was the bridge between my respiratory failure and the transplant,” Ms. Stoeffler told USA Today in 2009.ECMO — a treatment for lung-damaging viruses — has proved extremely helpful in the past with cases of H1N1 flu (or swine flu) and is now being widely used at major medical centers in the Covid-19 pandemic, according to data from Columbia and other ECMO centers around the world. A study published in the medical journal The Lancet last September showed that 62.6 percent of 1,035 severely ill Covid-19 patients survived after receiving ECMO treatments.Ms. Stoeffler’s transplanted lungs worked well for nearly a decade, enabling her to hike in the mountains near her childhood home in Austria and finish two New York City Marathons,half-marathons, an Ironman bicycle course and a sprint triathlon.But her body eventually rejected the transplanted lungs, and she underwent another transplant in 2019. It did not work as well or last as long. Ms. Stoeffler died of cystic fibrosis on March 4 at the Irving Medical Center, her brother Ewald Stoffler said. She was 61.Liesbeth Stoeffler was born on June 18, 1959, in Hermagor, Austria, a town at the foot of the Carnic Alps. Her father, Johann, was a truck driver; her mother, Margarethe (Strempfl) Stoeffler, was a homemaker.After finishing trade school, she left Austria in 1977 for an au pair job in Manhattan, where she had hoped to move since she was young, her brother said in an email.“During the first three years Liesbeth spent in New York, she refused to speak a single word of German,” Mr. Stoeffler wrote, “so she can learn English as fast and as good as possible.”She took classes in computers and graphic design and was hired by Deutsche Bank, the Blackstone Group and finally the investment management firm Sanford C. Bernstein (now AllianceBernstein). She worked there for nearly 20 years, rising to vice president and presentation specialist and creating graphics for marketing and sales documents.She began to experience breathing problems while at Bernstein and learned she had cystic fibrosis in 1995. But she kept it largely to herself.“She was always coughing, causing her co-workers to ask her to check it out,” said Christina Restivo, a close friend who had met her at Bernstein and was the leader of a support team of friends who looked after her. “She kept it private until she was so far along that the only way to live was with a double transplant.”In June 2009, after a routine blood test at the hospital, Ms. Stoeffler felt too exhausted to return home. One of her doctors, David Lederer, a pulmonologist, admitted her.“Within 48 hours, she was in the I.C.U., on a ventilator,” he said in a video about her case made by the Irving Medical Center. He added, “She wasn’t really improving on the vent support we were providing for her, so we knew we had to do something for her.”Using the ECMO helped her remain eligible for the transplant. “About five days into it, she told me it was the best she’d felt in years,” Dr. Matthew Bacchetta, who also treated Ms. Stoeffler, told a Columbia online publication.In less than two years, Ms. Stoeffler began running races in earnest. Starting with the Fred Lebow Classic, a five-mile race in Central Park in January 2011 (named after the founder of the New York City Marathon), she finished 47 different races hosted by the New York Road Runners club. Her last one was an 8-kilometer event in August 2017.Ms. Restivo said that her friend’s running had probably extended the life of her transplanted lungs.“Because your immune system is so suppressed by having a transplant, she was told not to exercise in a gym, where she could pick up bacteria,” she said. “She used the outdoors to exercise her lungs.”In addition to her brother Ewald, Ms. Stoeffler is survived by three sisters, Gabriele and Birgit Stoeffler and Waltraud Wildpanner; and another brother, Hannes.Ms. Restivo, who is the executor of Ms. Stoeffler’s will, said Ms. Stoeffler would sometimes text with instructions to give the doctors. Another text arrived on her last day.“I got a call to go to the hospital at 3:30 a.m. in the morning,” she said. “Liesbeth, with her oxygen mask on, was still alert, texting me as usual, telling me what to do and keeping me advised of her status. Fully cognizant at all times.”

How do different parts of the body communicate? Scientists at St. Jude are studying how signals sent from skeletal muscle affect the brain.
The team studied fruit flies and cutting-edge brain cell models called organoids. They focused on the signals muscles send when stressed. The researchers found that stress signals rely on an enzyme called Amyrel amylase and its product, the disaccharide maltose.
The scientists showed that mimicking the stress signals can protect the brain and retina from aging. The signals work by preventing the buildup of misfolded protein aggregates. Findings suggest that tailoring this signaling may potentially help combat neurodegenerative conditions like age-related dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
“We found that a stress response induced in muscle could impact not only the muscle but also promote protein quality control in distant tissues like the brain and retina,” said Fabio Demontis, PhD, of St. Jude Developmental Neurobiology. “This stress response was actually protecting those tissues during aging.”
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Materials provided by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

For people with tooth decay, drinking a cold beverage can be agony.
“It’s a unique kind of pain,” says David Clapham, vice president and chief scientific officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). “It’s just excruciating.”
Now, he and an international team of scientists have figured out how teeth sense the cold and pinpointed the molecular and cellular players involved. In both mice and humans, tooth cells called odontoblasts contain cold-sensitive proteins that detect temperature drops, the team reports March 26, 2021, in the journal Science Advances. Signals from these cells can ultimately trigger a jolt of pain to the brain.
The work offers an explanation for how one age-old home remedy eases toothaches. The main ingredient in clove oil, which has been used for centuries in dentistry, contains a chemical that blocks the “cold sensor”protein, says electrophysiologist Katharina Zimmermann, who led the work at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany.
Developing drugs that target this sensor even more specifically could potentially eliminate tooth sensitivity to cold, Zimmermann says. “Once you have a molecule to target, there is a possibility of treatment.”
Mystery channel
Teeth decay when films of bacteria and acid eat away at the enamel, the hard, whitish covering of teeth. As enamel erodes, pits called cavities form. Roughly 2.4 billion people — about a third of the world’s population — have untreated cavities in permanent teeth, which can cause intense pain, including extreme cold sensitivity.

University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers have identified the most toxic proteins made by SARS-COV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — and then used an FDA-approved cancer drug to blunt the viral protein’s detrimental effects. In their experiments in fruit flies and human cell lines, the team discovered the cell process that the virus hijacks, illuminating new potential candidate drugs that could be tested for treating severe COVID-19 disease patients. Their findings were published in two studies simultaneously on March XX in Cell & Bioscience, a Springer Nature journal.
“Our work suggests there is a way to prevent SARS-COV-2 from injuring the body’s tissues and doing extensive damage,” says senior author of the study Zhe “Zion” Han, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Precision Disease Modeling at UMSOM. He notes that the most effective drug against Covid-19, remdesivir, only prevents the virus from making more copies of itself, but it does not protect already infected cells from damage caused by the viral proteins.
Prior to the pandemic, Dr. Han had been using fruit flies as a model to study other viruses, such as HIV and Zika. He says his research group shifted gears in February 2020 to study SARS-COV-2 when it was clear that the pandemic was going to significantly impact the U.S.
SARS-COV-2 infects cells and hijacks them into making proteins from each of its 27 genes. Dr. Han’s team introduced each of these 27 SARS-CoV-2 genes in human cells and examined their toxicity. They also generated 12 fruit fly lines to express SARS-CoV-2 proteins likely to cause toxicity based on their structure and predicted function.
The researchers found that a viral protein, known as Orf6, was the most toxic killing about half of the human cells. Two other proteins (Nsp6 and Orf7a) also proved toxic, killing about 30-40 percent of the human cells. Fruit flies that made any one of these three toxic viral proteins in their bodies were less likely to survive to adulthood. Those fruit flies that did live had problems like fewer branches in their lungs or fewer energy-generating power factories in their muscle cells.
For the remaining experiments, the researchers focused on just the most toxic viral protein, so they could figure out what cell process the virus hijacks during infection. Dr. Han’s team found that the virus’ toxic Orf6 protein sticks to multiple human proteins that have the job of moving materials out of the cell’s nucleus — the place in the cell that holds the genome, or the instructions for life.
They then discovered that one of these human moving proteins, targeted by the virus, gets blocked by the cancer drug selinexor. The researchers tested selinexor on human cells and fruit flies making the toxic viral protein to see if the drug could help reverse the damage. Selinexor, like many cancer drugs is itself toxic. However, after accounting for its toxic effects, the drug improved human cell survival by about 12 percent. Selinexor prevented early death in about 15 percent of the flies making the toxic viral protein. The drug also restored branches in the lungs and the energy-generators in the muscle cells. Selinexor is FDA-approved to treat certain blood cancers.
“More than 1,000 FDA-approved drugs are in clinical trials to test as treatments for Covid-19, and luckily a trial testing selinexor, the drug used in our study, is being performed already,” says Dr. Han. “If this trial proves to be successful, our data will have demonstrated the underlying mechanism for why the drug works.”
Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, University of Maryland Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine, commented, “Although we now have vaccines, it may still be a while before we will have Covid-19 infections under control, especially with the new variants emerging. We will need to tap into every tool in the arsenal available to protect people from needless sickness, disability or even death, and this study guides us towards a new target for potential therapeutics.”
These two studies were funded by a University of Maryland COVID-19 Accelerated Translational Incubator Pilot Grant, the University of Maryland, the Baltimore Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, and the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy Mass Spectrometry Center.
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Materials provided by University of Maryland School of Medicine. Original written by Vanessa McMains. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers figured out how a jolt of discomfort gets from the damaged outside of your tooth to the nerves inside it.There’s nothing quite like the peculiar, bone-jarring reaction of a damaged tooth exposed to something cold: a bite of ice cream, or a cold drink, and suddenly, that sharp, searing feeling, like a needle piercing a nerve.Researchers have known for years that this phenomenon results from damage to the tooth’s protective outer layer. But just how the message goes from the outside of your tooth to the nerves within it has been difficult to uncover. On Friday, biologists report in the journal Science Advances that they have identified an unexpected player in this painful sensation: a protein embedded in the surface of cells inside the teeth. The discovery provides a glimpse of the connection between the outer world and the interior of a tooth, and could one day help guide the development of treatments for tooth pain.More than a decade ago, Dr. Katharina Zimmerman, now a professor at Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany, discovered that cells producing a protein called TRPC5 were sensitive to cold. When things got chilly, TRPC5 popped open to form a channel, allowing ions to flow across the cell’s membrane.Ion channels like TRPC5 are sprinkled throughout our bodies, Dr. Zimmerman said, and they are behind some surprisingly familiar sensations. For instance, if your eyes start to feel cold and dry in chilly air, it’s a result of an ion channel being activated in the cornea. She wondered which other parts of the body might make use of a cold receptor such as TRPC5. And it occurred to her that “the most sensitive tissue in the human body can be teeth” when it comes to cold sensations.Within the protective shell of their enamel, teeth are made of a hard substance called dentin that’s threaded with tiny tunnels. At the heart of the dentin is the tooth’s soft pulp, where nerve cells and cells called odontoblasts, which manufacture dentin, are intertwined.The prevailing theory for how teeth sense cold had been that temperature changes put pressure on the fluid in dentin’s tunnels, somehow provoking a response in those concealed nerves. But there was little detail about how exactly that could be happening and what could be bridging the gap between them.Dr. Zimmerman and her colleagues looked to see whether mice engineered to lack the TRPC5 channel still felt tooth pain as normal mice did. They were intrigued to find that these mice, when they had damage to their teeth, did not behave as if anything was amiss. They looked, in fact, about the same as if they had been given an anti-inflammatory painkiller, Dr. Zimmerman said.Her co-author Dr. Jochen Lennerz, a pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, checked human teeth for signs of the ion channel and found it in their nerves and other cells. That suggested that the channel might have a role in a person’s perception of cold.Over many years, the researchers constructed a way to precisely measure the nerve signals traveling out of a mouse’s damaged molar. They tested their ideas with molecules that could block the activity of various channels, including TRPC5.The picture they slowly assembled is that TRPC5 is active in the odontoblasts. That was a bit of a surprise, as these supporting cells are best known for making and maintaining dentin, not aiding in perception. Within the odontoblasts, Dr. Lennerz said, TRPC5 pops open when the signal for cold comes down the dentin tunnels, and this results in a message being sent to the nerves.As it happens, one substance that keeps TRPC5 from opening is eugenol, the main ingredient in oil of cloves, a traditional treatment for toothache. Though the Food and Drug Administration in the United States is equivocal about eugenol’s effectiveness, if it does lessen the pain for some people, it may be because of its effect on TRPC5.Perhaps the knowledge that this channel is at the heart of cold-induced pain will lead to better treatments for dental pain down the road — better ways to keep that message from becoming overwhelming.