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THURSDAY, Sept. 3, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- You tested positive for COVID-19 and dutifully quarantined yourself for two weeks to avoid infecting others. Now, you're feeling better and you think you pose no risk to friends or family, right? Not necessarily, claims a new study that shows it takes roughly a month to completely clear the coronavirus from your body. To be safe, COVID-19 patients should be retested after four weeks or more to be certain the virus isn't still active, Italian researchers say. Whether you are still infectious during the month after you are diagnosed is a roll of the dice: The test used in the study, an RT-PCR nasal swab, had a 20% false-negative rate. That means one in five results that are negative for COVID-19 are wrong and patients can still sicken...

THURSDAY, Sept. 3, 2020 (American Heart Association News) -- Feeling hot, nauseous and in pain after snow skiing in Missouri with her family, 40-year-old Kelly Kleiner tried getting some relief in a restroom at the lodge. Minutes later, her youngest daughter found Kelly on the floor in the far stall, stripping off layers of clothing in hopes of cooling down. "Time kind of stood still," Kelly said. It all started when Kelly tried to lift her husband, Matt, after he took a spill on the slopes. She felt her left arm pop followed by a searing pain. "I thought my arm popped out of its socket," she said. That's still what Kelly thought as she tried to cool down on the bathroom floor. Soon a medic arrived. He couldn't find a pulse in her left arm, and the pulse in her right arm was extremely...

THURSDAY, Sept. 3, 2020 (American Heart Association News) -- A growing number of studies suggest many COVID-19 survivors experience some type of heart damage, even if they didn't have underlying heart disease and weren't sick enough to be hospitalized. This latest twist has health care experts worried about a potential increase in heart failure. "Very early into the pandemic, it was clear that many patients who were hospitalized were showing evidence of cardiac injury," said Dr. Gregg Fonarow, chief of the division of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "More recently, there is recognition that even some of those COVID-19 patients not hospitalized are experiencing cardiac injury. This raises concerns that there may be individuals who get through the initial...

THURSDAY, Sept. 3, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Millions of people color their own hair, even though some of the chemicals in permanent hair dyes are considered possible carcinogens. So, is home hair coloring safe? According to a new study, the answer is a qualified yes. After tracking cancer risk among more than 117,000 U.S. women for 36 years, the investigators found that personal use of permanent hair dyes was not associated with any increase in the risk of developing bladder, brain, colon, kidney, lung, blood or immune system cancer. Nor were these dyes linked to an uptick in most skin or breast cancers. "We observed no positive association between personal permanent hair dye use and risk of most cancers or cancer-related mortality," said study lead author Dr. Yin Zhang, a research...