Companies outside of the health care industry, including Tyson Foods and Royal Caribbean Cruises, have responded to the novel coronavirus pandemic by adding chief medical officers to their executive leadership teams. Tom Brower of Tyson said the CMO will guide the company's COVID-19 monitoring strategy.
Physicians, hospitals and medical students are taking part in voter registration efforts for the fall election as a way to influence future health care policy. Brown University emergency medicine resident Kelly Wong said older generations of health care professionals may have considered nonpartisan election work as out their purview, while younger professionals see it as an important part of treating the whole patient.
Employees and their families in the Waterloo, Iowa, school district are getting a health clinic through a partnership between their health insurer, HealthPartners, and UnityPoint Clinic. The school district is not involved in the operational costs or building lease, and the clinic will provide preventive and acute care, chronic disease management, and on-site medication dispensing.
Yoga may not be considered an aerobic exercise but it does have a significant cardiovascular impact, according to Dr. Mehrdad Rezaee at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose, Calif. Cardiologist Dr. Pratiksha Gandhi of the Global Foundation for Preventive Cardiology said yoga can support a healthy heart by creating a "union of the body, mind and soul" that can reduce stress.
The CDC reports that 570 children were hospitalized in the US for multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a rare syndrome linked to COVID-19, during the peak of the pandemic from March 2 to July 18. All MIS-C patients had tested positive for the novel coronavirus and 10 of them died from the illness.
Researchers studied 18,117 pregnant women who exhibited clinical symptoms of Zika virus disease between June 2015 and July 2016, and found that 5,673 had positive serum samples on real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction assays and reported both gestational age at the time of symptom onset and pregnancy outcome, with adverse outcomes seen in 14% of these confirmed cases, of which 2% were eye or brain defects. The findings published in The New England Journal of Medicine also showed that the incidence of eye or brain defects was higher in pregnancies where the mother had an onset of Zika virus disease symptoms in the first trimester, compared with those with an onset in the second or third trimester.
Parental preferences for dietary sugar, fat and salt may affect the amount of less healthful food they give their children, researchers reported in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. Researchers found that regularly giving children ages 3 to 5 less healthful and highly processed food made it less likely the children would eat vegetables at preschool.
Almost 80% of adults ages 70 years and older had at least one skin disease needing treatment or follow-up, according to a study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The study found 39.1% of those had three or more skin diseases at one time and skin diseases were more common among men than women.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the US crossed the 5 million mark early Sunday, while the total number of fatalities climbed to 162,851, with over 1,000 deaths reported daily over the last five days. California, Texas, Florida, Georgia and New York account for over 40% of the cases.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, will collaborate with the largest vaccine maker in the world, the Serum Institute of India, to ensure the availability of up to 100 million doses of a potential COVID-19 vaccine to be distributed quickly to low- and middle-income countries, for less than $3 a dose, including an option to purchase additional doses if so required. Upfront capital will be provided by the Gates Foundation partnership to help the Serum Institute scale up manufacturing capacity.