Covid 19

The genetic materials in the cells of the human body are stored in a structure called chromatin. Some viruses of other categories have been reported to hijack or change our chromatin so that they can successfully reproduce in our cells. But SARS-CoV-2's effect on chromatin was not known.

One in every 10 women and one in every 14 men were found to be having mental health issues. Among women, housewives had the highest prevalence of mental health issues, in the urban areas one in every 11 individuals and in rural one in every 14 individuals were found with mental health issues.

The study, now posted on scientific research repository Zenodo and not peer reviewed yet, is based on genetic data drawn from swabs taken from in and around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market starting in January 2020. The swabs were collected in early 2020, after the market was shut down and cleared of animal products, after being linked to the outbreak of Covid pandemic. The researchers got the samples from swabbing walls, floors, metal cages and carts that are used for transporting animal cages.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan found that the relative effective reproduction number (Re) of XBB.1.5 was 1.2-fold greater than that of the parental XBB.1. This indicated that an individual with the XBB.1.5 variant could infect 1.2 times more people in the population than someone with the parental XBB.1 variant.

During the pandemic, medical doctors and researchers noticed that children and adolescents infected with Covid became less ill than adults. To understand this, researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, studied unique blood samples from children taken before the pandemic. They identified memory T cells that react to cells infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid.

The study, published in the journal Cortex, is the first to report "prosopagnosia," also known as face blindness, following symptoms consistent with Covid. Previously it was known that Covid can cause a range of neurological problems, including the loss of smell and taste, and impairments in attention, memory, speech, and language, known as "brain fog".

A real-time surveillance of cases of Influenza like Illness (ILI) and Severe Acute Respiratory Infections (SARI) presenting in OPDs and IPDs of health facilities is undertaken by Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).

The study found that healthcare workers infected with the original wild-type virus were up to 67 per cent more likely to report symptoms of long Covid than those who hadn't had Covid-19. However, people who were first infected with the Omicron variant were no more likely to report long Covid symptoms than those who'd never had Covid-19.

People infected with Covid can also see an increased likelihood of constipation, diarrhoea, abdominal pain, bloating and vomiting. "Gastrointestinal problems were among the first that were reported by the patient community," senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University said. "It is increasingly clear that the GI tract serves as a reservoir for the virus."

Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that cycles between periods of fasting and eating. It means that you don't eat for a period of time each day or week. The diet pattern, especially when done over the course of decades, is known to have positive effects on metabolic and cardiovascular health. In the study, researchers at Intermountain Health in the US examined 464 patients who were undergoing cardiac catheterisation from February 2013 to March 2020 and were diagnosed with Covid between 2020 and 2022.