Health
Bird Flu Outbreak Worsens in US, 9th Human Case Confirmed
United States: Colorado’s second poultry facility has been hit by bird flu in a worker, making it the seventh human case in the state this month as avian influenza ravages dairy cows.
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Colorado health officials said the seventh case is, however, still presumptive positive. This means that the person has come out positive at the state level as authorities continue to conduct an outbreak test at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
A presumptive positive worker was reported at a poultry facility in northeastern Weld County. H5N1 virus, which is associated with bird flu, has been identified in the plant as six workers of Weld tested positive for the virus in the past couple of weeks at another.
At that place, a commercial egg layer farm comprised nearly 1.8 million birds. Many of the workers got infected as they were engaged in the process of culling birds that were positive to the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), as arstechnica.com reported.
Genetic testing of the virus was conducted on the birds and the workers, and the results showed that they contracted a strain of H5N1 similar to the one emerging in dairy cattle and affecting workers on dairy farms.
Transmission of virus to humans
The US Department of Agriculture, USDA, only late in March admitted that the H5N1 bird flu virus that had been infecting wild birds across the globe for years had crossed over to dairy cows in the US.
Data show that at least 168 herds in thirteen states have been confirmed to have contracted the virus.
It was during the outbreak of the dairy that eleven humans were affected by the virus. Four of the cases were among dairy workers, of which there is one in Texas, two in Michigan, and one in Colorado, which had been reported earlier this month.
Seven other cases were among poultry workers, all from Colorado. There was also a human H5N1 case in a Colorado poultry worker in 2022; before the virus mutated and infecting cows, as arstechnica.com reported.
The most recent case is the appearance of human infections among poultry workers in Colorado, which is rather revealing, considering that H5N1 has impacted US poultry farms since January 2022.
So far, outbreaks have been registered in 48 states, and more than a hundred million birds have been infected. In most of those cases, direct transmission of bird-to-bird contact from wildlife thought to be carriers of avian influenza is assumed in poultry, which is considered to be highly vulnerable to attack.
However, cases of poultry workers have slowly and steadily started increasing only when the virus switched from wild birds to dairy cows and poultry.
Genetic sequencing up to now has not identified large shifts in the virus that would be potentially associated with the recent surge, or which would present fresh cause for concern.
Still there is no reports of transmission of the disease from one person to another, and according to the CDC the threat of the H5N1 to the average person is negligible.
Moreover, all the human cases reported so far have been mild, and clinical signs suggest that they can be treated with flu antivirals.
What does the official explain?
Federal officials state that human cases have increased, and excessive summer heat is to blame.
Poultry workers in Colorado who were charged with culling birds had to deal with temperatures touching over 100° Fahrenheit and noisy industrial fans blowing in the background. This causes a struggle to keep wearing the mask and goggles on their faces.
However, it is not yet understood how this virus is transmitted from dairy farms to poultry farms during this latest phase of the spread.
United States: As experts note, if one skips a workout or stays up late, his/her brain might still be paying for it even two weeks from now.
The team of researchers from Aalto University and the University of Oulu in Finland have presented how our lifelong daily behaviors influence brain connectivity and how they remain remodeled throughout our lifespan, thus providing valuable grounds for understanding neural plasticity.
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Researchers are now very specific that the ways our brains communicate also change, rather than staying the same over a long time, in response to recent experiences over a long extended time period.
Moreover, they also rejected several principles of brain function stability and opened the consciousness of the influence of human daily habits on the neural network, studyfinds.org reported.
The particular experimental design of this study was examined in one subject over the span of five months and reported in PLOS Biology.
Are Your Daily Habits Remodeling Your Brain? Find Out! Credit | Adobe Stock
By acquiring a brain image every few days and integrating it with data donated by wearables and smartphones, the researchers were able to assess how such pre-mentioned variables as sleep quality, physical activity, mood, and even heart rate variability affect the connectivity of the brain.
Further details of the analysis
The participant, Ana Triana, was also the main researcher in the study and received thirty scans over fifteen weeks.
Each scan involved four different tasks: simple attention task, working memory task, resting state, and then execution of watching the movie.
This variation helped the researchers to trace how various types of brain activities changed along with everyday perceptions.
At the same time, monitoring devices of her sleep/wake cycle, physical movements, and data about her heart and breathing rates were collected.
Simple events can leave “echoes” in our brain for up to 15 days! 🧠@AnaM_Triana and her colleagues were tracking one person’s brain and behavioural activity for five months using brain scans and wearable technology.@JariSaramaki @MedicalReel @eglereanhttps://t.co/Mxm7qRsltF
— Aalto University (@AaltoUniversity) October 9, 2024
The mobile application is used to capture the moods and events of each day. This integration of brain scans and actigraphy gave us an extremely high-resolution picture of how daily experience and brain activity were related, studyfinds.org reported.
The study revealed two distinct patterns of brain response: A brief wave, which lasts for a period of up to seven days, and a long-term wave, which can go up to fifteen days.
Results of the study
One of the interesting outcomes was a strong connection between heart rate variability – which is a measure of the heart’s adaptability – and brain connectivity while resting.
It shows that activities that affect our body’s relaxation response, like stress management ways, can shape our brain wiring even when we’re not actively concentrating on a task.
United States: Obesity remains a huge problem for Americans as far as their health is concerned. New data received by the governments indicate severe obesity, a condition that involves storing far too much fat in the body, has risen to a great extent in the last decade.
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About 40 percent of the population in the US is obese, according to a 2021-2023 survey of about 6,000 people.
Overall, 9 percent of those polled said they were suffering from severe obesity, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Moreover, women were nearly two times as likely as men to report severe obesity.
The general obesity rate looked to have decreased in comparison to what was observed in the 2017-2020 survey. However, it was not considered as a statistically significant change.
US Obesity Crisis: 40% of Americans Now Obese – What’s Going On? Credit | USA TODAY
That is, the numbers are small enough that there exists a probability that the rates did not fall at all.
What more are the experts stating?
Dr. Samuel Emmerich conducted the latest study for CDC as a public health officer. He said it is still early to determine its impact on the disease, including new obesity treatments, which include weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound.
What they found is that the combined obesity estimate of the United States in the last decade has not considerably altered.
According to Emmerich, “We simply can’t see down to that detailed level to prescription medication use and compare that to changes in obesity prevalence.”
The prevalence of severe obesity increased from nearly eight percent in the study between 2013 and 2014 to nearly 10 percent in the most recent study.
Prior to that, obesity rates had risen rapidly in the US since the 1990s, according to US federal research.
🇺🇸 — Nearly 40% of Americans are obese, with cases of severe obesity rising sharply, particularly among women, who are nearly twice as likely as men to be severely obese. In 23 states, more than 1 in 3 adults were obese.
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⚡️ @FolkishObserver | 📱 Follow pic.twitter.com/grwzoWKdTR
— Cod (@DocKnows097) October 2, 2024
Obesity and severe obesity are expressed in terms of BMI, which is calculated with the help of height and weight. The above BMI indicates that a person is obese, as per the Food and Drugs Administration.
Super obesity is defined as the condition when the person’s BMI is 40 or more.
Solveig Cunningham is a professor of global health at Emory University who is interested in obesity.
“Seeing increases in severe obesity is even more alarming because that’s the level of obesity that’s most highly associated with some of the highest levels of cardiovascular disease and diabetes and lower quality of life,” Cunningham added.
Cunningham also added that it is not apparent why severe obesity rates were higher among women.
United States: Recent reports about potential health risks and whether fluoride benefits are as big as once believed have prompted scrutiny of a public health practice – adding fluoride to water supplies.
This is because, as with some questions, the safety of the practice and new data raise questions about the value of fluoride.
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Adding fluoride to tap water produces only a slight benefit in reducing tooth decay in children’s baby teeth, a new report from the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent group reviewing scientific research, finds.
It is found that adding fluoride to tap water is a slight benefit, leading to slightly fewer cavities in children’s baby teeth, CNN Health reported.
One step in the right direction is to rid our water of fluoride!It’s toxic poison… M.A.H.A. 🇺🇸🦅💯🙌🏻M.A.H.A. https://t.co/WPog4DfVma
” IQ loss in children when exposed to what is presently considered “optimal levels” pic.twitter.com/jAxOFWJSjS— MrsCinkay (@MrsCinkay) October 7, 2024
More about the finding
Research done before 1975 had large benefits; children living in areas with fluoride added to their water averaged about one fewer primary teeth affected by decay than those of children living in areas without water fluoridation.
Those findings don’t apply to more current populations with increased access to other sources of fluoride and lower levels of dental disease at baseline.
Since the 1970s, fluoride-containing toothpaste has been widely available and is more often used.
According to the new report published this week, fluoride in water was tied to a difference in decay of only about a quarter of a tooth, on average, in more recent studies.
The federal judge, last month had asked the US Environmental Agency to further regulate fluoride in drinking water in response to concerns that fluoride may affect young children’s intellectual development, CNN Health reported.
In light of concerns about fluoride’s possible effect on young children’s intellectual development, a federal judge last month ordered that the EPA further regulate fluoride in drinking water.
Some foods and groundwater have fluoride, a mineral. It can help protect tooth enamel, which can erode with acids produced by plaque, bacteria, sugar, and other acids found in your mouth.
The USA began adding fluoride to public water systems in 1945.
Now, almost three-quarters of the US population, about two hundred and nine million people, are served by drinking water systems that have been fluoridated, according to data from the CDC.