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MONDAY, March 1, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- While many Americans await their turn for the COVID vaccine, a potentially record-setting number have already had their flu shot.That's the key finding in a nationwide poll of more conducted in December by the University of Georgia, involving more than 1,000 adults . In all, 43.5% of respondents said they had already had a flu shot, 13.5% said they would "definitely" get one; and 9.3% said they would "probably" do so.That means two-thirds of respondents had gotten or planned to get a flu shot during the 2020-2021 flu season. That's a significant increase over recent years.In 2019-2020, 48.4% of U.S. adults got the shot, up 3.1 percentage points from 2018-2019, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."These results...

MONDAY, March 1, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- That swollen lymph node under your arm could be a temporary side effect of a COVID-19 shot and not a sign of serious health problems.Radiologists from Massachusetts General Hospital noticed an increase in patients with swollen underarm lymph nodes as they were doing routine mammogram screenings. So they established an approach to help prevent delays in both vaccinations and breast cancer screening.When seen on mammograms, these vaccine-swollen nodes can be mistaken for those enlarged because of cancer. They may even lead to a biopsy."We had started to see more patients in our breast imaging clinic with enlarged lymph nodes on mammography, ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging. And we noticed they were coming to our clinic after a recent...

MONDAY, March 1, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- The world's researchers have worked at a breakneck pace during the COVID-19 pandemic.Through October, more than 87,000 papers about the new coronavirus were published worldwide. That's a remarkable number even given the significance of the pandemic, according to the researchers who tallied them all up. "It is an astonishing number of publications -- it may be unprecedented in the history of science," said study co-author Caroline Wagner, an associate professor of public affairs at Ohio State University."Nearly all of the scientific community around the world turned its attention to this one issue," she noted in a university news release.Wagner and her colleagues analyzed scientific databases and found that 4,875 articles on the coronavirus were...

MONDAY, March 1, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- It's already known that green space offers significant benefits in institutional settings, such as hospitals and schools, but new research suggests it may also reduce violence in prisons.In the new study, researchers compared the amount of trees, lawns and shrubs at prisons in England and Wales with data on violence between prisoners, prisoner assaults on staff and prisoner self-harm.The investigators also looked at specific features of the prisons, including capacity, security levels and whether buildings were originally built to house inmates or were converted from other uses (such as military bases). They also considered the ages and gender of the inmates.The study authors found that prisons with more generous green space had lower rates of...