What’s new in health? Here are the most interesting, under-the-radar stories from Yahoo News partners this week.
“No consent is ever required from a dead person.”
What does the future of grief and loss look like? You Only Virtual, an AI company with its founder Justin Harrison, is creating chatbots modeled after deceased relatives. Saying “Good morning America”. He hopes that people will not feel any sadness.
Only You, Virtual scans emails and phone calls shared between the person and the deceased to create a chatbot that mimics the deceased’s voice and produces original text and voice responses.
In the year The company, which was founded in 2020, will offer a video-chat option this year and will eventually offer augmented-reality that allows users to interact with a three-dimensional projection, GMA reported.
Harrison, who used the technology to create a “virtual mother” after his mother’s death, dismissed the privacy concerns that could arise from private conversations to build a chatbot without the deceased’s consent.
“You never need permission from a dead person,” he said. “My mother may hate the idea, but this is what I want and I’m alive.”
The World Health Organization has stated that thanks to global warming, the number of mosquito-borne diseases is likely to increase.
The World Health Organization said on Friday that cases of dengue fever are likely to peak this year – thanks in part to global warming, which allows mosquitoes and the viruses they carry to multiply faster, Reuters reported.
The World Health Organization warned earlier this year that dengue is a “threat of an epidemic” in the world’s fastest-growing tropical region.
Most cases are asymptomatic, however Dengue symptoms It can include fever with nausea, rash, or pain, which usually goes away in two to seven days. One in 20 people who get dengue will develop severe dengue, which can cause shock, internal bleeding and – in less than 1% of people – death.
A genetic variation may be the reason why some test positive for the virus without showing any symptoms of Covid.
Scientists involved in the study Published on Wednesday They have identified a gene that explains why some Covid-positive people never develop symptoms.
The study enrolled 29,947 volunteer bone marrow donors — “because high-quality genetic data is already available for this group,” The Washington Post reported — and asked them to use a smartphone to track their own coronavirus infections and any symptoms over a nine-month period, including taking weekly Covid tests. During the study, 20% of patients who tested positive and had no symptoms had a human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene variant called HLA-B*15:01. Participants carrying two copies of the variant were “more than eight times more likely to remain asymptomatic than those carrying other HLA variants.”
Researchers hope this discovery will lead to further innovations in vaccines and treatments.
“As we’ve all learned, preventing COVID infection turns out to be harder than we thought,” said Jill Hollenbach, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and co-author of the study. I personally would be happy if we could design a vaccine that would easily fight off the infection so that you would have no symptoms.
Prolonged Covid ‘brain fog’ can age the brain by ten years, study says
“Brain fog” linked to prolonged Covid-19 may be the equivalent of 10 years of aging, PA media reported.
Participants in Study at King’s College London Tested on memory, attention, reasoning, processing speed and motor control. Researchers whose test results found that those most affected by Covid were participants who had had symptoms of Covid for 12 weeks or more. And in that group, the virus’ effect on test accuracy is “comparable in magnitude to the effect of a 10-year increase in age.” When the second round of testing was conducted, an average of about two years after the participants’ first infection, there was no improvement in the results.
“Our findings suggest that for people who have had long-term symptoms after being exposed to Covid-19, the effects of the coronavirus on brain processes such as memory for words and shapes can be detected an average of two years after the initial infection,” he said.
“However, the result that Covid had no effect on the performance of our tests was good news for people who felt they had fully recovered, despite having symptoms for several months and could be considered to have had prolonged Covid.