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Research Finds Many Submit-Covid Sufferers Are Experiencing New Medical Issues

Study Finds Many Post-Covid Patients Are Experiencing New Medical Problems

The report “shows the point that Covid can affect almost any organ system for a long time,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, director of research and development for the VA St. Louis Health Care System, who was not involved in the new study.

“Some of these manifestations are chronic diseases that last a lifetime and will scar some individuals and families forever,” added Dr. Al-Aly, the author of a major study of persistent symptoms in Covid patients published in April in the Veterans Affairs Department, added.

In the new study, the most common problem for which patients sought medical help was pain – including inflammation of the nerves and pain related to nerves and muscles – which was reported by more than 5 percent of patients, or nearly 100,000 people, more than a fifth of those who have reported post-Covid issues. Difficulty breathing, including shortness of breath, suffered in 3.5 percent of post-Covid patients.

Nearly 3 percent of patients sought treatment for symptoms marked with diagnostic codes of malaise and fatigue, a broad category that could include problems like brain fog and fatigue that worsen after physical or mental activity – effects beyond that of many people with long Covid were reported.

Other new problems for patients, especially adults in their 40s and 50s, included high cholesterol, which was diagnosed in 3 percent of all post-Covid patients, and high blood pressure, which was diagnosed in 2.4 percent, the report said . Dr. Al-Aly said that such health conditions, which are generally not viewed as an aftereffect of the virus, “make it increasingly clear that post-Covid or long-term Covid have a metabolic signature characterized by disorders in the metabolic machinery”.

Relatively few deaths – 594 – occurred 30 days or more after Covid, and most were among people hospitalized for their coronavirus infection, the report said.

The study, like many with electronic records, only looked at some aspects of the post-Covid landscape. It didn’t say when the patients’ symptoms appeared or how long the problems lasted, and it didn’t accurately assess when patients sought help from doctors after an infection, only that it lasted 30 days or more.

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Health

Vaccinated Adults Helps Defend Unvaccinated Kids, Research Finds

Vaccinated Adults Helps Protect Unvaccinated Children, Study Finds

New data from Israel, which had the fastest Covid-19 vaccine rollout in the world, provides real evidence that widespread vaccination against the coronavirus can protect unvaccinated people as well.

The Israeli study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Medicine, capitalized on the fact that until recently Israel only vaccinated people 16 and older. For every 20 percentage points increase in the proportion of 16 to 50 year olds vaccinated in a community, the proportion of unvaccinated under 16 year olds who tested positive for the virus fell by half.

“Vaccination not only offers benefits to the individual vaccine, but also to the people around them,” said Roy Kishony, a biologist, physicist and data scientist who studies microbial evolution and disease at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Dr. Kishony led the research with Dr. Tal Patalon, who heads KSM, the Maccabi Research and Innovation Center, in Israel. The first authors of the paper are Oren Milman and Idan Yelin, researchers in Dr. Kishony’s laboratory.

Israel began vaccinating adults in December last year. Within nine weeks, it had vaccinated nearly half of its population.

The researchers examined the anonymized electronic health records of members of Maccabi Healthcare Services, an Israeli HMO. They analyzed vaccination reports and virus test results between December 6, 2020 and March 9, 2021. The records were from 177 different geographic areas with different vaccination rates and vaccination rates.

For each community, they calculated the proportion of adults between the ages of 16 and 50 who were vaccinated at different times. They also calculated the percentage of children under the age of 16 who tested positive for PCR.

They found a clear connection: As more and more adults were vaccinated in a community, the proportion of children who tested positive for the virus fell as a result.

People who are vaccinated are significantly less likely to contract the virus. Research also suggests that even if people who have been vaccinated become infected with the virus, they may have lower viral loads, which reduces their ability to be contagious. As more and more people are vaccinated, the likelihood that unvaccinated people will encounter infected, contagious people is decreasing.

“The results are consistent with the fact that vaccinated people not only do not get sick themselves, but also do not transmit the virus to others,” said Dr. Kishony. “Such effects can be intensified over several infection cycles.”

In another recent article that has not yet been published in a scientific journal, Finnish researchers reported that after vaccinating health workers, even unvaccinated family members were less likely to be infected with the virus.

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Entertainment

A Choreographer Finds His Approach, Getting Misplaced within the Stars

A Choreographer Finds His Way, Getting Lost in the Stars

Kyle Marshall’s pandemic year was all about change. He turned 30. He moved into his own apartment. He now depends on his dance company, which he formed in 2014, for his livelihood. And he’s working with new dancers, a major shift for a choreographer whose works were populated by close friends and roommates — fellow graduates from Rutgers University.

“That transition felt like a lot, but it also felt absolutely necessary because it brings new ideas forward,” he said in an interview. “It keeps me accountable to how I want my ideas to come across. I have to communicate in a different way. I have to work with less expectation, and I think that’s really healthy.”

In this next step of his career, he said, he’s more focused and more comfortable making decisions. But the pandemic made also him realize something else: Just how exhausted he was. Before the shutdown, in December 2019, his company performed two works exploring Blackness at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “It took a toll on me,” Marshall said. “One thing that came out of Covid that I was grateful for was just the time to rest.”

“I wish I was better prepared,” he said of dealing with the stress of his dancing life, which also includes teaching and being a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. He added, “I wish I was in therapy sooner.”

The experiences of the past year have shifted both his work and the way he works. During the pandemic, Marshall started to embrace improvisation; he also found himself drawn to jazz, which led him to think about the role improvisation plays in Black art.

“I also thought improvisation would be a helpful way for performers to get back into material after not being onstage for so long,” he said. “I was in such a place of improvisation that it didn’t feel quite right for me to start dictating to people what to do with their bodies.”

This month, two new dances — one a film, the other live — will have their premieres. “Stellar,” a trippy piece inspired by Afrofuturism, jazz and science fiction, is a digital work for the Baryshnikov Arts Center, available for two weeks starting June 7. The other dance, “Rise,” is a celebration of club music that will be performed live at the Shed on June 25 and 26.

In each, there is a sense of elation, of wonder. “‘Stellar’ was thinking about something that was sci-fi and still rooted in Black culture and Black art-making, but stemming from other things besides just pain,” he said. “There’s more that I want to explore and more that I want to sit in to make work.”

For “Stellar” Marshall conjures a universe, meditative and otherworldly, in which three dancers, Bree Breeden, Ariana Speight and Marshall himself, move to a dreamy score by Kwami Winfield, featuring the cornet, bits of metal, a hand drum and a tambourine. The dancers, in painted and dyed sweatsuits designed by Malcolm-x Betts, practically glow, lending a sense of mysticism to the darkened stage where Marshall’s circular patterns and revolving bodies, seem to regenerate the space over time. There’s a weightlessness to them; at times, they seem like particles.

“Stellar” unfolds in five sections, each a different grouping or exploration. “The first opening, as we call it, is ‘expansion,’” Marshall said. “I was trying to create a body that was floating.”

The work has a ritualistic quality, which owes much to the music. Before he started working with the dancers, Marshall spent time figuring out the structure and the concept with Winfield. Sun Ra, the avant-garde musician with a passion for outer space, was a big influence.

“Sun Ra represents an alternate vision of the future — the potential to be more than what we’re born into as humans and specifically Black people in America,” Winfield said. “Sun Ra is sort of in between traditionalism in jazz and expanding it outward into noise. And something that Kyle and I talked about specifically was the way Sun Ra treats his keyboard like the controls of a spaceship.”

Marshall was also inspired by other jazz artists, including John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane and Albert Ayler. The sound that they produced felt out there to him — in a good way. And it also came as a surprise: His knowledge of experimental music was linked to the composer John Cage. But “these people were also working on breaking down boundaries of sound, creating distortion, creating noise, working in dissonance,” Marshall said. “That was not a part of my education, and I found it very empowering: Here are Black artists working in a very radical way.”

It led to him to consider his own improvisational practice as he tried to explore new ways of moving. The transcendence of Alice Coltrane’s music was particularly meaningful. “It’s just not playing to perform,” Marshall said. “It feels like she’s pulling something out of her. It felt like it held me and kept me feeling that I can access that for myself.”

And as Winfield — a former roommate of Marshall’s — worked on the piece, he also participated in the dancers’ warm-up. That gave him, he said, “a holistic understanding of my role in reference to everyone else — just knowing the energy and focus required to maintain connections to the material, time and each other in space.”

“Stellar,” which the dancers hope to perform live in the future, creates a world where even the makeup (by Edo Tastic) is a space for Marshall to explore Afrofuturism: “I thought it added a little royalty to it,” he said.

But nailing the right makeup — or anything related to the look of a dance — doesn’t come naturally to him. “I’m a very, like, structural, embodied person,” he said. “Everyone asks me: ‘What about hair? What am I doing with my hair?’ And I’m like: ‘Don’t. I don’t know.’ Hair and makeup and costumes don’t come last, but they’re not my strengths. I’m trying to embrace that a little bit more and to get more people involved and see how it can inform the work.”

The music for “Rise,” his first live group piece since the pandemic, is composed and performed by Cal Fish, and inspired by house music. The feeling Marshall is going for? “It’s what you get both in the church and the club — that kind of opening and uplift,” he said. “I’m thinking about uplift as both an energetic feeling, but also a choreographic idea that the work ascends: It goes from a low place to a high place. Leaning into that expectation is something I’ve never indulged in choreographically.”

Again, it’s all about change. “Creating something that actually feels joyful,” he said with a smile.

It might seem odd, but Marshall’s embrace of joy is in response to the death of George Floyd and his aversion, he said, to displaying more pain. “A lot of my work was thinking about trauma and either displaying it or showing it,” he said. “I just think that cycle is toxic. I think about displaying Black violence: What does that do for the viewer?”

And what, he wonders, do we need coming out of this time? “I need a bit more space in my life, a bit more dreaming,” he said. “More affirmation and positivity. I just don’t think that right now for me is the time to sit in my trauma. I need more joy in my life.”

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Entertainment

All Her Life Research: A Downtown Dancer Finds Her Voice

All Her Life Studies: A Downtown Dancer Finds Her Voice

Leslie Cuyjet has performed with dozens of contemporary choreographers over the years, but she’s still something of a mystery. Her subtle, strong presence unassumingly grounds the stage. She has a way of revealing and receding.

But the layers are being peeled back: Lately, Cuyjet, 40, has unveiled a potent choreographic voice, excavating the solo form through video, writing and, of course, the dancing body.

“Blur,” a solo that looks at objectification and race, is set to debut on Friday at the Shed as part of its Open Call series. Cuyjet (pronounced SOO-zhay) also has a video piece, “For All Your Life Studies,” in an exhibition called “In Practice: You may go, but this will bring you back,” at SculptureCenter in Long Island City. Looking ahead, she’ll appear live on June 13 as part of the Performance Mix Festival in Manhattan and offer a virtual presentation on July 11 for the Center for Performance Research.

Earlier in May, as part of the Kitchen’s Dance and Process series, she presented “With Marion,” an elegant, complex look at identity partly inspired by Marion Cuyjet, her great-aunt, a pioneering teacher of Black ballet dancers who formed the Judimar School of Dance in Philadelphia in 1948.

“With Marion” seems to sum up Cuyjet’s approach as a choreographer, which is to bring the past into the present through writing and movement, as well as to surround herself with intimate artifacts. In this labyrinthine work of video, text and movement, she brought the image of her pandemic studio — a desk — into the space (Queenslab in Ridgewood, Queens), and operated a complex system of projections that included a photograph of her great-aunt.

It’s a feat to pull off something so conceptual and personal; Moriah Evans and Yve Laris Cohen — who curate Dance and Process, an incubator that affords choreographers the space and time to develop work — were impressed. Evans said she admired the nuances of seemingly simple gestures in the piece, as well as its “delicate shifts,” which “contain all the complexity that I think is within Leslie as a person and as a performer: the subtlety, the control, but also the anger, the rage, the freedom.”

Cuyjet’s dance lineage and her experience growing up in a middle-class Black family are complicated for her. In “With Marion,” she said she was looking at the privilege afforded by light skin. Marion “started teaching because she was kicked out of the corps in a ballet company when they found out that she was Black,” she said. “But before that, she had been successfully passing.”

Cuyjet didn’t know her great-aunt well. “When I started really getting into dance — I was maybe a preteen or a teenager — someone at a family reunion was just like, ‘You know that she’s a dancer,’” Cujyet said. “I thought she was this untouchable character. There’s something bigger brewing about celebrating her and her life and her legacy; this piece for the Kitchen felt like a start.”

As she digs deeper into how her identity both shapes and is shaped by the world, Cuyjet seems to be the kind of choreographer whose works, once unleashed, will continue to grow and morph. In the video “Life Studies,” she explores a favorite topic: Black bodies and water. Her younger self is shown swimming in a competition as well as simply basking by the pool. The children’s laughter you hear alongside splashing water is infectious, a familiar song of summer.

“That was just an expression of the privileges that I had growing up,” Cuyjet said. “I have all these home videos of us swimming in competition and enjoyment, and that’s the makeup of this piece.”

Over the years, Cuyjet has danced for many choreographers, including Kim Brandt, Jane Comfort, Niall Jones, Juliana F. May and Cynthia Oliver, her mentor. She loves to be in a process of collaboration. “Years and years of my work is embedded in Jane Comfort’s work,” she said. But “I started asking questions like, ‘What is my work going to be?’”

It then became clear to her, she said. She wanted to be the one in charge.

Cuyjet has also become more vocal on another topic: In a joint interview in March with another Black choreographer — “Leslie Cuyjet and Angie Pittman are not the same dancer” — she talks about the “shared experience of what it’s like to be the black dot on the white stage.”

Recently, Cuyjet spoke about some of her projects and practices, which weave together her life and her art. What follows are edited excerpts from that conversation.

How did “With Marion” develop?

It was completely shaped by the pandemic. I really started picking up writing to make sense of what was happening and to catalog this momentous occasion in our lifetime. I created a photograph: a collaged image of items and objects that were on and around my desk.

And that includes an image of Marion, which shows up in the work. What kind of comfort did having her so close to you during the pandemic bring?

I don’t know. She was tenacious, stubborn. I don’t know why I feel hesitant to talk about this, but I think the reason that I perform for other people is so that I don’t have to be out in front. I don’t have to use my own voice.

But that is changing. Why?

In the summer, with the movement for Black lives, I felt myself just sort of shoved in front of a microphone. And it felt really uncomfortable for me to feel like it was earned or deserved. And I think when I look to Marion — and I looked at everything that she went through for me to have this place where I am in this privilege — I feel like I have to take some of these opportunities. Now it feels like I can talk about nuance and I can talk about how my experience might be different than other Black artists.

How do you see your self as a Black woman in the contemporary dance scene?

I recently had a conversation with Angie Pittman [for Critical Correspondence, the online publication of Movement Research]. It was so monumental to talk about how, basically, we’re interchangeable. We are rarely cast in the same pieces.

This experience of being fluent in so many different dance languages and so many different postmodern and experimental forms is that it’s hard to decipher whether you are there for your virtuosity and knowledge or to check a box on somebody’s grant application. I want to feel like I’ve earned everything that I have, and I work really hard and I work all the time.

For years.

For years. It’s really isolating to be typecast. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but then there’s the other side of that, where it’s like, “Oh you’re Black, so you can give me these things.”

I want to feel free to let my freak flag fly a little bit, instead of being contained into “this is what Black art is.” And I’m definitely calling my work “Black art,” but sometimes I feel like that’s been challenged and I’ve had to defend it, and it’s just like, why? Why do I have to do this?

What is the background of your SculptureCenter video?

The piece grew out of research for a life-insurance project. My great-grandfather was the president of a Black-owned life-insurance company and was able to give my dad’s side of the family mobility and property and all these things. My mom’s first job was at the insurance company. So it really sort of secured a middle class-ness of both sides of my family.

How else has your family influenced your work?

I remember my parents [who grew up on the South Side of Chicago] telling me a childhood friend of theirs wrote this book about the way they were brought up, and it was Margo Jefferson’s “Negroland.” And I was like, Margo Jefferson was your friend? They sent me a copy and I read it, and I was floored. I changed the whole trajectory of my work. [Laughs]

Her memoir is about being a member of Chicago’s Black elite. Do you have a sense of privilege that is uncomfortable for you?

Absolutely. And it’s hard to acknowledge. And it’s so complicated when people are like: “No, but you have so much oppression. So it’s OK.” [Laughs] But this book and the way that Margo spells it out about being raised this way — it made a lot of sense to me. It’s making me understand my place in the world.

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Health

Poor Individuals Extra Prone to Have Respiratory Issues, Examine Finds

Poor Americans More Likely to Have Respiratory Problems, Study Finds

But that has changed drastically. By the survey period 2017-18, current and former smoking rates among the wealthiest dropped by nearly half to 34 percent — while rates among the poorest inched up to 57.9 percent

Though smoking is an acquired habit, lower-income people may be more likely to use tobacco to cope with the stresses of poverty, Dr. Gaffney said. Tobacco advertising often targets low-income communities, and there is a higher density of tobacco stores in poor neighborhoods, according to the authors of a commentary accompanying the study. Poor people may also have more limited access to smoking cessation programs and replacement therapies, they said.

“We’re increasingly thinking of tobacco dependence as a disease,” said Dr. Sarath Raju, an assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins University and one of the authors of the commentary. “Individual responsibility is important, but without appropriate treatment or access to treatment to help you quit, that’s a challenge.”

Among children, asthma rates increased in all income groups after 1980, but they rose more sharply among children from poorer households. There was little difference in asthma rates in young children aged 6 to 11 before 1980, which stood at 3 percent to 4 percent. But by 2017-18, rates among the poor increased to 14.8 percent, compared with 6.8 percent among children from the highest income families. (A similar pattern emerged among adults; statistical adjustments for smoking only slightly reduced the differences.)

Among low-income adults, rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, an inflammatory lung disease, have long been higher than among wealthier individuals. But rates have increased, widening the gap, with prevalence among the poorest Americans increasing to 16.3 percent from 10.4 percent, even as the rate remained stable, at 4.4 percent, among the wealthiest.

Between 1959 and 2019, poorer and less-educated adults consistently reported more troubling respiratory symptoms, like labored breathing, than wealthier, more educated people. For some symptoms, like having a problem cough, the gap between the rich and poor widened over time.

Wheezing rates fell for the highest income and most educated groups, but they remained stable in the poor, least educated groups, the study found.

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Entertainment

Stereotypes Are Rife Amongst Asian and Pacific Islander Movie Roles, Research Finds

Stereotypes Are Rife Among Asian and Pacific Islander Film Roles, Study Finds

Of the 1,300 top-grossing films released from 2007 to 2019, only 44 starred an Asian or Pacific Islander – and a third of the roles went to a single actor, Dwayne Johnson, a study found.

In 2019 in particular, by the end of the film, more than a quarter of Asian or Pacific islanders had died, and more than 41 percent had “experienced a degradation.” Two-thirds of Asian or Pacific islanders mirrored stereotypes, and nearly 20 percent spoke either a non-English language or English with a non-American accent, according to a study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, funded by Amazon Studios and the UTA Foundation.

Analysis of the 1,300 films released Tuesday also found that only 3.4 percent of the films featured Asian or Pacific islanders in leading or coleading roles. (In relation to the US population, 7.1 percent identify themselves in this category.)

Other sobering statistics: Of 51,159 people speaking, only 5.9 percent were Asian, Asian-American, or Hawaiian or Pacific islanders. 39 percent of the films did not include a single Asian or Pacific islander.

The study also broke the statistics by gender: four Asian or Pacific islanders were cast in six lead roles, compared to 336 unique white male actors over the same period – a ratio of 84 white male actors per Asian or Pacific islander actress.

Only 13 percent of the roles of Asian or Pacific islanders in 2019 films were classified as “fully human.” The study’s authors defined that they have a full spectrum of relationships and don’t take on any role as a foreigner, buddy, or villain. (Johnson’s Dr. Bravestone character in “Jumanji: The Next Level” or Constance Wu’s character Destiny in “Hustlers” were considered good examples.)

The study, led by Nancy Wang Yuen, professor at Biola University, and Stacy L. Smith of the University of Southern California at Annenberg, also found that of the 600 highest-grossing films released from 2014 to 2019, only 15 were Asian and Pacific Islander characters abstained from identifying themselves as LGBTQ and only 26 Asian and Pacific islanders were shown with a physical, cognitive or communicative disability in the 500 films released from 2015 to 2019 with a physical, cognitive or communicative disability.

The researchers also looked at representation among filmmakers, finding that of the 1,447 credited directors in the sample, only 3.5 percent were Asian or Pacific islanders – and only three were women. (Jennifer Yuh Nelson won two awards for the Kung Fu Panda franchise and Loveleen Tandan for Slumdog Millionaire.) No Asian or Pacific Islander was the sole director of any of the 1,300 films in the study. (The research period ended before the publication of “Nomadland”, whose director Chloé Zhao won the Oscar for best director this year as the first woman of color, first Chinese woman and second woman.) Among the producers, 2.5 percent were Asian or Pacific islanders , as do 3.3 percent of casting directors.

The results of the study are due to the increasing hostility and violence against Asians in the United States. The nonprofit Stop AAPI Hate announced in March that nearly 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents were reported over the course of a year during the pandemic, mostly against women.

“Whether through the lack of API characters or through stereotypical representations, entertainment can be a means of perpetuating inaccurate and dehumanizing portrayals of the API community,” the report concludes.

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CDC examine finds disparities in protection between rural and concrete areas

CDC study finds disparities in coverage between rural and urban areas

An El Paso Fire Department health worker administers the Moderna vaccine for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at a vaccination center near the Santa Fe International Bridge in El Paso, Texas on May 7, 2021.

Jose Luis Gonzalez | Reuters

According to a new study released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people in rural areas are receiving lower levels of Covid-19 vaccines than in urban areas, potentially boosting the country’s progress in ending the disease Pandemic hinders.

The CDC analyzed county-level vaccine administration data in American adults who received their first dose of the Pfizer BioNTech or Moderna Covid-19 vaccine or a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine. It examined data from 49 states and the District of Columbia through April 10.

The agency found, at 38.9% and 45.7%, respectively, a lower percentage of residents in rural districts who had received at least one shot than in urban districts. The CDC also found that people in rural areas who received a vaccine often had to travel farther to get it than people in urban areas.

“The hesitation of vaccines in rural areas is a major obstacle that doctors, health care providers and local partners must address in order to achieve equitable vaccination,” the CDC wrote in the report.

“As the availability of COVID-19 vaccines increases, public health doctors should continue to work with health care providers, pharmacies, employers, religious leaders and other partners in the community to identify and address barriers to COVID-19 vaccination in rural areas eliminate, “added the agency.

The new data comes as more studies have shown that rural residents may be more reluctant to get a vaccine. A report by the Kaiser Family Foundation published in April found that 3 out of 10 rural residents either “definitely won’t” get vaccinated or will only do so when needed.

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky brought up the study before it was released Tuesday, saying the Biden administration was determined to reach communities “in every corner of the United States.”

The US is working to “ensure that access to vaccines is fair whether you live in rural or urban areas,” she said during a Covid-19 briefing at the White House. “Public health workers nationwide are working to provide trusted information through trusted messengers.”

Walensky said CDC employees attended the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama last weekend, where U.S. health officials were doing Covid tests and vaccinations.

“We’re really making strides across the country to make sure people have access to vaccines,” she said.

Tuesday’s study did not calculate coverage by race and ethnicity, according to the CDC, because information about it was missing for 40% of the data.

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Many Unvaccinated Latinos within the U.S. Need the Shot, New Survey Finds

Many Unvaccinated Latinos in the U.S. Want the Shot, New Survey Finds

About 18 percent of Latino respondents said they did not yet have permanent residential status in the US. Although the Biden administration and local health authorities have reiterated that the recordings are available to everyone regardless of immigration status, more than half of this group said they were unsure whether they would be eligible for the recordings.

Updated

May 16, 2021, 9:09 p.m. ET

Nearly 40 percent of all unvaccinated Latinos who responded to the survey feared they would need to show government-issued ID in order to qualify. And about a third said they feared the shot would endanger either their immigrant status or that of a family member.

Many health departments have been taking increasingly inventive steps to attract Spanish speakers and reassure them that their immigration status will not be jeopardized, said Erin Mann, program manager for the National Resource Center for Refugees, Immigrants, and Migrants at the University of Minnesota, which guides communities on best practices advises to reach underserved people. This includes language-specific drive-on lanes for tests and vaccinations, running events in the evening, and telephoning health care workers to sign them up.

The survey results come from a nationally representative telephone poll conducted April 15-29 of 2,097 adults, including 778 English- and Spanish-speaking Latinos.

The report of the results also examined the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Latino families, which explained their willingness to be vaccinated. About 38 percent of Latino adults said a relative or close friend had died from Covid-19, compared with 18 percent of white adults who said they had similar experiences. Two-thirds of adults in Latino said they feared either they or a relative could contract the coronavirus. Financial fears related to the pandemic have also plagued Latino families. Almost half said they had been economically affected, compared with about a third of white respondents who said so.

While about a third of non-vaccinated Latino adults wanted to get a shot as soon as possible, two-thirds hesitated and described themselves as waiting and seeing (35 percent) only when it was necessary for work (13 percent) or definitely not (17 percent). However, this group appeared to be accessible to incentive strategies, the report said. Better access would be helpful for them.

More than half of this group, overall hesitant and also busy, said they would get the chance if their employers gave them paid time off to recover from side effects, a rate almost three times as high like those of the white workers. (The Biden government has urged companies to take the action.) And 38 percent of that group would like to be vaccinated if their employer arranges for the shots to be distributed on site. Almost four in ten respondents said they would be more likely to get the shot if their employer offered a $ 200 incentive to do so.

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Health

Lots of Reported Irregular Menstruation After Publicity to Tear Gasoline, Examine Finds

Hundreds Reported Abnormal Menstruation After Exposure to Tear Gas, Study Finds

At some point last summer there were just too many reports of protesters having abnormal menstrual cycles after exposure to tear gas for Britta Torgrimson-Ojerio, a nurse researcher at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, to dismiss them as a coincidence.

A preschool teacher told Oregon Public Broadasting that if she inhaled a significant amount of gasoline at night, she would get her period the next morning. Other Portland residents spoke of weeks of periods and unusual spots. Transgender men described sudden periods defying hormones that had kept menstruation in check for months or years.

Dr. Torgrimson-Ojerio decided that she would try to find out if these anecdotes were outliers or representatives of a more common phenomenon. She interviewed around 2,200 adults who said they had been exposed to tear gas in Portland last summer. In a study published this week in the journal BMC Public Health, she reported that 899 of them – more than 54 percent of those who may be menstruating – said they had experienced abnormal menstrual cycles.

“Even though we can’t say anything scientifically specific about these chemical agents and a causal relationship with menstrual disorders,” said Dr. Torgrimson-Ojerio, “We can definitely say that in our study, most people with menstrual cycles or a uterus reported menstrual irregularities.” after reporting exposure to tear gas. “

Downstream effects such as fertility effects are not known, but “this is our call to action to ask our scientific community to address this issue,” she said.

Dr. Torgrimson-Ojerio was also interested in whether people had other problems more than a few hours after exposure to tear gas. She found that 80 percent of respondents had difficulty breathing, which was one of the most common complaints.

Kira Taylor, a professor of epidemiology and population health in the University of Louisville’s School of Public Health and Information Sciences who is doing a similar study, said Dr. Torgrimson-Ojerio’s study provided “some of the first solid evidence” for tear gas to be associated with menstrual disorders. It is also “the first study to document the longer-term effects of tear gas exposure in a large population,” she said.

Sven-Eric Jordt, Professor of Anaesthesiology, Pharmacology and Cancer Biology at Duke University Medical School, who was not involved in the study, welcomed the work.

Most of the research that police and government use to educate them about tear gas safety “are out of date, often 50 to 70 years old, and inconsistent with modern toxicological approaches,” he said. “Most of these studies were conducted on young healthy men at the time, either in the police or the military, rather than women or a general civilian population representing protesters.”

Dr. Torgrimson-Ojerio and her colleagues recruited respondents through social media and links on The Oregonian and Oregon Health Authority websites in July and August.

The researchers asked participants to explain exactly how their periods had affected after exposure to tear gas. Increased cramps, unusual spotting, and unusually intense or prolonged bleeding were the most common reactions. A number of people who normally don’t have periods because of hormone therapy or age have reported unexpected bleeding and blotches, said Dr. Torgrimson-Ojerio.

This study has limitations. It is not a random sample.

“It is possible that people who felt that their health was harmed by tear gas were more likely to react than people who were also exposed but did not have such harmful effects,” said Dr. Taylor. “This means that some of the numbers may be exaggerated.”

Because the subjects were allowed to participate anonymously, the researchers were unable to verify their accounts.

Nor can the study answer how or why tear gas may contribute to menstrual disorders, or the extent to which other factors are involved. The authors acknowledge that, for example, the high levels of stress and anxiety among protesters may also have contributed to the physical response.

“It is possible that pain, stress, dehydration, and exertion play a role,” said Dr. Jordt. Alternatively, tear gas can act as an “endocrine disruptor” and impair normal hormone function.

“The tear gas agent CS, which is sometimes used by the police, is a chlorinated chemical compound and creates additional chlorinated by-products when burned in the canisters used by the police,” he said. “Exposure to chlorinated chemicals can affect menstrual health.”

Alexander Samuel, a molecular biologist in France, has been researching similar issues since French protesters began reporting menstrual disorders.

He mentioned two additional areas for research: whether tear gas is metabolized to cyanide, which can lead to heavy menstrual bleeding, and what role a traumatic event can play in changing menstrual cycles.

Suspicions of tear gas and menstruation arose more than a decade ago during the Arab Spring protests, noted Dr. Jordt firmly.

In 2011, Chile also banned the use of tear gas after a study found that CS gas could cause miscarriages and harm young children. Three days later, Chilean police lifted the ban and insisted that the type of tear gas used was completely safe.

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Health

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are 94 % efficient at stopping hospitalization in older adults, a examine finds.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are 94 percent effective at preventing hospitalization in older adults, a study finds.

Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines prevent 94 percent hospitalization of fully vaccinated adults aged 65 and over, according to a small study published Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The results, which are in line with clinical trial results, are the first real evidence from the US that the vaccines protect against severe Covid-19. Older adults are at the highest risk of being hospitalized and dying from the disease. More than 573,000 people have died from the virus across the country, according to a New York Times database. As of Wednesday, 142.7 million people had received at least one dose of one of three federally approved vaccines, including about 98 million people who were fully vaccinated.

“These results are encouraging and welcome news for two-thirds of people 65 and older who are already fully vaccinated,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC director, in a statement. “Covid-19 vaccines are highly effective and these real world results confirm the benefits of clinical trials preventing hospitalizations among the most vulnerable.”

The study is based on data from 417 patients enrolled in 24 hospitals in 14 states between January 1 and March 26. About half were 75 years or older.

Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two shots three to four weeks apart. Older adults who were partially vaccinated – that is, received a dose of the vaccine more than two weeks earlier – were 64 percent less likely to be hospitalized with the coronavirus than unvaccinated seniors, the researchers reported.

The vaccines did not reduce hospitalization rates in people who received their first dose less than two weeks earlier. It takes time for the body to build an effective immune response, and people are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after the last dose in the series.

“This also underscores the persistent risk of serious illness shortly after vaccination, before a protective immune response has been achieved, and increases the need for vaccinated adults to continue physical distancing and prevention behaviors,” the scientists wrote.