For pregnant women, the elderly and those with weakened immune systems, listeriosis is a serious foodborne illness often linked to deli meats, fresh produce and dairy products. Even with antibiotic treatment, listeriosis is fatal for about 20 percent of patients, resulting in thousands of deaths annually. Purdue University’s Arun Bhunia, a professor of food science, and [...]
Abstract The contamination of indoor nonsmoking environments with thirdhand smoke (THS) is an important, poorly understood public health concern. Real-time THS off-gassing from smokers into a nonsmoking movie theater was observed with online and offline high-resolution mass spectrometry. Prominent emission events of THS tracers (e.g., 2,5-dimethylfuran, 2-methylfuran, and acetonitrile) and other tobacco-related volatile organic compounds (VOCs) [...]
Abstract Hygroscopic particulate matter (PM) constituents promote uptake of aerosol water (AW), depending on relative humidity (RH), which can constrain qualities such as organic aerosol (OA) phase state and inorganic aerosol (IA) deliquescence and efflorescence. This work provides a first incorporation of AW predictions into residential indoor PM simulations. Read more… The post Indoor [...]
It typically takes many years of experiments to develop a new medicine. Although vaccines to protect against disease from the novel coronavirus are starting to reach clinics around the world, patients and doctors will still need treatments to manage COVID-19 symptoms for some time. At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), computational biologists, structural biologists, and analytical [...]
A coroner has made legal history by ruling that air pollution was a cause of the death of a nine-year-old girl. Philip Barlow, the inner south London coroner, said Ella Kissi-Debrah’s death in February 2013 was caused by acute respiratory failure, severe asthma and air pollution exposure. He said she was exposed to nitrogen dioxide and particulate [...]
“FOR THE COMING on of winter resolves the diseases of summer, and the coming on of summer removes those of winter,” wrote the father of medicine, the Greek physician and philosopher Hippocrates, in 400 B.C. This account is considered the earliest recorded study of the seasonal variability of a disease, namely influenza. Why some conditions are periodic, however, was [...]
The FDA has encouraged manufacturers to include the word “sesame” on ingredient labels whenever it’s used as a food flavoring or additive to alert consumers who have a sesame allergy. New draft guidance on the matter came 2 years after the agency invited consumers, advocacy groups, health professionals, industry groups, and others to submit data and comments about [...]
Having hope for the future could protect people from risky behaviors such as drinking and gambling—according to new research from the University of East Anglia. The researchers studied “relative deprivation”—the feeling that other people have things better than you in life. They wanted to find out why only some people experiencing this turn to escapist [...]
As US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine advisors prepare to consider Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use authorization (EUA) later this week, an agency review posted ahead of the meeting made a strong case, suggesting that a two-dose regimen was safe and 94% effective at preventing disease. The development comes as more states immunized the [...]
Two commentaries published yesterday in JAMA and a University of Michigan news release offer ideas from behavioral science and other fields to boost COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the United States and discuss the ethics of continuing placebo arms in trials of coronavirus vaccines already proven effective. Evidence-based uptake strategies The first commentary, by Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, and Alison [...]
