Should you be worry about JN.1? Here's what doctors are saying regarding new Covid variant
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The doctors in the national capital have advised people not to panic over the COVID-19 cases linked to the JN.1 variant, saying the strain is not severe and most patients have only reported mild symptoms.Following the recent government advisory, several hospitals in the city have started preparing by arranging oxygen cylinders, antibiotics, other essential drugs, BiPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure) machines, vaccines, ventilators and additional isolation beds as part of precautionary measures.Indian Medical Association Junior Doctors Network (IMA JDN) national spokesperson Dr Dhruv Chauhan said that people need not panic about the JN.1 variant, a descendant of the Omicron BA.2.86 lineage which is the predominant Covid-19 strain circulating in India."This is not a lethal variant and it's always better to take precautions like maintaining hand hygiene, wearing masks where necessary such as in hospitals or crowded places and following respiratory hygiene. It is also important to get your symptoms checked by a qualified doctor," reported news agency quoting Dr Chauhan."The public should remember that panic and chaos can cause more health issues than the disease itself," he added.Dr Nihal Singh, an internal medicine specialist, said, "We must understand that while the JN.1 variant is spreading, it has not shown signs of causing serious illness in the majority of cases.""Panic doesn't help, awareness does. There's no need for fear, only sensible precautions," he added.Dr Aviral Mathur, Associate Consultant at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, said "this strain is highly transmissible, though symptoms remain mostly mild"."Still, prevention is key. We urge the public to wear masks in crowded or enclosed spaces, practice hand hygiene and avoid unnecessary travel if unwell. Make sure your vaccinations, including booster doses, are up to date," he added.The health experts reiterate that while the JN.1 variant is not lethal, simple preventive measures can go a long way in keeping communities safe.Earlier on Friday, the Delhi government amid a slight rise in Covid-19 cases across the country issued an advisory directing hospitals to ensure preparedness, including the availability of beds, oxygen, essential drugs and functional equipment like ventilators and BiPAP machines.On Saturday, Union Health Secretary Punya Salila Srivastava reviewed the matter regarding COVID-19 cases reported across multiple states, mainly from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka, etc, reported ANI quoting official sources.It is observed that most of these cases are mild and under home care.According to the Union Health Ministry, as of May 19, India has 257 active COVID-19 cases, most of which are mild and require no hospitalisation. The country continues to monitor respiratory illnesses through the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) and the ICMR.The Union Health Ministry remains vigilant and proactive in monitoring the situation closely, ensuring that appropriate measures are in place to safeguard public health. While COVID-19 is now considered another type of viral infection, basic precautions such as hand hygiene, masks in crowded areas and avoiding unnecessary gatherings are still encouraged.
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'We as individuals internalize this notion that we have failed ourselves, our family, our society, our public healthcare system because we have 'allowed' ourselves to become a certain weight and therefore a burden," she said. 'To be told, 'This is beyond you, you don't have control over it' is really important for people to hear." Activists believe that some of the health problems afflicting the overweight are products of a biased healthcare system that treats their bodies as problems in themselves. 'The unfortunate reality is that a lot of the time, fat people don't get the care they need, which can result in healthcare disparities," said Ani Janzen, operations and project leader at the Association for Size Diversity in Health, one of several organizations that address fat bias in medicine. 'It's an awful Catch-22 because those disparities are then used to enforce the idea that larger people are in worse health than people are in smaller bodies." Pamela Mejia, a researcher who conducted a study on fat bias in the media for NAAFA, is familiar with this prejudice. 'I have a doctor who is convinced that everything that happens to me, from a sprained ankle to a migraine, would be helped if I lost weight," she said. 'Once I fell and bruised myself hiking and the doctors said, 'It would be better if you lose weight.' I just fell off a mountain! Does he think the mountain attacked me because I'm fat?" Nearly every fat activist has similar nightmare stories. Tigress Osborn recalls being pressured to have weight-loss surgery before undergoing a medically necessary hysterectomy. Then there are the smaller but repeated indignities confronted during routine medical visits. The absence of larger chairs in the waiting room. Hospital robes that won't fully cover their naked bodies. Equipment ranging from blood-pressure cuffs to MRI machines that cannot accommodate them. Orthopedic surgeons who refuse to do knee or hip replacements because they believe it will be too complicated or that body weight will compromise recovery. Doctors who immediately assume the reason for any visit is to lose weight and if that's not why they're there, well, it should be. No wonder overweight and obese people avoid or delay healthcare services, a fact backed by multiple studies. Either they are embarrassed by their weight or want to avoid being lectured about it. They put off cancer screenings and other tests, which some believe contribute to higher mortality rates among overweight people. Obesity doctors concede that the medical profession has a long way to go in how it approaches excess weight. Not only are more specialists needed, but doctors across the field need to be better trained. Apovian described an obese man in his 60s who couldn't move his legs, and a doctor had written on his chart, 'Patient didn't want to move his legs." By the time doctors realized the patient had an abscess blocking his spinal cord, he was paralyzed. In 2022, when leading U.S. organizations dedicated to obesity medicine gathered to discuss treatment and prevention, their consensus statement acknowledged that 'Bias and stigmatization directed at people with obesity contributes to poor health and impairs treatment." Fat studies, an interdisciplinary field that arose in the 1990s, focuses on what it calls 'weight-based oppression" and those who benefit from it. It criticizes the weight-loss industry for repeatedly selling quick fixes that help perpetuate weight cycling in a drive for profit. Fen-Phen, a 1990s diet drug that was recalled after it was shown to cause life-threatening heart problems, serves as a cautionary tale. Like ethnic studies and queer studies, fat studies was inspired by activism and organized around identity, incorporating aspects of social sciences, the arts and the humanities. In the language of fat studies, to 'fatten" an issue means to examine it through the lens of the fat justice movement. Scholars are now 'fattening" GLP-1s. One fear is an increased pressure to lose weight and a demonization of those who don't, despite the fact that GLP-1s are ineffective in 10-15% of patients. Even when successful, the drugs tend to yield a weight loss of 5% to 20%, which won't transform someone who weighs 350 pounds into a thin person. Much of the work of fat studies scholars focuses on stigma, building on 20th-century sociologist Erving Goffman's pioneering theory that stigmas around 'guilty" traits like obesity result in stronger biases than ones that are 'not your fault," such as schizophrenia. A general awareness of unconscious biases has grown in recent years, but body size remains an outlier. Research has shown that weight discrimination is nearly as common as race discrimination, and stronger against women than men. 'The most pressing issue to me is how amazingly negative and gratuitous the negative stereotypes are against fat people and all the daily ways in which this bias is made clear," Esther Rothblum, a professor emerita of psychology at San Diego State University and former editor of Fat Studies, an academic journal, told me. 'People say things about fat people that they would never say about black or elderly or gay people. It's very hard to be a member of any oppressed group in society but when it comes to fatness, people don't even see a problem with their prejudice." Of course, fat activists, like all identity campaigners, don't speak for everyone they aim to represent. Many overweight people find the movement's preferred word, 'fat," shaming. Plenty still want to escape what they see as an emotional and medical burden. Tommy Tomlinson, author of the 2019 memoir 'The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America," has lost 58 pounds since he began taking GLP-1s last year. For him, the change has been more than physical. 'The constant food noise in my head, always thinking about the next meal, looking up the menu for the place you're going to that night—all that has disappeared," he told me. 'It's an incredibly transformative thing in my life." Tomlinson described a conversation he once had with Lee Kaplan, an obesity doctor and pioneer in the field. Kaplan asked Tomlinson if after being on the drugs for a while, he believed there was a chemical component to losing weight. Tomlinson said he did. Could this also mean, Kaplan asked, that something chemical in his body made Tomlinson gain all that weight in the first place? 'I hadn't thought about it in those clear and direct terms before," Tomlinson recalled. 'It was shattering in a way but also comforting. To be told, 'It's not your fault.'" The fracas over whether a slimmed down Lizzo or Kelly Clarkson has betrayed the body positivity movement may garner more attention, but activists readily acknowledge that these drugs offer real relief to some people. The more important point, they maintain, is that regardless of the successes GLP-1s bring to any one individual, the larger problem of how fatness is handled socially, medically and economically persists. 'My goal isn't to stop people from wanting to lose weight," Osborn of NAAFA told me. Instead, it's 'to reach more people with the knowledge that you don't have to beat yourself up over being in this body, that we can work toward creating a world where people can live freely in the bodies they are in." That kind of message, she says, 'offers that same sense of relief—but delivers it to everyone."
