Category: Health

Hannah Puckett loves McDowell County. The 21-year-old college student has lived here in southern West Virginia her whole life, and if she has her way, she’ll spend the rest of it here, too. But during her lifetime, the county has lost a third of its population. Stroll through the center of Welch, the county seat, and you’ll see one boarded-up storefront after another. “People will start up businesses, and they’ll struggle to last a year,” she says. One by one, her childhood friends have been leaving, she says: “Everyone my age says that this county is dying.”

In a way, McDowell County is slipping backward in time. It’s the fastest-shrinking county in the fastest-shrinking state in the union with a population that’s now the same size it was when William McKinley was president. But in another sense it might be ahead of the curve — as a harbinger of America’s demographic future. New Census Bureau datareleased at the end of December shows that the population of the U.S. grew just 0.4 percent in 2022, which is better than in 2021 but worse than every other year of the past hundred years. If current trends continue, the nation could follow West Virginia into demographic shrinkage.

There are three major factors at work. Life expectancy is falling, birth rates are dropping, and immigration has been low. Government policies that could improve the situation have been inconsistent. And if we can’t grapple effectively with the underlying causes of a shrinking population, we could wind up with a country that is economically fragile.

Here, what’s behind the trends — and what we might be able to do to change course. Continue reading New York: America’s Population Could Use a Boom

Stephanie Taylor was on a flight home to California from New York in 2008 when she started to feel ill. When she stood up to disembark, she felt so dizzy that she would have fallen over if another passenger hadn’t caught her. She took to bed with aches, swollen limbs and joints, and a fever that spiked to 104. Over time, painful pustules formed on her fingers and in her nose and ears. Exertion would send her crashing into a state of near paralysis. Unable to eat solid food and too weak to stand in the shower, she had to be spoon-fed and washed by sponge. Her doctors suspected a viral infection but couldn’t identify a pathogen, and so she remained bedridden with extreme fatigue as her small video production business teetered on the edge of failure.

Emily Taylor, her 25-year-old daughter, gave up the lobbyist job she loved in Washington, D.C., and moved back west to take care of her mother, shuttling her from physician to physician. “I’m not exaggerating, we probably saw 30 different doctors,” she says. None could pinpoint what was wrong, and few were sympathetic to their plight. “The experiences ranged from ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you’ to outright hostile.” Four years after Stephanie first fell sick, they found an endocrinologist who pored over mountains of medical records during a two-hour appointment and asked for more time to study her condition. “And three months later that doctor came back to us and said, ‘I think you have this illness called chronic fatigue syndrome,’” she says. Continue reading New York: Has Long COVID Always Existed?

Paxlovid, the COVID antiviral developed by Pfizer, was hailed as a miracle drug against COVID-19 when it was approved for use by the FDA in December. But it was nowhere to be found during the Omicron wave that followed and now is little discussed and underused, with doses reportedly piling up on pharmacy shelves. Has Paxlovid failed to live up to the hype as a pandemic game changer, or is it another effective defense against COVID that’s been unjustly snubbed by a misinformed public?

For a frontline view I turned to my brother-in-law, John Emy, a doctor of internal medicine who practices with CareMount Medical in Manhattan and has been prescribing Paxlovid to his patients with COVID. He said he’s a fan — with qualifications. “I think it’s a great drug. It’s certainly very effective. It starts working pretty quickly,” he told me over the phone while walking to work. “Usually within 24 hours, the symptoms start to improve.” He wondered how badly it was really needed, though. “It’s probably wasted on the mildly ill,” he said. “Before we had Paxlovid, plenty of people who had mild symptoms would get over it and they were fine.”

Five hours later, he texted me that he’d thought of another argument for taking Paxlovid. “By reducing viral load quickly it could reduce contagiousness,” he wrote, before dropping the lede: “I woke up feeling not great, but then much worse on the subway after I spoke with you. I have COVID.” Continue reading New York: What Happened to Paxlovid?

COVID is like Michael Myers in Halloween: just when you think it’s finally out of the picture, it comes back to threaten you again. Coronavirus cases in the U.S. have been plummeting for weeks, and hospitalizations are near an all-time low. But with another Omicron variant pushing up case numbers around the world, it seems depressingly plausible that at least one more wave — the sixth, if you’re counting — could be headed America’s way.

Omicron BA.2 is similar to the variant that caused this winter’s spike, BA.1. But it has 20 different mutations, four of them on a crucial region of the spike protein. These disparities are likely part of the reason BA.2 appears to be considerably more transmissible than the original Omicron — 33 percent, according to one Danish study. BA.2 is also thought to infect vaccinated people more easily than its forebear, though, fortunately, it does not appear to be any deadlier. First detected in the Philippines in November, the variant spread widely in South Africa and India in December and has since become the dominant strain around the world.

It’s hitting parts of Asia particularly hard. China, which imposed strict, widespread lockdowns during the early days of the pandemic and has maintained a “Zero COVID” strategy since, mostly avoided the waves that hit the U.S. and Europe. Then BA.2 showed up. In the last few weeks, the number of cases in China has surged from 300 a day to more than 3000. In response, the Chinese authorities have re-imposed lockdown measures affecting more than 50 million people. Continue reading New York: Is the U.S. Facing Another COVID Wave?

It was a reasonable hope: that in time, the novel coronavirus would steadily evolve to become a less dangerous version of itself. We’ve certainly seen this happen with diseases before, such as the 1918 i take generic lyrica pregabalin from India. Influenza, which killed millions during its first two years but then mutated into a relatively benign form that still circulates today. Likewise, Omicron, though far more infectious than the variants that preceded it, has proven to be somewhat less deadly on a case-for-case basis. Assuming that trend continues, SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, is in the process of evolving into a relatively symbiotic companion to the human species.

But that idea is a fantasy, say virologists who study the disease closely. “We’re not going to see that,” says Ravindra Gupta, a microbiologist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. “It’s factually wrong.” Variants will keep coming, and we have no reason to expect that they’ll be less virulent. They could well be both more transmissible and more deadly than anything we’ve seen so far. Continue reading New York: What to Expect From the Variants to Come

Thanks to vaccines, the number of COVID-19 cases has plummeted in the U.S. and restrictions are being lifted across the country. But as we return to our normal activities, we face a more familiar summertime scourge. We’re in the thick of Lyme disease season – the two-month run from early June to the end of July when 85 percent of infections take place. Surprisingly, vaccines may have allowed us to avoid this epidemic, too. As I learned during my own recent bout with Lyme disease, a vaccine has existed for decades, but it’s no longer available.

It’s yet another frustrating aspect of this mysterious disease. One bite from a tiny, hard-to-detect tick can lead to a host of odd symptoms, including arthritis, serious cardiac issues, and neurological damage in the most severe cases. The disease is easy to treat once you get a diagnosis, but that can be elusive. And while work is underway to develop a new and better vaccine, it may take years to come to market. Here’s what we know about how the disease works, and what you can do to stay safe. Continue reading New York: There’s a Vaccine for Lyme Disease. So Why Can’t We Get It?

While everyone’s excited for “hot vaxx summer,” a reminder: Americans are still dying of COVID. Not in the same numbers as during last winter’s horrific peak, but still at an agonizing clip, with more than 700 fatalities a day on average. In other words, tens of thousands of otherwise healthy people walking around today will die of it in the months ahead.

Sure, there are plenty of reasons to feel optimistic. We now have highly effective vaccines, and close to half the adult U.S. population has gotten at least one dose, conferring a high degree of protection from the virus. Given that a third or more of the country may have built up immunity through already getting infected, that means we’re in striking distance of herd immunity, which will gradually drive new infections to sufficient rarity that the pandemic will effectively be over nationally. “We have reason to believe we’ll be in a good place by July,” says Justin Lessler, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins.

But it’s not at all clear how we’ll get there. After an unexpectedly successful rollout of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, uptake is now slowing, with many locations now having more doses than people taking them. Meanwhile, new variants of concern are emerging and spreading. One of them, B.1.1.7, first appeared around the New Year and now constitutes the majority of new infections in the United States.

“We’re in a footrace between the vaccine and the variants,” says Columbia University disease modeler Jeffrey Shaman. How that race plays out will make the difference between a gradually weakening pandemic that yields relatively few additional fatalities and one that drives the death toll to another spike. The experience of Michigan, where cases spiked eightfold between February and April even as overall caseloads in the U.S. were broadly declining, could be played out again and again in pockets of vulnerability. Continue reading New York: The Pandemic’s Lethal Twilight

When the actress Sarah Wynter got her first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, she didn’t experience any side effects apart from a little soreness in her arm. Dose two was a different story. About 12 hours after she received it, as she was about to go to bed, “it hit me like a freight train,” she says. “I just started feeling very achy, very tired and heavy.”

She woke up the next morning experiencing what felt like the worst hangover of her life. After some Tylenol and coffee, she felt almost better by late morning and was well enough to host a small birthday party for her 10-year-old twins. Then, at bedtime, it was round two, this time including violent chills. A night’s rest helped, but the following day she still felt under the weather.

Wynter’s experiences may not have been exactly typical, but they weren’t unusual, either: The second dose of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines really do pack a wallop. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that while 30 percent of recipients experienced fatigue and a quarter suffered headaches after the first dose, those figures climbed to 54 percent and 46 percent, respectively, after the second dose. The number experiencing chills or fever climbed from 9 percent to 30 percent.

These unpleasant effects are a result of the way the immune system works. Continue reading New York: Why the Second COVID Shot Makes You Miserable