uphillbothways

A recent study argues that scientists overly reliant on remote sensing and models miss important details about wet weather events, potentially affecting Earth systems models and scientific understanding. They advocate for direct, on-the-ground observations to improve data accuracy, inspire creativity, and enrich environmental education.

To be outstanding in one’s field, one may need to be out standing in one’s field.

An interdisciplinary research team led by John T. Van Stan from Cleveland State University argues that scientists should venture beyond the laboratory to directly observe weather phenomena like rain, snow, or occult deposition. In a paper published in the journal BioScience, the researchers contend that hands-on observation of storm events is crucial for comprehending the complexities of wet weather and its diverse impacts on the environment.

Recently, Van Stan and colleagues noted a trend in the scientific community towards relying on remote sensing to study storms and their consequences: “Natural scientists seem increasingly content to stay dry and rely on remote sensors and samplers, models, and virtual experiments to understand natural systems. Consequently, we can miss important stormy phenomena, imaginative inspirations, and opportunities to build intuition—all of which are critical to scientific progress.”

This type of “umbrella science,” they warn, can miss important localized events. For instance, in describing rainwater’s flow from the forest canopy to the soils, the authors note that “if several branches efficiently capture and drain stormwaters to the stem, rainwater inputs to near-stem soils can be more than 100 times greater.”

The authors also point out that important phenomena like low-lying fog events, vapor trapped beneath forest canopies, and condensate plumes may escape remote detection, yet be sensible to scientists on the ground. At the broader scale, these oversights can affect Earth systems models, which often underestimate canopy water storage. They argue that these errors may represent a “large potential bias in surface temperatures simulated by Earth systems models.”

Direct observation, however, has merits beyond remedying the shortcomings of “umbrella science.” Van Stan and colleagues see intrinsic value in firsthand storm experiences – not only for natural scientists, but also students studying climate change impacts on ecosystems. They claim that this immersive method enhances understanding, incites curiosity, and strengthens bonds with nature, thereby enriching environmental education, inspiring research, and preparing the future scientific community.

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archive link: https://archive.is/dMyrZ

The agency finalized the new regulation to reflect a U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this year

The Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday it has revised a key rule to comply with a sweeping U.S. Supreme Court ruling from earlier this year, which could strip federal protections from up to 63 percent of the nation’s wetlands.

In a final rule issued Tuesday, the EPA and the Department of the Army changed parts of the previous definition of “waters of the United States” to align with the Supreme Court’s decision, which weakened the federal agency’s power to regulate the nation’s waterways.

“While I am disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Sackett case, EPA and Army have an obligation to apply this decision alongside our state co-regulators, Tribes, and partners,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a news release Tuesday.

As a result of the decision, several types of waters will no longer be under federal protection, an EPA official said. Up to 63 percent of wetlands by acreage could be affected in addition to an estimated 1.2 million to 4.9 million miles of ephemeral streams, the official said.

The issue Sackett v. EPA brought before the Supreme Court was the scope of the Clean Water Act’s reach and how courts should determine what counts as “waters of the United States” under protection of the law. Nearly two decades ago, the court ruled that wetlands are protected if they have a “significant nexus” to nearby regulated waters.

In May, however, the court decided that rule no longer applies and said the EPA’s interpretation of its powers went too far, giving it regulatory power beyond what Congress had authorized.

Writing for five justices of the court, Justice Samuel A. Alito ruled that the Clean Water Act extends only to “those wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right, so that they are ‘indistinguishable’ from those waters.” He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

The EPA said the amendments announced Tuesday are limited and only change the parts of the previous rule that are invalid under the court’s decision. For example, the final rule removes the significant nexus test from consideration when identifying tributaries and other waters as federally protected, according to the agency.

“The exclusive purpose of the 2023 Rule was to define ‘waters of the United States,’ and this rule simply conforms that definition to Sackett,” the text of the final rule states.

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archive link: https://archive.is/BJhpj

Storm expected to strengthen to category 3 before it makes landfall on Florida’s Gulf coast on Wednesday

Live updates at link.

Eleven planes and helicopter from bloc sent to tackle fire that has burned more than 300 sq miles of land

A forest blaze in Greece is the largest wildfire ever recorded in the EU and the bloc is mobilising nearly half its firefighting air wing to tackle it, a European Commission spokesperson has said.

Eleven planes and a helicopter from the EU fleet have been sent to help extinguish the fire north of the city of Alexandroupoli, along with 407 firefighters, Balazs Ujvari said on Tuesday.

The EU’s civil protection service said the fire had burned more than 310 sq miles (810 sq km) – an area bigger than New York City.

“This wildfire is the largest in the EU since 2000, when the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis) began recording data,” the service said.

Greece’s fire service said the blaze was “still out of control” in the north-east region’s Dadia national park, a vital sanctuary for birds of prey.

Since it began on 19 August, the blaze has killed 20 people, 18 of them migrants whose bodies were found in a region that is often used as an entry point from neighbouring Turkey.

The EU calls on a fleet of 28 aircraft – 24 water-dumping planes and four helicopters – supplied by member countries to help battle blazes in the bloc and in neighbouring territories.

It is working on creating a standalone, EU-funded air wing of 12 aircraft that will be fully in place by 2030.

“We do know that fires are getting more severe,” Ujvari said. “If you look at the figures every year in the past years, we are seeing trends which are not necessarily favourable, and that calls for of course more capacities at the member states’ level.”

Greece has been ravaged by numerous fires this summer, which the government and experts attribute to the climate crisis.

Janez Lenarčič, the EU’s commissioner for crisis management, said the air deployment underscore the bloc’s commitment to swift and effective collective action in times of crisis.

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archive link: https://archive.is/6Lewf

On a private call with Christian millionaires, home-schooling pioneer Michael Farris pushed for a strategy aimed at siphoning billions of tax dollars from public schools

The message Michael Farris had come to deliver was a simple one: The time to act was now.

For decades, Farris — a conservative Christian lawyer who is the most influential leader of the modern home-schooling movement — had toiled at the margins of American politics. His arguments about the harms of public education and the divinely endowed rights of parents had left many unconvinced.

Now, speaking on a confidential conference call to a secretive group of Christian millionaires seeking, in the words of one member, to “take down the education system as we know it today,” Farris made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s. Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion, he said.

The solution: lawsuits alleging that schools’ teachings about gender identity and race are unconstitutional, leading to a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or home schooling.

“We’ve got to recognize that we’re swinging for the fences here, that any time you try to take down a giant of this nature, it’s an uphill battle,” Farris said on the previously undisclosed July 2021 call, a recording of which was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with The Washington Post. “And the teachers union, the education establishment and everybody associated with the education establishment will be there in full array against us — just as they were against home-schoolers.”

Nevertheless, Farris assured the conservative donors, their money would be well spent on this legal campaign. A conservative supermajority reigned on the nation’s highest court. In statehouses and at school boards, political activism over parental rights had reached a fever pitch.

“The time is right,” he said, later adding, “Sometimes it does take a while for seed to be planted and to germinate.”

The 50-minute recording, whose details Farris did not dispute in a series of interviews with The Post, is a remarkable demonstration of how the ideology he has long championed has moved from the partisan fringe to the center of the nation’s bitter debates over public education.

A deeply religious evangelical from Washington state, Farris began his career facing off with social workers over the rights of home-schoolers and representing Christian parents who objected to “Rumpelstiltskin” being read in class.

In recent years, he has reached the pinnacle of the conservative legal establishment. From 2017 to 2022, he was the president and chief executive of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a powerhouse Christian legal group that helped draft and defend the restrictive Mississippi abortion law that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. ADF and its allies have filed a flurry of state and federal lawsuits over the past two years alleging that public schools are violating parental and religious rights.

Yet it is outside the courtroom that Farris’s influence has arguably been most profound. No single figure has been more instrumental in transforming the parental rights cause from an obscure concern of Christian home-schoolers into a GOP rallying cry.

When former president Donald Trump called for a federal parental bill of rights in a 2023 campaign video, saying secular public school instruction had become a “new religion,” he was invoking arguments Farris first made 40 years ago. The executive order targeting school mask mandates that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed on his first day in office cited a 2013 state law guaranteeing “fundamental” parental rights that Farris helped write.

In Florida, a home-schooling mom introduced Farris’s ideas to a state lawmaker, setting in motion the passage of the state’s Parents’ Bill of Rights in 2021. The law, repeatedly touted by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on the presidential campaign trail, laid the groundwork for the state’s controversial Parental Rights in Education Act, dubbed by its critics the “don’t say gay” bill.

“He is our hero,” Patti Sullivan, the home-schooler involved in Florida’s 2021 law, said of Farris. “He is the father of the modern movement in parental rights.”

Fundamental parental rights measures have been proposed or enacted this year in more than two dozen other states, according to a Post analysis using the legislation-tracking database Quorum, and in March, a federal parents’ bill of rights passed the Republican-controlled House.

Farris has not been personally involved in pushing the most recent bills, which have been fueled by anger over covid-19 mask mandates and how schools are handling Black history, sexual orientation and gender identity. Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty, which has become a powerful force in the parental rights movement since its launch less than three years ago, said it would be a mistake to overemphasize the impact of conservative Christian home-schoolers on the battles now playing out across the country.

Justice said she has met Farris but that the arguments he was making in the 1980s haven’t strongly influenced her organization, whose members have pushed to remove some books with LGBTQ+ themes from schools and to restrict what teachers can say about race and gender.

“It’s 2023,” she said. “There are a lot of things that people thought 40 years ago.”

Yet to those who have followed Farris’s career, the adoption of his arguments by so many families unconnected to home schooling is a measure of his success. In the eyes of his critics, he has masterfully imported an extreme religious agenda into the heart of the nation’s politics through the seemingly unobjectionable language of parents’ rights. Some argue that it has always been the goal of the most radical Christian home-schoolers not merely to opt out of the public schools but to transform them, either by diverting their funding or allowing religion back into the classroom.

“Everyone should be aware of Michael Farris and his influence on the Christian right,” said R.L. Stollar, a children’s rights advocate who was home-schooled and has long warned of the conservative home-schooling movement’s political goals. “To Farris’s credit, he is really good at what he does. He is really good at taking these more extreme positions and presenting them as if they are something that would just be based on common sense.”

Farris, 72, has a long track record of taking stands on the right. He argued in 2003 for the authority of states to criminalize gay sex, a position the Supreme Court rejected in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas. He aided the legal effort to keep Trump in power by overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election and has urged what he calls a “Joshua Generation” of young home-schoolers to “engage wholeheartedly in the battle to take the land,” expanding the political and cultural power of conservative Christians.

Farris nevertheless told The Post he supports the continued existence of public schools and abhors the idea of using them — or any other form of state power — to impose his religious beliefs on others.

“Do I want as many people as possible in this country to come to Christ? Yes, I do,” he said. “Do I want to use the government to accomplish that? I would absolutely oppose that with everything in my being.”

His parental rights agenda, he said, reaches beyond creed. And as more people embrace those ideas, he believes his patient strategic mantra — “take as much ground as you can take at the moment” — is paying off.

“I don’t want to say it’s my personal legacy,” he said. “It’s the movement’s legacy. Have I been a key player in the movement? Absolutely. It would be false modesty to say anything other than that.”

‘We all come to fight’
In 1980, the oldest of Farris’s 10 children, Christy, began attending kindergarten at an elementary school in eastern Washington, giving Farris and his wife, Vickie, their first and only experience as parents of a public school student. It lasted about two months.

After that, they moved to a different part of the state and enrolled Christy at a private Christian school. But even there, Farris said, they became concerned their daughter was being unduly influenced by other 6-year-olds. In 1982, they began home-schooling, part of a vanguard of evangelical Christians rejecting the secularization of American society. Vickie, the family’s primary educator, would devote the next 33 years of her life to lessons at the dining room table.

Home schooling at the time was rare, its legality uncertain. The Farris family, like others, confronted suspicion: Farris said a neighbor once asked one of his daughters, then about 6, if she was learning how to read. In Farris’s telling, the girl responded by reading aloud from the front page of the newspaper.

In many states, school administrators and prosecutors viewed home education as truancy or even child neglect. After repeatedly hearing from parents accused in such cases, Farris, a graduate of Gonzaga University School of Law, hit upon the idea of a “home-school union” of families to share court costs. In the spring of 1983 — a few months before Farris moved his family to Northern Virginia so he could work for the conservative Concerned Women for America — he co-founded the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA).

The basic idea, according to Farris: “You touch one of us, we all come to fight.”

Though it frequently worked on behalf of Christians, the association also represented Black Muslims, and atheists.

“From my theological perspective, God gave those children to them, not to me,” Farris said. “And I’m going to defend their right.”

Over the next decade, Farris and the HSLDA were at the forefront of courtroom and political battles that eventually led not only to the legalization of home schooling in every state but also to notably lax oversight for home educators in much of the country.

He also showed a keen interest in reshaping the public schools his clients were fleeing.

In the early 1980s, Farris argued that a high school English class was promoting a religion of “secular humanism” by teaching “The Learning Tree,” a novel by Black filmmaker Gordon Parks. His efforts on behalf of his client to have the book removed from the curriculum were rejected by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

But his most famous confrontation with public school officials came during a 1986 trial in Tennessee. His clients were born-again Christians who argued their children should not be required to read “Rumpelstiltskin,” “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and other material that they said undermined their religious beliefs.

A federal judge agreed, ordering that the children could opt out of the school’s reading lessons. But the decision in the case, Mozert v. Hawkins, was reversed by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that merely exposing children to ideas did not violate their rights. When the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, Farris was crushed.

In a 1987 speech, he called public schools “very, very dangerous” and “per se unconstitutional” because of the worldview they conveyed to students, according to “Battleground,” a 1993 book about the case.

“Inculcation of values is inherently a religious act,” he said. “What the public schools are doing is indoctrinating your children in religion, no matter what.”

Farris’s uncompromising positions gained him a following among conservative Christians, who helped him win the Republican nomination for Virginia lieutenant governor in 1993. But his views on education — especially his assertion in a 1990 book that public schools are “a godless monstrosity” — became a drag on his general election campaign. Prominent Republicans refused to endorse him. Democratic incumbent Don Beyer’s campaign tirelessly mocked Farris’s courtroom arguments against “The Wizard of Oz.”

In a good year for the GOP — Republicans won both the governor’s and attorney general’s races by double-digit margins — Farris lost by nine points.

But Farris wasn’t finished. Soon after his election loss, he began incorporating his arguments into a cause destined to dominate Republican political discourse: parental rights.

‘A right which comes from God’
On an October morning in 1995, Farris, then 44, sat before a House Judiciary subcommittee and urged legislators to pass the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act. The bill had been introduced by conservatives in Congress, but Farris, as he acknowledged in his testimony, was one of its authors.

He wanted Congress to decree that parental rights are fundamental, according them the same high level of deference that courts show to freedom of speech and of worship. Confusion abounded among judges over how they should balance the rights of parents against the duties of school officials and social workers, Farris contended.

“We are simply clarifying a right that exists — a right which comes from God,” Farris said.

To its opponents, the bill was far from an innocuous clarification, and the stakes for kids were potentially huge.

The law could shield abusive parents and wreak havoc in schools, children’s welfare advocates testified. Then-Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) predicted a barrage of lawsuits against schools from religious parents over subjects and materials they found offensive. Melvin Watt, an African American congressman from North Carolina, worried about the bill’s implications for the perspectives of racial and religious minorities.

“Having seen for all the years of my life how the curriculum in classes in schools has been pretty much devoid of any experiences in this nation from the Black side of America, it is to me kind of scary,” Watt said.

The bill never made it out of committee.

The parental rights movement won a more modest victory later that year when Michigan legislators adopted a bill Farris helped draft. But in 1996, the heavily publicized defeat of a Colorado ballot measure that would have enshrined parental rights in the state’s constitution seemed to be the movement’s death knell, recalled Greg Erken, a conservative activist who worked on the Colorado campaign.

“As so often happens in politics, people thought it was a loser rather than a winner,” Erken said.

Not Farris. For several years, he receded from politics, founding Patrick Henry College — the country’s first catering specifically to home-schoolers — in 2000.

Then, in 2007, Farris and other home-schooling leaders created a new parental rights group. Parentalrights.org, later joined by the Parental Rights Foundation, would never achieve its loftiest objective: an amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring the fundamental right of parents to “direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children.”

It was in state capitols — not the halls of Congress — that the organizations were destined to find success.

In 2013, Farris wrote a Virginia bill closely modeled on his proposed constitutional amendment. He took it to Brenda Pogge, a Republican state delegate who had home-schooled her own children and volunteered on his lieutenant governor’s campaign. After some revisions, the bill passed the Republican-controlled state legislature.

The new law was “kind of a sleeper,” Pogge recalled in a recent interview. That changed dramatically eight years later, when an up-and-coming Republican gubernatorial candidate began to invoke parents’ rights on the campaign trail. Farris said he was among those who urged Youngkin to promise “to get rid of all the politics in the public schools.”

“Say that a thousand times,” Farris recalled advising Youngkin. “You’ll be governor of Virginia.”

Youngkin acknowledged Farris’s counsel during his campaign and said he has continued to offer valuable input since he won office.

“Mike has been just an incredible contributor to protecting parents’ rights and advancing this whole cause,” Youngkin said in an interview.

But some doubt that Farris and his political allies truly believe that the rights of all parents are worth protecting.

In July, Youngkin once again cited the 2013 state law when he overhauled policies on how schools should deal with transgender students. Trans kids are now supposed to use single-occupant bathrooms or those matching their biological sex. School officials are not to address them by their preferred names or pronouns without a parent’s written request — and when parents do make such a request, the new policy states, teachers aren’t obligated to respect their wishes.

Labeling that a victory for parents’ rights angers Laura Jane Cohen, the mother of a recent high school graduate who identifies as transgender nonbinary.

“Whose rights? What parents? Who are these people that you claim to be representing? It’s not me,” said Cohen, a Fairfax County School Board member and Democratic candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. “It is offensive to me, the idea that this is supposedly a parents’ rights movement. Because it’s not any parents I know.”

‘Attacking the Christian worldview’
While he has fought in court for parents across the political and religious spectrum, Farris said he doesn’t believe that parents should have the right to help children transition to a different gender.

“Parents who engage in a behavior that causes long-term harm to their children — that crosses the barrier of what parental rights protects,” he said.

The best way to accommodate different ideas about how schools should handle such issues is to give parents as much choice as possible in how their kids are educated, Farris said, through universal voucher programs like those created in a handful of conservative states.

It’s a goal he shares with some powerful allies.

In May 2021, Farris attended a gathering of conservative activists at which former attorney general William P. Barr denounced public schools’ “indoctrination with a secular belief system” that is “antithetical to the beliefs and values of traditional, God-centered religion.”

Farris was approached after the speech by Peter Bohlinger, a Southern California real estate magnate who helps lead Ziklag, a group devoted to expanding Christian influence over American culture and government.

Membership in the organization — named after a town in the Bible that David used to organize raids against enemies of the ancient Israelites — is restricted to people with a net worth of at least $25 million, according to a page on Ziklag’s website that was viewed by The Post but has since been made private. The group envisions schools that welcome prayer and “a conservative, biblical worldview in science, humanities and the arts,” according to a Ziklag document that was among several recordings and other materials obtained by Documented and shared with The Post.

Neither Bohlinger nor several other Ziklag representatives responded to detailed questions about the recordings and documents.

As Bohlinger later recounted in one video, he approached Farris — then head of the Alliance Defending Freedom — about using the courts to achieve a far-reaching resolution to their concerns about public education.

Several weeks later, Farris was on the call with Ziklag members to make his pitch.

“Parents are being forced to choose: either pay for themselves for a form of education that is consistent with [their] moral worldview or send their kids into a system where they will be deliberately undermined,” Farris said, adding that school officials were “directly attacking the Christian worldview.”

It was a version of the argument he had been making for 40 years, but the stakes were almost inconceivably larger. Hanging in the balance were not the preferences of a tiny community of home-schoolers but the fate of tens of millions of children in America’s public schools.

Farris had recently set up a Center for Parental Rights at ADF. Bohlinger laid out the plan on the donor call: ADF lawyers would file lawsuits they hoped would lead to a Supreme Court ruling that declared a constitutional right to vouchers for private and home schools. As a result, Ziklag’s education committee estimated in one document, the public education system could lose about $238 billion a year — a third of its total funding.

“Our goal is to take down the education system as we know it today,” Bohlinger said in one of the videos reviewed by The Post.

Farris declined to discuss his Ziklag conversations with The Post, saying they were confidential.

ADF received a $444,249 grant from Ziklag in 2021, according to tax records — close to the $500,000 Farris requested. Ziklag gave ADF another $514,491 the following year, tax records show.

ADF has filed several lawsuits in state courts challenging schools’ instruction on racism or gender transition policies. Among the plaintiffs are Virginia parents arguing they should be reimbursed for education costs after pulling their children out of public schools they say taught an anti-racist curriculum. ADF has also filed amicus briefs in federal lawsuits brought by its allies asserting that school policies on gender transition are unconstitutional.

None of those lawsuits ask the courts to establish a universal right to school vouchers. ADF declined an interview request but issued a statement saying that “strategies to protect parental rights are constantly evolving.”

“Mr. Farris has worked on parental rights issues for many years and accomplished much in this area,” the group said. “ADF does not share all his views and is not pursuing all his theories.”

Farris told The Post that ADF’s lawsuits reflect “a more modest approach” than he once envisioned but could help lay a foundation for his larger goals. “I don’t think that the ground is ready for moving as rapidly as I had hoped originally,” he said.

Legal experts said that even if the Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down the school policies being challenged, it is unlikely the justices would upend America’s educational landscape by declaring a constitutional right to public funding for private and home schooling.

“I don’t see five votes for that,” said Douglas Laycock, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Virginia. “There might not be any votes for that.”

Farris himself sought to manage expectations on his call with Ziklag donors, saying that even with the court’s favorable composition they faced a hard — and possibly long — road to victory.

But so had home-schoolers during their legal battles decades earlier. Those fights had eventually led to broad acceptance of parents’ right to educate their children at home.

Now the time had come, Farris argued, for another revolution in public opinion — not toward home-schoolers but toward the education system they had left behind. Whether or not the lawsuits succeeded, he told the donors, their work would have an important consequence.

“More and more people,” Farris said, “will be upset about what’s going on in the public schools.”

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archive link: https://archive.is/kFEUu

After a live roundworm was found in the brain of an Australian woman, we take a look at other unusual cases of parasites turning up unexpectedly and explore how worried we should be.

Beetles
A tune by the homophonous band might give you an earworm, but an infestation of beetle larvae can cause a disease known as canthariasis.

Researchers in China reported such a case in 2016 in an eight-month-old girl with an underdeveloped immune system who had an irritable feeling. She was initially described as having worms in her stool, but further investigation revealed the creatures to be larvae of Lasioderma serricorne, commonly known as the cigar beetle.

The team say the beetle’s eggs could have been swallowed when the girl had contact with mud or ate oranges, which she had recently consumed.

While rare – the authors say their report is the first such case – they note such an infestation could be serious.

“This report implicates that L serricorne can infest human accidentally and cause canthariasis that may lead to severe damage to infant and older patient upon involvement of important organs of the body,” the team wrote.

Eye worms
In another stomach-turning first, a woman in Oregon was discovered to have a type of eye worm previously only seen in cattle in 2018. The worm larvae are picked up and spread by flies that feed on cow tears.

After horse riding in Gold Beach in an area where cattle are farmed, the woman, 26, experienced a week of eye irritation. The cause was discovered when she pulled a small worm from her left eye. She sought medical help, and 14 worms were subsequently removed, most of them by the patient herself.

The tiny worms, each less than a centimetre (half an inch) long, were found to be of a species called Thelazia gulosa.

Dr Richard Bradbury, the lead author of the study that reported the case and who works with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of parasitic diseases and malaria, said at the time that the infection was rare.

“Infections from Thelazia worms mostly happen in animals and humans are just incidental hosts,” he said. “This is incredibly interesting and I’m sure it might make some people squeamish, but it’s not something people should worry about.”

Rat lungworm
Graham McCumber, 24, ended up in hospital in Hawaii experiencing joint stiffness, fatigue and nausea after eating kale from his garden. The cause, it turned out, was rat lungworm, a parasite prevalent in south-east Asia and tropical Pacific islands.

The adult worm lives only in rodents, but its larvae can infect creatures including slugs, snails and freshwater shrimp. Should these intermediate hosts be eaten by humans, the larvae can cause angiostrongyliasis, a disease that affects the brain and spinal cord.

McCumber survived, but he was not alone. There have also been reports of people becoming infected with rat lungworm after swallowing snails for a dare. Some cases are mild but others can be fatal.

Experts say the disease can be prevented by washing and cooking vegetables, snails, crabs or shrimp thoroughly, checking vegetables for snails and slugs and avoiding eating raw vegetables where the parasite is prevalent.

Maggots
Infestation with maggots, known as myiasis, is rare in the UK and US, but it has been found in people who had travelled to tropical and subtropical areas.

In one case, doctors removed three live botflies, each two centimetres in size, from a woman’s eye, arm and neck. The 32-year-old American had experienced a swollen eye for four weeks after visiting the Amazon rainforest.

Tapeworms
Parasites can be a real headache, as a 50-year-old man in Britain discovered when doctors found a tapeworm in his brain.

The patient had been experiencing headaches, seizures, memory flashbacks and strange smells for four years before doctors removed the worm in 2012, revealing it had burrowed from one side of his brain to the other.

The worm was discovered after MRI scans revealed an unusual cluster of rings that were found to be moving through his brain. Scientists subsequently revealed it to be a type of tapeworm known as Spirometra erinaceieuropaei, which is typically found in amphibians and crustaceans in China.

Doctors behind the discovery said the man had probably picked up the parasite when visiting China, possibly through contaminated meat or water.

Dr Hayley Bennett, who worked on the case, said at the time: “Humans are a rare and accidental host for this particular worm.”

Even more bizarre is the discovery by experts in 2015 that when tapeworms get what looks like cancer, their human host can develop tumours.

The discovery was made after scientists in the US were asked to investigate biopsies from lung tumours and lymph nodes taken from a 41-year-old man who had HIV. The team found cancer-like cells, but revealed they were not human. Instead they were from a common type of tapeworm called Hymenolepis nana.

Dr Peter Olson of the Natural History Museum in London, who worked on the case, said such situations were very rare and only found in patients who are heavily immunocompromised.

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archive link: https://archive.is/Sg2eV

After a live roundworm was found in the brain of an Australian woman, we take a look at other unusual cases of parasites turning up unexpectedly and explore how worried we should be.

Beetles
A tune by the homophonous band might give you an earworm, but an infestation of beetle larvae can cause a disease known as canthariasis.

Researchers in China reported such a case in 2016 in an eight-month-old girl with an underdeveloped immune system who had an irritable feeling. She was initially described as having worms in her stool, but further investigation revealed the creatures to be larvae of Lasioderma serricorne, commonly known as the cigar beetle.

The team say the beetle’s eggs could have been swallowed when the girl had contact with mud or ate oranges, which she had recently consumed.

While rare – the authors say their report is the first such case – they note such an infestation could be serious.

“This report implicates that L serricorne can infest human accidentally and cause canthariasis that may lead to severe damage to infant and older patient upon involvement of important organs of the body,” the team wrote.

Eye worms
In another stomach-turning first, a woman in Oregon was discovered to have a type of eye worm previously only seen in cattle in 2018. The worm larvae are picked up and spread by flies that feed on cow tears.

After horse riding in Gold Beach in an area where cattle are farmed, the woman, 26, experienced a week of eye irritation. The cause was discovered when she pulled a small worm from her left eye. She sought medical help, and 14 worms were subsequently removed, most of them by the patient herself.

The tiny worms, each less than a centimetre (half an inch) long, were found to be of a species called Thelazia gulosa.

Dr Richard Bradbury, the lead author of the study that reported the case and who works with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of parasitic diseases and malaria, said at the time that the infection was rare.

“Infections from Thelazia worms mostly happen in animals and humans are just incidental hosts,” he said. “This is incredibly interesting and I’m sure it might make some people squeamish, but it’s not something people should worry about.”

Rat lungworm
Graham McCumber, 24, ended up in hospital in Hawaii experiencing joint stiffness, fatigue and nausea after eating kale from his garden. The cause, it turned out, was rat lungworm, a parasite prevalent in south-east Asia and tropical Pacific islands.

The adult worm lives only in rodents, but its larvae can infect creatures including slugs, snails and freshwater shrimp. Should these intermediate hosts be eaten by humans, the larvae can cause angiostrongyliasis, a disease that affects the brain and spinal cord.

McCumber survived, but he was not alone. There have also been reports of people becoming infected with rat lungworm after swallowing snails for a dare. Some cases are mild but others can be fatal.

Experts say the disease can be prevented by washing and cooking vegetables, snails, crabs or shrimp thoroughly, checking vegetables for snails and slugs and avoiding eating raw vegetables where the parasite is prevalent.

Maggots
Infestation with maggots, known as myiasis, is rare in the UK and US, but it has been found in people who had travelled to tropical and subtropical areas.

In one case, doctors removed three live botflies, each two centimetres in size, from a woman’s eye, arm and neck. The 32-year-old American had experienced a swollen eye for four weeks after visiting the Amazon rainforest.

Tapeworms
Parasites can be a real headache, as a 50-year-old man in Britain discovered when doctors found a tapeworm in his brain.

The patient had been experiencing headaches, seizures, memory flashbacks and strange smells for four years before doctors removed the worm in 2012, revealing it had burrowed from one side of his brain to the other.

The worm was discovered after MRI scans revealed an unusual cluster of rings that were found to be moving through his brain. Scientists subsequently revealed it to be a type of tapeworm known as Spirometra erinaceieuropaei, which is typically found in amphibians and crustaceans in China.

Doctors behind the discovery said the man had probably picked up the parasite when visiting China, possibly through contaminated meat or water.

Dr Hayley Bennett, who worked on the case, said at the time: “Humans are a rare and accidental host for this particular worm.”

Even more bizarre is the discovery by experts in 2015 that when tapeworms get what looks like cancer, their human host can develop tumours.

The discovery was made after scientists in the US were asked to investigate biopsies from lung tumours and lymph nodes taken from a 41-year-old man who had HIV. The team found cancer-like cells, but revealed they were not human. Instead they were from a common type of tapeworm called Hymenolepis nana.

Dr Peter Olson of the Natural History Museum in London, who worked on the case, said such situations were very rare and only found in patients who are heavily immunocompromised.

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archive link: https://archive.is/Sg2eV

Without proven treatments, many people are still sick.

Since August 2020, David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, has helped treat more than 3,000 people with Long COVID. These patients, in his experience, fit into one of three groups.

A small number, no more than 10%, have stubborn symptoms that don’t get better, no matter what Putrino and his team try. A big chunk see some improvement, but remain sick. And about 15% to 20% report full recovery—an elusive benchmark that Putrino greets with cautious optimism.

“I call it ‘fully recovered for now,’” Putrino says, since lots of people’s symptoms eventually come back, sometimes if they catch COVID-19 again, which can land them back at square one.

Putrino’s outlook isn’t purposely gloomy; it’s one informed by the difficult realities of treating Long COVID, a condition with no known cure and is defined by long-lasting symptoms following a case of COVID-19. More than 200 symptoms are associated with Long COVID, commonly including fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, intolerance to exercise, chronic pain, and more. Millions of people around the world have developed Long COVID, and an uncertain number have completely recovered.

“It’s really hard to tell” exactly how many people get over their symptoms entirely, says Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis who researches Long COVID. “But anecdotally, from clinical experience, the majority unfortunately don’t.”

Who gets better?
Zeroing in on the Long COVID recovery rate is a work in progress, but two recent reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest remission is possible.

One, based on U.S. Census Bureau data, found that roughly 6% of U.S. adults currently have Long COVID, down from about 7.5% in the summer of 2022. The other found that many people’s symptoms disappear over time. A year post-infection, people who’d had COVID-19 were roughly as likely to have lingering symptoms as people who’d had other respiratory illnesses, the researchers found. That tracks with a January 2023 study in the BMJ, which found people who develop Long COVID after mild initial illnesses can expect most symptoms to improve within a year.

Other researchers, however, have come to less optimistic conclusions. In an August study published in Nature Medicine, Al-Aly and his team found people who’d had mild COVID-19 remained at increased risk of more than 20 Long COVID symptoms—including fatigue, gastrointestinal problems, and pulmonary issues—two years later. People whose COVID-19 was severe enough that they were hospitalized were at increased risk of more than 50 health problems two years later.

The findings reflect “the arduous, protracted road to recovery" for some people who catch COVID-19, Al-Aly says—a road that many people with Long COVID are still on, according to research posted online in July as a not-yet-peer-reviewed preprint. In a group of 341 people with Long COVID, only about 8% had fully recovered after two years of follow-up, co-author Dr. Lourdes Mateu and her colleagues found.

How can multiple studies on the same topic reach such different conclusions? The way they’re designed can make a difference, Putrino says. Some Long COVID research uses data drawn from patients’ health records. In these studies, Putrino says, researchers sometimes assume symptoms have resolved if someone stops coming in for care. But there are lots of other reasons someone might stop seeing their doctor: financial constraints, frustration that treatments aren’t working, health declining to the point that leaving home becomes difficult, and so on.

“Recovery” can also be defined differently. Is it a complete resolution of symptoms, or improving enough that someone can function despite their ill health? Once researchers start splitting those hairs, Al-Aly says, they often find that someone “didn’t really recover; they adjusted to a new baseline.”

For that reason, research that takes into account patients’ own perceptions of their symptoms and recovery is important. That’s what Mateu and her team did. For two years, they tracked Long COVID patients who’d sought care at a hospital in Badalona, Spain, periodically asking about their symptoms during face-to-face visits and performing secondary diagnostic tests when necessary. With that level of scrutiny, Mateu says, the vast majority of patients did not meet their definition of recovery: the resolution of all persistent symptoms for at least three consecutive months.

Granted, the patients in Mateu’s study were a specific group. Most were infected before vaccines (which have been shown to be somewhat, though not entirely, protective against Long COVID) were available and they were all sick enough to seek care at a hospital-based Long COVID clinic. Counterintuitively, however, the people in the study who were originally sickest—those who were admitted to the ICU when they had acute COVID-19—were more likely to recover within two years than people with milder initial illnesses, Mateu says.

In some cases, Mateu says, people with severe COVID-19 are left with issues that are significant but have better prognoses than Long COVID, such as post-intensive care syndrome. People who develop Long COVID after mild illnesses, by contrast, can be more vexing. Their test results may come back pristine yet their health remains poor, making it difficult for doctors to determine what to treat and how.

NIH is studying possible treatments
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently launched clinical trials focused on potential treatments, but it’s not yet clear if any will succeed and less likely any will work for all Long COVID patients, since the condition’s symptoms can look different from person to person. The NIH will test various therapies in patients with specific symptom clusters—offering brain training for those with cognitive dysfunction, for example, and wakefulness drugs for those with sleep issues—rather than across the board.

As of now, there is no one-size-fits-all treatment for Long COVID, nor any treatment guaranteed to work at all. Each time a new patient enters their clinic, Putrino and his team start from the ground up, doing a comprehensive analysis of the individual's health in hopes of finding a problem that may respond to drugs, supplements, nerve stimulation, or other tools.

Sometimes this approach works better than others; sometimes it doesn’t work at all. The rarity of complete recovery, Putrino says, underscores how desperately Long COVID sufferers need more extensive treatment trials, and fast.

“I feel time pressure with these patients,” Putrino says. “Every second that we’re not testing something new or trying something that’s a moonshot for these patients, they’re getting worse.”

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archive link: https://archive.is/EKcy0

Without proven treatments, many people are still sick.

Since August 2020, David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, has helped treat more than 3,000 people with Long COVID. These patients, in his experience, fit into one of three groups.

A small number, no more than 10%, have stubborn symptoms that don’t get better, no matter what Putrino and his team try. A big chunk see some improvement, but remain sick. And about 15% to 20% report full recovery—an elusive benchmark that Putrino greets with cautious optimism.

“I call it ‘fully recovered for now,’” Putrino says, since lots of people’s symptoms eventually come back, sometimes if they catch COVID-19 again, which can land them back at square one.

Putrino’s outlook isn’t purposely gloomy; it’s one informed by the difficult realities of treating Long COVID, a condition with no known cure and is defined by long-lasting symptoms following a case of COVID-19. More than 200 symptoms are associated with Long COVID, commonly including fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, intolerance to exercise, chronic pain, and more. Millions of people around the world have developed Long COVID, and an uncertain number have completely recovered.

“It’s really hard to tell” exactly how many people get over their symptoms entirely, says Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis who researches Long COVID. “But anecdotally, from clinical experience, the majority unfortunately don’t.”

Who gets better?
Zeroing in on the Long COVID recovery rate is a work in progress, but two recent reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest remission is possible.

One, based on U.S. Census Bureau data, found that roughly 6% of U.S. adults currently have Long COVID, down from about 7.5% in the summer of 2022. The other found that many people’s symptoms disappear over time. A year post-infection, people who’d had COVID-19 were roughly as likely to have lingering symptoms as people who’d had other respiratory illnesses, the researchers found. That tracks with a January 2023 study in the BMJ, which found people who develop Long COVID after mild initial illnesses can expect most symptoms to improve within a year.

Other researchers, however, have come to less optimistic conclusions. In an August study published in Nature Medicine, Al-Aly and his team found people who’d had mild COVID-19 remained at increased risk of more than 20 Long COVID symptoms—including fatigue, gastrointestinal problems, and pulmonary issues—two years later. People whose COVID-19 was severe enough that they were hospitalized were at increased risk of more than 50 health problems two years later.

The findings reflect “the arduous, protracted road to recovery" for some people who catch COVID-19, Al-Aly says—a road that many people with Long COVID are still on, according to research posted online in July as a not-yet-peer-reviewed preprint. In a group of 341 people with Long COVID, only about 8% had fully recovered after two years of follow-up, co-author Dr. Lourdes Mateu and her colleagues found.

How can multiple studies on the same topic reach such different conclusions? The way they’re designed can make a difference, Putrino says. Some Long COVID research uses data drawn from patients’ health records. In these studies, Putrino says, researchers sometimes assume symptoms have resolved if someone stops coming in for care. But there are lots of other reasons someone might stop seeing their doctor: financial constraints, frustration that treatments aren’t working, health declining to the point that leaving home becomes difficult, and so on.

“Recovery” can also be defined differently. Is it a complete resolution of symptoms, or improving enough that someone can function despite their ill health? Once researchers start splitting those hairs, Al-Aly says, they often find that someone “didn’t really recover; they adjusted to a new baseline.”

For that reason, research that takes into account patients’ own perceptions of their symptoms and recovery is important. That’s what Mateu and her team did. For two years, they tracked Long COVID patients who’d sought care at a hospital in Badalona, Spain, periodically asking about their symptoms during face-to-face visits and performing secondary diagnostic tests when necessary. With that level of scrutiny, Mateu says, the vast majority of patients did not meet their definition of recovery: the resolution of all persistent symptoms for at least three consecutive months.

Granted, the patients in Mateu’s study were a specific group. Most were infected before vaccines (which have been shown to be somewhat, though not entirely, protective against Long COVID) were available and they were all sick enough to seek care at a hospital-based Long COVID clinic. Counterintuitively, however, the people in the study who were originally sickest—those who were admitted to the ICU when they had acute COVID-19—were more likely to recover within two years than people with milder initial illnesses, Mateu says.

In some cases, Mateu says, people with severe COVID-19 are left with issues that are significant but have better prognoses than Long COVID, such as post-intensive care syndrome. People who develop Long COVID after mild illnesses, by contrast, can be more vexing. Their test results may come back pristine yet their health remains poor, making it difficult for doctors to determine what to treat and how.

NIH is studying possible treatments
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently launched clinical trials focused on potential treatments, but it’s not yet clear if any will succeed and less likely any will work for all Long COVID patients, since the condition’s symptoms can look different from person to person. The NIH will test various therapies in patients with specific symptom clusters—offering brain training for those with cognitive dysfunction, for example, and wakefulness drugs for those with sleep issues—rather than across the board.

As of now, there is no one-size-fits-all treatment for Long COVID, nor any treatment guaranteed to work at all. Each time a new patient enters their clinic, Putrino and his team start from the ground up, doing a comprehensive analysis of the individual's health in hopes of finding a problem that may respond to drugs, supplements, nerve stimulation, or other tools.

Sometimes this approach works better than others; sometimes it doesn’t work at all. The rarity of complete recovery, Putrino says, underscores how desperately Long COVID sufferers need more extensive treatment trials, and fast.

“I feel time pressure with these patients,” Putrino says. “Every second that we’re not testing something new or trying something that’s a moonshot for these patients, they’re getting worse.”

---

archive link: https://archive.is/EKcy0

The White House on Tuesday bashed House Republicans for pursuing “handouts” for pharmaceutical companies to highlight its announcement of the first 10 drugs chosen for Medicare price negotiation under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

“[A]s the Biden Administration takes these newest historic actions to lower drug costs for Americans and strengthen Medicare, congressional Republicans continue to side with Big Pharma’s price gouging and cuts to Medicare benefits instead,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates wrote in a memo.

“Not only do congressional Republicans want to take the new benefits being announced today away from Americans with repeal legislation — they are even siding with Big Pharma’s lawsuits to stop them in their tracks,” he wrote.

The drugs, announced Tuesday by the White House, were chosen based on their eligibility under the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law in a year ago. They account for $50.5 billion in total gross Medicare Part D costs.

Negotiations over these drugs will take place in 2023 and 2024, and drugmakers have until Oct. 1 to sign agreements, according to the law. However, industry groups are seeking an injunction by that date amid various legal efforts to block the law entirely. Even if it goes forward as planned, actual savings would not kick in until 2026.

In his memo, Bates noted that Republicans have floated trying to repeal Biden’s plan to let Medicare negotiate lower drug costs, pointing to the 2022 midterms when some Republicans said an agenda item would be to claw back the law.

He said doing so would benefit only big pharmaceutical companies and contrasted the GOP economic agenda to Biden’s economic agenda, dubbed Bidenomics.

“The handouts congressional Republicans are pursuing for Big Pharma would explode our deficit, weaken Medicare, and subject more American seniors and families to price gouging for life-saving medicines,” Bates wrote.

“Across the board, the hallmark of congressional Republicans’ trickle-down economic agenda is to increase costs and financial burdens shouldered by hardworking Americans in exchange for welfare payoffs to the super rich and multinational corporations. In this case, Big Pharma.”

“We should be bolstering Medicare’s ability to lower drug costs for families, instead of trying to erase them,” he added.

Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), among the GOP critics of the drug negotiations, said in a hearing in June the plan is “an unconstitutional taking” and it will likely face challenges in the courts, in light of a Merck lawsuit against the drug pricing provision.

Ahead of the midterm elections, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) said repealing the law could be a GOP agenda item “because those drug provisions are so dangerous, by discouraging investment in life-saving cures,” Axios reported at the time.

Later Tuesday, Biden is expected to give a speech to mark the selection of the drugs.

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archive link: https://archive.is/wip/dx3px

Australia gifted the Corvo PPDS drone, made of lightweight board and rubber, to Ukraine. Now it's possible they've struck a Russian airfield.

Ukraine claimed that an attack that damaged five fighter planes at a Russian airfield was carried out using "cardboard" drones from Australia.

Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) told the Kyiv Post on Saturday that it had struck a MiG-29 four Su-30 fighter jets at Kursk airfield in western Russia.
As well as the planes, the drones damaged two Pantsir missile launchers and part of an S-300 air defense system, the SBU told the outlet.

According to prominent pro-Russian blogger @fighterbomber, which closely follows the Russian air force, the attack was the first use of Australian-provided delivery drones made of cardboard.
Insider could not independently confirm the claim, but on Tuesday Ukraine's ambassador to Australia Vasyl Mryoshnychenko vouched for it, saying in a post on X: "Cardboard drones from Australia used in attack on Russian airfield."

The claim is not as wild as it sounds. In March, Australian defense manufacturer SYPAQ announced it had secured a $700,000 contract with the Australian government to produce its Corvo Precision Payload Delivery System drones for Ukraine.

The Corvo drones are described by SYPAQ as "the cardboard plane," but per an earlier company press release they're made from waxed foamboard. They come flat-packed and can fly up to 75 miles — putting Kursk just within reach of the borders of Ukraine.

They are designed for reconnaissance or delivery rather than for carrying explosives.

It's unclear how exactly they would have been used as part of the latest attack. Per @fighterbomber's claim, the attack combined explosive drones with empty ones, suggesting the Corvo's lightweight board construction would help the overall group evade radar.

Former Australian general Mick Ryan told The Age that it would be simple to adapt the Corvo to carry explosives. SYPAQ declined to comment to the paper on how the drones were used.
In a post about the drone attack, the Russian MoD's description of the drones over Kursk said they were aircraft-style, which corresponds with the Corvo design.

The strike would be a cost-effective way to take out exorbitant Russian planes: A Su-30 is estimated to cost tens of millions of dollars to manufacture.

The Russian MoD made no mention of damage at the airfield, simply saying it had shot down two drones over Kursk and in Bryansk, around 150 miles away. Meanwhile, Kursk's governor, Roman Starovoyt said that a drone had damaged an apartment block.
Explosions were caught on camera near Kursk railway station that night, Ukrainian outlet RBC reported.

The ambassador told the Sydney Morning Herald that the airfield is a "legitimate target" because Russia uses it as a base to launch attacks on Ukraine.

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archive link: https://archive.is/8TkUt

Experts say it’s less risky to catch Covid-19 than it used to be, but there are still good reasons not to treat it casually.

Covid-19 was never just another cold. We knew it was going to stick around and keep changing to try to get the upper hand on our immune systems.

But we’ve changed, too. Our B cells and T cells, keepers of our immune memories, aren’t as blind to this virus as they were when we first encountered the novel coronavirus in 2020. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has screened blood samples and estimates that 97% of people in the US have some immunity to Covid-19 through vaccination, infection or both.

Then there’s science: We have updated vaccines and good antivirals to lean on when cases start to rise. Masks still work. Rapid tests are in stores. We now know to filter the air and to ventilate our spaces.

Those strategies, plus our hard-won immunity, had helped bring our national numbers of infections, hospitalizations and deaths down to levels that felt almost forgettable.

Almost.

Now that Covid-19 infections have started to rise again, it feels like people all over the country are testing positive, and it’s hard to know how to react. The government has been dialing back its response since the end of the public health emergency in May. Good Covid-19 data is hard to come by and harder to interpret.

So if people are less likely to be hospitalized or die from a Covid-19 infection now, has the danger passed? Is there still reason to worry if you do catch the infection for a second, third or fourth time?

Experts say it’s less risky to catch Covid-19 than it used to be, but there are still good reasons not to treat it casually.

“At this point, the risk is lower because of our prior immunity, whether for severe outcomes or for long Covid,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and dean of the Yale School of Public Health.

“Covid is still more dangerous than the flu, but its level of danger is becoming less,” she said, noting that we’re still very early in our human experience with the coronavirus, even four years in, and there are still things we don’t know.

“But for it to behave like other respiratory viruses in terms of seasonality and surges is entirely expected,” she added.

It would be “really weird” for Covid to disappear or for it not to cause illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths. “It is still a virus,” Ranney said.

But a somewhat predictable waxing and waning of infections doesn’t make Covid-19 something to turn our backs on.

Our immune systems are better at spotting danger

After more than three grueling years, nearly all Americans have some immunity against Covid-19.

That means our immune systems – as long as they’re healthy and working as they should – will remember most forms of the coronavirus when it next comes our way.

That process takes some time to get going, however. That lag may give the virus enough of a window to get a foothold in our nasal passages or lungs, and we get sick. We may feel crummy for a few days, but then our B cells and T cells get their antibody production up and running. Eventually, they shut the virus down, and we get better.

That’s what should happen. But for many, their immune system just doesn’t kick in as quickly or as vigorously as it should.

Immune function drops off naturally with age. About 1 in 4 Americans is over the age of 60, according to census data. Then there are certain medications and health conditions that suppress immune function. About 3% of the U.S. population – 7 million people – is severely immunocompromised, according to the National Institutes of Health. This is a group taking medications to protect organ transplants or who are getting powerful drugs for cancer treatment, for example.

Then there’s individual variability. Through genetic bad luck, some people may just be at higher risk of serious reactions to Covid-19 infections, and they probably wouldn’t know it.

Taken together, that’s a sizeable pool of people who benefit greatly from having antibodies at the ready to take on the coronavirus as fast as possible. Vaccines get those antibodies in place and ready to work as soon as they’re needed.

Sometimes, people are so immunocompromised that vaccines can’t help them much, either. They benefit from preventive shots containing Covid-fighting antibodies that are built to stick around the body for a few months. Until this year, there was such a preventive product available, Evusheld. But the virus has evolved so much that Evusheld lost its potency, and in January, the FDA revoked its authorization.

Since then, people who have very low immune function haven’t had anything to protect them from infection or severe disease. But that could change. The government announced this week that it’s funding the development of a new preventive antibody through the drug company Regeneron. Trials of that drug are expected to start this fall, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

While nearly all of us have immune systems that can recognize key parts of the virus now, even that memory to the infection fades over time. The longer it has been since you’ve been infected or vaccinated, the more forgetful your immune system becomes.

Those B cells and T cells, “they’re going to be a little slower to respond. They’re not they’re not as primed and ready to go,” Ranney said.

Your strongest immunity will be in the two weeks to two months after you get your vaccines. That means it’s smart to try to get your shots shortly before Covid is expected to be on the upswing. Just like for flu, experts expect the worst of Covid to hit in the fall and winter.

CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen said that even though cases are going up now, most people will be better off waiting a few weeks to get the newly updated Covid-19 vaccines rather than trying to get one of the older bivalent vaccines right now. But this is dependent on personal risk, so if you’re concerned, talk to your doctor or nurse practitioner about your options.

Risks from new variants

Variants are another reason people need to keep getting Covid vaccines. The coronavirus evolves constantly. Most of the time, its improvements are incremental. In essence, it slips on a hat or fake mustache, but that’s not enough to completely disguise it from our immune system or our vaccines when it tries to break in.

Occasionally, it gets a makeover. It has cut and dyed its hair, had plastic surgery and lost a ton of weight, so to speak. These big changes make it unrecognizable to our immune system and sometimes to vaccines and drugs we use to fend it off.

That happened during the first wave of Omicron. A virus emerged in South Africa and Botswana that was wholly different from the viruses in circulation but still caused Covid-19. It quickly spread worldwide, infecting vaccinated and previously infected people alike. Omicron caused a jaw-dropping 1 million infections a day in the United States in the winter of 2021.

Another virus like that has emerged on the world stage. It’s called BA.2.86, and it has more than 30 amino acid changes to its spike protein, which makes it as genetically distant from its next closest ancestor – BA.2 – as the original Omicron variant was from the ancestral strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that emerged in 2019 in China.

Compared with the very first sequences of the virus that causes Covid-19, it has 58 changes to amino acids in its spike protein, according to Dr. Jesse Bloom, who studies the molecular structure of viruses at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.

It’s not clear exactly where BA.2.86 came from. Scientists believe that the pattern of mutations it carries are characteristic of a virus that’s been changing inside the body of a chronically infected person. Typically, these patients have diminished immune function so that they can’t completely clear the virus from their bodies, but they have enough immunity that it puts pressure on the virus to keep changing to survive. Or it may have previously circulated in a part of the world with limited variant surveillance.

Scientists have spotted 13 human infections with this emerging variant have been confirmed from six countries: Israel, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United States, Portugal and South Africa. The status of the patients is not known in every case. Of the cases for which information on the patients is available, one has been hospitalized, and none have died.

he people do not appear to have had contact with each other, and only one has traveled, indicating that the variant is present around the world and spreading in the community – though it is not known to what extent.

It has also been picked up at very low levels in wastewater in the US, Switzerland, Denmark and Thailand.

It is also not clear whether this virus will outcompete other circulating variants and grow to cause widespread infections. Variant hunters around the world seem to have spotted it early.

Researchers are studying whether it will be able to evade immunity from past infection and vaccination. More information should be available within a few weeks.

Unfortunately, the fact that the new coronavirus can morph this way means we’ll probably need to keep updating our vaccines and our immunity to keep pace.

The US government has launched Project NextGen, which aims to create longer-lasting and more variant-proof vaccines. The first clinical trials of those new vaccines are expected to start this winter, HHS says.
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