Lifeboat Foundation

Europe’s medicines regulator on Friday backed the use of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children as young as 12, paving the way for a broader roll-out in the region after similar clearances in the United States and Canada.

In March of 2014, I knew my eight year old daughter was sick. Once borderline overweight, she was now skeletally thin and fading away from us. A pre-dawn ambulance ride to the hospital gave us the devastating news – our daughter had Type 1 diabetes, and would be dependent on insulin injections for the rest of her life.

This news hit me particularly hard. I’ve always been a preparedness-minded kind of guy, and I’ve worked to free myself and my family from as many of the systems of support as possible. As I sat in the dark of the Pediatric ICU watching my daughter slowly come back to us, I contemplated how tied to the medical system I had just become. She was going to need a constant supply of expensive insulin, doled out by a medical insurance system that doesn’t understand that a 90-day supply of life-saving medicine is a joke to a guy who stocks a year supply of toilet paper. Plus I had recently read an apocalyptic novel where a father watches his 12-year old diabetic daughter slip into a coma as the last of her now-unobtainable insulin went bad in an off-grid world. I swore to myself that I’d never let this happen, and set about trying to find ways to make my own insulin, just in case.

Since the start of the pandemic, scientists have been seeking to better understand immunity to the novel coronavirus. How long is a person immune after having Covid-19, after getting vaccinated, or both? And what could long-lasting immunity mean for booster shots?

It’s still too early to tell — but experts are getting closer to cracking the code.

Researchers from Zurich have developed a compact, energy-efficient device made from artificial neurons that is capable of decoding brainwaves. The chip uses data recorded from the brainwaves of epilepsy patients to identify which regions of the brain cause epileptic seizures. This opens up new perspectives for treatment.

Current neural network algorithms produce impressive results that help solve an incredible number of problems. However, the electronic devices used to run these algorithms still require too much processing power. These artificial intelligence (AI) systems simply cannot compete with an actual brain when it comes to processing sensory information or interactions with the environment in real time.

Many people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 will probably make antibodies against the virus for most of their lives. So suggest researchers who have identified long-lived antibody-producing cells in the bone marrow of people who have recovered from COVID-19¹.

The study provides evidence that immunity triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection will be extraordinarily long-lasting. Adding to the good news, “the implications are that vaccines will have the same durable effect”, says Menno van Zelm, an immunologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Antibodies — proteins that can recognize and help to inactivate viral particles — are a key immune defence. After a new infection, short-lived cells called plasmablasts are an early source of antibodies.

It’s the rare individual who actually looks forward to getting jabbed with a needle, even if what’s in the needle can protect them from a serious disease such as COVID-19.

But several teams around the world are working on a way to inject a vaccine without the ouch. The trick is to make the needles small. Really small. So small they don’t interact with the nerve endings that signal pain.

Mark Prausnitz is director of the Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery at Georgia Tech. He works on something called microneedle patches to deliver vaccines. So far, he’s developed patch vaccines for flu and measles, but the technology could be used for a COVID-19 vaccine as well.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes about a growing consensus among researchers that the pathogen that gave rise to the COVID-19 pandemic may have emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, rather than through a natural migration from animals to humans.

Things to note: Treating the rats until they die. They are at 31 months and the longest they have lived without treatments is 38 months. Also, a small number of people have done this and though ailments like arthritis go away they still look elderly.

We recently had an update from Professor Rodolfo Goya who is conducting a follow up experiment from the one that Dr. Katcher first did in India, showing a rejuvenation in old rats. This video goes through the update that we had and provides a short introduction to the background.

Continue reading “Young Blood Plasma Extending Rats Max Lifespan | Professor Rodolfo Goya’s Experiment Update” »

Rift Valley fever used to mostly affect livestock in Africa. But the virus that causes it is also spread by mosquitoes whose habitats are expanding because of climate change. If it were to make its way to the rest of the world, it would decimate livestock causing agricultural collapse as well as affecting human health.

In 2015 the Zika virus triggered a global health crisis that left thousands of parents devastated. The virus can cause serious problems in pregnancy, leading to babies with birth defects called microcephaly and other neurological problems. But Zika is not the only virus that can be devastating to pregnant women and their babies; there is another with pandemic potential that could be even more deadly – Rift Valley fever.

The placenta that encases the baby acts as a fortress against many pathogens, but a few can evade its defences. Rift Valley fever is one of them – a 2019 study shows that the virus has the ability to infect a specialised layer of placental cells that carry nutrients to the baby, something that even Zika may not be capable of. In cattle and other livestock, in which the virus spreads, infection can cause more than 90% of pregnant cows to miscarry or deliver stillborn calves. Although the virus kills fewer than 1% of people it infects, it is the risk to babies, and the lasting neurological effects in adults, that is of great concern.