Teachers line up for hours in Madrid for virus test

Thousands of teachers lined up for hours in Madrid on Wednesday to be tested for the coronavirus before the start of the new school term next week as concern mounts over a spike in infections. The regional government of Madrid, which is responsible for education and health care, summoned teachers on Tuesday night to be […]

Healthcare consultations in the digital age – are carebots up to the job?

Research shows that doctors who offer empathic and positive messages can reduce a patient’s pain, improve their recovery after surgery and lower the amount of morphine they need. But it doesn’t mean that telling a patient something simple, such as “this drug will make you feel better”, will have an effect. It’s more complicated than […]

Researchers speed up gold-standard COVID-19 diagnostic test

Clinician-scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore’s (NTU Singapore) Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine) have demonstrated a way to improve the speed, handling time and cost of COVID-19 laboratory tests. The improved testing method yields results in 36 minutes—a quarter of the time required by existing gold-standard tests. Their new approach could enable the […]

Surgery in older adults does not up risk for Alzheimer disease

(HealthDay)—Older adults who have surgery with general anesthesia may experience a modest cortical thinning in the brain, but it does not appear to be tied to Alzheimer disease, according to a study recently published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia. Juraj Sprung, M.D., Ph.D., from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues assessed brain […]

Local health agencies struggle to ramp up virus tracking

As state after state begins to reopen, local health departments charged with tracking down everyone who has been in close contact with those who test positive for the new coronavirus are still scrambling to hire the number of people they need to do the job. They are often hundreds—even thousands—of people short of targets for […]

Kidney injury up during pregnancy-related hospitalizations

(HealthDay)—The rates of pregnancy-related acute kidney injury (AKI) hospitalizations increased during the last decade, according to a study published in the March issue of the American Journal of Nephrology. Silvi Shah, M.D., from the University of Cincinnati, and colleagues used data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (2006 to 2015) to identify 42,190,790 pregnancy-related hospitalizations among […]

Search for a COVID-19 vaccine heats up in China, US

Three potential COVID-19 vaccines are making fast progress in early-stage testing in volunteers in China and the U.S., but it’s still a long road to prove if they’ll really work. China’s CanSino Biologics is beginning the second phase of testing its vaccine candidate, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology said Tuesday. In the U.S., a […]