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 Around 17% of deaths due to coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in India could be linked to long-term exposure to air pollution, higher than the 15% seen on average across the world, according to a study published in the journal Cardiovascular Research on Tuesday. The analysis was based on study of air quality data and distribution of fatalities across the world till the third week of June, which the researchers used to calculate a Covid-19 mortality rate attributable to pollution. The highest proportion of these was in Czech Republic (29%), Poland (28%), and China (27%). In terms of global regions, East Asia had the highest proportion of such deaths at 27%, followed by Central Europe and America where nearly 25% of the deaths in each of the regions were attributed to air pollution by the study. The authors say that these are proportion of deaths that could have been avoided if the populations had been exposed to lower levels of air pollution. “...Attributable fraction does not imply a...

Non-generic queries in the online tool Google Trends may yield better insight into health information-seeking behavior, according to a new study by researchers from the George Washington University (GW). Google Trends analyzes the popularity of top Google queries geographically and longitudinally. More recently it has been used as a surveillance and retrospective epidemiological tool to study the impact of COVID-19 around the world. However, studies focusing on the pandemic's impact in the United States have been lacking, according to the researchers. "What's interesting about Google Trends is that it is a free platform that allows researchers like me to assess information-seeking behavior from a big data perspective," said King John Pascual, a third-year MD student at the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) and first author on the study. "Just like with any big-data platform, if you have the right research questions, it can be a powerful epidemiolog...

 The Telegraph Online,  October 15, 2020 British spies are trying to defend Covid-19 vaccine work against hostile powers that seek to either steal or sabotage research data in the race for the global prize of a jab that could provide immunity, the head of MI5 said on Wednesday. Oxford University’s vaccine candidate, which has been licensed to AstraZeneca, is in late stage trials, while a vaccine candidate being developed by Imperial College London is in early stage clinical trials. “Clearly, the global prize of having a first useable vaccine against this deadly virus is a large one, so we would expect that a range of other parties around the globe would be quite interested in that research,” security service (MI5) director-general Ken McCallum told reporters. McCallum, in his first major remarks since being named as the new boss of MI5 in March when the UK was under national lockdown, said there were a range of threats against the vaccine development work. “I guess there are t...

 The Indian Express, October 15, 2020 A COVID-19 vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceutica has come under the spotlight after late-stage human trials were paused over a potential safety concern. This vaccine uses the same approach as that of Oxford-AstraZeneca — whose trials were globally paused over similar concerns last month. What do we know about the pause? Late on Monday, trials for Janssen’s vaccine candidate, including phase 3 testing with 60,000 participants, were put on pause after a participant developed an “unexplained illness”. According to J&J, the illness is being reviewed by an independent Data Safety Monitoring Board as well as J&J’s internal clinical and safety physicians. The pause — decided by the company and not regulators — basically means the firm will temporarily halt recruitment and dosing of participants. What is common between the two trials that were halted? In the Oxford-AstraZeneca trials, a participant in the U...

 WION News October 13, 2020 If you see less of our content on your Facebook feed, it is because the social media giant is now censoring WION. If a user tries to share some of WION’s stories on Facebook, they may see a prompt saying the following: “False information: Checked by independent fact checkers". Why are we bringing this up? Facebook has rated one of our interviews as “fake news”. The interview in question was with Dr Li-Meng Yan, a virologist from China who claimed that COVID-19 was manufactured in a lab, and shed light on the discreet underpinnings of the pandemic in China. The Chinese virologist had made world headlines with a sensational claim of the origins of COVID-19. On October 12, Facebook sent out a message to us regarding a piece that ran on our website - wionews.com about the interview with Dr Yan. During the interview, Dr Yan had told WION that Chinese virologists in Wuhan were forced into silence about the outbreak. The report was shared on Facebook. A few we...

Zero Hedge October 12, 2020 In a stunning rebuke of the "science" and the "doctors" and leftist politicians and career bureaucrats in the US and across much of The West, The Epoch Times' Evan Pentchoukov reports that The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 has urged world leaders to stop using lockdowns as the primary control method against the spread of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus. “We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” David Nabarro told The Spectator in an interview aired on Oct. 8. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.” “Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, because people aren’t taking th...

 Moneycontrol October 12, 2020 Research conducted at the KU Leuven Rega Institute in Belgium has found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) does not limit the multiplication of the novel coronavirus. However, a very high dose of the flu drug favipiravir does have antiviral efficacy, according to their results. The researchers gave the hamsters either hydroxychloroquine or favipiravir for four to five days, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of the United States. Hamsters are often chosen as test subjects because they closely resemble the human body's reaction to an experimental drug. Coronavirus vaccine tracker October 9 | Check out the latest developments from around the world. "No toxicity signs were observed in the clinical presentation of the hamsters treated with these high doses. Importantly, significant improvements of histological lung pathology were observed in hamsters treated with the medium ...

  Hintustan Times Dated: September 08, 2020 By:  Niyati Singh World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday the world must be better prepared for the next pandemic, as he called on countries to invest in public health. World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday the world must be better prepared for the next pandemic, as he called on countries to invest in public health. More than 27.19 million people have been reported to be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and 888,326​ have died, according to a Reuters tally, since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019. “This will not be the last pandemic,” Tedros told a news briefing in Geneva. “History teaches us that outbreaks and pandemics are a fact of life. But when the next pandemic comes, the world must be ready – more ready than it was this time.” Reference:  https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/world-must-be-better-prepared-for-next-p...

Bloomberg,  April 27, 2020 Billionaire Bill Gates’s foundation will focus all of its resources on fighting the coronavirus,  according to  the Financial Times. The philanthropist and founder of Microsoft Corp. said that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment exceeding  $40 billion , will give “total attention” to the pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 and is roiling economies around the world, he said in an interview with the newspaper. “You’re going to have economies with greatly reduced activity levels for years,” Gates said. The pandemic could cost the global economy “tens of trillions of dollars,” he said in the interview. The foundation has contributed  $250 million  to help counter the coronavirus and is re-purposing units dedicated to fighting other diseases to join in the battle against the pandemic. “We’ve taken an organization that was focused on HIV and malaria and polio eradication, and almost en...