The Recovery Room: News beyond the pandemic â May 14
Written by Tim Snaith on May 14, 2021
The coronavirus pandemic has dominated the headlines and our daily lives for more than a year. Medical News Today has covered this fast-moving, complex story with live updates on the latest news, interviews with experts, and an ongoing investigation into the deep racial disparities that COVID-19 has helped unmask.
However, this has not stopped us from publishing hundreds of fascinating stories on a myriad of other topics.
Design by Diego Sabogal
This week, we reconsidered the link between eating carbohydrates and gaining weight. The carbohydrate-insulin model may not represent the true complexity of the body’s response to bread, fries, and pasta after all.
How We Created the Perfect Storm for Pandemics
Recent editorial shows how we urgently need to control the transmission of pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2
May 11, 2021
University of East Anglia
The way that many of us live has created the perfect storm for the evolution and transmission of infectious diseases like COVID-19, according to a researcher at the University of East Anglia (UAE).
A new editorial published May 6 describes how the world s vast population of people, pets, and livestock has created an ideal breeding ground for infectious diseases which are passed between humans and animals.
It shows how we urgently need to control the transmission of pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 by using vaccination passports, maximizing genetic variation in livestock, and reducing how much meat we eat.
Written by James Kingsland on May 10, 2021 â Fact checked by Alexandra Sanfins, Ph.D.
Photo editing by Lauren Azor; Bloomberg Creative Photos/Getty Images
A professor of evolutionary genetics states centuries of intensive breeding have made livestock a âmixing vesselâ for the evolution of pathogens that can jump from animals to humans.
In an editorial in the journal
Virulence, he argues that emerging infectious diseases pose an âexistential threatâ to our species.
To minimize the threat, he advocates reintroducing genetic variation to livestock and crops and reducing consumption of animal protein.
In the wild, parasites and their animal hosts are engaged in a dynamic cooperation comprising reciprocal, adaptive genetic changes that naturally occur when two species interact.