You might want to avoid Savannah for a little while

Savannah and Chatham county’s Covid infection rate has shot up high enough to put it back in the red zone, and hospitalizations are at the highest level since March. Remember March? March wasn’t good.

Only 41 percent of the county has been fully vaccinated, mostly those over 65. The big fear: Parts of Georgia becoming like parts of Missouri.

A bit of good news

Here’s something positive: : Kids who get multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS) as a result of Covid-19 (C) only have to deal with it for a few months after infection — at least, so found researchers at Columbia University. Granted, it’s not a great few months — MIS-C puts kids in the ICU with heart problems — but it’s better than at least one alternative.

Pfizer settles over EpiPen prices

The company agreed to pay $345 million to patients who overpaid for their EpiPens “due to anticompetitive and unfair practices by the drugmaker and the company that markets the emergency allergy treatment, Mylan.”

This is fallout from waaaaaay back in 2016, when Mylan raised the price of EpiPens 600 percent and the New York Times reported that Mylan’s board chair, Robert Coury, used, um, colorful language to describe critics.

Mylan has since merged with Pfizer’s Upjohn to form Viatris.

Antibiotics too early?

Giving kids antibiotics before they’re two years old might change their microbiome enough that it affects the gene expression in their brains. So found Rutgers researchers who suggest “reducing widespread antibiotic use or using alternatives when possible to prevent neurodevelopment problems.”

“Our previous work has shown that exposing young animals to antibiotics changes their metabolism and immunity. The third important development in early life involves the brain. This study is preliminary but shows a correlation between altering the microbiome and changes in the brain that should be further explored.”

Cancer GPS

What if you could use a urine test not only to detect if someone had cancer, but exactly where that cancer was? You’d obviously have to use nanoparticles, like all the cool kids, and that’s just what engineers at MIT came up with.

Their nanoparticles “can detect specific cancer-associated molecules that circulate in bodily fluids,” telling doctors both what and where the cancer is:

It can reveal the presence of cancerous proteins through a urine test, and it functions as an imaging agent, pinpointing the tumor location. In principle, this diagnostic could be used to detect cancer anywhere in the body, including tumors that have metastasized from their original locations.

This again

Yet another case of H5N6 bird flu has been found in a human — this one in Bazhong, China. Fear not, as local officials “activated an emergency response and sterilized the area,” which doesn’t sound terrifying at all.

And then this

A man in Texas has been diagnosed with monkeypox — the first such case in the U.S. in 20 years. He had just flown back from Nigeria (presumably to meet with a prince to collect his millions). The other passengers are probably very glad masks were required on the flights.

Listen to your elders (they may have dementia)

On Thursday we told you about using GPS to potentially detect Alzheimer’s by monitoring someone’s driving. But what if Grandpa won’t go for that? Japanese researchers have another way: an algorithm they say can detect the onset of dementia just by hearing phone conversations — live or recorded.

In fact, testing showed that their machine-learning system was as good at predicting Alzheimer’s as existing cognitive tests.

More creepy-crawlies

Yesterday it was spiders and caterpillars with potentially helpful venom. Today we’ll go with tarantulas and snakes.

Bioengineers led by Canada’s Western University are working to turn the blood clotting enzyme reptilase — it comes from the venom of the deadly (and usually-in-South-America) lancehead snake — into surgical glue that’s both stronger and faster to set than today’s clinical fibrin glue.

Meanwhile, entomologists at UC Davis are looking at using the venom of the Peruvian green velvet tarantula…

…to keep pain signals from transmitting between nerves and muscles. This spider’s venom has a particular peptide associated with a specific channel that transmits pain.

The goal is a pain treatment as strong as opioids without the side effects.

Instead of a spider, here’s a kitten. You’re welcome.