healthcare
Environmental solutionsnews Covering infection prevention, medical waste management & sustainable practices
VOL. XVI NO.41 XII NO.
www.HealthcareEnvironmentalSolutions.com
spring 2020 WINTER 2016
COVID-19: An Ongoing Challenge for Both Healthcare Professionals and Infectious Waste Management
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OVID-19 is a coronavirus, one of a number of viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to highly fatal respiratory syndromes like SARS and MERS. COVID-19 is a new strain of coronavirus causing pneumonia-like symptoms. Researchers have now confirmed that the virus can spread via human-to-human transmission, though the original source of the virus has not been identified. Unlike other coronaviruses, COVID-19 has a much larger global spread and has infected more individuals than SARS and MERS combined. Individuals who have recovered from COVID-19 infection may have developed some protective immunity, but this has not yet been confirmed. A Japanese patient was said to have been re-infected, but experts note that it could also be a flare-up of the original disease. This shows us that, while medical leaders and researchers across the world are studying every aspect of this disease, they do not have a great handle on what it will do, or what if anything, the antidote might be, but time. On top of that, we have been exposed to different flu strains throughout our lives, which help us build immunity, but no one has immunity to this new virus. We know who are hit the worst – the elderly and compromised, not the young. We also know that it mutates. “A new but preliminary study
by Kathleen Marquardt published in the National Science Review, the journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the more virulent of these two strains struck first, which explains the rapid transmissibility of the disease and its unnaturally high mortality rate during the first weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in China. This more virulent strain exists alongside its less harmful cousin. The study identified these two strains as type L (the more virulent) and type S (which was found to be the ancestral version). “The study found the more aggressive type of SARS-CoV-2 accounted for roughly 70% of analyzed strains. On the other hand, 30% had been linked to a less aggressive type.”
Virologist Stephen Griffin, from University of Leeds in the U.K., explained that when RNA viruses first cross the species barrier into humans, they “aren’t particularly well adapted to their new host (us!),” thus they mutate in order to “become better able to replicate within, and spread from human to human.” Other experts expect more variants to be discovered as infections spike around the world and viruses adapt to new environments and hosts. One sample “ . . . of an American patient who had recently traveled to Wuhan, suggested he might have been infected with both. Scientists say the possibility of a third mutation cannot be ruled out.” Yang Zhanqiu, a Wuhan-based virologist, told the Global Times recently that the American patient was probably infected with a third variant yet to be identified with enough samples. Usually a person can only be infected with one subtype of the coronavirus because different types clash with each other. According to an article in the Journal of Medical Virology, “some COVID-19 patients also showed neurologic signs such as headache, nausea and vomiting. Increasing evidence shows that coronaviruses are not always confined to the respiratory tract and that they may also invade the central nervous system, inducing neurological diseases. The infection of SARS‐CoV has been reported in the brains
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