Lifeboat Foundation

A guy used Google, and turned his parents’ first floor bedroom into a makeshift hospital ward and saved his dad’s life from coronavirus. In the darkest moments, sometimes a plan of action and a little luck are the only things people have.

…and people keep saying this can not be treated, from day one.

When Suryakant “Suri” Nathwani returned from the hospital, the reserved 81-year-old grabbed his son’s hand and pleaded to be allowed to die at home. “He said, ‘Please promise me one thing: If I’m going to go, I’m going to go here. Do not take me back there,’” his son Raj Nathwani said.

Continue reading “This man came home from the hospital to die. His son found a way to keep him alive” »

In a bid to ensure physical distancing at COVID-19 care facility in Amritsar, a robotic trolley ‘carbeot’ has been deployed to provide essentials like medicines, food to coronavirus patients.

With the Space Launch System’s inaugural test flight now officially delayed to November 2021, NASA says work halted by the coronavirus pandemic will resume within weeks to prepare for the first test-firing of the SLS core stage at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

The last official schedule from NASA had the first SLS test launch in March 2021, but managers have said for months that schedule was no longer achievable. After a thorough review, NASA says the first SLS launch — named Artemis 1 — is now planned in November of next year.

The most powerful launch vehicle since the Apollo-era Saturn 5 moon rocket, the Space Launch System will carry an unpiloted Orion crew capsule into space. The Orion spaceship will orbit the moon to demonstrate the capsule’s capabilities and performance before NASA commits to flying astronauts around the moon on the second SLS/Orion flight in late 2022 or early 2023.

A North Korean defector-turned-South Korea lawmaker claimed Friday he is “99 percent” sure that Kim Jong Un died after surgery — amid swirling speculation about the dictator’s condition.

Ji Seong-ho, who earned a proportional representation seat of a minor party in the country’s April 15 elections, told Yonhap News Agency he believes Kim died after his recent surgery and that North Korea will announce it this weekend.

“I’ve wondered how long he could have endured after cardiovascular surgery. I’ve been informed that Kim died last weekend,” Ji told the outlet. “It is not 100 percent certain, but I can say the possibility is 99 percent. North Korea is believed to be grappling with a complicated succession issue.”

“According to WAM, stem cells are extracted from the patient’s blood and then reintroduced in an “activated” state to the lungs through inhalation after being nebulized into a fine mist.

ADSCC researchers said the mist had a therapeutic effect, helping to regenerate lung cells and alter the response of the immune system to stop it from overreacting to the COVID-19 infection and causing more damage to healthy cells.

The treatment has undergone and successfully passed the first stage of clinical trials with further tests to demonstrate its effectiveness being carried out over the next two weeks.”

Continue reading “Abu Dhabi stem cell center develops ‘promising’ new COVID-19 treatment” »

WASHINGTON — Michael Fleming never got to say goodbye to his father. He didn’t know his dad was fading away on a ventilator, diagnosed with coronavirus at the federal prison where he was serving time for a drug charge.

His father, also named Michael, was held at FCI Terminal Island in Los Angeles and died April 19. At least half the population there has tested positive, the largest known hot spot in the federal prison system. But the first word the family received of the father’s illness was the day he died, from a prison chaplain asking if the body should be cremated and where the ashes should be sent.

“They just left us all in the dark,” Fleming said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We had to find out from the news what the actual cause of death was. It was kind of screwed up.”

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a current pandemic infection caused by a positive-sense RNA virus named the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The particularly infectious capacity of the virus, along with mortality rates ranging from 1% to above 5%, has raised concerns across the globe.¹ Older patients with comorbid conditions including pulmonary disease, cardiac disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and hypertension have been associated with even higher mortality rates, suggesting particularly susceptible populations.

The increased mortality and morbidity of COVID-19 in patients with hypertension is an association that has been observed in a number of initial epidemiological studies outlining the characteristics of the COVID-19 epidemic in China. Wu et al² found hypertension to have a hazard ratio of 1.70 for death and 1.82 for acute respiratory distress syndrome in 201 patients with COVID-19. Zhou et al³ found hypertension to have a hazard ratio of 3.05 for in-hospital mortality in 191 patients with COVID-19.

Neither of these studies^2,3 adjusted for confounding variables and thus it remains unclear if this association is related to the pathogenesis of hypertension or another associated comorbidity or treatment. There has been a growing concern that this association with hypertension is confounded by treatment with specific antihypertensive medications: angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs) and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs).

This is very surreal. A study was done to assess the safety of common drugs, and COVID, and whether taking them leads to severe symptoms. There has been concern as these drugs increase ACE2 receptors coronavirus binds to. So someone had the bright idea of going through over 12,000 digital patients records to come up with the conclusion the drugs are safe to take and they do not cause worse symptoms. No animal studies, no clinical trials, and this was actually published.

“For the study, the researchers identified patients in the NYU Langone Health electronic health record with COVID-19 test results. For each identified patient with COVID-19 test results, the team discretely extracted medical history needed for the analysis, which compared treated and untreated patients.”

First you do a mouse study at least to review how coronavirus behaves in mice who are given the drugs, and compare it to mice not given the drugs. If science has been reduced to just going over records and coming to a conclusion, with no experimentation I have officially lost my mind.

Continue reading “Study finds high blood pressure medications safe for patients with COVID-19 disease” »

To tackle this problem, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research identified a gel that closely mimics the physicochemical properties of organs that have undergone the tissue clearing process. Starting with computer simulations and following up with laboratory tests, the team optimized the soaking solution temperature, dye and antibody concentrations, chemical additives, and electrical properties to produce the best staining and imaging results. They then tested their method with more than two dozen commonly used dyes and antibodies on mouse and marmoset brains.

Scans of an entire mouse brain and one hemisphere of a marmoset brain—rendered into 3D using light sheet microscopy—revealed the similarity between the two animals’ neural vascular systems, showing the use of the system for comparative anatomy, the researchers report this week in. They also showed that they could simultaneously stain and image up to four molecular targets in a mouse brain, a feat that “has never been reported before,” says Ludovico Silvestri, of the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy, who was not involved in the research.

The team also used its technique to image an entire infant marmoset and a small human brain sample—something that could one day lead to new understandings of solid tumors and neurodegenerative diseases. The team says its approach to optimizing staining can be applied to other techniques to advance the entire field of 3D imaging.