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How Worried Should We Be About Disease X?
They’re calling it Disease X. It’s a mysterious illness circulating in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC. Current figures: almost 400 cases and 79 deaths. International health authorities are monitoring.
It all started on Oct. 24 when the first patient fell ill with an unidentified sickness. Others soon followed, all in Kwango Province, which is more than 400 miles from the capital Kinshasa. But it wasn’t until more than five weeks later that the national government was notified.
“At the Emergency Operation Center for Public Health and at the INSP [National Institute of Public Health] — which is in maximum alert mode — we’ve already positioned central-level teams who will leave within 24 hours to join the [local] health zone,” says Dr. Dieudonné Mwamba, the director general of INSP, who spoke in French at a press briefing on Thursday.
“The most frequent symptoms that were noted: fever, headache, cough and sometimes difficulties to breathe,” he said. More than half the cases are in children under 5.
No one knows yet how worried to be about Disease X — as it’s been called by Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In fact, “situations like this occur probably several times a year around the world,” says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, who has been tracking the DRC outbreak.
Lilly Adds to Obesity Drug Production Push With $3B Investment
Eli Lilly will spend $3 billion to expand a manufacturing facility in Wisconsin it bought in April, adding new capabilities to produce injectable medicines like its fast-selling weight loss and diabetes drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro, the company said Thursday.
The expansion of the Kenosha County facility will be Lilly’s “single largest U.S. manufacturing investment” outside of its home state of Indiana, said Edgardo Hernandez, the head of the company’s manufacturing operations, in a statement.
Lilly will acquire additional land and an adjacent warehouse in the deal, which will add 750 employees to the 100 already working at the facility. Another 2,000 people will be involved in the construction of the facility, the company said.
Once operational, the larger facility will produce medicines in several therapeutic areas, assemble injection devices and package products for patient use, Lilly said.
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Mpox Continues Its Africa Spread as Clade 1b Confirmed in 2 More Nations
Africa’s mpox outbreaks are still trending upward, with a rise in cases and deaths last week compared to the previous week, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said today at a weekly briefing.
Countries reported 36 more deaths, raising the total this year to 1,200. “We are still losing people,” said Jean Kaseya, M.D., MPH, director-general of Africa CDC. The region reported 2,708 new cases, putting the total for the year at 62,171 cases in 20 countries. Most cases and all of the deaths last week were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, which has been the main outbreak epicenter.
Kaseya said sequencing results from two recently affected countries — Zimbabwe and Zambia — have revealed the novel clade 1b virus for the first time there. Overall, clade 2 viruses are mainly affecting adults, and the older clade 1a virus is disproportionately affecting children, such as in the DRC, where 87.6% of people with clade 1a are children. Meanwhile, the novel clade 1b virus is affecting both children and adults.
Analysis Predicts Big Drop for U.S. In Global Health Rankings
Americans are falling farther behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to health and life expectancy, a new study shows.
Life expectancy in the U.S. is expected to increase to 79.9 years in 2035 and 80.4 years by 2050, up from 78.3 years in 2022, researchers reported. That sounds good, but it’s actually a modest increase that will lower the nation’s global ranking from 49th in 2022 to 66th in 2050 among 204 countries around the world, they found.
“The rapid decline of the U.S. in global rankings from 2022 to 2050 rings the alarm for immediate action,” said co-senior study author Dr. Stein Emil Vollset, an affiliate professor with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“The U.S. must change course and find new and better health strategies and policies that slow down the decline in future health outcomes,” Vollset added in a university news release.
The U.S. is also expected to rank progressively lower than other nations in the average number of years a person can expect to live in good health, researchers reported Dec. 5 in The Lancet journal.
Psilocybin Can Lift Depression in Clinicians Who Worked on COVID-19 Frontlines, Trial Finds
A small double-blind randomized clinical trial of U.S. frontline healthcare workers with COVID-19 pandemic–related depression finds that the psychedelic drug psilocybin can relieve feelings of despair and burnout.
For the study, published yesterday in JAMA Network Open, a University of Washington (UW)-led research team randomly assigned 30 physicians, advanced-practice practitioners, and nurses to receive either 25 milligrams (mg) of psilocybin or 100 mg of niacin placebo from February to December 2022.
The participants had provided frontline patient care for more than 1 month in 2020 and/or 2021 and had no history of mental illness but did have moderate or severe depression at enrollment.
