Latest Health News

THURSDAY, April 21, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- A fully vaccinated health care worker got COVID-19 twice in less than a month — the shortest known time between infections, Spanish researchers report.The 31-year-old was infected with the Omicron variant just 21 days after catching the Delta variant."This case highlights the potential of the Omicron variant to evade the previous immunity acquired either from a natural infection with other variants or from vaccines," said study author Gemma Recio, a researcher at Catalan Institute of Health in Tarragona, Spain.The woman first tested positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 20, 2021, during a staff screening at her workplace. She had received a booster shot 12 days earlier. She self-isolated for 10 days before returning to work and did not develop any...

THURSDAY, April 21, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Larger and more intense wildfires in the U.S. Pacific Northwest are causing a spike in air pollution across North America that endangers millions of people, a new study warns.Wildfire smoke has been linked to significant respiratory problems, and may also cause heart and pregnancy complications."Wildfire emissions have increased so substantially that they're changing the annual pattern of air quality across North America," said lead author Rebecca Buchholz, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. "It's quite clear that there is a new peak of air pollution in August that didn't used to exist."For the study, her team analyzed wildfire emissions from 2002 to 2018 and found a sharp increase in carbon...

THURSDAY, April 21, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- A prior COVID-19 infection may provide unvaccinated adults with as much immunity against reinfection as the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna mRNA vaccines, new research suggests.However, the study was conducted before the surge of the highly transmissible Omicron variant. "We found that, before the emergence of the Omicron variant, natural immunity provided a similar degree of protection against COVID-19 infection as mRNA vaccination," said study author Dr. Ari Robicsek. He is chief medical analytics officer for the Providence health system, which operates in the western United States."That said, vaccination is a considerably safer way to acquire that immunity," Robicsek added in a health system news release.For the study, the investigators...

THURSDAY, April 21, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Obesity is tied to many types of cancer, and new research finds that over the long term it nearly doubles a woman's risk of endometrial cancer."This study is an interesting first step into how genetic analyses could be used to uncover exactly how obesity causes cancer, and what can be done to tackle it," said study lead author Emma Hazelwood, of the University of Bristol in England."Links between obesity and womb [endometrial] cancer are well-known, but this is one of the largest studies which has looked into exactly why that is on a molecular level. We look forward to further research exploring how we can now use this information to help reduce the risk of cancer in people struggling with obesity," Hazelwood said in a Cancer Research UK...