Tag Archives: effectiveness

Dozens of COVID Virus Mutations Arose in Man With Longest Known Case – HealthDay

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FRIDAY, April 19, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- An immune-compromised man with a year-and-a-half-long COVID infection served as a breeding ground for dozens of coronavirus mutations, a new study discovered.

Worse, several of the mutations were in the COVID spike protein, indicating that the virus had attempted to evolve around current vaccines, researchers report.

This case underscores the risk of persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections in immunocompromised individuals, as unique SARS-CoV-2 viral variants may emerge, said the research team led by Magda Vergouwe. She's a doctoral candidate with Amsterdam University Medical Center in The Netherlands.

The patient in questioned endured the longest known COVID infection to date, fighting with the virus for 613 days before dying from the blood disease that had compromised his immune system, researchers said.

Immune-compromised patients who suffer persistent infections give the COVID virus an opportunity to adapt and evolve, the investigators explained.

For instance, the Omicron variant is thought to have emerged in an immune-compromised patient initially infected with an earlier form of COVID, researchers said.

In this latest report, the man was admitted to Amsterdam University Medical Center in February 2022 with a COVID infection at age 72, after hed already received multiple vaccinations.

He suffered from myelodysplastic and myeloproliferative overlap syndrome, a disease in which the bone marrow makes too many white blood cells, according to the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

Following a stem cell transplant, the man also had developed lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells, researchers said.

A drug he took for lymphoma, rituximab, depleted all the immune cells that normally produce antibodies for COVID, they added.

To clear his COVID, the man received a monoclonal antibody cocktail that ultimately proved ineffective.

In fact, gene sequencing showed that the coronavirus started mutating to evade the antibodies hed received, a step that could have potentially undermined the effectiveness of the treatment in others, researchers said.

Gene sequencing of 27 nasal specimens taken from the man revealed more than 50 mutations in the COVID virus, including variants with changes in the spike protein targeted by vaccines.

The prolonged infection has led to the emergence of a novel immune-evasive variant due to the extensive within-host evolution, researchers said.

Such cases pose a potential public health threat of possibly introducing viral escape variants into the community, they added.

However, they noted that there had been no documented transmission of any COVID variants from the man into other people.

The researchers will present their findings at the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases meeting next week in Barcelona. Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about COVID.

SOURCE: European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, news release, April 19, 2024

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Dozens of COVID Virus Mutations Arose in Man With Longest Known Case - HealthDay

The GAO Calls on the FAA to Improve its Mishap Investigation Process – Payload

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The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the FAA should improve its procedures when things go awry in spaceflight. The federal agency watchdog published a report yesterday that called on the FAA to develop tools to 1) define criteria for when a mishap report is operator-led, and 2) better evaluate the effectiveness of the process as a whole.

Without a comprehensive evaluation of its mishap investigation process, FAA cannot be assured its process is effective, especially given the expansion of commercial space operations in recent years, the GAO report said.

The FAAs Office of Commercial Space Transportation is responsible for issuing launch licenses and investigating flight mishaps.

12% mishap rate: Mishap investigations kick in when a flight is not completed as planned, like in the case of Starships two big kabooms this year. Out of 433 launches between 2000 and mid-January 2023, 50 were mishaps, according to the report.

In-house? Since all launch vehicles are specializedand literally rocket sciencethe FAA believes operators are best suited to sniff out root causes and identify corrective actions. The agency estimates that in-house investigations could take the agency 10-20 times longer.

After a September anomaly with Rocket Labs Electron, it took the FAA just 36 days to approve a Rocket Lab-led mishap investigation and Electron was cleared to fly again. According to the agencys estimates mentioned above, an FAA-led investigation could have taken north of a year.

GAO does not necessarily disagree with that logic; instead, they are requesting that the FAA better track effectiveness, share data, and develop a defined criteria for when the investigations should be operator-led.

The FAA concurs with the GAOs recommendations to evaluate and further improve the FAA commercial space mishap program, the FAA said in an email to Payload. Protecting public health and safety are at the core of the program.

Learning period: As for human spaceflight/tourism, the industry has been operating under an eight-year learning period, where the FAA is restricted from enacting regulations. The learning period is set to expire on Jan. 1.

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The GAO Calls on the FAA to Improve its Mishap Investigation Process - Payload