This coincides with WHO's new strategy to move from emergency response to sustainable long-term management of COVID-19.
This may not change much in practice. COVID will remain in a pandemic situation, and countries will continue to have their own power over whether to treat COVID as an emergency within their territory (some countries, including the United States, have already declared an end to the national emergency).
However, for the global public health community, this is an event of great significance, as it approaches the end of the emergency response period that began on January 30, 2020.
Meanwhile, for a large part of the general public, it may go relatively unnoticed. For many people, it has been a long time since they saw Covid as an emergency.
Simon Nicholas Williams, Lecturer in Psychology, Swansea University, has been following public experiences of the pandemic for the past three years.
The results have not yet been reviewed, but by the summer of 2022, many participants described the pandemic as like a "distant memory" or as "it never happened".
As we move into this next phase, it's time to consider what we've learned about human behavior during the pandemic, and what happens next.
Old habits die hard
In the early days of the pandemic, many behavioral scientists, including Williams, wondered if some of our pandemic habits were here to stay. Will face masks become a wardrobe staple? Will people stop "enlisting" and go to work when they are well?
Social distancing has long since disappeared, except for a relatively small percentage of the public, particularly those most vulnerable to contracting Covid. The COVID pandemic has taught us what adaptive behavior can be, and in particular how willing people are to change their behavior to keep themselves and others safe.
And most people followed the rules at the height of the pandemic, no matter how difficult they were. And Covid has reminded us how resilient we humans can be.
These epidemiological adaptations, and the fact that our pre-pandemic behavior bounced back so quickly, shows how important social cues and norms of behavior can be.
Wearing a mask or distancing from others was a habit — actions triggered automatically in response to contextual cues, such as seeing signs with pictures of people socially distancing.
The pandemic has also shown how important social bonds and social contact, especially physical ones, are. And this is something that has already been discussed that “Covid” cannot remain in critical condition forever.
According to social safety theory, which sees stress and well-being as a product of biological, psychological and social factors, Covid posed a threat to "the social fabric that makes humans resilient and keeps us alive and well".
Not surprisingly, life satisfaction and happiness were at their lowest levels during the lockdowns, and recovered when people started to socialize again.
The state of emergency is not over for everyone
As we celebrate the end of the emergency phase, it is important to remember the nearly 7 million lives lost to COVID-19 since 2020.
Of course, we must bear in mind that for some, especially those who are clinically at risk, the emergency is not over yet, and it may never end.
And “Covid” is still responsible for millions of infections and thousands of deaths every week around the world. Also, thanks to “long Covid,” hundreds of millions of people need long-term care.
In the future, we need to move from relying on the resilience of individuals to building resilience into our organisations. And we can all take measures to continue protecting ourselves and those around us from COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses (such as washing hands and keeping up with vaccinations).
But the responsibility for preventing a public health emergency should not rest solely with the public. Actions that governments, employers and health authorities can take now can protect against public health emergencies in the future.
Systematically tackling misinformation, improving ventilation in schools, workplaces, and other indoor public spaces, and making long-term improvements to paid sick leave are good ways to start building more resilient societies in preparation for the next pandemic.
An experiment showing why baby changing places in public bathrooms must be sterilized!
It seems that a new experiment will make parents think twice about using public diaper changing places.
Howdirtyis , a TikTok account, ran a test on a plastic table in a public toilet, and found that the table's composition was full of bacteria.
The samples grew two different types of microbes, most likely from microscopic water droplets sprayed from flushing toilets.
While the video does not specify which bacteria were found, previous work has found fecal matter, such as salmonella, listeria and norovirus, all of which can make a child very sick.
However, parents can avoid germs by cleaning the area with sanitary wipes and placing a disposable changing pad on the plastic table before putting their baby down.
The video contains more than 1,300 comments. And many parents share how they deal with the terminals used in general.
Some people believe that germs are key to a baby's developing immune system, but diaper changing stations have led to several outbreaks — a 2007 outbreak in Florida sickened 46 babies.
And in 2013, an outbreak of norovirus in Oregon was linked to baby changing stations.
An "important discovery" that can eliminate brain cancer in mice!
Glioblastoma is one of the most common and dangerous forms of brain cancer, and it is one of the most difficult types of brain cancer. However, there may be good news on the horizon.
A newly developed hydrogel, tested on mice, cleaned the effects of glioblastoma tumors and prevented them from returning. And the hydrogel was so effective that there was an "amazing" 100% survival rate in the animals.
Although we can't be sure that the same treatments will have this level of success in humans, it is a very promising new approach.
Paclitaxel is a chemotherapy in the center of a gel, and is used to make nano-sized threads for insertion into the brain. This drug is already approved to treat other types of cancer, including breast cancer and lung cancer.
The hydrogel evenly covers the cancerous cavity and the thin furrows left by tumor removal, and releases an antibody called aCD47 over several weeks. The treatment appears to reach parts of the tumor site that other medications can miss.
“We don't usually see 100% survival in mouse models of this disease,” says Betty Tyler, M.D., professor of neurosurgery from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “To think that there is potential for this new hydrogel formulation to change the survival curve for patients with glioblastoma is exciting.” Extremely".
And this ability to deliver drugs and antibodies together — delivering both chemotherapy and immunotherapy simultaneously — is another part of what makes hydrogels so special. It is difficult to combine the two because they have different molecular structures.
The researchers describe the strategy as a "drug-by-drug" and, in tests, appeared to boost the animals' immune systems.
When the glioblastoma tumors re-emerged, the mice were able to fight them off on their own, without further treatment.
However, surgery is still required to remove the original tumor. When the gel was applied without removing the tumor first, the survival rate dropped to 50 percent.
"It's possible that surgery will relieve some of this pressure and allow more time for the gel to activate the immune system to fight cancer cells," says Honggang Cui, a chemical and biomolecular engineer from Johns Hopkins University.
Glioblastoma remains difficult to treat - partly due to a lack of protective T cells in the brain - but we are making progress.
Small discs called Gliadel wafers, developed by the same research team behind this latest study, are now used after a tumor has been removed to prevent the cancer from returning.
The researchers admit it will be a "challenge" to turn their findings into practical therapies that work on the human brain.
"Despite recent technological advances, there is an urgent need for new treatment strategies," says Cui. "We believe this hydrogel will be the future and will complement existing treatments for brain cancer."
The research is published in PNAS.
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health