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THURSDAY, March 5, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- An Ebola drug that's proven effective against some coronaviruses may also work against the new COVID-19 coronavirus, scientists say. Remdesivir was developed by Gilead Sciences in response to the 2014 West African Ebola virus epidemic. "We know the drug works against different coronaviruses, like MERS [Middle East respiratory syndrome] and SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome], and we know the novel coronavirus is very similar to SARS," said virologist Matthias Götte, of the University of Alberta in Canada. "So I would say I'm cautiously optimistic that the results our team found with remdesivir and MERS will be similar with COVID-19." The researchers said they discovered why remdesivir is effective in treating the MERS and SARS...

THURSDAY, March 5, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- California declared a state of emergency Wednesday as health officials kept a cruise ship linked to the state's first coronavirus death from docking in San Francisco. The U.S. Coast Guard was to deliver testing kits Thursday to the Grand Princess, where 62 passengers have been quarantined in their cabins because they were on the first leg of the cruise with a California man who died of COVID-19 on Wednesday, CNN reported. A helicopter will deliver the passenger samples to a lab in the San Francisco area for testing, CNN reported. Eleven passengers and 10 crew members are showing symptoms. Roughly 2,500 passengers are on board the ship, which was returning to San Francisco from Hawaii, the second leg of the cruise, CNN reported. California...

WEDNESDAY, March 4, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- A brain-controlled robotic arm gives users precise hand control that enables them to do more complicated things intuitively than they could with a conventional prosthetic, researchers say. "It's like you have a hand again," said study participant Joe Hamilton, who lost his arm in a fireworks accident in 2013. "You can pretty much do anything you can do with a real hand with that hand. It brings you back to a sense of normalcy." According to the University of Michigan team behind the technology, the new hand uses the patient's own muscle tissue to amplify normally faint signals from arm nerves, pumping them up to a much higher level. That application in signaling allows users to achieve real-time, intuitive, finger-level control of the...

WEDNESDAY, March 4, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Go ahead and crack that egg. Eating one a day isn't likely to increase your risk of heart disease, researchers say. The three-decade study showed no association between moderate egg consumption and risk of heart disease. The report -- led by a team at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston -- should help reassure uneasy egg eaters. "Recent studies reignited the debate on this controversial topic, but our study provides compelling evidence supporting the lack of an appreciable association between moderate egg consumption and cardiovascular disease," first author Jean-Philippe Drouin-Chartier, a visiting scientist, said in a Harvard news release. He's an assistant professor at Laval University in Quebec, Canada. For the new...