LONG COVID and EXCITING NEW ANTIBIOTICS

LONG COVID

Although the pandemic seems to be fading from our memories, millions of people are still affected by COVID-19! Today, it is estimated that around 65 million people suffer from long COVID. Nearly four years after the first cases, evidence on the causes of long COVID is rapidly accumulating through research and leads to treatments. However, numerous treatment trials are ongoing and promising results are already being achieved.

Another fact is that people experience different prolong COVID symptoms. Therefore, it is expected that no single approach to treatment will work for everyone. Perhaps the solution to this is personalized medicine...

There are still many questions left to be answered: Could low levels of certain hormones explain fatigue and brain fog? Could the persistence of the virus help us understand what's really going on? Is there a way to protect ourselves from long COVID?

A few months after SARS-CoV-2 began spreading around the world in early 2020, reports began to emerge that some people were experiencing persistent symptoms. The term "long COVID" was first coined in May 2020. Symptoms of long COVID include more than 200 symptoms, ranging from headaches, brain fog, fatigue or weakness after even a small amount of activity, to depression and gastrointestinal issues. Since then, much has become clear about this once mysterious condition, but researchers still have a long way to go. A study conducted in October of this year by Paul Elliott of Imperial College London, which followed more than 242,000 adults, found that the average duration of symptoms of COVID-19 infection was 1.3 weeks. This seems to be consistent with many previous analyses that show most people recover within a few weeks. However, it was found that 67.5% of the patients continued to have symptoms after 12 weeks and 5.2% after one year. On the other hand, a study conducted in Switzerland followed 1,106 unvaccinated adults who caught SARS-CoV-2 and found that 22.9 of the participants still had long COVID symptoms after 6 months and 617.2 after 2 years.

It is estimated that approximately 200 million people will experience long COVID in the next decade, almost equal to the number of people who currently have heart disease. However, it is also known that the risk of long COVID is associated with the virus variant. For example, approximately 11% of people infected with the old delta variant and 4.5% of those infected with the omicron variant that started spreading in late 2021 experience long COVID.

Women are also at higher risk of developing long COVID than men, as are unvaccinated people and people with pre-existing conditions like asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. Scientists are also considering genetics as a factor. To investigate this, researchers compiled data from 24 studies that included about 6,500 people diagnosed with long COVID, along with more than a million participants as controls. In an analysis that combined data from 11 of these studies, the researchers identified a specific region of the genome that they believe is associated with a roughly 1.6-fold higher chance of developing long COVID. This segment of DNA is located near a gene called FOXP4, which is active in the lungs and other organs.

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Urgent Call for Action for Zoonotic Disease:

Researchers have claimed that some diseases transmitted from animals to humans could affect 12 times more people in 2050 than in 2020. Experts from United States biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks have called for "urgent action" to address the global public health risk. Researchers believe that epidemics caused by zoonotic diseases may be affected by climate change and deforestation and are poised to be more rampant in the near future.

The team's analysis looked at historical trends for four specific viral pathogens: filoviruses, which include Ebola virus and Marburg virus, SARS coronavirus 1, Nipah virus, and Machupo virus, which causes Bolivian haemorrhagic fever.

The study did not include COVID-19, which caused a global pandemic in 2020 and likely originated in bats. The study, published in the journal UN Global Health, examined more than 5,150 outbreaks between 1965 and 2019 and identified 75 outbreaks in 24 different countries. The database includes outbreaks reported by the World Health Organization, outbreaks that caused 50 or more deaths since 1963, and historically significant events, including the 1918 and 1957 influenza pandemics. Of these outbreaks, which caused the deaths of 17,232 people, 15,771 were caused by filoviruses and occurred mostly in Africa.

They say that diseases increased by almost 5% every year between 1963 and 2019, and deaths from them increased by 969. They also emphasized that if annual rates of increase continue at this rate, they expect the analysed pathogens to cause four times more spreading events and 12 times more deaths by 2050 than in 2020. According to the researchers, the low numbers are likely due to the strict criteria they apply when determining which pathogens are included in the analysis and the fact that they did not include COVID-19.

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Exciting New Antibiotic

Researchers have identified an entirely new class of antibiotics that can kill bacteria resistant to most existing drugs. This class of antibiotics, called zosurabalpine, was found to be highly effective against the bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii, a common cause of hospital infections and classified as a "priority 1" pathogen by the World Health Organization. This bacterium, which usually causes urinary tract, respiratory tract and bloodstream infections and potentially leads to sepsis, is responsible for about 20% of infections in hospitals, nursing homes and similar settings, and is unfortunately highly resistant to a powerful, broad-spectrum class of antibiotics called carbapenems. In a study published in the journal Nature in January, researchers from Harvard University and the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche demonstrated that a new class of antibiotic, zosurabalpine, is effective against A. baumannii. Infections resistant to antibiotics, especially those caused by the Gram-negative bacteria group, pose a threat to human health.

Antibiotics generally show their effects by passing through the cell wall of bacteria and reaching the vital mechanism inside. Beta-lactams (penicillin, methicillin, cephalosporin) and non-beta-lactam antibiotics (vancomycin) attack the peptidoglycan cell wall of bacteria. 48 years after their initial discovery, carbapenems derived from penicillin work in the same way. Once inside the cell, antibiotics block this mechanism, stopping the growth of bacteria or causing cell death.

In this new study, scientists first identified a molecule that can pass through the cell wall and eliminate bacteria. The new class of antibiotics, zosurabalpine, has been shown to be highly effective against A. baumannii in both the laboratory and in infected animals. The researchers tested zosurabalpine against more than 100 A. baumannii samples from patients suffering from the infection. The team found that zosurabalpine was able to kill all of these bacteria. It was also able to kill bacteria in the bloodstream of infected mice, preventing them from developing sepsis. Zosurabalpine is currently being tested in phase 1 clinical trials to evaluate its safety in humans.