President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that his administration will have a coronavirus vaccine ready for Americans before the year ends. The lofty promise came during his acceptance speech on the final night of the Republican National Convention. “In recent months, our nation and the entire planet has been struck by a new and powerful invisible enemy,” Trump said to a largely mask-less crowd of 1,500 supporters gathered on the White House lawn. “We are delivering lifesaving therapies. And we’ll produce a vaccine before the end of the year, or maybe even sooner.” The pledge is ambitious by any measure. Several companies are vying for vaccine approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by the end of this year or by early 2021, but approval is just the beginning, The New York Times reported. Patients must be willing to take the vaccine, and there must be enough doses produced to be distributed widely. Medical experts noted that the audience setting for Trump’s speech posed the danger of community spread and set another bad example when Americans are being told they need to continue to wear masks, maintain social distancing and limit large gatherings, the Washington Post reported. “When you look at the way the president has handled the pandemic, it has basically been one evasion after another evasion,” Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert…  read on >

With the arrival of late summer, it’s essential to know the signs of heat exhaustion and how to intervene before it escalates to a more severe condition like heat stroke, emergency medicine experts say. Heat exhaustion comes with symptoms including: heavy sweating; breathlessness; a fast, but weak, pulse; headache; dizziness; nausea or vomiting. “Heat exhaustion can happen to anyone overexerting themselves in extreme heat,” said Dr. Laura Burke, an emergency medicine physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “If symptoms are severe, call for medical help right away.” Some people have an increased risk of heat exhaustion, including: People with heart disease or high blood pressure. People over age 65. Infants and children. People with sunburn, which impairs the cooling mechanism of the skin. If heat exhaustion occurs and appropriate measures are not taken to cool down, it can sometimes escalate to a life-threatening condition called heat stroke. “During heat stroke, the body can no longer cool itself down through sweating, which can result in damage to major organs,” Burke said in a hospital news release. Symptoms of heat stroke include hot and dry skin, a fever higher than 102 degrees Fahrenheit, headache, confusion and unconsciousness. “If you see someone suffering from heat stroke, try to cool the person down by getting to shade or into the air conditioning. Apply cool water with…  read on >

It may seem like a paradox, but giving someone a gift to help them save money is a sure way to make them hate it. The reason: It will make the recipient feel inferior to you, researchers say. In contrast, a gift that helps a recipient save time is taken as a compliment. The findings, from a series of experiments, are outlined in a study recently published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. “Most of us have this belief that any gift we give is going to be appreciated — but the way a gift is presented can influence how people feel about it,” said study co-author Grant Donnelly, assistant professor of marketing at Ohio State University, in Columbus. “When you don’t have time, you’re perceived as busy and in high demand. There’s something high-status about that, compared to not having enough money, which is seen as low status,” Donnelly said in a university news release. In one experiment, the researchers asked 405 people how they felt about receiving a gift they thought was intended to save them either time or money. Those who received a gift that was intended to save them money were more likely to say it made them feel embarrassed, ashamed and bad, compared to those who received a time-saving gift. “They thought the gift-giver was implying they…  read on >

It may seem like a paradox, but giving someone a gift to help them save money is a sure way to make them hate it. The reason: It will make the recipient feel inferior to you, researchers say. In contrast, a gift that helps a recipient save time is taken as a compliment. The findings, from a series of experiments, are outlined in a study recently published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. “Most of us have this belief that any gift we give is going to be appreciated — but the way a gift is presented can influence how people feel about it,” said study co-author Grant Donnelly, assistant professor of marketing at Ohio State University, in Columbus. “When you don’t have time, you’re perceived as busy and in high demand. There’s something high-status about that, compared to not having enough money, which is seen as low status,” Donnelly said in a university news release. In one experiment, the researchers asked 405 people how they felt about receiving a gift they thought was intended to save them either time or money. Those who received a gift that was intended to save them money were more likely to say it made them feel embarrassed, ashamed and bad, compared to those who received a time-saving gift. “They thought the gift-giver was implying they…  read on >

As the World Health Organization cautioned on Monday that using plasma from COVID-19 survivors to treat other patients is still an experimental therapy, American scientists challenged a key statistic cited by U.S. officials as grounds for emergency approval of the treatment. In announcing the approval on Sunday, President Donald Trump and two of his top health officials spoke of the same stunning statistic — that the treatment had reduced deaths by 35 percent, the New York Times reported. Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, went so far as to say that 35 out of 100 COVID-19 patients “would have been saved because of the administration of plasma.” But many scientists, including a researcher on the Mayo Clinic study from which the statistic was supposedly gleaned, said Monday they could not ascertain where the number came from and that Hahn had appeared to overstate the treatment’s benefits, the Times reported. “Do I know where the 35 percent comes from?” said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, one of the May Clinic study’s main authors who hails from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “No.” The actual data from the Mayo Clinic study shows that, among a group of more than 35,000 patients, when plasma was given within three day of diagnosis, the death rate was about 22 percent, compared with 27 percent when it was…  read on >

Scientists say they are seeing signs of lasting immunity to the coronavirus, even in those who only experience mild symptoms of COVID-19. A slew of studies show that disease-fighting antibodies, as well as B-cells and T-cells that can recognize the virus, appear to persist months after infections have run their course, The New York Times reported. “This is exactly what you would hope for. All the pieces are there to have a totally protective immune response,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington and an author of one of the new studies, which is now undergoing review by the journal Nature. “This is very promising,” said Smita Iyer, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis, who is studying immune responses to the coronavirus in rhesus macaques, told the Times. “This calls for some optimism about herd immunity, and potentially a vaccine.” Although researchers cannot predict how long these immune responses will last, experts consider the data to be the first proof that the body has a good chance of fending off the coronavirus if exposed to it again. “Things are really working as they’re supposed to,” Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, told the Times. Bhattacharya is an author on one of the new studies, which was published on medRxiv, a pre-print server for health research that has…  read on >

Microscopic bits of plastic have most likely taken up residence in all of the major filtering organs in your body, a new lab study suggests. Researchers found evidence of plastic contamination in tissue samples taken from the lungs, liver, spleen and kidneys of donated human cadavers. “We have detected these chemicals of plastics in every single organ that we have investigated,” said senior researcher Rolf Halden, director of the Arizona State University (ASU) Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering. There’s long been concern that the chemicals in plastics could have a wide range of health effects ranging from diabetes and obesity to sexual dysfunction and infertility. But the presence of these microscopic particles in major organs also raises the potential that they could act as carcinogenic irritants in much the same way as asbestos, Halden explained. “It is not always necessarily the chemistry that harms us. Sometimes it’s the shape and the presence of foreign particles in our bodies,” Halden said. “We know the inhalation of asbestos leads to inflammation and that can be followed by cancer.” Previous research has shown that, on average, people ingest about 5 grams of plastic every week, the equivalent of a credit card, said Dianna Cohen, CEO of the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition. “It’s heartening to see quality quantitative research being performed on humans to assess the cumulative harmful…  read on >

Women with early-stage breast cancer whose surgery has been postponed during the coronavirus pandemic need not worry about the delay, new study findings suggest. A longer time from diagnosis to surgery doesn’t affect overall survival of women with early-stage tumors, the researchers found. They also said a delay didn’t lower survival among women with estrogen-sensitive, early-stage breast cancer who received neoadjuvant endocrine therapy before their surgery. “Usually we take these patients with very small tumors directly to surgery, so it is a big change in practice to first put those patients on tamoxifen or an aromatase inhibitor,” said lead study author Dr. Christina Minami, an associate surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “What we can say from our findings is that despite the delay in surgical therapy, because you were on neoadjuvant endocrine therapy, we do not think that your survival will at all be impacted,” she added in a news release from the American College of Surgeons. For the study, her team used data on nearly 379,000 women. One group had ductal carcinoma in situ — the earliest form of breast cancer. The other group had small invasive tumors — stage 1 and 2 — that had not spread to lymph nodes and were estrogen receptor-positive. The researchers wanted to know if waiting up to one year from diagnosis to surgery affected…  read on >