Study says inhalers OK to use amid COVID-19 concerns

Researchers find that the benefits of inhalers for asthma sufferers outweigh the risks of contracting coronavirus, following concerns raised after WHO warned that steroids could reduce immunity.

Date:July 9, 2020   Source:University of Huddersfield

The benefits of using inhalers and nebulisers containing steroids outweigh the risks despite warnings to the contrary during the COVID-19 pandemic, a study by University of Huddersfield researchers has found.

A warning issued by WHO in March advised that steroids used in inhalers and nebulisers could have a negative effect on a user's immunity system, leaving them more susceptible to COVID-19. The concern was that regular steroid use could leave users vulnerable to contracting the virus, or developing a more severe version than non-users.

WHO's cautionary note caused worry for people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), leaving them unsure about whether they could keep using inhalers and nebulisers or not. The British Thoracic Society had reported that demand for inhalers had jumped by 400%, leading to shortages in the UK, following WHO's announcement.

However, Dr Hamid Merchant and Dr Syed Shahzad Hasan from the University of Huddersfield commissioned research into the use of steroids and risk of infections, especially viral infections of the upper respiratory tract. That included previous outbreaks of SARS, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It confused a lot of people," says Dr Hasan. "After the WHO advice, people thought that continuous use of steroids would leave them at a greater risk of contracting the virus or developing more than a mild version of CoViD-19."

Inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) and oral corticosteroids (OCS) are prescribed to help asthma sufferers and those with COPD, with inhalers used to prevent attacks.

The study has been published in Respiratory Medicine, having assessed evidence and findings from a range of bodies including the British Thoracic Society and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). The other authors in the study included Toby Capstick (a consultant pharmacist on respiratory medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust), Syed Tabish Zaidi (Associate Professor in Pharmacy at the University of Leeds) and Chia Siang Kow (a clinical pharmacist from Malaysia).

"We found there is strong evidence that the benefits of continuing with steroids outweighs the risk," declares Dr Merchant.

"There is a risk that the immune system goes down, and there is a chance of acquiring infections but the benefits of continuing with steroids throughout were higher than the risks. We concluded by saying that the patients should continue their regular medicines including steroids."

Journal Reference:
Syed Shahzad Hasan, Toby Capstick, Syed Tabish Razi Zaidi, Chia Siang Kow, Hamid A. Merchant. Use of corticosteroids in asthma and COPD patients with or without COVID-19. Respiratory Medicine, 2020; 170: 106045 DOI: 10.1016/j.rmed.2020.106045

CRIMINAL CAPITALISM

Scientists trace the origin of our teeth from the most primitive jawed fish

Scientists have digitally 'dissected', for the first time, the most primitive jawed fish fossils with teeth found near Prague more than 100 years ago. The results show that their teeth have surprisingly modern features.

Date:July 9, 2020

Source:European Synchrotron Radiation Facility

The origin of our teeth goes back more than 400 million years back in time, to the period when strange armoured fish first developed jaws and began to catch live prey. We are the descendants of these fish, as are all the other 60,000 living species of jawed vertebrates -- sharks, bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. An international team of scientists led by Uppsala University (Sweden), in collaboration with the ESRF, the European Synchrotron (France), the brightest X-ray source, has digitally 'dissected', for the first time, the most primitive jawed fish fossils with teeth found near Prague more than 100 years ago. The results, published today in Science, show that their teeth have surprisingly modern features.

Teeth in current jawed vertebrates reveal some consistent patterns: for example, new teeth usually develop on the inner side of the old ones and then move outwards to replace them (in humans this pattern has been modified so that new teeth develop below the old ones, deep inside the jawbone). There are, however, several differences between bony fish (and their descendants the land animals) and sharks; for example the fact that sharks have no bones at all, their skeleton is made of cartilage, and neither the dentine scales nor the true teeth in the mouth attach to it; they simply sit in the skin. In bony fish and land animals, the teeth are always attached to jaw bones. In addition, whilst sharks shed their worn-out teeth entire, simply by detaching them from the skin, bony fish and land animals shed theirs by dissolving away the tooth bases.

This diversity raises many questions about the origin of teeth. Until now, researchers have focused on fossils of a group of ancient fish that lived about 430 to 360 million years ago, called the arthrodires, which were the only stem jawed vertebrates in which teeth were known. However, they struggled to understand how they could have evolved into the teeth of modern vertebrates, as arthrodire teeth are so different in position and mode of tooth addition in comparison to bony fish and sharks.

Scanning the most primitive jawed fishes

A team from Uppsala University, Charles University (Czech Republic), Natural History Museum in London (UK), National Museum in Prague (Czech Republic) and the ESRF, the European Synchrotron (France) set out to determine whether this peculiar type of dentition was really ancestral to ours, or just a specialised offshoot off the lineage leading towards modern jawed vertebrates.

With this aim, they turned to the acanthothoracids, another early fish group that are believed to be more primitive than the arthrodires and closely related to the very first jawed vertebrates. The problem with acanthothoracids is that their fossils are rare and always incomplete. The very finest of them come from the Prague Basin in the Czech Republic, from rocks that are just over 400 million years old, and were collected at the turn of the last century. They have proved difficult to study by conventional techniques because the bones cannot be freed from the enclosing rock, and have therefore never been investigated in detail.

The researchers used the unique properties of the ESRF, the world's brightest X-ray source and the synchrotron microtomography ID19's beamline, to visualise the internal structure of the fossils in 3D without damaging them. At the ESRF, an 844 metre-ring of electrons travelling at the speed of light emits high-powered X-ray beams that can be used to non-destructively scan matter, including fossils.

"The results were truly remarkable, including well-preserved dentitions that nobody expected to be there" says Valéria Vaškaninová, lead author of the study and scientist from Uppsala University. Follow-up scans at higher resolution allowed the researchers to visualize the growth pattern and even the perfectly preserved cell spaces inside the dentine of these ancient teeth.

Like arthrodires, the acanthothoracid dentitions are attached to bones. This indicates that bony fish and land animals retain the ancestral condition in this regard, whereas sharks are specialized in having teeth that are only attached to the skin -- in contrast to the common perception that sharks are primitive living vertebrates. Again, like arthrodires, the teeth of acanthothoracids were not shed.

More different from arthrodires than expected

In other ways, however, acanthothoracid dentitions are fundamentally different from those of arthrodires. Like sharks, bony fish and land animals, acanthothoracids only added new teeth on the inside; the oldest teeth were located right at the jaw margin. In this respect, the acanthothoracid dentitions look remarkably modern.

"To our surprise, the teeth perfectly matched our expectations of a common ancestral dentition for cartilaginous and bony vertebrates." explains Vaškaninová.

The tooth-bearing bones also carry small non-biting dentine elements of the skin on their outer surfaces, a character shared with primitive bony fish but not with arthrodires. This is an important difference because it shows that acanthothoracid jaw bones were located right at the edge of the mouth, whereas arthrodire jaw bones lay further in. Uniquely, one acanthothoracid (Kosoraspis) shows a gradual shape transition from these dentine elements to the neighboring true teeth, while another (Radotina) has true teeth almost identical to its skin dentine elements in shape. This may be evidence that the true teeth had only recently evolved from dentine elements on the skin.

"These findings change our whole understanding of the origin of teeth" says co-author Per Ahlberg, professor at Uppsala University. And he adds: "Even though acanthothoracids are among the most primitive of all jawed vertebrates, their teeth are in some ways far more like modern ones than arthrodire dentitions. Their jawbones resemble those of bony fish and seem to be directly ancestral to our own. When you grin at the bathroom mirror in the morning, the teeth that grin back at you can trace their origins right back to the first jawed vertebrates."


Journal Reference:
Valéria Vaškaninová, Donglei Chen, Paul Tafforeau, Zerina Johanson, Boris Ekrt, Henning Blom, Per Erik Ahlberg. Marginal dentition and multiple dermal jawbones as the ancestral condition of jawed vertebrates. Science, 2020 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz9431

European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. "Scientists trace the origin of our teeth from the most primitive jawed fish." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 9 July 2020. 

PREHISTORIC FISH PIC
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/07/fossil-of-giant-70m-year-old-fish-found.html

New evidence of long-term volcanic, seismic risks in northern Europe

An ancient European volcanic region may pose both a greater long-term volcanic risk and seismic risk to northwestern Europe than scientists had realized, geophysicists report. The densely populated area is centered in the Eifel region of Germany, and covers parts of Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg.

Date:July 9, 2020

Source:University of California - Los Angeles

An ancient European volcanic region may pose both a greater long-term volcanic risk and seismic risk to northwestern Europe than scientists had realized, geophysicists report in a study in the Geophysical Journal International.

The scientists are not predicting that a volcanic eruption or earthquake is imminent in the densely populated area, which is centered in the Eifel region of Germany, and covers parts of Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg. But the study revealed activity that is uncommon for the region.

"Our findings suggest this region is an active volcanic system, and much more seismically active than many of the faults in Europe between the Eifel volcanic region and the Alps," said Paul Davis, a UCLA research professor of geophysics and a senior author of the study.

Davis and his co-authors report subtle, unusual movements in the surface of the Earth, from which they conclude the Eifel volcanic region remains seismically active. The region has a long history of volcanic activity, but it has been dormant for a long time; scientists think the last volcanic eruption there was some 11,000 years ago.

The geophysicists report that the land surface in that region is lifting up and stretching apart, both of which are unusual in Europe. Although the uplift is only a fraction of an inch per year, it is significant in geological terms, Davis said.

The geophysicists analyzed global positioning system data from across Western Europe that showed subtle movements in the Earth's surface. That enabled them to map out how the ground is moving vertically and horizontally as the Earth's crust is pushed, stretched and sheared.

The dome-like uplift they observed suggests those movements are generated by a rising subsurface mantle plume, which occurs when extremely hot rock in the Earth's mantle becomes buoyant and rises up, sending extremely hot material to the Earth's surface, causing the deformation and volcanic activity. The mantle is the geological layer of rock between the Earth's crust and its outer core.

Corné Kreemer, the study's lead author, is a research professor at the University of Nevada, Reno's Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology. He said many scientists had assumed that volcanic activity in the Eifel was a thing of the past, but the study indicates that no longer seems to be the case.

"It seems clear that something is brewing underneath the heart of northwest Europe," he said.

The Eifel volcanic region houses many ancient volcanic features, including circular lakes known as maars -- which are remnants of violent volcanic eruptions, such as the one that created Laacher See, the largest lake in the area. The explosion that created Laacher See is believed to have occurred approximately 13,000 years ago, with an explosive power similar to that of the spectacular 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines.

The researchers plan to continue monitoring the area using a variety of geophysical and geochemical techniques to better understand potential risks.

The research was supported by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the United States Geological Survey, the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program and NASA.


University of California - Los Angeles. "New evidence of long-term volcanic, seismic risks in northern Europe." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 9 July 2020. .

Skull of two million year-old giant dormouse reconstructed

A researcher has digitally pieced together fossilized fragments from five giant dormouse skulls to reconstruct the first known complete skull of the species, which was roughly the size of a cat.

Date:July 9, 2020

Source:University of York

A PhD student has produced the first digital reconstruction of the skull of a gigantic dormouse, which roamed the island of Sicily around two million years ago.

In a new study, the student from Hull York Medical School, has digitally pieced together fossilised fragments from five giant dormouse skulls to reconstruct the first known complete skull of the species.

The researchers estimate that the enormous long-extinct rodent was roughly the size of a cat, making it the largest species of dormouse ever identified.

The digitally reconstructed skull is 10 cm long -- the length of the entire body and tail of many types of modern dormouse.

PhD student Jesse Hennekam said: "Having only a few fossilised pieces of broken skulls available made it difficult to study this fascinating animal accurately. This new reconstruction gives us a much better understanding of what the giant dormouse may have looked like and how it may have lived."

The enormous prehistoric dormouse is an example of island gigantism -- a biological phenomenon in which the body size of an animal isolated on an island increases dramatically.






The palaeontological record shows that many weird and wonderful creatures once roamed the Italian islands. Alongside the giant dormouse, Sicily was also home to giant swans, giant owls and dwarf elephants.

Jesse's PhD supervisor, Dr Philip Cox from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York and Hull York Medical School, said: "While Island dwarfism is relatively well understood, as with limited resources on an island animals may need to shrink to survive, the causes of gigantism are less obvious.


"Perhaps, with fewer terrestrial predators, larger animals are able to survive as there is less need for hiding in small spaces, or it could be a case of co-evolution with predatory birds where rodents get bigger to make them less vulnerable to being scooped up in talons."

Jesse spotted the fossilised fragments of skull during a research visit to the Palermo Museum in Italy, where a segment of rock from the floor of a small cave, discovered during the construction of a motorway in northwest Sicily in the 1970s, was on display.

"I noticed what I thought were fragments of skull from an extinct species embedded in one of the cave floor segments," Jesse said. "We arranged for the segment to be sent to Basel, Switzerland for microCT scanning and the resulting scans revealed five fragmented skulls of giant dormice present within the rock."





The reconstruction is likely to play an important role in future research directed at improving understanding of why some small animals evolve larger body sizes on islands, the researchers say.

"The reconstructed skull gives us a better sense of whether the giant dormouse would have looked similar to its normal-sized counterparts or whether its physical appearance would have been influenced by adaptations to a specific environment," Jesse explains.

"For example, if we look at the largest living rodent -- the capybara -- we can see that it has expanded in size on a different trajectory to other species in the same family."

Jesse is also using biomechanical modelling to understand the feeding habits of the giant dormouse.

"At that size, it is possible that it may have had a very different diet to its smaller relatives," he adds.

Journal Reference:

Jesse J. Hennekam, Victoria L. Herridge, Loïc Costeur, Carolina Di Patti, Philip G. Cox. Virtual Cranial Reconstruction of the Endemic Gigantic Dormouse Leithia melitensis (Rodentia, Gliridae) from Poggio Schinaldo, Sicily. Open Quaternary, 2020; 6 DOI: 10.5334/oq.79

University of York. "Skull of two million year-old giant dormouse reconstructed." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 9 July 2020. .


ILLUSTRATIONS ALICE IN WONDERLAND CHAPTER VII
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/alice-VII.html

New study detects ringing of the global atmosphere

Date:July 7, 2020

Source:University of Hawaii at Manoa

A ringing bell vibrates simultaneously at a low-pitched fundamental tone and at many higher-pitched overtones, producing a pleasant musical sound. A recent study, just published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, shows that the Earth's entire atmosphere vibrates in an analogous manner, in a striking confirmation of theories developed by physicists over the last two centuries.

In the case of the atmosphere, the "music" comes not as a sound we could hear, but in the form of large-scale waves of atmospheric pressure spanning the globe and traveling around the equator, some moving east-to-west and others west-to-east. Each of these waves is a resonant vibration of the global atmosphere, analogous to one of the resonant pitches of a bell. The basic understanding of these atmospheric resonances began with seminal insights at the beginning of the 19th century by one of history's greatest scientists, the French physicist and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. Research by physicists over the subsequent two centuries refined the theory and led to detailed predictions of the wave frequencies that should be present in the atmosphere. However, the actual detection of such waves in the real world has lagged behind the theory.

Now in a new study by Takatoshi Sakazaki, an assistant professor at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Science, and Kevin Hamilton, an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the authors present a detailed analysis of observed atmospheric pressure over the globe every hour for 38 years. The results clearly revealed the presence of dozens of the predicted wave modes.

The study focused particularly on waves with periods between 2 hours and 33 hours which travel horizontally through the atmosphere, moving around the globe at great speeds (exceeding 700 miles per hour). This sets up a characteristic "chequerboard" pattern of high and low pressure associated with these waves as they propagate.

"For these rapidly moving wave modes, our observed frequencies and global patterns match those theoretically predicted very well," stated lead author Sakazaki. "It is exciting to see the vision of Laplace and other pioneering physicists so completely validated after two centuries."

But this discovery does not mean their work is done.

"Our identification of so many modes in real data shows that the atmosphere is indeed ringing like a bell," commented co-author Hamilton. "This finally resolves a longstanding and classic issue in atmospheric science, but it also opens a new avenue of research to understand both the processes that excite the waves and the processes that act to damp the waves."

So let the atmospheric music play on!

Journal Reference:
Takatoshi Sakazaki, Kevin Hamilton. An Array of Ringing Global Free Modes Discovered in Tropical Surface Pressure Data. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 2020; 77 (7): 2519 DOI: 10.1175/JAS-D-20-0053.1

University of Hawaii at Manoa. "New study detects ringing of the global atmosphere." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 7 July 2020. .

Care for cats? 

So did people along the Silk Road more than 1,000 years ago

Common domestic cats, as we know them today, might have accompanied Kazakh pastoralists as pets more than 1,000 years ago. This is indicated by new analyses done on an almost complete cat skeleton found during an excavation along the former Silk Road in southern Kazakhstan. An international research team has reconstructed the cat's life, revealing astonishing insights into the relationship between humans and pets at the time.

Date:July 9, 2020

Source:Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg

FULL STORY

Person stroking kitten (stock image).
Credit: © kulkann / stock.adobe.com

Common domestic cats, as we know them today, might have accompanied Kazakh pastoralists as pets more than 1,000 years ago. This has been indicated by new analyses done on an almost complete cat skeleton found during an excavation along the former Silk Road in southern Kazakhstan. An international research team led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), Korkyt-Ata Kyzylorda State University in Kazakhstan, the University of Tübingen and the Higher School of Economics in Russia has reconstructed the cat's life, revealing astonishing insights into the relationship between humans and pets at the time. The study will appear in the journal Scientific Reports.

The tomcat -- which was examined by a team led by Dr Ashleigh Haruda from the Central Natural Science Collections at MLU -- did not have an easy life. "The cat suffered several broken bones during its lifetime," says Haruda. And yet, based on a very conservative estimate, the animal had most likely made it past its first year of life. For Haruda and her colleagues, this is a clear indication that people had taken care of this cat.

During a research stay in Kazakhstan, the scientist examined the findings of an excavation in Dzhankent, an early medieval settlement in the south of the country which had been mainly populated by the Oghuz, a pastoralist Turkic tribe. There she discovered a very well-preserved skeleton of a cat. According to Haruda, this is quite rare because normally only individual bones of an animal are found during an excavation, which prevents any systematic conclusions from being drawn about the animal's life. The situation is different when it comes to humans since usually whole skeletons are found. "A human skeleton is like a biography of that person. The bones provide a great deal of information about how the person lived and what they experienced," says Haruda. In this case, however, the researchers got lucky: after its death, the tomcat was apparently buried and therefore the entire skull including its lower jaw, parts of its upper body, legs and four vertebrae had been preserved.

Haruda worked together with an international team of archaeologists and ancient DNA specialists. An examination of the tomcat's skeleton revealed astonishing details about its life. First, the team took 3D images and X-rays of its bones. "This cat suffered a number of fractures, but survived," says Haruda. Isotope analyses of bone samples also provided the team with information about the cat's diet. Compared to the dogs found during the excavation and to other cats from that time period, this tomcat's diet was very high in protein. "It must have been fed by humans since the animal had lost almost all its teeth towards the end of its life."

DNA analyses also proved that the animal was indeed likely to be a domestic cat of the Felis catus L. species and not a closely related wild steppe cat. According to Haruda, it is remarkable that cats were already being kept as pets in this region around the 8th century AD: "The Oghuz were people who only kept animals when they were essential to their lives. Dogs, for example, can watch over the herd. They had no obvious use for cats back then," explains the researcher. The fact that people at the time kept and cared for such "exotic" animals indicates a cultural change, which was thought to have occurred at a much later point in time in Central Asia. The region was thought to have been slow in making changes with respect to agriculture and animal husbandry.

The Dhzankent settlement, where the remains of the cat were found, was located along the Silk Road, an ancient network of important caravan routes that connected Central and East Asia with the Mediterranean region by land. According to Haruda, the find is also an indication of cultural exchange between the regions located along the Silk Road.

The study was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the University of Leicester and the Max Planck Society.

Journal Reference:
A. F. Haruda, A. R. Ventresca Miller, J. L. A. Paijmans, A. Barlow, A. Tazhekeyev, S. Bilalov, Y. Hesse, M. Preick, T. King, R. Thomas, H. Härke, I. Arzhantseva. The earliest domestic cat on the Silk Road. Scientific Reports, 2020; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-67798-6

Why children’s asthma and sleep apnoea has improved in lockdown

Since lockdown began, Jo-Anne Johnson has noticed a strange phenomenon – cases of childhood breathing problems seem to be improving. The clinician explains what might be causing this

SPOILER ALERT

DON'T RUSH INTO CHEMICALLY DISINFECTED SCHOOLS TOO SOON

BEFORE THEY ARE PROPERLY AIRED OUT

SCHOOLS BEFORE THE  PANDEMIC WERE THE WORST PLACE FOR INDOOR AIR QUALITY FOR CHILDREN WHO ARE THERE EIGHT HOURS A DAY 

MORE SO EVEN THAN THE DIESEL POLLUTION FROM THE IDLING SCHOOL BUS

#IEQ        #IAQ

For such a dramatic clinical effect to occur over such a short space of time for so many, there has to be an environmental reason to explain some of it ( AP )

It’s Monday morning and I’m running my regular children’s sleep clinic. Except it’s not a Monday morning like any other I have had in my 20 years of practice. I am running the clinic on my laptop, seeing patients and their families on a video screen rather than in person, in an eerily quiet children’s outpatient department.

After two months of Covid-19 lockdown and working “all hands on deck” to deal with the pandemic surge, I am allowed to resume my outpatient work. One thing that strikes me in this clinic is another new phenomenon. Parents are reporting that their child’s symptoms have dramatically improved over the last few weeks.

Most of the children I see in my clinic have obstructive sleep apnoea, a condition that leads to a disturbed night’s sleep due to the repeated blocking of the upper airways (apnoeas). This leads to daytime symptoms such as tiredness, behavioural issues and poor concentration. Left untreated, these children may not reach their full academic potential and may go on to develop heart failure in later life.

We often see symptoms improving gradually as children get older, but families were reporting a near-resolution of symptoms over just a few weeks. To my amazement, this trend has continued from lockdown into the period of social distancing we are currently facing.

This has led me to reflect on how unexpectedly quiet our paediatric wards have been since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The vast majority of children with Sars-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) have very mild symptoms and are not admitted to hospital. But what about all the other acute conditions that normally fill our wards at this time of year, such as asthma?

Read more

Lockdown prompts drop in children needing emergency asthma treatment
We usually see a surge in children with acute allergic asthma attacks during the period of May-June, which corresponds to the peak tree pollen counts. But we have barely seen any cases in this period.

I’m sure there is an element of increased home-management with parents understandably reluctant to bring their children anywhere near a hospital at this time. But we would still expect to see a significant number of children whose symptoms are severe enough to need specialised hospital treatments.

For such a dramatic clinical effect to occur over such a short space of time for so many children, there has to be an environmental reason to explain at least part of it. The biggest change for children during the Covid-19 pandemic has been the closure of schools and nurseries. Only children of key workers have been allowed to attend primary school and nurseries from late March until early June in the UK.

Whether these effects last remains to be seen. Up to now, our attention has focused on containment of the contagion, but it appears there are other lessons to be learnt

This measure, combined with social distancing policies outside school, is likely to have reduced the spread of not only Sars-CoV-2 among children but also reduced the spread of other viruses. And respiratory viruses are strongly associated with acute asthma and worsening obstructive sleep apnoea symptoms in children.

Another similarity between asthma and obstructive sleep apnoea is their association with allergens. During the period of lockdown, unless making essential journeys for work or school, or to get groceries, the public (including children) were allowed out of their homes only once a day for up to one hour to exercise. This would have reduced their exposure to common airborne allergens such as tree pollen, a potent trigger of allergic asthma and hay fever. Both are positively associated with obstructive sleep apnoea in children.


Nitrogen dioxide emissions in China before and after lockdown (Nasa)

There is also good evidence of a correlation between air pollution and asthma or obstructive sleep apnoea. Fine-particulate matter and gases, such as nitrogen dioxide (NO2), are known to trigger airway inflammation. As travel has declined globally during the pandemic, there has already been a significant reduction in air pollution levels, particularly in industrial countries across the world. Data from Nasa suggests a 20 per cent to 30 per cent reduction in NO2 emissions in Europe between March 2019 and March 2020.

Read more

What do people with asthma need to know about coronavirus?

Coronavirus: Idris Elba says asthma puts him in ‘high risk’ category

Cleaning products linked to breathing problems in children

The World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020. Since then, saturation news coverage has emphasised the dangers of the disease. As a clinician, I prepared for these dangers, but have been surprised by some of the unexpected consequences of the lockdown, which seem to be related to wide-scale behavioural change.

Whether these effects last remains to be seen. Up to now, our attention has focused on containment of the contagion, but it appears there are other lessons to be learnt.

Jo-Anne Johnson is a senior lecturer in child and family health at Anglia Ruskin University. This article first appeared on The Conversation

USA 
'Teachers’ union ‘double-dog dares’ 

Trump to sit in class during pandemic

'There’s no one that wants their kids back with us more than teachers... but we want to open it safely'

Louise Hall The Independent JULY 9, 2020

The president of the largest US teachers union has said they “double-dog dare” Donald Trump to sit in one of their classrooms during the pandemic when schools reopen.

Mr Trump has demanded that schools resume in-person classes in fall, and has also criticised the Centre for Disease Control’s (CDC) guidelines for re-opening as “expensive” and “tough”.

“There’s no one that wants their kids back with us more than teachers... but we want to open it safely,” National Education Association (NEA) President Lily Eskelsen García told CNN on Wednesday.

“We see what happens when they let bars open prematurely,” she added, referencing a number of states that have seen a surge in cases after re-opening their economies early on.

“This isn’t a bar. We’re talking about second graders. I had 39 sixth graders one year in my class. I double-dog dare Donald Trump to sit in a class of 39 sixth graders and breathe that air without any preparation for how we’re going to bring our kids back safely,” she said.

Watch more

White House denies pressuring CDC to change school guidelines

ROFLMAO ORWELLIAN LOGIC

AMERIKA THE THEOCRACY

Religious schools immune from discrimination suits, Supreme Court says

Trump threatens to withhold $13b if school systems don’t open

White House kicks off push to open schools despite Covid-19 surge

The NEA has insisted on a number of benchmarks before schools can re-open safely including personal protective equipment, deep-cleaning procedures that meet CDC standards, classroom layouts allowing six feet of distancing alongside hand-washing and sanitising stations.

On Wednesday, Mr Trump threatened to cut federal funding for districts ignoring his demand after suggesting that strict guidelines could lead some officials to decide to continue teaching an online-only curriculum by fall.

“In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS,” Mr Trump wrote on Twitter. “The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if US schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!”

The president has made it clear that he disapproves of the CDC’s new guidelines which aim to keep children safe through social distancing, cloth face coverings, the closing of communal areas like dining rooms and playgrounds, and possible implementation of hygienic barriers.

“I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!” he tweeted on Wednesday morning.

Ms Garcia suggested that the “expensive” measures should be funded with the $3 trillion HEROES Act passed by house democrats in May that has not yet been considered by the Republican-controlled Senate.

The US has over three million confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus and has seen 132,723 deaths as of Thursday, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University.

UK 

The arts are an essential service – as vital as health, education, defence

CUT THE WAR BUDGET FUND THE ARTS

The Tories’ cash injection is not before time, says Mark Hudson, but it’s still a box of band-aids rather than a life-saving transfusion

The National Gallery allowed its first visitors on Saturday ( EPA )

The government’s announcement of a £1.57bn bailout for the culture sector is an acknowledgement – if somewhat belated – of the vital importance of the arts in our national life. “The beating heart of the nation,” boomed the prime minister. And if that’s hardly the subtlest of metaphors, for once Johnson got it essentially right.

There’s a tendency to think of theatres, art galleries and concert halls as optional luxuries in the wider struggle of life: frivolous add-ons that societies can afford to enjoy once they’ve paid for the really important things: health, education, infrastructure, defence. In fact, the arts, culture – whatever you want to call it – performs a vital function in our society, just as essential, in my opinion, as any of the so-called essential services we’ve been hearing so much about.

Indeed, while the past four months have left us feeling profoundly, and entire rightly, grateful to the NHS and the dedicated professionals who have risked – and in some cases given – their lives to keep the system going, this period has equally demonstrated the absolute centrality of the arts to the mental and physical health of the nation.

While we’ve been cooped up in our domiciles, deprived of life-giving social contact, put on furlough, losing our jobs and our loved ones, what have we actually been doing? While some have been driven frantic trying to homeschool children, while maintaining demanding jobs from the kitchen table, many more have been thrown back entirely on their own emotional resources. When final assessments are made, the Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdown will be found to have been as much a crisis in mental as physical health. And the things we’ve found to fill that terrifying spiritual and emotional gap – that sense of the abyss yawning beneath us – have been to a very large extent, and in the broadest sense, cultural.


Watching telly and posting years-old holiday snaps or listening to your favourite albums on Facebook may not be the most elevated of cultural pursuits, but they cater in varying ways to the imaginative and expressive impulse that is at the root of all art forms, and which can manifest itself in extremely destructive – as well as very positive – ways if not properly nurtured: from insanity, murder and suicide, to sexual abuse, drugs and alcohol addiction.
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The public has, in addition, been giving concerts via Zoom, often at an exemplary level, writing poetry (very much less exemplary, if my efforts were anything to go by), gardening, reorganising their photo archives, finishing novels, doing table-top art exercises set by famous artists. Many of the latter were piffling – I, for one, can’t wait to be rescued from Grayson Perry’s Art Club – but they show we just need to do this stuff. We’ve been on virtual gallery tours, seen great masterpieces locked away from the public gaze, with the feeling, certainly at the height of the lockdown when we were endlessly hearing that “things will never go back to the way they were”, that this was as close to a gallery visit as we would ever get again.


Now, with lockdown slowly lifting, the museums and galleries are among the first cultural institutions to open their doors – with the National Gallery allowing its first visitors last Saturday – and they’re opening onto a very different world to the one they closed them on in March. Blockbuster exhibitions, those resource-heavy mainstays of the big galleries will be in short supply in the stark and straitened post-Covid landscape, while more than 50 per cent of museum and gallery directors surveyed by the museum charity the Art Fund doubt the future viability of their institutions: from attracting visitors back to maintaining valuable collections.

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These are grave questions. We’ve grown used to having culture on tap, as freely available as water or gas, and actually much cheaper to the consumer. The Victorians gave us our big national and municipal galleries, which are still free to enter. The post-war period gave us the Arts Council and all its works, while the late Nineties and early Noughties gave us a whole raft of spanking new, architecturally remarkable provincial galleries – Tate St Ives, Hepworth Wakefield, Margate’s Turner Contemporary – that have added immeasurably not only to the appeal of our towns and cities, but to the creative, cultural, social and, yes, economic vitality of the country.


The future of this great national resource is by no means guaranteed. The idea of museums and galleries going the way of pubs, banks and petrol stations as redundant chunks of real estate is horrible to contemplate.

Last autumn saw a £100m injection of government cash into the crumbling fabric of our national museums and galleries, a gesture that while very much welcomed was seen as more of a sticking plaster than a permanent remedy. In that context, the current £1.57m bailout, across the entire cultural sector – the breakdown of how it will be used has yet to be announced – feels more like a box of band-aids than a life-saving transfusion.

There are desperate times ahead for the cultural sector. Yet, on the question of attracting audiences back, I’m personally optimistic. After four months of online culture under effective house arrest, which has felt like a lifetime, people will be screaming to get back into real-life cultural spaces, with actual, physical works of art, where the injunction “please don’t touch the exhibits” will feel like a wonderful luxury. We need to support our museums and galleries, not just by giving donations and spending money in the cafe and shop, but by using them, making them ours, as their founders intended. It’s only when you’ve been deprived of the experience of being in a gallery or museum with other people, even if you don’t know them, speak to them or even look at them, that you realise what a precious, life-enhancing and essentially social experience that is.