COVID Variant That's Been Circulating Since 2024 Still Dominant Strain in US: CDC
Recent data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that a COVID-19 variant that has been circulating since last year is currently the dominant variant in the United States.
The LP.8.1 COVID-19 variant, an offshoot of the Omicron strain, was first detected in June 2024, health officials have said. CDC data show that it makes up 73 percent of all cases detected in the country as of May 24, according to an update issued on June 1. The XFC variant is No. 2 at 10 percent, and the XEC variant is third at 4 percent.
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Yahoo
44 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Teens press NC lawmakers to raise the age for tobacco, vape products to 21
Among middle school and high school students who currently use e-cigarettes, 1 in 4 use the devices daily according to the CDC. (Photo: iStock) Thursday, June 5th would be Solomon Wynn's 17th birthday. But instead of planning Solly's birthday party, his stepmother Charlene Zorn was back at the legislature this week pleading with lawmakers to raise the minimum age to buy tobacco and vaping products in North Carolina from 18 to 21. Solly was just 15-year-old when he died from vaping in 2021. Zorn said her stepson went from being a healthy, athletic teen who was training for high school football, to one who suffered kidney failure and eventually had to be placed on a ventilator. 'When we lost Solomon, I vowed to make a difference in the lives of teenagers so no family would have to go through what my family's experienced,' Zorn told reporters at a Tuesday press conference. 'Over these last two years, I have realized that in addition to speaking with youth, the best way to honor Solomon's memory is to advocate for change in North Carolina and to make this about every child in our state, not just Solomon.' House Bill 430 and Senate Bill 318 — the 'Protect Youth From Harms of Vaping & Nicotine Act' — would raise the legal age of sale for tobacco and vape products to 21 and require sellers to have a tobacco retail sales permit. While the two bills have bipartisan sponsors, neither has moved since they were introduced in March. Sine both missed the legislature's self-imposed 'crossover deadline,' it will be a heavy lift to resurrect the legislation at this point in the session. But Zorn came prepared Tuesday. Joined by the bills' sponsors, more than a dozen teenagers from Alamance, Duplin and Wake counties came ready to walk the halls of the North Carolina General Assembly and urge their representatives to protect youth from the addictive and dangerous health effects of vaping and nicotine use. Macey Morris, a senior at Eastern Alamance High School, said lawmakers need to understand how many young people are becoming addicted because of the lack of state regulation. 'Vaping has completely changed our schools today. It's not only in the bathrooms, but also in classrooms where you find distracted kids who are hiding vapes in their clothing and their backpacks,' said Morris. 'It affects learning, it affects focus, and it deteriorates health.' Morris said the practice may seem harmless at first, but she's watched student athletes lose stamina and struggle to compete in their chosen sports because their lungs were damaged by a product many were told was safer than cigarettes. Advocates say permitting or licensing the sale of vape and tobacco products would allow the state to know where tobacco products are being sold and improve merchant education efforts, while also allowing the state to inspect for responsible retail practices. Some members of the National Federation of Independent Business owners raised concerns about a permit fee in the proposed legislation, but Rep. Donnie Loftis said that should not keep the bills bottled up in the Rules Committee. 'There was some concerns that $400 may be so detrimental to a business. I'm thinking if $400 is the difference between you staying open or closed, a child's life is well worth more than $400 for your business,' said the Gaston County Republican. Loftis said the bill would also set the age for legal purchase for vaping and nicotine products at 21, the same age for alcohol sales. North Carolina is currently one of just seven states that have not raised the federal minimum legal sales age of all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, from 18 to 21. Senator Gale Adcock (D-Wake) said after three decades as a family nurse practitioner, she's convinced her bill will provide teenagers with the structural supports needed to prevent nicotine abuse. 'To help them make better short-term choices until their own decision-making capacity can catch-up with their physical growth,' reasoned Adcock. 'That is what this bill does. It gives our youth a fighting chance.' Ninety-five percent of vaping and tobacco use begins before age 21, according to advocates. North Carolina currently ranks 6th in the nation for youth vaping.
The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
CDC now advising international travelers to get measles vaccine
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. health officials have changed their advice to international travelers about measles, saying that Americans should be vaccinated against the virus no matter where they're going. U.S. residents are recommended to get measles-mumps-rubella shots, anyway. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention previously emphasized the importance of vaccination for travelers going to countries with outbreaks. Last week, the CDC updated its guidance to call for vaccinations for travelers going to all other countries. Ashley Darcy-Mahoney, a researcher at George Washington University's nursing school, called the update significant. An Colorado outbreak last month stemmed from an international flight that landed in Denver, she noted. The CDC travel notice change reflects a recognition that people are not just being exposed to measles in countries where it's spreading, but also in airplanes and during travel, she added. 'We're seeing a shift from localized outbreaks to transmission in transit,' and the CDC seems to be responding to that, Darcy-Mahoney said. The travel notice advises two doses for all Americans ages 1 and older. An early dose is advised for traveling infants ages 6 months to 11 months. The U.S. has seen more than 1,000 measles cases so far this year. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Medscape
an hour ago
- Medscape
Do Pregnant Women Need COVID Boosters?
You're pregnant, healthy, and hearing mixed messages: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is not a scientist or doctor, says you don't need the COVID vaccine, but experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Protection still put you in a high-risk group of people who ought to receive boosters. The science is on the side of the shots. Pregnant women who contracted covid-19 were more likely to become severely ill and to be hospitalized than non-pregnant women of the same age and demographics, especially early in the COVID pandemic. A meta-analysis of 435 studies found that pregnant and recently pregnant women who were infected with the virus that causes COVID were more likely to end up in intensive care units, be on invasive ventilation, and die than women who weren't pregnant but had a similar health profile. This was before COVID vaccines were available. Neil Silverman, a professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology and the director of the Infectious Diseases in Pregnancy Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said he still sees more bad outcomes in pregnant patients who have COVID. The risk of severe COVID fluctuated as new variants arose and vaccinations became available, Silverman said, but the threat is still meaningful. 'No matter what the politics say, the science is the science, and we know that, objectively, pregnant patients are at substantially increased risk of having complications,' Silverman said. A request for comment regarding the scientific literature that supports COVID vaccination for pregnant women sent to HHS' public affairs office elicited an unsigned email unrelated to the question. The office did not respond when asked for an on-the-record comment. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist before joining the Trump administration, announced May 27 that COVID vaccines would be removed from the CDC's immunization schedule for healthy pregnant women and healthy children. His announcement, made in a video posted on the social media platform X, blindsided CDC officials and circumvented the agency's established, scientific processes for adding and removing shots from its recommended schedules, The Washington Post reported. There's still much unknown about how COVID affects a pregnant person. The physiological relationship between COVID infections and mothers and fetuses at different stages of a pregnancy is complex, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan. The increased risk to pregnant patients comes in part because pregnancy changes the immune system, Rasmussen said. 'There is natural immune suppression so that the mother's body doesn't attack the developing fetus,' Rasmussen said. 'While the mother does still have a functioning immune system, it's not functioning at full capacity.' Pregnant patients are more likely to get sick and have a harder time fighting off any infection as a result. In addition to changing how the immune system works, being pregnant also makes women five times as likely to have blood clots. That risk is increased if they contract COVID, said Sallie Permar, chair of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine. The virus that causes COVID can affect the vascular endothelium — specialized cells that line blood vessels and help with blood flow, Rasmussen said. In a healthy person, the endothelium helps prevent blood clots by producing chemicals that tweak the vascular system to keep it running. In a person infected with the COVID virus, the balance is thrown off and the production of those molecules is disrupted, which research shows can lead to blood clots or other blood disorders. Permar said that those clots can be especially dangerous to both pregnant women and fetuses. Inflammation and blood clots in the placenta could be connected to an increased risk of stillbirth, especially from certain COVID variants, according to studies published in major medical journals as well as by the CDC. When the placenta is inflamed, it's harder for blood carrying oxygen and nutrients to get to the developing baby, said Mary Prahl, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine. 'If anything is interrupting those functions — inflammation or clotting or differences in how the blood is flowing — that's really going to affect how the placenta is working and being able to allow the fetus to grow and develop appropriately,' she said. It makes sense that we see the effects of COVID in the placenta, Silverman said. 'The placenta is nothing more than a hyper-specialized collection of blood vessels, so it is like a magnetic target for the virus.' Blood vessels in the placenta are smaller and may clot more easily than in the mother's circulatory system, he said. Permar said recent data suggests that pregnant women sick with COVID still have a higher risk of pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia, preterm birth, and miscarriage, even with existing immunity from previous infection or vaccination. COVID, she said, can still land women in the hospital with pregnancy complications. Prahl said the connection between stillbirth and COVID may be changing given the immunity many people have developed from vaccination or prior infection. It's an area in which she'd like to see more research. There's already strong evidence that both mRNA-based and non-mRNA COVID vaccines are safe for pregnant women. Prahl co-authored a small, early study that found no adverse outcomes and showed antibody protection persisted for both the mother and the baby after birth. 'What we learned very quickly is that pregnant individuals want answers and many of them want to be involved in research,' she said. Later studies, including one published in the journal Nature Medicine showing that getting a booster in pregnancy cut newborn hospitalizations in the first four months of life, backed up her team's findings. Prahl expects more evidence will be available soon to support the benefits of mothers receiving a COVID booster during pregnancy. 'I can say, kind of behind the scenes, I'm seeing a lot of this preliminary data,' she said. She blames the delay in part on the Biden administration's scaling back of federal efforts to track COVID. 'A lot of the surveillance of these data were pulled back,' she said. The Trump administration is further cutting money used to track COVID. But because the vaccines give a pregnant woman's immune system a boost by increasing neutralizing antibodies, virologist Rasmussen is confident that getting one while pregnant makes it less likely a pregnant woman will end up in the hospital if she gets COVID. 'It will protect the pregnant person from more severe disease,' she said. Getting a COVID vaccine while pregnant also helps protect newborns after birth. Pregnant women who get vaccinated pass that protection to their young babies, who can't get their own shots until they are at least 6 months old. According to data released by the CDC in 2024, nearly 90% of babies who had to be hospitalized with COVID had mothers who didn't get the vaccine while they were pregnant. As recently as April 2024, research showed that babies too young to be vaccinated had the highest COVID hospitalization rate of any age group except people 75 and older. The Trump administration's decision to remove the COVID vaccine from the list of shots it recommends for pregnant women means insurance companies might no longer cover it. Pregnant women who want to get it anyway may have to pay hundreds of dollars out-of-pocket. 'I don't want to be that doctor who just says, 'Well, it's really important. You have to vaccinate yourself and your kids no matter what, even if you have to pay for it out-of-pocket,' because everyone has their own priorities and budgetary concerns, especially in the current economic climate,' Silverman said. 'I can't tell a family that the vaccine is more important than feeding their kids.' But he and his colleagues will keep advising pregnant women to try to get the shots anyway. 'Newborns will be completely naive to COVID exposure,' he said. 'Vaccinating pregnant women to protect their newborns is still a valid reason to continue this effort.'
