All Posts Tagged as 'Effect'

Coronavirus could age the brain by ten years or cause IQ to fall, a study has suggested.

Researchers have warned that survivors of the worst cases of the virus could be at risk of lasting mental damage, equivalent to an 8.5-point drop in IQ or the brain ageing a decade.

This 'brain fog' has already been reported by sufferers for weeks, even months after recovering from Covid-19.

Some have told of losing the ability to recall everyday facts or hold a conversation.

Mouthwashes may help lower the transmission and spread of the coronavirus, according to a new study.

In the study, published in the Journal of Medical Virology, researchers investigated over-the-counter mouthwashes and nasal rinses commonly found in drug stores and supermarkets, since both types of products “directly impact the major sites of reception and transmission of human coronaviruses (HCoV)” — namely, the mouth and nose — and “may provide an additional level of protection against the virus.”

To find out whether mouthwashes and nasal rinses would be effective against the coronavirus, the researchers tested a common human coronavirus known as 229e — one of several strains that typically only cause mild infections like the common cold, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — not SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus associated with COVID-19.

I live in a huge apartment complex with about 500 tenants. I happen to live on the back side of the complex, with a window facing the dumpster in the alleyway. Many of the maintenance workers hang out in that alley when they’re not working. I’ve been working from home for six months now, meaning I spend way more time overhearing their conversations than I used to. They probably spend three to four hours a day just shooting the breeze. They laugh loudly, speak at a way higher volume than necessary, and tell an endless number of sexist jokes in Spanish (I speak Spanish fluently so I can understand every word). I hate having to listen to sexist vitriol for literally hours every day. I’ve tried headphones and a white noise machine but neither block out the sound.

I finally gave up and emailed management. Three of the guys were fired. They have been replaced with workers who spend significantly less time joking and hanging out in the back alley. I view this as a win: I don’t have to be subjected to this for hours every day, and the guys learned a valuable lesson about not going on sexist rants at work. My partner, on the other hand, is angry at me. They say I should’ve just talked to the men myself (which seems naïve, considering they clearly hate women) or, in my email to the complex, asked for the men not to be fired. I disagree. All I did was speak up about an issue that affected me—it’s not my responsibility how the complex chooses to handle it. My partner is basically saying I’m a monster for getting blue-collar workers fired. We cannot seem to move past this issue. Did I do the right thing? What can I do now to get my partner and I past this difference of opinion?

—Not Sorry They’re Gone

Just before production resumed in August on the hit CBS police drama “S.W.A.T.,” co-creator and executive producer Shawn Ryan called an infectious-disease expert with one question.

“Are we crazy to be doing this?” Mr. Ryan asked Marissa Baker, a professor at the University of Washington.

Ms. Baker, who specializes in potential exposure to infectious diseases, reassured Mr. Ryan that if the show followed the coronavirus protocols she advocated to protect the cast and crew, it should be fine.

Easier said than done. As Hollywood resumes production in the midst of a pandemic, fear of Covid-19 is changing how television gets made. Producers are avoiding scenes with crowds, guest stars or intimacy between characters, wherever possible. Crew members have backups in case they get sick. Special cameras give the illusion that actors are near each other when they are far apart.

For Mirabai Nicholson-McKellar, Covid-19 brought an onslaught of symptoms from chest pains to an 11-day migraine, three positive test results, and a period in hospital.

Seven months later, the rollercoaster is far from over: the 36-year-old from Byron Bay, Australia is still experiencing symptoms – including difficulties with thinking that are often described as “brain fog”.

“Brain fog seems like such an inferior description of what is actually going on. It’s completely crippling. I am unable to think clearly enough to [do] anything,” says Nicholson-McKellar, adding that the experience would be better described as cognitive impairment.

The consequences, she says, have been enormous.

“I can’t work more than one to two hours a day and even just leaving the house to get some shopping can be a challenge,” she says. “When I get tired it becomes much worse and sometimes all I can do is lay in bed and watch TV.” Brain fog has made her forgetful to the point that she says she burns pots while cooking.

“It often prevents me from being able to have a coherent conversation or write a text message or email,” she adds. “I feel like a shadow of my former self. I am not living right now, I am simply existing.”

There is no medical definition or list of symptoms shared by all patients - two people with long Covid can have very different experiences.

However, the most common feature is crippling fatigue.

Others symptoms include: breathlessness, a cough that won't go away, joint pain, muscle aches, hearing and eyesight problems, headaches, loss of smell and taste as well as damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys and gut.

Mental health problems have been reported including depression, anxiety and struggling to think clearly.

It can utterly destroy people's quality of life. "My fatigue was like nothing I've experienced before," said one sufferer Jade Gray-Christie,

How can you be sure your child is really your child? Could that innocent-seeming baby be a changeling – a cuckoo in your nest? There is something about the evil elf child, reborn as the alien walking among us, that continues to fascinate and terrify us. So much so, the broadcaster Sky has announced it has commissioned a third version of Village of the Damned from David Farr, the writer of The Night Manager.

The first, filmed in 1960, is a cult classic of understated British horror. The 1995 version, starring Christopher Reeves, translated the nightmare to small-town America.

Both were based on John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, in which a whole village briefly loses consciousness. Nine months later, eerily identical alien babies with telepathic powers are born to the women. They are smarter and grow faster than normal – and are soon threatening not just their “parents”, but all humankind.

Teenagers are again euphorically embracing revolution, literally toppling statues in joyful Black Lives Matter protest and skipping school to protest climate change.

Meanwhile, the widespread use of social media in itself can produce a hive mind effect. Although social media was intended to support free speech and allow anyone to share their opinion, the effect of a Twitter pile-on can be to crush nuance, doubt or divergence. Commentators, such as Gavin Haynes, have highlighted the resulting purity spirals in which nobody can stand alone.

Both the single-minded power of the Chinese state and the collective force of an online horde echo the strength of the Midwich aliens versus the fragmented, conflicted arguments of the humans opposing them. The aliens’ power was that they were not individuals – they were parts of a single entity with a single idea – to survive. As in Wyndham’s time, we again face a real contrast between individualism and groupthink.

Shortly after U.S. lockdowns began, the Ashley Madison “married dating” site saw an uptick in members. Today, more than 21,000 people are signing up each day for the online membership service, up from 17,000 a day in March. That’s on top of a worldwide base of 65 million members around the world in 2019.

“We’re in such unprecedented catastrophic times,” sex and relationship therapist Dr. Tammy Nelson said. “It’s so apocalyptic that you have got to have something to look forward to.”

The vast majority of Ashley Madison members have said that having affairs keeps them married. In an effort to understand the motivations behind choosing infidelity over divorce during a pandemic and how marriage will be impacted in the future, the company conducted surveys of its members. The results backed up Ashley Madison’s belief that marriage is a pragmatic arrangement that offers inherent value despite a partner often failing to provide sufficient love, support, or desire.

Historic wildfires which ravaged California throughout August and September may cause 3,000 early deaths, according to research from academics at Stanford University.

This year there have been over 8,100 wildfires that have burned well over 3.7 million acres in California. Since August 15, when California's fire activity elevated, there have been 26 fatalities and over 7,000 structures destroyed.

On Sunday, 17,000 firefighters were still at work, battling 25 wildfires in the state.

Now academics have concluded that the wildfires, from August 1 to September 10, were responsible already for at least 1,200 deaths in California - and may, over the next month, cause a total of 3,000 deaths.

Dear How to Do It,

I’m in a relationship with a woman who I strongly consider to be a potential life partner, and if her words are anything to go by, she feels the same way about me. We share hobbies and passions, find the others’ individual interests fascinating, can talk for hours, and have a great sex life for the most part. I consistently satisfy her during sex in almost every way (you’ll see shortly why I say almost), and by her own words, I am by far the best partner she has had in terms of physical, emotional, and kink compatibility. However, despite my complete satisfaction with our sex life, she seems to be unable to believe that she is enough for me.

I have, in the many, MANY sexual experiences we’ve shared, come maybe a half-dozen times compared to my partner’s firecracker-style orgasms from start to finish during nearly every sexual session we have. This is no fault of mine or my partner. I received physical trauma to my body a number of years ago in a way that has impacted my ability to feel touch as strongly as some might. My sensations of touch and pain are muted, and for some time, fine motor control was a serious struggle. To give a good analogue, raw sex feels to me now like what sex wearing a condom used to feel like, if I also coated my dick with a numbing cream (I use this analogy because in my teen years I made exactly this same mistake).

Annrene Rowe was getting ready to celebrate her 10th wedding anniversary this summer when she noticed a bald spot on her scalp. In the following days, her thick, shoulder-length hair started falling out in clumps, bunching up in the shower drain.

“I was crying hysterically,” said Rowe, 67, of Anna Maria, Florida.

Rowe, who was hospitalized for 12 days in April with symptoms of the coronavirus, soon found strikingly similar stories in online groups of COVID-19 survivors. Many said that several months after contracting the virus, they began shedding startling amounts of hair.

Doctors say they too are seeing many more patients with hair loss, a phenomenon they believe is indeed related to the coronavirus pandemic, affecting both people who had the virus and those who never became sick.

Dear How to Do It,

I’m a 36-year-old single straight woman, and I really didn’t think this was going to be an issue until later in life. I’m a very sexual person (just reading about sex in your column is enough to turn me on) and I’d like to get married one day, but for the past few years, I haven’t even been able to manage halfway decent sex, much less great sex or a relationship. The problem I keep experiencing in the dating world is the same: men with all kinds of erection issues.

The most recent guy could get hard but would lose it after a few thrusts, saying sex doesn’t do it for him these days (he preferred mutual masturbation or blow jobs). Guy No. 2 was good in bed but refused any touching outside of that 20 minutes. Guy No. 3 required 20 minutes of me going down on his flaccid penis before possibly getting hard enough to have intercourse for three minutes (most of the time, he wouldn’t get hard at all). Guy No. 4 hadn’t had sex in years so he’d either come in 30 seconds or he’d stick it in and barely move so he could last five minutes (I could have worked with him sexually, but we broke up for other reasons). Guy No. 5 completely ignored his problem, continuing to thrust even after I told him he was soft (I suspect he had a porn addiction).

The list goes on. I’ve barely had any good sex in the past six years. I don’t know what to do. These guys are all my age or younger. I try to be patient and understanding, asking if there’s something they’d like me to do or offering up a menu of things they might like, but most just shrug awkwardly and avoid talking about it. None of them sound like they’ve made any effort to get help. I get that it can be embarrassing and men might feel ashamed, but these guys keep cropping up in my dating pool. I can orgasm on my own, but I crave and miss sex, and I know I wouldn’t be happy in a relationship without it. So I’m stuck in a lonely, sexually frustrated land and I can’t get out. Any suggestions?

—Elusive Wood

People often throw the phrase "obsessive-compulsive disorder" (OCD) around as jokey shorthand for being excessively particular or high-strung, casting the disorder as a sort of innocuous, yet desexualizing, set of anxieties.

But OCD isn’t a quirk. It's a mental health condition that more than 2 percent of people experience at some point. It takes the random thoughts that flash through people's heads—that irrational fear of having done something wrong, or an unbidden, bizarre fantasy—and, instead of allowing them to quickly fade, forces them to the forefront of their minds in distressing spirals. Because these obsessions don’t respond well to reason, people with OCD develop rituals in an attempt to bring themselves relief from those anxieties. But that relief is fleeting, and people get stuck in this cycle of obsession and ritual. Many become dependent on a growing list of compulsions, which can become their own sources of anxiety and shame.

Obsessions and rituals can bleed directly into sex, as well. People with contamination obsessions often talk about fixating on the perceived dirtiness of genitals or bodily fluids and putting up hard limits on how they have sex. By some estimates, at least one in 10 people with OCD will also at some point develop obsessions about sex, constantly questioning their sexualities or worrying they might be developing harmful urges and building rituals into their relationships, their masturbation habits, their engagement with porn, to test or reassure themselves about their desires. Fears of being misunderstood—or actually dangerous—force some people with sexual obsessions to avoid intimacy altogether. Often, current or potential romantic partners who face the realities of OCD write those with the condition off as just too much.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.

Former presidential candidate and low-energy American Jeb Bush had an interesting thought for us all to chew on in the lead-up to election day. During an appearance at Harvard last week, he was asked if he was voting for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, since he's already publicly ruled out voting for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. He dodged the question, but when asked what would happen if normal voters followed his lead and avoided the major-party candidates, he replied, "If everybody didn't vote, that would be a pretty powerful political statement, wouldn't it?"

What would happen if, say, a brain parasite that prevents people from voting in any way infects everyone in America from now until inauguration day 2017? And while we're imagining things, let's also go back in time and give that parasite to the Americans who already voted by mail, so now they all haven't voted either. Jeb Bush's fantasy has come to life.

What happens now, and who becomes president?

"The Constitution says somebody has to be president," said Richard E. Berg-Andersson, creator of TheGreenPapers.com, one of the first election-tracking websites. "You can't go around without a president of the United States."

As anyone who has watched Veep knows, if no candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College—which none of them would if no electors voted—the presidential pick would go to the House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting one vote to be doled out to any of the three presidential candidates who got the most electoral votes.