Resources & Information

CDC
July 16, 2024
The CDC released the annual update to the Disability and Health Data System (DHDS), providing quick and easy online access to state-level health data on adults with disabilities. The latest data, from the 2022 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), reveal that more than 1 in 4—over 70 million—adults in the United States reported having a disability in 2022.

For the first time, the 2022 BRFSS collected data on experiences with Long COVID, defined as symptoms lasting three months or longer that the person did not have before COVID, to help us better understand the relationship between disabilities and Long COVID. Of particular concern is the finding that Long COVID symptoms were more prevalent among people with disabilities (10.8%) than among those without disabilities (6.6%).

Nature
July 12, 2024
Experts say the bird flu virus infecting dairy herds and some farmworkers is just “a single mutation” from becoming a human pandemic. Read how countries are preparing.

University of Minnesota
June 26, 202
A new study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases uses data from 1,988 SARS-CoV-2–positive US Military Health System beneficiaries to define the characteristics and clinical patterns observed in patients with long COVID, or post-COVID condition (PCC), grouping patients into three phenotypes based on clusters of symptoms.

AP News
June 21, 2024
As temperatures and humidity soar outside, what’s happening inside the human body can become a life-or-death battle decided by just a few degrees. The critical danger point outdoors for illness and death from relentless heat is several degrees lower than experts once thought, say researchers who put people in hot boxes to see what happens to them. With much of the United States, Mexico, India and the Middle East suffering through blistering heat waves, worsened by human-caused climate change, several doctors, physiologists and other experts explained to The Associated Press what happens to the human body in such heat.

MedicalNewsToday
June 20, 2024
A study published today in the journal JAMA Network Open reports that living a healthy lifestyle, even after the age of 80, can help people live to be 100. Researchers in China evaluated 1,454 centenarians and 3,768 people who died before reaching 100 years old. They reported that the participants with the highest healthy lifestyle scores – based on smoking history, exercise routines, and dietary diversity – had a significantly higher likelihood of living to 100 compared to those with the least healthy lifestyle behaviors.

NPR via Body Electric Podcast
June 11, 2024
In 2007, former Microsoft executive Linda Stone noticed something strange happening every time she’d sit down to answer emails. She was holding her breath. “I would inhale in anticipation, but I wouldn’t exhale because so many emails would be streaming in,” Stone told Manoush Zomorodi in an interview for NPR’s Body Electric. “And this would go on for hours.” Stone wondered how common this was and set out to investigate using “kitchen table science,” as she called it. She recruited dozens of friends and colleagues to sit at her computer answering emails while she monitored their pulse and heart rate variability. Of those participants, 80% had what Stone coined “email or screen apnea” — shallow or suspended breathing while working on a screen.