Host
Stacey Wade
Podcast Content
Chan School of Public Health showed findings that higher fiber intake lowers the risk of breast cancer, suggesting fiber consumption in adolescence and early adulthood may be especially important. Meanwhile, many healthcare providers still routinely recommend higher fiber intake to individuals seeking to lower colon cancer risk.
Researchers found that the vaccine seemed to decrease the odds of enduring COVID for those infected only about 15%. Another conundrum was whether longer COVID was less likely to occur following a breakout infection - an infection in someone who had been vaccinated. Vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 reduces the risk of long COVID after an infection to just about 15%, according to one study in over 13 million people1. Long COVID has proven challenging to study, in part because its constellation of symptoms makes its definition hard.
Other viruses that chronically infect patients also vary more rapidly within one host than they do when spreading from one person to another, says Aris Katourakis, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University. The surge is rolling at high speed because it keeps finding people whose immunity from vaccines or infections has been declining for some time - thatll keep happening, says William Hanage, an epidemiologist and adjunct professor at the Harvard T.H. Looking forward, William Hanage said, There is probably one step forward, two steps back as far as the pandemics progress is concerned.
The latest domination of Omicron has evolutionary biologists wondering what comes next. Some believe this is a sign that the original frenzied evolutionary run by SARS-CoV-2 is ending, and it, like other coronaviruses that have been around for far longer, is settled into a gradual evolution mode. Even if the omicron is not replaced, Omicrons final reign is not cause for complacency, says Maria Van Kerkhove, the COVID-19 technical lead for the World Health Organization.
If that is the case, Bloom says, then the United States decision to upgrade COVID-19 vaccines by adding the Omicron component is a good one; even if Omicron continues to shift, vaccines built around it are likely to offer better protection than those built around earlier variants. If the next variant is similar in its changes from Delta to Omicron, that will be quite a shift from what is been happening lately, Topol says.
More than 13 million1 are the largest cohort that has not been used yet to study how well vaccines protect against longer-lasting COVID, but that is not likely to put an end to uncertainty. All this is to say: Estimating how much global poverty will rise as a result of the pandemic is challenging, and carries lots of uncertainty.
Such projections suggest COVID-19 is likely to lead to the first global poverty rise since 1998, when the Asian financial crisis struck. Countries like Indonesia, South Africa, and China are also projected to see over a million people driven to extreme poverty by COVID-19. Another way of looking at it is the estimates are suggesting the pandemic will force 49 million people into extreme poverty by 2020.
Comparing these projections for COVID-19 impacts to those in previous World Economic Outlook editions, starting with the October edition, allows us to assess the pandemics effect on global poverty. Of course, other factors could also have deteriorated countries outlooks for growth from October through April, but it is safe to say most changes to the outlook are driven by the pandemic. The small shift in the forecasts for 2019 from 8.2% to 8.1% occurred as revised growth projections were changed also due to reasons unrelated to COVID in a few countries. Taking that into account, it means the pandemic is driving a change in our global poverty estimate of 0.7 percentage points in 2020 -- - .
If it is not adequately addressed by policies, the societal crisis created by the COVID-19 outbreak could also exacerbate global inequality, exclusion, discrimination, and unemployment over the medium to long-term. Indigenous Peoples are also looking for their own solutions to this pandemic. As underscored by the UN secretary-general at the COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan launched on March 23, 2020, We need to reach out to the most vulnerable -- millions of people least able to protect themselves. We are facing a global health crisis like no other in the 75-year history of the United Nations: a crisis that is killing people, spreading human suffering, and disrupting peoples lives.
We need solidarity, political will, and innovative policy responses to protect vulnerable people and their wellbeing, as well as uphold the right to health, including access to information, treatment, and health services. We will honour these by becoming the people and nations that we know that we can and must become. Young people are crucial in restricting the spread of this virus and in controlling the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak on the health of communities, societies, and economies as a whole.
Two closely related subvariants called BA.4 and BA.5 are driving infections globally right now, but there are more candidates, including one called BA.2.75, knocking at the door.