FDA Approves First RSV Vaccine for Pregnant Women to Protect Infants
August 24th 2023Monday’s action followed by one month the agency’s approval of another first — a monoclonal antibody immunization for newborns — against respiratory syncytial virus, the leading cause of infant hospitalizations in the United States
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Insomnia Adds to the Economic Burden of All Five Comorbid Conditions Studied
July 14th 2023Between 9% and 12% of American adults have insomnia, and 85% of them also are diagnosed with comorbid conditions like type 2 diabetes and dementia. While the numerous health consequences of comorbid insomnia have been well-documented, the additional costs for specific disease groups have not been measured in large studies — until now.
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Most babies born to mothers who used opioids during pregnancy are delivered with a form of addiction called neonatal abstinence syndrome. It is treated in the hospital, but how long the treatment lasts depends on the severity of withdrawal symptoms called neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome — the amount of distress that the newborn is experiencing.
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Pre-pandemic Sleep Disorders Associated With Risk of Long COVID, Study Finds
June 15th 2023Some effects of poor sleep (fatigue, daytime dysfunction) resemble some symptoms of long COVID. As it turns out, infected women who were healthy sleepers before and early in the pandemic were less likely to report long COVID symptoms.
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The purpose of the federal vaccine safety reporting system often is misunderstood, and its data can be easily used to spread false information about vaccination. A new report from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania looks at how it was manipulated to raise doubts about COVID-19 vaccines and suggests remedies.
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A Universal Flu Vaccine: The Dream Inches Just A Bit Closer to Reality
May 19th 2023Seasonal influenza kills hundreds of thousands of people every year due to a constantly changing virus and highly inefficient vaccine production. A universal flu vaccine could deal with the first problem, and mRNA technology with the second.
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Ghana is First To Approve ‘World-Changing’ Malaria Vaccine
May 3rd 2023Researchers have spent a century trying to develop a vaccine against malaria, one of the world’s biggest killers. The first shot to be approved, two years ago, is 30% effective. A new one, in the works for three decades, has a reported 77% efficacy and a licensee with the capacity to produce 200 million doses a year.
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CDC Streamlines COVID-19 Vaccination Recommendations: One Shot for Adults Under 65, Two for Seniors
April 24th 2023The federal government is hoping that newly simplified vaccination guidelines will lead more Americans to get vaccinated against COVID-19. In other pandemic news, HHS announced plans to keep vaccines and treatments free for the uninsured, and an appellate court sided with the Biden administration's disputed vaccination requirement for federal contractors.
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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Works With Most Kinds of Insomnia. It Might Work With All.
April 24th 2023Insomnia is responsible for a lot of angst — and worse. Treatment is fairly straightforward. But for one cause of insomnia, the mechanism of treatment — and whether it works — remains elusive.
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Vaccines to Protect the Young and the Old Against RSV Show Promising Results in Phase 3 trials
April 13th 2023Despite decades of research, no available vaccine targets respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a disease that causes hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide among young children and older adults. Interim results of two late-stage trials of Pfizer’sRSV prefusion F vaccine suggest the vaccine is efficacious, although the low RSV infection rates during the high COVID-19 pandemic years limited some of the findings.
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