WASHINGTON — The Biden administration said Wednesday it will release doses of prescription flu medicine from the Strategic National Stockpile to states as flu-sickened patients continue to flock to hospitals and doctors’ offices around the country. This year’s flu season has hit hard and early. Some people are even noticing bare shelves at pharmacies and grocery stores when they make a run for over-the-counter medicines as cases have spiked. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the flu has resulted in 150,000 hospitalizations and 9,300 deaths so far this season. “Jurisdictions will be able to get the support they need to keep Americans healthy as flu cases rise this winter,” Dawn O’Connell, an assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees the CDC, said in a statement. States will be able to request doses of the prescription flu medication Tamiflu kept in the Strategic National Stockpile from HHS, the administration said. The department is not releasing how many doses will be made available. This flu season is coming on the heels of a nasty spike of RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, cases in children and just as COVID-19 cases are climbing — again. Spot shortages of over-the-counter pain relievers and medicines have been reported at stores around the country, particularly for children. CVS Health, for example, has placed a two-product limit on all children’s pain relief products bought through its pharmacies or online. Walgreens is limiting customers online to six purchases of children’s over-the-counter fever reducing products. The Food and Drug Administration has not reported a shortage of Tamiflu. However, the federal agency says the prescription antibiotic amoxicillin is in short supply due to increased demand. ___ AP Medical Writer Mike Stobbe in New York contributed to this report. from https://ift.tt/JR7WhDr Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/
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Chinas Stunning U-Turn on Zero-COVID Takes Xi Jinping From Suffocating Control to Callous Inaction12/21/2022 Even for China, where the distance between official narrative and empirical evidence is often a chasm, the last few days have been jarring. On Tuesday, officials announced five deaths from COVID-19—up from two the previous day, which were the first recorded in the country since Dec. 3. On Wednesday, there were officially none. But a glance online tells a different story. Dozens of hearses line up at a Beijing crematorium; bodies wrapped in orange plastic pile in hospitals; patients on ventilators are crammed on a ward floor. The decision by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership to roll back its stringent zero-COVID policy and allow the virus to proliferate has led to a surge in cases and an immense strain on health services. It’s a quite staggering reversal. On Nov. 10, President Xi Jinping—the self-anointed “commander-in-chief” of a “people’s war” against the virus—instructed his Politburo to stick “resolutely” to “dynamic zero-COVID.” Residents of Shanghai were forcibly detained in quarantine facilities over the summer because of a single case in a neighboring housing block. Read More: China’s Zero-COVID Trap But zero-COVID was virtually abandoned on Dec. 7, with China’s top medical adviser now comparing the Omicron variant to “flu.” On Dec. 13, a tracking app that had tyrannized every life in China for the past three years was abruptly taken offline. On Sunday, officials in the central city of Chongqing decreed that mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 cases could “go to work as normal.” The screeching U-turn underlines the fickle nature of strongman rule but also the immense paranoia of the CCP when faced with public discontent, such as the protests that erupted in late November across several Chinese cities. The catalyst was the deaths of at least 10 people in an apartment block fire in China’s western city of Urumqi that observers blamed on draconian pandemic controls keeping residents locked in their homes. (Officials deny this.) It spurred a wave of protests, with scores of people gathering on streets and university campuses across the country, shouting “we want freedom, not PCR tests,” and even “down with Xi Jinping.” Read More: Detained Zero-COVID Protesters in China Share Their Stories The sudden rollback of restrictions that followed “could be seen as a victory for people power,” says Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. Still, the policy climbdown is surprising. China’s security services were swift to track down and detain demonstrators, who were never close to forming a political opposition. “They never quite galvanized into a single, unified, politically actionable message,” says Wen-Ti Sung, a scholar specializing in Chinese elite politics at the Australian National University. But what likely spooked Xi was the breadth of discontent that zero-COVID engendered. Affluent Shanghainese, embattled students facing bleak job prospects, and migrant workers in southern factories all railed against its privations and related economic blowback in distinct but analogous acts of rebellion. Their concerns were well-founded; models suggest zero-COVID may have cost the Chinese economy $384 billion and reduced GDP growth by 2.2 percentage points. It’s perhaps unsurprising that a CCP spawned from popular revolution should fear the wrath of the masses most of all. In truth, however, over two-thirds of the 303 autocrats ousted from power worldwide between 1946 and 2008 were unseated by elite coups, with only a small minority bested by popular uprisings. The lesson being that rather than fear a mob over the horizon, leaders like Xi should be looking over their shoulder. It’s clear that he does the latter too, of course; by assuming a protocol-breaking third leadership term in November, while stocking his inner circle with loyalists and lackeys, Xi has doggedly insulated himself from potential rivals. Herein may lie the problem. The fear was always that this new leadership’s homogeneity would undermine the quality of its policy-making. “That it has been having a hard time facing its first major test—smooth transition out of zero-COVID—has not been helpful in dispelling those concerns,” says Sung. The government saw the economic pain of zero-COVID and wanted to make adjustments. But local officials who for the past three years have been judged first and foremost on stamping out the virus were naturally hesitant. So the central leadership had to take bolder steps to force their arm such as dismantling the nationwide tracking apparatus. Cue the lurch from one extreme to another. Today, China is caught between Xi’s two festering paranoias—fear of the people, and of challenges within the party. The consequences may be dire. With virtually no community exposure to the virus, and only low efficacy domestic vaccines, the surge in cases will no doubt result in many deaths—some models predict over 1 million—despite official denials. Zhang Wenhong, a prominent Chinese doctor often likened to America’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, has warned that China’s medical institutions will face their “darkest hour” by next month. Instead, a new propaganda campaign has taken over. Previously, pandemic chaos in the West was painted as evidence of liberal democracy’s failings. Meanwhile, China’s success in banishing the virus was proof of a superior political system. But on Dec. 12, the CCP mouthpiece People’s Daily newspaper instead framed zero-COVID as a necessary stopgap to buy time while the virus’s severity waned and effective treatments were developed. Its dismantling, so it went, was always in the works. “Be the first person responsible for your own health,” it wrote. The problems with this account are myriad and glaring. If this opening up was long-planned, then surely more efforts should have been made to vaccinate the elderly. Currently, only 42% of over-80s have had three doses of the vaccines, according to government figures. Today, people seeking boosters are being turned away from clinics due to a lack of supply. The most vulnerable could have been given more effective foreign vaccines. (On Tuesday, the U.S. offered China mRNA vaccines, though nobody expects the nationalistic CCP to accept.) In addition, effective antivirals like Paxlovid should have been stockpiled; one Chinese website sold out its supply in half-an-hour. Public health experts also struggle with the logic of opening up some six months after most Chinese have had their last jab, given the rapidly decreasing efficacy of vaccines over time. Not to mention there’s just weeks before China’s Spring Festival—humanity’s largest annual migration, when some 200 million Chinese cram into buses and trains for long journeys to ancestral villages where medical facilities are rudimental at best. “Even healthcare workers were caught off-guard [by the reversal],” says Huang. Yet the CCP’s account is already written. On Dec. 14, authorities stopped reporting infections deemed “asymptomatic,” which in China is often stringently defined as those not confirmed with a chest scan. Then, on Dec. 20, officials said that they would only include on its official COVID-19 death tally those who had tested positive for the virus and died of respiratory failure or pneumonia—excluding anyone with complicating conditions, as is frequently the case with elderly patients. The aim is to push home the message that China suffered the lowest COVID-19 toll of any major power. Many Chinese will no doubt buy the propaganda. But a large number have had their eyes opened by the bungling of zero-COVID, the lives lost to suicides and treatable ailments that worsened in an ultimately futile attempt to stamp out the virus. The protests only serve to show that the party is, in fact, fallible and responsive to public anger, that the people have more power than anyone thought. “This will be very encouraging for Chinese civil society, which has had very little space to work in for years,” says Sung. The irony is, of course, that so far they have only nudged the CCP from suffocating control to callous inaction. “I don’t know how anybody can have confidence in China anymore,” says one Shanghai resident, speaking to TIME on condition of anonymity for fear of official reprisals. “Disruption and unexpected things is one thing, but a government pulling the rug under your feet is quite another.” from https://ift.tt/aURNIZn Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ After Dr. Anthony Fauci steps down as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical advisor to President Biden on Dec. 31, he’ll leave behind a long and storied career. Ahead of his last day, he spoke to TIME from his office at the National Institutes of Health about what’s next for him—and his advice for whoever fills his shoes. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. TIME: You’re leaving your leadership positions in the federal government, but you aren’t retiring. What are you calling the next stage in your career? Dr. Anthony Fauci: My wife jokingly calls it a rewiring. I would like to lecture and write, and advise to the extent that my advice is solicited. I have 54 years of experience as a scientist at the National Institutes of Health and 38 years running what everyone agrees is the largest and most important infectious-disease research institution in the world. And the privilege of advising seven Presidents of the United States over almost 40 years. Could you reflect on what it was like to serve under each of those presidents? When you look at the Reagan Administration, when I was first appointed we were trying very hard to get the administration to be a little bit more proactive in recognizing the seriousness of the HIV epidemic. That was just emerging at the time. That was a bit frustrating, because for all of the productive elements of that administration, the Reagan Administration still did not use the full bully pulpit capability of the presidency to call attention to the outbreak. That changed somewhat with George H. W. Bush, whom I got to know personally very well. Even though there’s been criticisms—”did he do enough?”—he really changed things a lot. That’s when the budget of the NIH really went up with the help of Congressional support. Clinton opened up much more accessibility of different constituency groups—the LGBT community and others—to have a say in what went on. George W. Bush, when it comes to HIV/AIDS, in my mind, has had the most impact of anybody. He gave me the privilege and the honor of being one of the architects of the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program, which, as we know, saved more than 20 million lives. Then we went to Obama, who was someone in my mind who handled crises very well. We had pandemic flu, we had Ebola, we had Zika. The Trump Administration—it’s very clear that there were difficulties there, because I had to be put in a position of having to contradict the president for things that he had said in the impression that he was giving: that the virus was going to disappear like magic. I just felt I owed my responsibility to the American public to stand up for the data and evidence and facts and science. That put me in a very uncomfortable position of having a lot of opposition to me, which has now continued on to this day. Then, things got back to science in the current administration with Biden, who made it very clear that he wanted science to be the thing that guided us. He knew that we’re not going get everything right, but we’re going to try our best. You began your career as a target of criticism by the HIV activists in the 1980s and are ending it with a bullseye on your back again during COVID-19. How did your earlier experience help you recently? People talk about the bookends of my career, and they show pictures of the AIDS activists storming the NIH campus, saying, “You’re killing us, you’re not listening to us.” And then they show pictures of people in today’s environment saying, “Hang him, cut his head off, execute him,” things like that. The differences there are so profound. Back then, the activists were trying to call attention to the rigidity of the federal government in its scientific clinical trial approach and its regulatory approach. They were iconoclastic, they were disruptive, they were theatrical. One of the best things I did in my entire life was to look at what they were doing and listen to what they were saying. And they were making sense; I would’ve done the same thing if I were in their shoes. It went from confrontation to collaboration, to cooperation, to actual friendship, because they were absolutely correct, and the system needed to be changed. So the end game for them was good. I would never, ever feel threatened, no matter how much they were demonstrating against us. What we’re dealing with today is a reflection of the divisiveness in society where people talk about things that are patently untrue conspiracy theories, a normalization of untruth, which is very dangerous. Because when society shrugs their shoulders and accepts the fact that people can just say things that are patently false and get away with it, and then social media amplifies it, sooner or later, people can’t figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. Not only is that dangerous to public health, that’s dangerous for our own democracy. During that time, science has come in and out of favor with the public. How important is it for the public to understand and appreciate science? We’re dealing, unfortunately, with somewhat of an antiscience theme in this country, which is reflected by antivax movements and things like that. Political ideation has been very disruptive to the kind of cooperation and collaboration that you need for public health. If there’s one area where you would really like to have everyone pulling together, it would be as we confront a historic pandemic such as COVID-19. But that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing fundamental public-health principles being interpreted one way or the other, depending upon what your political ideology is. You and your family have required personal security after threats from critics of the COVID-19 response. Did you ever question whether continuing was the right thing to do? That never deterred me for a moment. I would never, ever let that kind of a threat from people who are cowards deter me from what I felt my mission is. What bothers me more than anything is the cowardice of people who harass and threaten my wife and my children. What advice would you have for your successor? Stick with the science. No. 1, always go with the data, with the evidence. And although you may be involved in policy, stay out of politics. Do not at all show any ideology one way or the other. Just be a pure scientist. That’s what you need in the job. What do you predict COVID-19 will look like in coming years? We don’t know for sure, but I can give you what I think are some reasonable projections. Unless we get a surprise with a way-out-there, totally different variant, we will have greater control as more people get vaccinated or wind up getting infected. If you get vaccinated and then get infected, the chances of you getting a serious outcome are very, very low. We will get little blips and surges, but we’re hoping that it never gets to that level where it really disrupts the social order. We may need an updated SARS-CoV-2 booster every year, similar to the flu vaccine. Your career has been a series of skirmishes with a variety of pathogens. Which foe has surprised you the most? HIV and COVID-19 are up there. HIV came on insidiously, and over 40 years [later], we’re still dealing with it. It was mysterious in the beginning. I was taking care of patients for three years knowing they’re dying in front of me, but not knowing what the agent is that’s killing them. That is a unique and terrible experience as a physician that I will never, ever shake. Thank goodness we developed lifesaving drugs so that now people living with HIV can live essentially a normal lifespan. [With] COVID-19, I never would’ve thought it was going to be prolonged like this and have so many variants. I was hoping in the beginning when it was so bad, it would be a one-off—we’d have a big blast, and then it would come down. But that’s not what happened. It’s been a terrible ride ever since. As you step down from leading NIAID, is there any unfinished business you leave behind? Oh, absolutely. There is always unfinished business. We need to get a vaccine for HIV. It’s going to be a very formidable scientific challenge, but we need to continue to push the envelope and try to get there. Perhaps even a cure for HIV, which I think is going be even more aspirational, but it’s not out of the question. Also, there are big killers throughout the world for which we don’t have highly effective vaccines yet—specifically malaria and tuberculosis. Not to mention the perpetual threat of a new emerging infection. Looking back on your career, what achievement are you are most proud of? Well, I wear three hats and I have achievements in all three that I feel good about. Others will judge how important they are. I’ve devoted my scientific career early on to developing cures for inflammatory vasculitis diseases, although they’re rare. The therapies that I developed have transformed those diseases. I also spent 41 years studying the pathogenic mechanisms of HIV, and together with a lot of other really good investigators throughout the country, we’ve made some good contributions. Then, as director of NIAID, the thing I’m proud of the most is developing and creating the AIDS program, which, together with the pharmaceutical companies, was responsible for developing the combinations of drugs that now clearly have saved millions of lives. I don’t take credit for that alone, but as the director of the institute, I feel proud to have played a major role in that. Policy-wise, maybe the most impactful of anything I’ve done was to have the privilege that was given to me by President George W. Bush to be the architect of the PEPFAR program. And things that you aren’t so proud of? I’m far from perfect. But there isn’t anything I’m ashamed of at all. There are so many things I could have done better. One of those things was early on in HIV, the people in classic infectious diseases were reluctant to use prophylaxis [to prevent opportunistic infections], because we felt it would have some harm to it, and it would lead to resistance of the pathogen. Now, that’s an integral part of treating somebody with advanced HIV. I felt we should have probably started that a little bit earlier than we did. But again, we acted on the data that we had at the time. So it’s nothing that I’m ashamed of, but I think we could have done it better. What are your plans for the first day you are no longer head of NIAID? Probably sleep an extra hour and not get up at five o’clock in the morning the way I have for the last 40 years. That’s the first thing I will do. from https://ift.tt/dQEvSIx Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ CVS Health Corp. and Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc., two of the largest U.S. pharmacy chains, are limiting purchases of children’s pain-relief medicines amid constrained supplies and high demand. CVS is restricting shoppers to two products each for in-store and online purchases. Walgreens is limiting online orders to six products and isn’t setting limits for in-store purchases. Walmart Inc. isn’t placing any purchase limits, while Kroger Co. said it is asking shoppers to limit purchases to two kids pain medicine products. Rite Aid Corp. isn’t limiting purchases. “Due to increased demand and various supplier challenges, over-the-counter pediatric fever-reducing products are seeing constraint across the country,” Walgreens said in an email without offering more details on the supplier challenges. Pediatric medicines containing acetaminophen and ibuprofen, which relieve pain and reduce fever, have been hard to come by across the U.S. and Canada since at least October as respiratory viruses spread. Rates of hospitalization for respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and influenza have reached heights not seen in recent years. The drugs don’t kill the viruses, but they do relieve symptoms. Read More: We Still Don’t Have At-Home Testing For the Flu—But COVID-19 Has Changed the Stakes More U.S. children had been hospitalized in 2022 for influenza as of Dec. 10 than in any other year since 2009, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. RSV hospitalizations are the highest since 2018, when the agency began tracking. On Oct. 7, Canadian health authorities posted a notice online alerting the public that children’s formulations of both types of drugs were limited because of high demand. “Over the summer months, there was unprecedented demand for these products and supply had not kept pace,” Health Canada said in a statement. The Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a U.S. organization which represents companies that make the medicines, said the scarcity “is a direct result of the recent and rapid increase in demand driven by a rise in pediatric cases of respiratory illnesses including the flu, COVID, and RSV.” A CVS location in downtown Boston had a sign posted on Monday morning informing shoppers of the two-item limit. The only kids acetaminophen or ibuprofen product on the shelf was a 12-pack of store-brand acetaminophen suppositories. A spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson, which manufactures Motrin and Tylenol, said that the children’s version of those medicines “may be less readily available at some stores.” Haleon Plc, which sells Advil, a product made with ibuprofen, declined to comment, referring to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association. from https://ift.tt/TbAH2OC Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ I’ve been saying for years that the world is getting better. I’ll point out that, for example, the number of young children who die before their fifth birthday has fallen by more than half in just two decades—from 10 million in 2000 to just over 4 million today. But current events are making it harder to argue that the future will be better than the past. Russia’s war on Ukraine is inflicting terrible suffering in Eastern Europe and driving up food and energy prices around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic caused millions of deaths and severely hampered efforts to immunize children. Economic growth is slowing. And climate change is leading to more frequent extreme weather. These setbacks are causing the most pain for people who were already the worst off. It would compound the tragedy if nations stopped doing the things that have worked for the past two decades—including being generous with foreign aid. The world should continue to do more to help the poorest. The good news is that this is eminently achievable. We can continue to reduce health inequity while dealing with war, the economy, the pandemic, and climate change—thanks in part to innovations in global health that will allow the world’s efforts to have more impact than ever. Some of these innovations are already being deployed, like a new polio vaccine that will move us closer to eradication despite recent setbacks. Others are being tested now with the potential to be used more widely soon, like AI-powered ultrasounds that could help save mothers and their babies. Although the number of children who die before age 5 has gone down dramatically, the number of babies of who die in the first 30 days of life—what’s known as the neonatal period—is not dropping nearly as fast. Almost 1.9 million newborns died in 2019, only a third fewer than in 2000. The causes of neonatal deaths are complicated. To make a dent in them, health workers need to deal with underlying causes as early in the child’s life as possible, or even before they’re born. The first step is to identify women with the greatest risk of complications during pregnancy. In rich countries like the United States, we do this with frequent checkups, lab tests, and an ultrasound. But in low-income settings, ultrasound machines simply aren’t practical. They’re bulky, expensive, and require special training to use. That’s why the foundation and several partners are funding work to vastly simplify the process. Instead of wheeling in a big machine on a cart, you just plug a probe into a mobile phone or tablet. You swipe it across the mom’s belly a few times, and then up and down. Software uses artificial intelligence to read the images and provide all the information that a trained human would provide. This super-promising approach is being tested in Kenya and South Africa to see whether using it at scale makes a measurable difference for moms and babies. If it does, we’ll bring in more partners to reduce the cost so that more countries can afford it. Some of the innovations I’m most excited about are a lot further away, but they have the potential to save and improve millions of lives. Based on recent research, I think there’s a good chance a cure for HIV will be available in 10 to 15 years. The key is breakthroughs in gene therapy, which involves making edits to small portions of a person’s genetic makeup. These edited genes can’t be passed on to the person’s children, but they can fix genetic mutations that cause the patient debilitating and deadly medical problems. Scientists are working on various ways to accomplish this. (One involves modifying the surface of the cells that HIV likes to invade, making it much harder for the virus to get inside them.) There are still years of work ahead before any of these approaches are proven safe and effective, and the earliest versions might be short-lived and require additional doses to keep the HIV from coming back. But the potential impact is enormous. Today, roughly 38 million people around the world are living with HIV, and another 1.5 million become newly infected each year. To survive, they have to take antiretroviral drugs every day for the rest of their lives. An ideal HIV cure will free all of them from taking these drugs and save the world millions of dollars a year in treatment costs. It will also mean that millions of people never have to worry about getting HIV in the future. While there is a lot of bad news these days, I’m inspired by the breakthroughs amazing scientists around the world are making every day—whether they are a lifesaving new use for CRISPR or a groundbreaking new way to produce clean energy. Each one represents a new opportunity to help people, but it’s important to remember that none of these breakthroughs happened overnight. If we want to make things better for the next generation, we need to invest in a better future today. The opportunities to reduce inequity, even at this tumultuous moment, are out there. Success is a long-term prospect, and it starts with actions we take now. 2023 is the year we should make the most of these opportunities. This essay is adapted from Gates’ The Year Ahead 2023 from https://ift.tt/p2Nlfnh Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ As a former immigration attorney who represented survivors of gang violence, domestic abuse, and family separation, Anna Rupani knew tough work. But she says her current job is even harder: since late 2020, she has run Fund Texas Choice, an abortion fund meant to provide Texans with the resources and logistical support they need to get abortion care. Rupani’s work ground to a halt when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, ending constitutional protections for abortion and paving the way for more than a dozen states to enforce near-total abortion bans. Prior to that decision, Texas already had a law on the books banning almost all abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy—but after Roe fell, Texas abortion funds and providers also had to contend with an older law that says those who help “furnish the means” to an abortion may face criminal penalties, in addition to potential fines. While there is some ambiguity around how Texas’ laws will be interpreted and enforced, Fund Texas Choice decided to shut down most of its operations in Texas to avoid potential criminal charges. Rupani and her team can still direct Texans to information about how to obtain an abortion that is freely available online, and they are pitching in to help a Midwest abortion fund from afar. Rupani also plans to devote much of 2023 to advocacy and public-education work. But not being able to carry out her organizations’ core function wears on her and her team. “Staff members are often like, ‘When are we going to help people again?’” she says. “And I don’t know.” More than 90 abortion funds operate across the country, according to the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF). Their overarching goal is to “unapologetically support folks needing to get access to abortion care and unapologetically eliminate barriers to accessing care, which include things like fear and shame and stigma,” says NNAF executive director Oriaku Njoku. That can mean helping someone locate an abortion provider and navigate state laws, paying for the procedure, and/or assisting with finding and funding associated needs like lodging, child care, and transportation. Abortion funds have received an outpouring of support since Roe v. Wade fell. NNAF raised more than $8 million from late June to mid-October of 2022, Njoku says. By contrast, the organization raised less than $2 million in individual donations during 2020. But even with the influx of cash, resources are being squeezed. Abortion funds operating in restrictive states like Texas have to contend with increasingly aggressive laws, while those located in abortion-friendly states are trying to keep up with the deluge of people crossing borders to get care. And with inflation straining budgets across the country, more people need help paying for abortions and related expenses, such as transportation and hotel stays. Read More: This Group Wants to Teach You How to Get Abortions Even Where They’re Banned Even before the Supreme Court’s decision, about 9% of U.S. abortion seekers left their home states to get one. In some states with more restrictive policies—such as gestational age limits or mandatory pre-procedure waiting periods—15% traveled for appointments, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights nonprofit. Post-Roe, travel is a more widespread obstacle. Now, almost 30% of U.S. women ages 15 to 49, as well as additional people who are capable of becoming pregnant but do not identify as women, live in a state where elective abortion is banned or severely restricted, and thus would likely be forced to leave their home states to end a pregnancy. One recent study estimated that a woman of reproductive age in the U.S. must now travel, on average, 100 minutes to reach an abortion provider, compared to about 28 minutes before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Some people need to travel much further. The Brigid Alliance, a national organization that helps organize and pay for travel and other logistical needs associated with abortion care (but not abortion procedures), prioritizes people seeking abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, at which point it becomes more difficult to find a provider. The average Brigid client must travel more than 1,000 miles for an appointment in a state, like Oregon or Vermont, that allows abortions later in pregnancy, says executive director Odile Schalit. Brigid is helping more clients than ever: referrals for its services rose by about 50% in the first month after the Supreme Court’s decision, and Schalit expects it to keep growing with time. Stephanie Loraine Piñeiro, executive director of the Florida Access Network (FAN), an abortion fund in Central Florida, says demand for her group’s services rose by 235% from November 2021 to November 2022. Donations have also risen dramatically—FAN has raised more than $400,000 in individual donations since June, compared to about $8,000 during the second half of 2021. But the organization is still scrambling to keep up with the number of calls it receives, Piñeiro says. The group had to freeze its online inquiry form for the last weeks of 2022 to allow staff time to catch up, hire more people, and strategize for the year ahead. FAN gave grants to several local clinics so they could provide care to people who needed financial assistance during the group’s pause. Read More: The Abortion-Rights Messages That Resonate With Men Megan Jeyifo, executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, says that this year, her group has fielded calls from about 7,000 people and supported individuals from 40 states, Puerto Rico, and multiple countries, including Mexico, Ecuador, Ireland, and England. Jeyifo’s organization is able to respond to every call it receives because it employs about a dozen paid staff members and receives funding from the city of Chicago, in addition to private donations. But that’s somewhat rare in the world of abortion funds. Many are staffed entirely or primarily by volunteers and rely on philanthropy and grant funding to do their work. Though donations to abortion funds have risen significantly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, they’re a fickle source of funding. “My hope is that this is not one of those one-and-done situations and that people start to realize the same sort of investment that we’ve seen in anti-abortion organizations” is needed to keep abortion accessible, Njoku says. That effort will require not just money, but also building political power and slowly shifting cultural narratives about abortion, Njoku says. To help accomplish those goals, Jeyifo says she’d like to see more states and cities invest in their local funds, as well as policy-level support for abortion access and abortion funds in legislation. “Abortion funds are essential and experts at the work that we do,” Jeyifo says. “Abortion funds should not be forced to be scrappy in a way that I think people have expected us to be for a long time.” from https://ift.tt/aW62XN1 Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ We’ve entered a strange moment in history where every year feels somehow both a burning furnace of upheaval and recreation and a frozen monolith we are made to unwillingly re-encounter over and over. The images captured by TIME’s global roster of photojournalists over the course of 2022 reveal how deeply these two opposing trends penetrated society and public discourse this past year. Photos showing the grief of the Uvalde, Texas community over the horror that occurred at a local elementary school on May 24, in which an 18-year-old man fatally shot 19 students and two teachers, highlight how gun violence and mass shootings continued to be one of the great failings of the American project in 2022. In other areas, the country went backwards when it comes to human rights—despite what the voting public seems to want. The Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade flew in the face of public opinion, as captured in these photos taken in March; indeed, analysts have said that the pro-choice sentiment shared by the majority of Americans helped the Democrats limit losses in this years midterm elections. Meanwhile, some aspects of geopolitics have also taken on an atavistic hue. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not so much a novel shift in international relations, but rather an effort by Vladimir Putin to return the country he has led with an iron fist for over two decades back to its Soviet-era imperialist designs. At the same time, however, Ukraine has leveraged the guile of its people and the support of NATO to keep authoritarianism at bay. And some of the most compelling images captured this year outside of the states were those of women in Iran protesting the decades-long religious laws that have made misogynism public policy in the country. Both examples suggest that despite the efforts of a few to turn back the clock, the will of the many to move forward may yet win out. Perhaps nowhere is this dynamic more fully realized than in the world of climate change. On the one hand, images of the devastating flooding in Pakistan and in post-Hurricane Ian Florida show how ill prepared we are for the environmental catastrophe experts have been warning about for decades. On the other, photojournalism on Finland’s project to implement a fully circular economy by 2050, and the Kichwa Indigenous people’s bold effort to protect their sacred Piatúa River in Ecuador, to name two examples, offers a sense of the wide range of ways the world is finally, in 2022, recognizing climate change as a problem this generation cannot push off to the future.--Elijah Wolfson, Editorial Director Below is a selection of some of the most impactful photos TIME published this year. from https://ift.tt/pWqD4k5 Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. For a brief moment, there seemed to be a lull in the politicization of a plague. Sure, there were still the anti-vaxxers showing up at school board meetings—and sometimes running them—and the occasional kerfuffle over mandates boiled over. Dr. Anthony Fauci remained a despised figure for some, and one cable network in particular made a point of finding every excuse to post his mug on screen. The internet, safe harbor for kooks of all stripes, continued to promote baseless theories about Covid-19’s origins and potential end. Still, as the spread of the disease and its disinformation seemed to slow from its hateful boil, things started to feel like they were approaching pre-pandemic levels of normal. Sure, there were still some 135,000 new cases on Thursday in the United States, but that’s way off from the million-plus cases seen last January. This was, to be clear, a good development. Treating every discussion around a global pandemic that has infected more than 650 million people and killed almost 6.7 million as some sort of binary political test was—and is—a maddening approach to a crisis. Yet there are those who are all too happy to view the pandemic as a useful weapon in scoring points, a detour away from responsible conduct and into the circus tent of politics. Screaming as loud as you can doesn’t make your denial of Covid’s threat any less of one. Like I said, there was a moment when the carnival organ grinded to a stop, notably when the Republican primaries of this year ended. The silence, however, proved short-lived. Its pipes are back screaming, right as the opening days of the 2024 contest appear to have arrived. Newly crowned Twitter owner Elon Musk last week sent his own rocket of a troll on his new toy: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” It was a double-barreled ding against both the nation’s top immunologist, and the inclusive approach of allowing individuals to choose their own gendered or gender-neutral pronouns. Musk, who is testing just how elastic Twitter can be in accommodating political stances, drew the predictable outrage and reward—a cycle some politicians already know well. Then there was the recent decision by Congress, or more specifically Senate Democrats, to trade away a mandate on vaccines for U.S. military members in exchange for the must-pass defense bill. Even though Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin supported the mandates, it was just one of those things that fell aside in the chase for the big-picture spending. (A companion effort to reinstate discharged service members, however, did not get support.) Defending the Biden administration’s mandate was unlikely to win Democrats many friends, especially when it meant potentially sacrificing a pay raise for the troops. There are no wins in denying men and women serving in uniform their due, especially at the holidays. Cynicism, however, always wins. Consider Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example. Just over a year ago, the leader of the aging state of Florida leaned heavily into vaccines. He urged his residents to get the jab, praised vaccines for saving lives, and scrambled to understand the impact of a pandemic on a state with a heavy reliance on tourism. But then, he looked around at the political landscape facing his 2022 re-election and potential 2024 presidential bid, and pulled a full 180: he banned mask and vaccine mandates, trashed Fauci at every turn he could find, and wouldn’t even say if he got his booster shot. He barreled ahead with plans to reopen Florida before the pandemic had even hit its nadir. Last week, while convening anti-vaxxers for a chat—and preparing for his next act in politics—DeSantis suggested his state’s supreme court should impanel a grand jury to investigate pharmaceutical companies’ transparency in vaccines. The ultimate practitioner of such savvy amplification of Covid-19’s political juice remains former—and perhaps future—President Donald Trump. His return to power hinges on DeSantis’ potential to chase and catch him. After all, it was only a year ago that Trump drew boos when he told an otherwise friendly crowd that he had received his vaccine booster. And to the chagrin of much of his base, he never fired Fauci (even though he couldn’t really do it). Trump is, for the true anti-vaxxers, an unreliable partner when it comes to fighting the Establishment’s faith in science. Both men’s supporters are looking at their positions on vaccines as an early barometer for success. For Trump, his role in developing Operation Warp Speed is seen as evidence that he helped beat back the virus’ hellscape—even though he wrongly says the vaccine rollout was delayed until after the election for political hackery. For DeSantis, his steady evolution into an anti-vaxxer—or at least someone who seems palatable for true anti-vaxxers—is a way to creep onto turf long assumed to be safely in the MAGA column. So, even as Covid’s threat seems to be fading, it is surely going to have VIP access to the coming GOP primary calendars. The contest, however, may end up coming down to who has the louder megaphone, and Covid amounts to an easy primal scream. The decibel-level-as-proxy-for-fact strategy is one that seldom serves voters well and often drives the conversation into a ditch of regret. This sort of performative protest is nothing new, and it can read as tired after a while. There are real costs to this conduct, though. Red states have borne the brunt of Covid-19, with states that backed Trump posting the absolute lowest rates of immunization. Being a “vaccine skeptic,” as some prefer to be known, is fashionable in some circles. That status, new research tells us, can also be deadly: the redder a locale, the more likely it was a high-mortality place for Covid-19 and other ailments. Judging by how some thought leaders are positioning themselves, it’s a point of pride to keep hospitals and funeral homes alike packed with avoidable troubles. And some of the biggest self-described proponents of besting science with trolling are preparing their next shouts. The quiet, it seems, is over. Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter. from https://ift.tt/4LlKxGu Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Jacquie Baker, a former Air Force engineer, has had nightmares four or five nights a week for nearly a decade. The scenarios vary, but the feeling of helplessness is always the same: she’ll watch someone get murdered, or she’ll forget her pre-flight checklist and the plane she’s riding will crash. “I started having skin issues, because I was constantly sleeping in my own sweat,” she says. “I had to change my sheets multiple times a night.” After struggling through those nights, Baker would often have to miss the morning or day of work. She was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stemming from her time in the military, as well as anxiety and depression. But no medications or interventions helped her nightmares—until 2021, when she began using Nightware, an Apple Watch-enabled app that helps to interrupt nightmares. The system—which includes an Apple Watch preloaded with Nightware and locked to only run that app—taps into Baker’s nighttime biorhythms, including her heart rate, breathing, and movements. Using an algorithm, it determines when these metrics escalate enough to indicate a nightmare. The watch then buzzes at her wrist, pulling her out of the dream without necessarily awakening her. The morning after using the device for the first time, she was disappointed because she thought she hadn’t had a nightmare. She hadn’t woken up overnight and felt she had finally gotten a good amount of uninterrupted sleep. “I felt like a liar,” she says. “Then I went back and looked at the report and found I had 12 interventions that night.” Sam Schultz, a veteran who served in Afghanistan and also uses Nightware after being diagnosed with PTSD, sees similarly high tallies when he’s stressed. “One night, it went off 56 times in the span of eight hours,” he says. “But I very rarely remember ever waking up. Instead, I wake up feeling rested and feeling like I can actually do stuff that day.” Since using the app, Baker says she’s returned to being the person she was before incessant nightmares hijacked her personality. “I have a seven-year-old son, and for six years of his life, Mommy was bananas; Mommy was grumpy and had no patience,” she says. But no longer. Even though she still physically has nightmares, she doesn’t remember them—and they don’t bother her. “It gave me my life back.” Nightware was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2020 to reduce sleep problems associated with nightmare disorder and nightmares related to PTSD, and so far has been prescribed primarily to veterans and people in the military. The device is not a treatment or cure for nightmares in the sense that it can eliminate them, but it interrupts the process so the sleeper is spared the stressful, emotionally difficult, and traumatic fallout of the dreams. It’s an important first step. In an October 2022 study involving 65 veterans with PTSD-related nightmares, the device improved sleep among the most compliant users. Even though Nightware does not treat the cause of nightmare disorder, interrupting the stressful dream has a lot of value, and it could pave the way toward de-escalating and eventually neutralizing nightmares. The use of physical triggers to pull people out of nightmares is not entirely new: Schultz, for instance, has a service dog who is trained to recognize his frantic movements during sleep that could signal a nightmare. But having the dog wake him up out of nightmare comes with some downsides. “When you’re woken up by a 50-pound dog sitting on your chest, that can rattle you a little bit.” Because it’s still new to the market, there isn’t enough data yet to evaluate what effect Nightware has over the long term, but sleep specialists are eager to see what the data show in coming years. “I’m not sure we know in deep ways whether or not the whole way the brain is functioning during sleep changes a great deal [because of the device],” says Dr. Timothy Morgenthaler, professor of medicine and director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Sleep Medicine. (Morgenthaler is not affiliated with the app.) “Is it reparative or just different? We don’t know.” Read More: Why Not Everyone Needs 8 Hours of Sleep Nightmare disorder is a relatively new entrant to the list of psychiatric conditions listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In the latest guidelines issued by the American Society of Sleep Medicine, sleep specialists recommend that doctors treat nightmare disorder with various forms of cognitive or behavioral therapy. These can involve techniques such as image-rehearsal therapy, in which patients are asked to write down the nightmares they experience in as much detail as possible, including the scents, sounds, and feelings they encounter. They are then asked to rewrite the script of these nightmares, redirecting their thoughts to a less threatening scenario, with the goal of training the brain to reroute thoughts from a traumatic experience to a more benign one. Imaging studies involving this approach suggest that strategy can change which parts of the brain are activated during sleep. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) delves deeper into the triggers and causes of nightmares. Working with therapists, patients unpack the meaning of their nightmares and learn ways to de-escalate or neutralize the threat they feel from them. These types of therapy have drawbacks. Many people suffering from nightmares don’t have adequate access to mental-health professionals who can work with them, or the time needed to gradually conquer their trauma. And for some, including victims of sexual assault, the process of reliving the nightmare can even be damaging. During the time it takes for CBT to have an impact, for example, patients are still experiencing nightly trauma. And the sleeplessness that results can blunt potentially helpful therapies, or even make them futile. Nightware can help bring people to a point where they are more receptive to therapy, just by letting them sleep better. “Once I was able to get some sleep…that made my day so much more manageable,” says Baker. “I could see, wow, I am kind of depressed.” Good sleep made her better equipped to “participate more in treatment.” There’s also the intriguing possibility that over time, the constant interruption of nightmares could eventually extinguish them, or at least the emotional trauma associated with them. “Can the nightmares stop? We don’t have the research to show that,” says Dr. Brian Robertson, chief medical officer at Nightware. “But we do know that [the device] is interrupting nightmares for sure, and I do know of a couple of patients who stopped having them.” So far, about 400 doctors have prescribed Nightware to service members, according to the company. For active duty military, it’s covered by their insurer Tricare, but not yet covered by the VA or for veterans. (Both Baker and Schultz received their devices from the Semper Fi & America’s Fund, which provides financial support to wounded, ill, and injured service members.) As the device continues to show benefit among people in the military with PTSD, the company plans to expand to other affected populations as well, including first responders and victims of sexual trauma. For nightmare sufferers like Baker and Schultz, the device has been a life saver. “It’s so crazy how something so simple can quite literally change everything,” says Baker. from https://ift.tt/lOm3nhe Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ The updated COVID-19 booster shots give adults ages 65 and older the greatest level of protection against hospitalization, according to new U.S. government data. Bivalent boosters were 73% effective at preventing hospitalizations due to COVID in this group of older adults compared with people of the same age who got two or more doses of the original formulation of the vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. The reduced risk of hospitalization was smaller in younger adults, the agency said. The findings add to research that shows the new booster shots have at least some benefit, although the magnitude seems to vary by a person’s age and how long they wait between doses. from https://ift.tt/UQn7qRp Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ |
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