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THURSDAY, May 27, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- A third antibody treatment designed to keep high-risk COVID-19 patients from winding up in the hospital was approved for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday.Importantly, in lab tests the newly authorized drug, dubbed sotrovimab, neutralized the highly infectious virus variant that is crippling India, as well as variants first spotted in Britain, South Africa, Brazil, California and New York. "With the authorization of this monoclonal antibody treatment, we are providing another option to help keep high-risk patients with COVID-19 out of the hospital," Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in an agency news release. "It is important to expand the arsenal of...

THURSDAY, May 27, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Patients facing relatively simple outpatient surgeries are nonetheless being told to undergo a number of preoperative tests that just aren't necessary, a new study reports.More than half of a group of patients facing low-risk outpatient surgery received one or more tests -- blood work, urinalysis, an electrocardiogram (EKG), a chest X-ray -- prior to their operation.One-third of patients underwent at least two tests, and roughly 1 in 7 patients had three or more tests before their simple surgery, said lead researcher Dr. Nicholas Berlin, a surgeon and health policy expert at the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.These tests are still being requested even though "we've known for almost a decade that there's...

THURSDAY, May 27, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Each city has its individual mix of tell-tale microbes, new research shows."If you gave me your shoe, I could tell you with about 90% accuracy the city in the world from which you came," said study senior author Christopher Mason, director of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction in New York City. His team analyzed microbes gathered from the air and surfaces of public transit systems and hospitals in 60 cities on six continents."Every city has its own 'molecular echo' of the microbes that define it," said Mason, who is also a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.The more than 4,700 samples analyzed in the study were collected over three years as part of the first systematic worldwide catalog of urban microbial...

THURSDAY, May 27, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- There was a sharp drop in testing for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that could translate into a future rise in cases, researchers say."The quickest way for people to spread STIs is to not know that they have one," said study author Casey Pinto, an assistant professor of public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine."The inability to detect asymptomatic cases could have negative repercussions for years to come," Pinto warned in a Penn State news release.For the study, the investigators reviewed data on more than 18 million STI test results from patients (aged 14 to 49) from January 2019 through June 2020, and found screening declines of 63% for men and 59% for women in...