Background: This study summarizes drug resistance analyses in 4 recent phase 2b trials of the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) fusion inhibitor presatovir in naturally infected adults.

Methods: Adult hematopoietic cell transplant (HCT) recipients, lung transplant recipients, or hospitalized patients with naturally acquired, laboratory-confirmed RSV infection were enrolled in 4 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies with study-specific presatovir dosing. Full-length RSV F sequences amplified from nasal swabs obtained at baseline and postbaseline were analyzed by population sequencing. Substitutions at RSV fusion inhibitor resistance-associated positions are reported.

Results: Genotypic analyses were performed on 233 presatovir-treated and 149 placebo-treated subjects. RSV F variant V127A was present in 8 subjects at baseline. Population sequencing detected treatment-emergent substitutions in 10/89 (11.2%) HCT recipients with upper and 6/29 (20.7%) with lower respiratory tract infection, 1/35 (2.9%) lung transplant recipients, and 1/80 (1.3%) hospitalized patients treated with presatovir; placebo-treated subjects had no emergent resistance-associated substitutions. Subjects with substitutions at resistance-associated positions had smaller decreases in viral load during treatment relative to those without, but similar clinical outcomes.

Conclusions: Subject population type and dosing regimen may have influenced RSV resistance development during presatovir treatment. Subjects with vs without genotypic resistance development had decreased virologic responses but comparable clinical outcomes.

The 65-inch LG 65SM8600AUA 4K HDR smart LED TV is marked down to just $769.99, a 48 percent discount off its $1,469 list price.

Naval engagement played a decisive role in America's victory in its struggle for independence from Great Britain.

Historical play about the Delaware patriot by museum historic-site interpreter David Price.

Naval engagement played a decisive role in America's victory in its struggle for independence from Great Britain.

A look at how Kesavananda Bharti saved the Indian constitution

What if we tell you that making besan ladoos is possible within four corners of your house, and we have just the right recipe that could help you out.

The long-term battle to restore the Chesapeake Bay is quietly being waged on the Deep Creek Tract of Redden State Forest in Georgetown.

The Governor released a statement on USDA Report Showing Positive Impact of Farming Practices in Chesapeake Bay Region.

The Delaware Forest Service's Urban and Community Forestry (U&CF) Program is offering a new "Partnership Tree Planting Grant" to nonprofit groups who own property within the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. The U&CF Program will award eight (8) $1000 matching grants on a first-come, first-served basis to qualifying nonprofit groups who apply by February 27, 2015.

Volunteers of all ages are needed this month to help plant 8,800 hardwood seedlings along the Cypress Branch at Blackbird State Forest to enhance the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. The planting will take place on Saturday, March 17, and Sunday, March 18, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day at Blackbird State Forest’s Naudain Tract, 2076 Harvey Straughn Road, Townsend, Delaware 19734. The weekend tree planting is a “rain or shine” event. Equipment, including shovels, will be provided. Volunteers are encouraged to dress appropriately for the weather and wear boots or other work shoes. Snacks will be provided and commemorative T-shirts and patches will be given to both youth and adult volunteers on a first-come, first-served basis. The project is a cooperative partnership between the Delaware Forest Service, the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) Division of Watershed Stewardship, and the Girl Scouts of the USA.

The Division of Public Health launched a new smartphone app that provides lifesaving step-by-step instructions on how to use naloxone during an opioid overdose.

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Voice AI apps can help in prevention, detection and treatment of hundreds of patients at the same time, thus helping mitigate the shortage of doctors

Buchi (Sesame Seed Balls) with Cheese Filling appeared first on CASA Veneracion

Sweet bean paste is the traditional filling for the Chinese pastry jian dui, known as buchi in the Philippines and sesame seed balls among native English speakers. In this indulgent version, the filling is cheese. I’ve wanted to make this popular Chinese snack for a long time. But the thought alone of making the bean …

Buchi (Sesame Seed Balls) with Cheese Filling was written by Connie Veneracion and originally published in CASA Veneracion.

This Metasploit module exploits a stack buffer overflow vulnerability in the handling of the TextBytesAtom records by Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer. According to Microsoft, the PowerPoint Viewer distributed with Office 2003 SP3 and earlier, as well as Office 2004 for Mac, are vulnerable. NOTE: The vulnerable code path is not reachable on versions of Windows prior to Windows Vista.

ENGIE Storage has announced it will supply and operate a 19 MW/38 MWh portfolio of six energy storage sites that will contribute to the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target Program and participate in ISO-New England wholesale markets.

California, long a progressive leader on renewable energy and climate change mitigation, has neglected a key market segment for renewable energy: the “community-scale,” or “wholesale distributed generation” (DG), market. This market segment is defined as projects below 20 megawatts that connect to the distribution grid and export power to the grid for sale.

Last week, Sunrun announced that its bid to supply 20 MW of residential solar + storage capacity into the New England ISO Forward Capacity Market for 2022-2023 was approved. According to Chris Rauscher, Director of Policy and Storage Market Strategy for Sunrun, this is not a pilot project or an experiment in any way.

ENGIE Storage has announced it will supply and operate a 19 MW/38 MWh portfolio of six energy storage sites that will contribute to the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target Program and participate in ISO-New England wholesale markets.

Endesa Chile has unveiled a plan to develop 36 projects, amounting to 6300 MW of power in Brazil, Chile, Peru and Colombia. The board of directors are looking at hydroelectric power in particular for the bulk of the new capacity.

ENGIE Storage has announced it will supply and operate a 19 MW/38 MWh portfolio of six energy storage sites that will contribute to the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target Program and participate in ISO-New England wholesale markets.

Clean water — it’s a precious resource in hot demand right now, for more than taking a shower or watering our crops. The United Nations projects the world’s population will grow by another billion people, to 8.4 Billion, by 2030. More people means more need for food, water, electricity, and other necessities. Beyond the obvious demands for water, our increasing appetite for electricity also requires water — and plenty of it. Most of the electricity generated in the U.S. uses water in some capacity.

This week Siemens Gamesa said it signed its third contract in so many years with Voltalia in Brazil to supply wind turbines for wind farms the company is building.

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Last week, we announced a number of actions we are taking to support our people and community during the global COVID-19 crisis. Today, we’re pleased to provide more detail about one of those actions, which, with the help of registrars, will make it easier for domain name registrants worldwide to keep their domain names in […]

The post Verisign Will Waive Wholesale Restore Fee to Help Registrants Keep Their Domain Names During COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on Verisign Blog.

So delicious. From Southern Living, April 2009. -- posted by Vicki Kaye

La enseñanza bíblica en profundidad de John MacArthur lleva la verdad transformadora de la Palabra de Dios a millones de personas cada día.

 

La enseñanza bíblica en profundidad de John MacArthur lleva la verdad transformadora de la Palabra de Dios a millones de personas cada día.

 

La enseñanza bíblica en profundidad de John MacArthur lleva la verdad transformadora de la Palabra de Dios a millones de personas cada día.

 

La enseñanza bíblica en profundidad de John MacArthur lleva la verdad transformadora de la Palabra de Dios a millones de personas cada día.

 

The Daesan petrochemical industrial zone in Seosan, South Chungcheong Province, will transform into an advanced chemical industrial complex. The nation's major petrochemical companies may invest up to 10 trillion won in this area. On September 14, S-Oil, Lotte Chemical, Hanwha Total, South Chungcheong provincial government, and Seosan city gathered in Lotte World Tower and signed a memorandum to create a Daesan specialized industrial complex. Currently the area is home to large petrochemical ...

In July 2017, the German Federal Cartel Office (“FCO”) published a detailed guidance paper (the “Guidance Paper”) on resale price maintenance (“RPM”) in the retail food sector. The purpose of the paper is to expl...

A new water and sewage plant in Ebeye, one of the most densely populated locations on earth, is helping to ease the prevalence of water-borne diseases.

Title: For Kids With Genetic Condition, Statins May Be Lifesavers
Category: Health News
Created: 10/16/2019 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 10/17/2019 12:00:00 AM

Title: How Pets Can Be True Lifesavers for Seniors
Category: Health News
Created: 4/3/2020 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 4/3/2020 12:00:00 AM

PURPOSE

Although cesarean delivery is the most common surgical procedure in the United States, postoperative opioid prescribing varies greatly. We hypothesized that patient characteristics, procedural characteristics, or both would be associated with high vs low opioid use after discharge. This information could help individualize prescriptions.

METHODS

In this prospective cohort study, we quantified opioid use for 4 weeks following hospital discharge after cesarean delivery. Predischarge characteristics were obtained from health records, and patients self-reported total opioid use postdischarge on weekly questionnaires. Opioid use was quantified in milligram morphine equivalents (MMEs). Binomial and Poisson regression analyses were performed to assess predictors of opioid use after discharge.

RESULTS

Of the 233 patients starting the study, 203 (87.1%) completed at least 1 questionnaire and were included in analyses (86.3% completed all 4 questionnaires). A total of 113 patients were high users (>75 MMEs) and 90 patients were low users (≤75 MMEs) of opioids postdischarge. The group reporting low opioid use received on average 44% fewer opioids in the 24 hours before discharge compared with the group reporting high opioid use (mean = 33.0 vs 59.3 MMEs, P <.001). Only a minority of patients (11.4% to 15.8%) stored leftover opioids in a locked location, and just 31 patients disposed of leftover opioids.

CONCLUSIONS

Knowledge of predischarge opioid use can be useful as a tool to inform individualized opioid prescriptions, help optimize nonopioid analgesia, and reduce opioid use. Additional studies are needed to evaluate the impact of implementing such measures on prescribing practices, pain, and functional outcomes.

The ExoMars mission, a joint venture between the European and Russian space agencies, will be delayed for two years. It has already been plagued by issues and the coronavirus hasn't helped

A satellite mission that bounces laser light off the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland has found that hundreds of billions of tons' worth of ice are being lost every year due to Earth's changing climate. Scientists involved in NASA's ICESat-2 project report in the journal Science that the net loss of ice from those regions has been responsible for 0.55 inches of sea level rise since 2003. That's slightly less than a third of the total amount of sea level rise observed in the world's oceans over that time. To track how the ice sheets are changing, the ICESat-2… Read More

Theresa May has hit out at world leaders for failing "to forge a coherent international response" to the coronavirus pandemic.

My mother-in-law, Carol, lives alone. It was her 75th birthday the other day. Normally, I send flowers. Normally, she spends some part of the day with the family members who live nearby and not across the country as my husband, Mark, and I do. And normally, she makes plans to celebrate with a friend. But these are not normal times. I was worried about sending a flower delivery person. Social distancing means no visiting with friends or family, no matter how close they are. So, my sister-in-law dropped off a gift and Mark and I sang “Happy Birthday” down the phone line with our kids. But I could hear the loneliness in Carol’s voice.

This was hardly the worst thing anyone experienced in America on that particular April day. We are fortunate that Carol is healthy and safe. But it upset me anyway. People over 60 are more vulnerable to COVID-19 than anyone else. They are also vulnerable to loneliness, especially when they live alone. By forcing us all into social isolation, one public health crisis—the coronavirus—is shining a bright light on another, loneliness. It will be some time before we have a vaccine for the coronavirus. But the antidote to loneliness is accessible to all of us: friendship.

Those who valued friendship as much as family had higher levels of health and happiness.

All too often we fail to appreciate what we have until it’s gone. And this shared global moment has illuminated how significant friends are to day-to-day happiness. Science has been accumulating evidence that friendship isn’t just critical for our happiness but our health and longevity. Its presence or absence matters at every point in life, but the cumulative effects of either show up most starkly in the later stages of life. That is also the moment when demographics and health concerns can conspire to make friendships harder to find or sustain. As the world hits pause, it’s worth reminding ourselves why friendship is more important now than ever.

Friendship has long been understood to be valuable and pleasurable. Ancient Greek philosophers enjoyed debating its virtues, in the company of friends. But friendship has largely been considered a cultural phenomenon, a pleasant by-product of the human capacity for language and living in groups. In the 1970s and 1980s, a handful of epidemiologists and sociologists began to establish a link between social relationships and health. They showed those who were more socially isolated were more likely to die over the course of the studies. In 2015, a meta-analysis of more than 3 million people whose average age was 66 showed that social isolation and loneliness increased the risk of early mortality by up to 30 percent.1 Yet loneliness and social isolation are not the same thing. Social isolation is an objective measure of the number and extent of social contact a person has day to day. Loneliness is a subjective feeling of mismatch between how much social connection you want and how much you have.

Once the link between health and relationships was established in humans, it was noticed in other species as well. Primatologists studying baboons in Africa remarked that when female baboons lost their primary grooming partners to lions or drought, they worked to build bonds with other animals in place of the one they’d lost. When the researchers analyzed the social behavior of the animals and their outcomes over generations, they found in multiple studies that the animals with the strongest social networks live longer and have more and healthier babies than those that are more isolated.2 Natural selection has resulted in survival of the friendliest.

Since baboons don’t drive each other to the hospital, something deeper than social support must be at work. Friendship is getting “under the skin,” as biologists say. Some of the mechanisms by which it works have yet to be explained, but studies have demonstrated that social connection improves cardiovascular functioning, reduces susceptibility to inflammation and viral disease, sharpens cognition, reduces depression, lowers stress, and even slows biological aging.3

We also now have a clearer definition of what friendship is. Evolutionary biologists concluded that friendship in monkeys—as well as people—required at least three things: it had to be long-lasting, positive, and cooperative. When an anthropologist looked for consistent definitions of friendship across cultures, he found something similar. Friendships were described as positive, and they nearly always include a willingness to help, especially in times of crisis. What friendship is about at the end of the day is creating intensely bonded groups that act as protection against life’s stresses.4

Social connection reduces depression, lowers stress, and even slows biological aging.

That buffering effect is particularly powerful as we age. Those first epidemiology studies focused on people in the middle of life. In 1987, epidemiologist Teresa Seeman of the University of California, Los Angeles, wondered if age and type of relationship mattered for health.5 She found that for those under 60, whether or not they were married mattered most. Being unmarried in midlife put people at greater risk of dying earlier than normal. But that did not turn out to be true for the oldest groups. For those over 60, close ties with friends and relatives mattered more than having a spouse. “That was a real lightbulb that went on,” Seeman says.

In a 2016 study, researchers at the University of North Carolina found that in both adolescence and old age, having friends was associated with a lower risk of physiological problems.6 The more friends you had, the lower the risk. By contrast, adults in middle age were less affected by variation in how socially connected they were. But the quality of their social relationships—whether friendships provided support or added strain—mattered more. Valuing friendship also proved increasingly important with age in a 2017 study by William Chopik of Michigan State University. He surveyed more than 270,000 adults from 15 to 99 years of age and found that those who valued friendship as much as family had higher levels of health, happiness, and subjective well-being across the lifespan. The effects were especially strong in those over 65. As you get older, friendships become more important, not less; whether you’re married is relatively less significant.7

There’s a widespread sense, especially among younger people, that people are lonely post-retirement. The truth is more complicated. Social networks do get smaller later in life for a variety of reasons. In retirement, people lose regular interaction with colleagues. Most diseases, and the probability of getting them, worsen with age. It’s more likely you will lose a spouse. Friends start to die as well. Mental and physical capacities may diminish, and social lives may be limited by hearing loss or reduced mobility.

Yet some of this social-narrowing is intentional. If time is of the essence, the motivation to derive emotional meaning from life increases, says Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center for Longevity. She found that people choose to spend time with those they really care about. They emphasize quality of relationships over quantity. While family members fill much of a person’s inner social circle, friends are there, too, and regularly fill in in the absence of family. A related, more optimistic perspective on retirement is that with fewer professional and family obligations, there are more hours for the things we want to do and the people with whom we want to do them.

At all stages of life, how we do friendship—whether we focus on one or two close friends or socialize more widely—has to do with our natural levels of sociability and motivation. Those vary, of course. I recently spoke with a man who had retired to Las Vegas. When he and his wife moved to their new house, his wife began baking cookies and distributing them to neighbors. She started throwing block parties for silly holidays and those neighbors showed up. No one had bothered to organize such a thing before. Even in retirement, this woman is what psychologists call a “social broker”—someone who brings people together. She has most likely always been friendly.

What best predicted health wasn’t cholesterol levels, but satisfaction in relationships.

How you live your life before you reach 60 makes a difference, experts on aging say. Friendship is a lifelong endeavor, but not everyone treats it that way. Think of relationships the way we do smoking, says epidemiologist Lisa Berkman of Harvard University. “If you start smoking when you’re 14, and stop smoking when you’re 65, in many ways, the damage is done,” she says “It’s not undoable. Stopping makes some things better. It’s worth doing but it’s very late in the game.” Similarly, if you only focus on friendships when your family and professional obligations slow, you will be at a disadvantage. Damage will have been done. The payoff in making friendship a priority was born out in the long-running Harvard Study of Adult Development, which followed more than 700 men for the entire course of their lives. What best predicted how healthy those men were at 80 wasn’t middle-aged cholesterol levels, it was how satisfied they were in their relationships at 50.8

Fortunately, it is possible to make new friends at every stage of life. In Los Angeles, I met a group of 70-something women who bonded as volunteers for Generation Xchange, an educational and community health nonprofit. The program places older adults in early elementary classrooms as teachers’ aids for a school year. As a result of the extra adult attention in class, the children’s reading scores have gone up and behavioral problems have gone down. The volunteers’ health has improved—they’ve lost weight, and lowered blood pressure and cholesterol. But they have also become friends, which is just what UCLA’s Seeman had in mind when she started the program. “One of the reasons our program may be successful is that we are motivating them to get engaged through their joint interest in helping the kids,” Seeman says. “It takes the pressure off of making friends. You can start getting to know each other in the context of the school and our team. Hopefully, the friendships can grow out of that.”

Concerns about loneliness among the elderly are well-founded. Demographics are not working in favor of the fight against loneliness. By 2035, older adults are projected to outnumber children for the first time in American history. Because of drops in marriage and childbearing, more of those older adults will be unmarried and childless than ever before. The percentage of older adults living alone rose steadily through the 20th century, and now hovers at 27 percent. And a digital divide still exists between older adults and their children and grandchildren, according to recent studies. That means older adults are less able to use virtual technology like Zoom to stay connected during the COVID-19 pandemic—though some are learning. Laura Fisher, a personal trainer in New York City, found that putting her business online meant training older clients one-on-one in videoconferencing. She now works out with one of her young clients in New York City and her client’s grandmother in Israel. Generally, older adults who use social media report more support from both their grown children and their friends. “For older people, social media is a real avenue of connection, of relational well-being,” says psychologist Jeff Hancock who runs the social media lab at Stanford University.

That is good news in this moment of enforced social isolation. So is the fact that being apart has reminded so many of us of how much we enjoy being together. For my part, I sent those flowers to my mother-in-law after all when I discovered contactless delivery. When the flowers arrived, we spoke again. And then I called her again two days later. “It’s great to talk to you,” she said.

Lydia Denworth is a contributing editor for Scientific American and the author of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond.

Lead image: SanaStock / Shutterstock

References

1 Holt-Lunstad, J., et al. Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, 227-237 (2015).

2 Silk, J.B., Alberts, S.C., & Altmann, J. Social bonds of female baboons enhance infant survival. Science 302, 1231-1234 (2003).

3 Holt-Lunstad, J., Uchino, B.N., Smith, T.W., & Hicks, A. On the importance of relationship quality: The impact of ambivalence in friendships on cardiovascular functioning. Annals of Behavioral Medicine 33, 278-290 (2007).

4 Uchino, B.N., Kent de Grey, R.G., & Cronan, S. The quality of social networks predicts age-related changes in cardiovascular reactivity to stress. Psychology and Aging 31, 321–326 (2016).

5 Seeman, T.E., et al. Social network ties and mortality among tile elderly in the Alameda County Study. American Journal of Epidemiology 126, 714-723 (1987).

6 Yang, Y.C., et al. Social relationships and physiological determinants of longevity across the human life span. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, 578-583 (2016).

7 Chopik, W.J. Associations among relational values, support, health, and well‐being across the adult lifespan. Personal Relationships 24, 408-422 (2017).

8 Vaillant, G.E. & Mukamal, K. Successful aging. American Journal of Psychiatry 158, 839-847 (2001).

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I hope you are staying healthy and are managing to navigate your work-at-home mandates.

Last week, I tapped the collective insights of the Drug Channels’ audience. Nearly 700 readers shared their perspectives and projections for how the coronavirus pandemic could ultimately affect behavior, policy, and industry structure. Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond.

I will share the results over three articles this week:

• Today, in Part 1, I will review the responses relating to patient behavior, pharmacies, and wholesalers. 
• In Part 2 (tomorrow), I’ll focus on expectations for pharmaceutical manufacturers and third-party payment. 
• In Part 3 (Thursday), I’ll examine how the coronavirus may affect the public perception of the industry’s participants.

P.S. A special shout out to the respondent who hoped that the coronavirus would not impact the quality of Drug Channels memes. Never fear, dear readers: Drug Channels will remain the internet’s top destination for pharmaceutical-related humor!
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