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☆ China holds the key to understanding COVID-19 origins: WHO chief
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-06 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

"Without full access to the information that China has, you cannot say this or that," said Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in response to a question about the origin of the virus. That's WHO's position and that's why we have been asking China to be cooperative on this." Data from the early days of the COVID pandemic was briefly uploaded by Chinese scientists to an international database last month. The WHO's Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead for COVID-19, said the latest Chinese information offered some "clues" on origins but no answers. She added WHO still did not know whether some of the research required had been undertaken in China.

☆ Price hikes are double whammy for pet owners who are crushed by inflation
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-19 | by ( Alicia Wallace | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +11 min

Minneapolis CNN —As head of PAWS Atlanta, Joe Labriola can get a good sense of the region’s economic well-being from the day-to-day activity of the city’s oldest no-kill animal shelter. And the shelves at PAWS Atlanta’s Pet Food Pantry quickly go bare. She said her pet food costs for Lola, her Australian Shepherd mix, and for Phoebe, her Golden Retriever, have doubled to $250 per month. Josh Fiala, Animal Rescue League of Iowa's Pet Support Services Manager, helps load pet food into a vehicle during a Pet Food Pantry in January 2022. Courtesy Animal Rescue League of IowaARL gave out about 40,000 pounds of pet food in both 2020 and 2021.

☆ WHO, advisors urge China to release all COVID-related data after new research
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-18 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Access to the information was subsequently restricted “apparently to allow further data updates” by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). WHO officials discussed the matter with Chinese colleagues, who explained that the new data were intended to be used to update a preprint study from 2022. "We continue to call on China to be transparent in sharing data, and to conduct the necessary investigations and share the results," he said. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was shut down by Chinese authorities after the novel coronavirus emerged in the city in late 2019. The market has since been a focus of study of whether the virus had infected several other species before jumping to humans.

☆ Kidney dialysis-related infection rates higher in U.S. minorities -report
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-06 | by ( Nancy Lapid | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Feb 6 (Reuters) - Preventable bloodstream infections related to kidney failure treatment are more common in U.S. Patients whose kidney function falls below a certain level require a dialysis machine periodically to do the organs' work of cleansing the blood. The highest use of central venous catheters was seen in Black patients ages 18 to 49. Even after accounting for use of these catheters, the risk of S. aureus bloodstream infections was still higher in Hispanics than in whites. There were also more S. aureus bloodstream infections in areas with higher poverty, crowding, and lower education levels.

The issue brief stated that a "10% increase in median childcare prices was associated with 1 percentage-point lower county-level maternal employment rates." "High childcare prices and minimal public childcare investments are especially detrimental to employment among mothers with lower wages, as childcare affordability is out of reach," the researchers wrote. Childcare costs have outpaced inflation during the pandemic, according to one recent report, and the lion's share of childcare duties have fallen on women during the pandemic, causing them to leave the workforce en masse. Childcare workers made a mean hourly wage of $13.31 as of 2021, with the bottom 10% earning about $9 an hour. That's as childcare workers are more than twice as likely to live below the poverty line as those in other industries.

And Black women are often in their late 30s or early 40s when they start, older on average than white women. Black women are also twice as likely as white women to have fertility challenges, according to a 2008 study in Fertility and Sterility. He suggested that insurance coverage, awareness of the “biological clock” and partners’ attitudes toward fertility treatment may all play a role. Regina Townsend via Broken Brown Egg‘The myth assigned to us’National data identifying racial disparities in fertility care only recently became available when Seifer published his 2007 study. Doctors’ lack of knowledge about racial disparities in fertility treatment doesn’t surprise Townsend.

☆ Leonid Radvinsky bought OnlyFans after building an empire of porn sites. Now he wants to join the ranks of the super-rich and give away his fortune.
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-30 | by ( Jyoti Mann | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Leonid Radvinsky bought OnlyFans, an adult content platform, in 2018 for an undisclosed sum. The subscription-based adult content platform was founded in the UK by Tim Stokely in 2016 before Radvinsky took control. OnlyFans is not his first foray into the world of adult content. It ran a number of websites in the early 2000s that marketed "hacked" and "illegal" passwords to porn sites, Forbes reported last year. Radvinsky's next venture came in 2002 when he set up MyFreeCams, a porn site that featured "models" who got naked and offered sexual performances on webcams.

☆ I'm a pawnbroker. Here's how I deal with shady customers, fakes, and the occasional boa constrictor.
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-26 | by ( Ingrid Cruz | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

I've been the president of the Mississippi Pawnbrokers Association for four years, and prior to that, I was a board member. Gas prices are also a common reason why people sell or pawn items now. When setting prices to buy an item, the pawnbroker has to make sure the client doesn't want to return for it. If a person wants to sell an item, we only have to hold onto it for 14 days. You used to have to check newspapers on Sundays to check an item's worth.

☆ Omicron subvariants pose a new threat to people with immune deficiencies
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-23 | by ( Benjamin Ryan | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +7 min

Troubling recent reports reveal the emergence of new omicron subvariants that not only evade AstraZeneca’s Evusheld, the antibody drug authorized to prevent Covid infection, but also the sole antibody drug that has retained effectiveness as treatment for Covid, Eli Lilly’s bebtelovimab. Doctors have cautioned that should Laura get Covid, this could aggravate her autoimmune disease and lead to catastrophic kidney damage. Evusheld is a long-acting antibody injection given every six months that studies have suggested provides a robust buffer to the immunosuppressed. For now, immunocompromised people are anxiously watching the pandemic forecast to see if the subvariants that research indicates evade monoclonal antibodies will become predominant. “If fewer people are prescribed Evusheld,” she said, “there’s less incentive for drug companies to start developing newer therapeutics.

Chickenpox vaccines have virtually wiped out severe complications and deaths in American children from the highly contagious virus, a new report finds. Chickenpox —which is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, a type of herpes virus — was considered just a normal part of growing up until the vaccine became available in 1995. The chickenpox vaccine implementation is “a tremendous achievement,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Mona Marin, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease. An estimated 90.3% of children have been vaccinated against chickenpox by age 2, according to the CDC. The CDC recommends two doses of chickenpox vaccine for children, teens and adults who have never had the disease.

☆ Air Force ordered to pay more than $230M in Sutherland Springs church shooting
▼ + stars: | 2022-02-08 | by ( The Associated Press | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +2 min

More than two dozen people were killed when Devin Patrick Kelley opened fire during a Sunday service at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs. U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez had ruled in July that the Air Force was “60% liable” for the attack because it failed to submit Kelley’s assault conviction during his time in the Air Force to a national database. An Air Force record of the Kelley court-martial says he pleaded guilty to multiple specifications of assault, including striking his wife, choking her with his hands and kicking her. For unspecified reasons, the Air Force did not provide the information about Kelley as required. Messages to the Justice Department, Air Force and the plaintiffs’ legal team were not immediately returned.

☆ One millionaire landlord was behind half of Milwaukee's evictions during Covid lockdowns last June. Here's the story of how corporate landlords helped drive the evictions crisis
▼ + stars: | 2021-03-26 | by ( Abigail Higgins | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +23 min

Corporate landlords in cities like Milwaukee helped drive an evictions crisis during the pandemic. Corporate landlords, which own almost 50% of rental properties, are more likely to evict, advocates say. Before the 2008 recession, corporate landlords owned 20% of rental properties; today, it's nearing a whopping 50%. Since the Center for Disease Control's evictions moratorium took effect last September, evictions by corporate landlords have actually been steadily increasing. There is no national database of evictions, and evictions are only tracked at the level of the country's more than 3,000 counties.

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