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WEDNESDAY, June 23, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- One dose of a two-dose mRNA COVID-19 vaccine is enough to protect previously infected people, but it's likely they and everyone with two doses will still require booster shots at a later date, a new study suggests.That's because antibodies triggered through either natural infection or vaccines decline at about the same rate, the University of California, Los Angeles researchers explained."Our data suggest that a person who previously had COVID-19 has a huge response after the first mRNA vaccination and has little or no benefit from the second dose," said senior author Dr. Otto Yang, a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, and of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics. "It is worth considering changing public...

WEDNESDAY, June 23, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Losing weight is hard, but many weight loss supplements promise to make the journey easy. Unfortunately, there's little high-quality research to back these claims, a new study shows.Hundreds of weight loss supplements like green tea extract, chitosan, guar gum and conjugated linoleic acid are being hawked by aggressive marketers. And an estimated 34% of Americans who want to lose weight have tried one, according to the researchers."The temptation is great because someone has a megaphone, but you don't need a celebrity endorsement and/or splashy headlines to tell you how to lose weight. The medical establishment will speak loudly and clearly when there's something to say," said study co-author Dr. Srividya Kidambi, an associate professor and...

WEDNESDAY, June 23, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- The pandemic not only cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, but it also appears to have triggered a deep drop in births, U.S. health officials reported Wednesday. Until 2020, the birth rate had been declining about 2% a year, but that rate dropped to 4% with the start of the pandemic, researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. "When you take that one step further and look at the decline across 2020, there were greater declines in the second half of the year — 6% versus the first part of the year [at] 2%," said report author Brady Hamilton, a statistician demographer at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)."You have this decline that is larger than what we've seen in prior years and...

WEDNESDAY, June 23, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Rashes, itchiness and other skin problems can develop after people receive COVID-19 vaccines, but such problems are rare and go away quickly, new research shows.For the study, the researchers looked at more than 40,000 employees of a Boston hospital system who received two-dose mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (such as the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines) and completed at least one symptom survey after their first shot."This is the first information we have on risk of recurrence of skin reactions after dose 2 when there is a dose 1 reaction," said study leader Dr. Kimberly Blumenthal. She is co-director of the clinical epidemiology program, division of rheumatology, allergy and immunology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "Our findings could...