The findings revealed most Americans, 61 percent, believe most or all abortions should be legal in the first three months of a woman’s pregnancy known as the first trimester. For the second trimester that begins on week 13, 65 percent believe abortion should be illegal. The final trimester begins on the 28th week of pregnancy.

“Removing the many existing barriers to earlier abortion care would reduce the need for second-and third-trimester abortions,” said Jenny Ma, the Center for Reproductive Rights’ senior staff attorney, to the Associated Press.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recently available data from 2018 shows around 92 percent of U.S. abortions occur within the first 13 weeks. In the third trimester, just 19 percent of Americans believe most or all abortions should legal and 26 percent think they should be illegal in most circumstances, according to the poll.

Anti-abortion activists demonstrate in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 2020. A new poll found 80 percent of Americans think abortion should usually be illegal in the third trimester. NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The poll comes just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving a currently blocked Mississippi law that would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, two weeks into the second trimester. If the high court upholds the law, it would be the first time since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision confirming a woman’s right to abortion that a state would be allowed to ban abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The poll finds many Americans believe the procedure should be allowable under at least some circumstances even during the second or third trimesters. For abortions during the second trimester, 34 percent say they should usually or always be legal, and another 30 percent say they should be illegal in most but not all cases.

Michael New, an abortion opponent who teaches social research at the Catholic University of America, predicted the findings regarding second-and third-trimester abortions will be useful to the anti-abortion movement.

“This helps counter the narrative that the abortion policy outcome established by the Roe v. Wade decision enjoys substantial public support,” he said.

David O’Steen, executive director of the National Right to Life Committee, said the findings suggest abortion rights advocates are “way out of the public mainstream” to the extent they support abortion access even late in pregnancy.

But Dr. Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco, who supports abortion rights, cited research showing that Americans viewed second-trimester abortions more empathetically when told about some of the reasons why women seek them.

These include time-consuming difficulties making arrangements with an abortion clinic and learning during the second trimester the fetus would die or have severe disabilities due to abnormalities, Grossman said.

“More work needs to be done to elevate the voices of people who have had abortions and who want to share their stories to help people understand the many reasons why this medical care is so necessary,” he said via email.

Majorities of Americans—Republicans and Democrats alike—think a pregnant woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if her life is seriously endangered, if the pregnancy results from rape or incest or if the child would be born with a life-threatening illness.

Americans are closely divided over whether a pregnant woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if she wants one for any reason, 49 percent yes to 50 percent no.

Ma said women seeking second-trimester abortions included disproportionately high numbers of young people, Black women, and women living in poverty. Some had not learned they were pregnant until much later than the norm; others had trouble raising the needed funds to afford an abortion, Ma said.

She noted that Republican-governed states have enacted numerous restrictions in recent years that often complicated the process for getting even a first-trimester abortion.

Abortions after the first trimester are not rare, but they are exceptions to the norm.

The poll also shows how opinions on abortion diverge sharply along party lines. Roughly three-quarters of Democrats think abortion should be legal in all or most cases; about two-thirds of Republicans think it should be illegal in all or most cases.

But most Americans fall between extreme opinions on the issue. Just 23 percent say abortion, in general, should be legal in all cases, while 33 percent say it should be legal in most cases. Thirty percent say abortion should be illegal in most cases; just 13 percent say it should be illegal in all cases.

Respondents from three major religious groups—white mainline Protestants, nonwhite Protestants, and Catholics—are closely divided as to whether abortion should usually be legal or illegal in most cases. It was different for white evangelicals—about three-quarters of them say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

Dave Steiner, a hotel manager from suburban Chicago, was among those responding to the AP-NORC poll who said abortion should be legal in the first trimester but generally illegal thereafter.

“I was raised a very strict Catholic—abortion was just no, no, no,” said Steiner, 67. “As I became more liberal and a Democrat, I felt the woman should have the right to choose—but that should be in the first trimester.”

“Abortions are going to happen anyway,” he added. “If you’re making it illegal, you’re just chasing it underground.”

In this Nov. 30, 2005 file photo, an anti-abortion supporter stands next to a pro-choice demonstrator outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.MANUEL BALCE CENETA/AP PHOTO

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/80-percent-americans-think-abortion-should-illegal-third-trimester-poll-1604282?piano_t=1

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1. Does vaccination completely prevent infection?

The short answer is no. You can still get infected after you’ve been vaccinated. But your chances of getting seriously ill are almost zero.

Many people think vaccines work like a shield, blocking a virus from infecting cells altogether. But in most cases, a person who gets vaccinated is protected from disease, not necessarily infection.

Every person’s immune system is a little different, so when a vaccine is 95% effective, that just means 95% of people who receive the vaccine – but who would have gotten ill if exposed to the virus before – won’t get sick. These people could be completely protected from infection, or they could be getting infected but remain asymptomatic because their immune system eliminates the virus very quickly. The remaining 5% of vaccinated people – if exposed to the virus – could become infected and get sick, but are extremely unlikely to be hospitalized.

Vaccination doesn’t 100% prevent you from getting infected, but in all cases, it gives your immune system a huge leg up on the coronavirus. Whatever your outcome – whether complete protection from infection or some level of disease – you will be better off after encountering the virus than if you hadn’t been vaccinated.

Vaccines prevent disease, not infection. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, CC BY

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2. Does infection always mean transmission?

Transmission happens when enough viral particles from an infected person get into the body of an uninfected person. In theory, anyone infected with the coronavirus could potentially transmit it. But a vaccine will reduce the chance of this happening.

In general, if vaccination doesn’t completely prevent infection, it will significantly reduce the amount of virus coming out of your nose and mouth – a process called shedding – and shorten the time that you shed the virus. This is a big deal. A person who sheds less virus is less likely to transmit it to someone else.

This seems to be the case with coronavirus vaccines. In a recent preprint study which has yet to be peer reviewed, Israeli researchers tested 2,897 vaccinated people for signs of coronavirus infection. Most had no detectable virus, but people who were infected had one-quarter the amount of virus in their bodies as unvaccinated people tested at similar times post-infection.

Less coronavirus virus means less chance of spreading it, and if the amount of virus in your body is low enough, the probability of transmitting it may reach almost zero. However, researchers don’t yet know where that cutoff is for the coronavirus, and since the vaccines don’t provide 100% protection from infection, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people continue to wear masks and social distance even after they’ve been vaccinated.

New, more infectious, and transmissible variants of the coronavirus might limit the effectiveness of current vaccines. AP Photo/John Raoux

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     3. What about the new coronavirus variants?

New variants of coronavirus have emerged in recent months, and recent studies show that vaccines are less effective against certain ones, like the B1351 variant first identified in South Africa.

Every time SARS-CoV-2 replicates, it gets new mutations. In recent months, researchers have found new variants that are more infective – meaning a person needs to breathe in less virus to become infected – and other variants that are more transmissible – meaning they increase the amount of virus a person sheds. And researchers have also found at least one new variant that seems to be better at evading the immune system, according to early data.

So how does this relate to vaccines and transmission?

For the South Africa variant, vaccines still provide greater than 85% protection from getting severely ill with COVID–19. But when you count mild and moderate cases, they provide, at best, only about 50%-60% protection. That means at least 40% of vaccinated people will still have a strong enough infection – and enough virus in their body – to cause at least moderate disease.

If vaccinated people have more virus in their bodies and it takes less of that virus to infect another person, there will be higher probability a vaccinated person could transmit these new strains of the coronavirus.

If all goes well, vaccines will very soon reduce the rate of severe disease and death worldwide. To be sure, any vaccine that reduces disease severity is also, at the population level, reducing the amount of virus being shed overall. But because of the emergence of new variants, vaccinated people still have the potential to shed and spread the coronavirus to other people, vaccinated or otherwise. This means it will likely take much longer for vaccines to reduce transmission and for populations to reach herd immunity than if these new variants had never emerged. Exactly how long that will take is a balance between how effective vaccines are against emerging strains and how transmissible and infectious these new strains are.

This story was updated to clarify the explanation of vaccine efficacy.

Source: https://theconversation.com/can-vaccinated-people-still-spread-the-coronavirus-155095

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The numbers in March indicate the steady rise has continued. During the first four days of the month, more than 1,500 unaccompanied migrant minors were taken into custody, according to the data. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency charged with housing these minors, has been receiving an average of 337 children per day, according to figures shared with Congress.

In January, the refugee office’s network of shelters and foster homes received more than 4,000 unaccompanied children — a 19% increase from December.

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Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that it is “possible” Americans may still need to wear face masks in 2022, even as the country could approach a certain “degree of normality.”

FAUCI DOWNPLAYS CONCERNS OVER COVID-19 VARIANTS, BUT CLAIMS VARIANT VACCINES IN DEVELOPMENT

While Fauci noted he can’t predict when the U.S. could return to the way it operated during pre-pandemic life, he believes that, by the end of the year, the United States could have “a significant degree of normality beyond what the terrible burden that all of us have been through over the last year.”

“As we get into the fall and the winter, by the end of the year, I agree with [President Biden] completely, that we will be approaching a degree of normality,” Fauci said. “It may or may not be precisely the way it was in November of 2019 but it’ll be much much better than we’re doing right now.”

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“I think at this point, containment is already a lost cause,” one expert said.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

Amid furious efforts to stem the tide of the expanding coronavirus outbreak, health officials are soberly preparing for the growing risk of a worldwide pandemic. That calculus reflects the continued spike in cases in Wuhan, China, the epidemic’s epicenter, as well as heightened fears that sustained person-to-person transmission could take off on other continents, including North America.

Increasingly, some experts said, the question was a simple one: How ugly will this get?

“I think at this point, containment is already a lost cause,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Osterholm’s comments echoed grim realism from health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a call with reporters early this week.

Although the disease’s severity appears to be lower than once feared, Osterholm said the 2019 novel coronavirus’s transmission patterns so far are reminiscent of influenza. “To the extent that we have to deal with this, if this in fact is being transmitted like influenza, then there really isn’t much chance to contain it,” he said. “We can surely minimize transmission in health care facilities and some public spaces. But beyond that, this virus is going to kind of do what it damn pleases.”

Several other experts, while offering somewhat more optimistic outlooks, agreed that the world was entering a critical phase that will determine—over the next few weeks —whether the epidemic that has spread from China to at least two dozen other countries goes nuclear.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” said Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist at Toronto General Hospital and the University of Toronto. “It’s hard to know if the massive, massive efforts taken by the Chinese government will be sufficient to curtail this or if we have to be prepared for more widespread transmission worldwide.”

Among its efforts, China has quarantined roughly 45 million people in Wuhan and surrounding cities in Hubei province. Although travel bans and quarantines have had limited success in containing previous outbreaks and pose difficult questions about human rights and supply chains, Bogoch said, the unprecedented scale of the response by China makes any past comparisons difficult. “Within the same hour, I’ll think, ‘Maybe this can be contained,’” Bogoch said. “And then three minutes later, I’ll read some other data and think, ‘You know what? This is going to be a pandemic.’”

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York, said preparations for a worst-case scenario, including training health care workers, outfitting them with personal protective equipment, and ensuring ample testing supplies, may help avert the very worst. “I think if anything, it will improve what the worst-case scenario might look like since I think this means that our public health apparatus will be mobilizing as if there are already many patients instead of few,” she said.

By the end of Tuesday, the U.S. had confirmed 11 cases, though no deaths. Worldwide the toll had risen to more than 24,000 cases, about 99 percent of them—and all but one of the (at least) 492 deaths—in China.

While there was room for optimism, Rasmussen noted, recent U.S. cuts to biopreparedness and pandemic preparations clearly haven’t helped. She also questioned the effectiveness of involuntary quarantines and travel bans, arguing that they can erode economies, public trust, and the flow of information. “A virus doesn’t discriminate based on national origin,” she said. “It doesn’t care what passport you are carrying.”

One key variable driving the epidemic’s potential severity is whether epidemiologists see ongoing, sustained transmission of the virus to people with no travel history to China or clear connections to others who have been there. So far, most of the human-to-human spread beyond China has been limited to close contacts of infected patients, which some researchers have pointed to as a hopeful sign.

“If this remains limited in nature, the epidemic can be contained,” said Jason Kindrachuk, an expert on emerging viruses at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, in an email to The Daily Beast. “If we start seeing sustained human-to-human transmission outside of China, there will likely be some pretty quick revisiting of current screening procedures,” he added.

Given his work throughout Africa, Kindrachuk said he will be closely watching for confirmed cases on the continent as well as other low and middle-income regions around the world. “The limitations on health care infrastructure in many of these regions could be problematic for containment if the virus is able to gain a foothold and sustained H2H [human-to-human transmission] occurs,” he said.

The World Health Organization cited that danger as part of its rationale for declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern last week. If the disease accelerates, the capacity of multiple countries could be sorely tested, Bogoch said. “It’s like catching fly balls in the outfield,” he said. “When there’s one or two or three or four, you can run around and catch them.” But if countries become inundated with more cases at a faster pace, “it might be challenging to keep up and one or two might hit the ground.”

Tempering reports that the outbreak may be considerably larger than initially thought, emerging data also suggest that it may be less deadly than other recent outbreaks. A Feb. 3 report from the South China Morning Post, for example, suggested that the more than 5,000 reported cases in Wuhan by that point were “just the tip of the iceberg” due to a shortage of testing kits in the outbreak’s epicenter (several modeling studies have likewise pointed to much higher numbers). The report, however, also suggests that the true proportion of fatal cases—officially hovering around 3 percent for the city and surrounding Hubei province—might be significantly lower since milder cases would be more likely to go undiagnosed.

“Many of the sicker people are going to be seeking medical care and being diagnosed because they’re hospitalized,” Bogoch said. “And we’re going to be over-selecting for the sicker individuals who are going to have a higher fatality rate.”

Elsewhere in China, where hospitals haven’t been as overwhelmed, the proportion of fatal cases is roughly 0.2 percent, while the proportion elsewhere around the world is about 0.5 percent. Those numbers could quickly change, of course, and more accurate case fatality rate estimates may not be known for months. But epidemiologists and virologists were in large agreement that the virus appeared to be considerably less lethal than either SARS or MERS, at least so far.

The good news, Bogoch said, also carries a downside: “The negative side of it is, OK, if it causes less severe illness, there may be a large cohort of people that aren’t sick enough to seek medical care,” he said. “They may be contributing to further transmission in the community, and it’s just going to continue to spread and spread beyond China.”

Bogoch downplayed fears of transmission from truly asymptomatic patients, noting that many likely have had mild symptoms that didn’t require medical care. German officials, in fact, moved to correct a recent study suggesting that an asymptomatic Chinese woman passed the virus to four others in Germany; a follow-up confirmed that she did have symptoms after all.

Even so, Osterholm said the dynamic transmission of the coronavirus within China suggests that the same thing could readily happen elsewhere. “Viruses don’t change their skin when they cross a political border, so why do we think what’s happening there would be different if it went elsewhere in the world?” he asked.

If so, the impact could be severe. “In this case, we have a combination here where it appears to be much more infectious than what we’ve seen with SARS or MERS,” Osterholm said. “So even though the disease severity seems to be less, potentially substantially less, than SARS or MERS, the overall impact may be as great if not greater.”

Researchers believe the new coronavirus spreads when an infected person coughs or sneezes and releases tiny droplets, similar to how seasonal cold and flu viruses proliferate. Since both cold and flu viruses in temperate regions seem to spread more readily in drier air, some scenarios have envisioned a similar future of fewer 2019 novel coronavirus infections over the summer and a seasonal resurgence over the winter.

Roughly 0.1 percent of people who become infected with seasonal flu in the U.S. every year die from it, with the risk skewed toward older and much younger people. Even if only 1-2 percent of coronavirus patients die, Osterholm said, “that is 10 to 20 times higher than we see with seasonal flu. That’s still a very important number.”

If containment efforts fail, Dr. Bogoch said, “We’re going to see a lot of people with upper and lower respiratory tract infections throughout the world, unfortunately.”

Public health preparations throughout the world, he said, may ultimately help determine where most cases land on the spectrum between mild symptoms and a “death sentence.”

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Health workers last month burying an Ebola victim in Beni, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Of about 3,100 Congolese with confirmed infections, almost 2,100 have died.CreditCreditHugh Kinsella Cunningham/EPA, via Shutterstock

The United States remains committed to fighting Ebola in Africa, American health officials said on Monday, but the scope of the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has become somewhat unclear.

There were rumors that Ebola had reached Tanzania, the officials noted. And the arrest of Congo’s former health minister, who until recently led his country’s response to the outbreak, has raised doubts about how effective that effort ever was.

The American delegation included Alex M. Azar, the secretary of Health and Human Services; Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and Tim Ziemer, a retired admiral who is a senior deputy assistant administrator at USAID.

The group toured Ebola response operations in Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. In a telephone news conference as the trip neared its end, Mr. Azar said that, to date, the United States has spent $158 million in direct aid on the fight and another $238 million in technical assistance, including research on vaccines and treatments.

Of about 3,100 Congolese with confirmed infections, almost 2,100 have died. “It’s a genuine health emergency with significant challenges,” Mr. Azar said.

Several recent events show just how significant those challenges remain.

While the number of new confirmed cases has been dropping for weeks, it is too soon to tell if the intensity of transmission has actually slowed, the World Health Organization reported on Thursday. New hot spots keep appearing, and many victims still die outside of treatment centers with no known connections to previous cases.

Only about 30 percent of patients seek treatment immediately after being infected when the chances of curing them with new antibody infusions is greatest, Dr. Redfield said on the call.

Fewer than 40 percent of the suspected contacts of each known patient are followed and vaccinated. Before officials can conclude that the epidemic is slowing down, Dr. Redfield said, “those numbers need to change.”

Health care workers continue to die of Ebola. Some of them were not vaccinated, which is mystifying since more than 200,000 doses of vaccine have been given out.

The W.H.O. said it had received only $55 million of the $120 million to $140 million that officials estimated would be needed through December to support its role in the response.

Some American government personnel are now working in front-line areas in eastern Congo, Mr. Azar said Monday, but he did not say more precisely where.

In August 2018, after several C.D.C. doctors nearly drove into a gun battle on a rural road, the State Department barred all American government personnel from dangerous areas of Congo, which originally forced the doctors to withdraw to the capital, Kinshasa, about 1,000 miles from the hot zone.

Permission to work in those areas is now granted “on a village-by-village basis after security assessments,” Mr. Azar said. A C.D.C. spokesman later said that 259 agency staff members had been deployed to Kinshasa, Geneva and elsewhere, including the hot zones, but declined to break down that figure further.

On Saturday, Congo’s former health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga, was arrested and accused of embezzling more than $4 million in Ebola funds, according to an Agence France-Presse report quoting his lawyers and a police spokesman.

Dr. Ilunga resigned in July after the command of the response was taken from him and given to a presidential commission led by Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, a renowned Ebola researcher. In April, Dr. Muyembe oversaw a scathing report on Dr. Ilunga’s efforts, accusing him of arrogance and weak leadership.

It said national health officials rented deluxe accommodations and expensive cars on visits to the Ebola outbreak area and were “brandishing large dollar bills” while local health workers went unpaid.

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Health officials in the south Indian state of Kerala say nine people have died in confirmed and suspected cases of the deadly Nipah virus.

Three victims have tested positive for the virus in the past fortnight. The results from the remaining six samples will be available later on Monday.

Twenty-five others have been hospitalised with symptoms of the infection in Kozhikode, officials said.

Nipah is an infection which can be transmitted to humans from animals.

There is no vaccination for the virus which has a mortality rate of 70%.

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Nipah virus is also “top of the list” of 10 priority diseases that the WHO has identified as potentials for the next major outbreak.

Kerala’s health secretary Rajeev Sadanandan told the BBC that a nurse who treated the patients had also died.

“We have sent blood and body fluid samples of all suspected cases for confirmation to National Institute of Virology in Pune. So far, we got confirmation that three deaths were because of Nipah,” he said.

“We are now concentrating on precautions to prevent the spread of the disease since the treatment is limited to supportive care.”

Fruit bats are considered to be the natural host of the virus.

Health officials said they had found mangoes bitten by bats in a home where three people died of the suspected infection.

What is Nipah virus?

• Nipah virus (NiV) infection is a newly emerging disease which can be transmitted to humans from animals. The natural host of the virus are fruit bats
• The infection was first identified in 1999 during an outbreak of encephalitis and respiratory illness among pig farmers and people with close contact with pigs in Malaysia and Singapore
• Nearly 300 human cases with over 100 deaths were reported in that outbreak. In order to stop it, more than a million pigs were euthanized, causing tremendous trade loss for Malaysia
• Nipah virus infection can be prevented by avoiding exposure to sick pigs and bats in endemic areas and not drinking raw date palm sap
• Symptom of the infection include fever, headache, drowsiness, respiratory illness, disorientation and mental confusion. These signs and symptoms can progress to coma within 24-48 hours
• There is no vaccine for either humans or animals

(Source: WHO, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44193145

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(CNN)President Donald Trump will roll out new plans to tackle the country’s opioid epidemic on Monday in New Hampshire, the White House said Sunday. The plan will include stiffer penalties for high-intensity drug traffickers, including the death penalty for some dealers, Andrew Bremberg, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, told reporters Sunday.

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MIAMI – The flu continues to blanket most of the state of Florida this season.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported it has been the most active since the 2009 swine flu pandemic. As of Tuesday afternoon, health officials reported 37 children have died from this season.

Children and the elderly are at greater risk from the contagious respiratory illness, spread by mostly the Type A H3N2 flu virus. The CDC’s Dr. Dan Jernigan suspects officials haven’t seen the worst of it yet. There may be some degree of mutation in the virus that hasn’t been detected.

Note: See source for links to many resources and information regarding this flu.

Source: https://www.local10.com/health/flu-epidemic-worsens-here-is-everything-you-need-to-know

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