The study, published Friday in JAMA Pediatrics, is the first large-scale research effort to compare the health outcomes of coronavirus infection from Omicron to Delta in children 4 and younger — the age group not yet able to be vaccinated.

The findings show that the Omicron variant is 6-8 times more infectious than the Delta variant. The severe clinical outcomes ranged from a 16% lower risk for emergency room visits to 85% less risk for mechanical ventilation. And about 1.8% of children infected with Omicron were hospitalized, compared to 3.3% with Delta.

The Case Western Reserve-led team analyzed the electronic health records of more than 651,640 children in the United States who had medical encounter with healthcare organizations between 9/2021-1/2022-including more than 22,772 children infected with Omicron in late December and late January — to more than 66,000 children infected when Delta was prevalent in the fall. The study also compared the records of more than 10,000 children immediately before the detection of Omicron in the U.S., but when Delta was still predominant.

Children younger than 5 are not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccines and have a low rate of previous SARS-CoV-2 infections, which also limits their pre-existing immunity.

The team examined clinical health outcomes for pediatric patients during a 14-day window following SARS-CoV-2 infection. Among the factors they reviewed were: emergency room visits, hospitalizations, ICU admissions and mechanical ventilation use.

Further demographic data analysis found that children infected with Omicron were on average younger-1.5 years of age versus 1.7 years-and had fewer comorbidities.

“The major conclusion to our research was that many more children were infected with Omicron when compared to Delta, but the children who are infected are not impacted as severely as were children infected with the Delta variant,” said Pamela Davis, the Arline H. and Curtis F. Garvin Research Professor at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. “However, because there are so many more children infected, our hospitals were affected over the winter months by an influx of young children.”

“We saw the number of hospitalizations within this age group skyrocket in January of this year because the infection rate of Omicron is about 10 to 15 times compared to that of the Delta variant,” said Rong Xu, professor of biomedical infomatics and director of the Center for AI in Drug Discovery at the School of Medicine. “Omicron is less severe than Delta, however, the reduction of the severity range in clinical outcomes is only 16 to 85%. Furthermore, since so many un-vaccinated children were infected, the long-term effects of COVID-19 infections on the brain, heart, immune systems and other organs of children remains unknown and worrisome. “

The CDC recommends those age 5 and older receive a COVID-19 vaccine, and fully vaccinated people 12 and older receive a booster shot. According to updated guidance by the CDC, Americans no longer need to mask indoors in counties with low or medium “Covid-19 Community Level.”

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The paper, “Mortality, In-Hospital Morbidity, Care Practices, and 2-Year Outcomes for Extremely Preterm Infants in the US, 2013-2018,” examined the survival outcomes of 10,877 infants born at 22-28 weeks’ gestational age between January 1, 2013, and December 31, 2018, at 19 academic medical centers that form the NIH-funded Neonatal Research Network.

Survival among actively treated infants was 30.0% (60/200) at 22 weeks and 55.8% (535/958) at 23 weeks. This is a considerably higher rate of survival than when the study when previously conducted between 2008-2012, in which survival to discharge was 7% (22/334) for live-born infants at 22 weeks and 32% (252/779) for live-born infants at 23 weeks.

This improvement in outcomes for extremely pre-term infants can be attributed to multiple factors, including enhanced treatment protocols across participating medical centers, according to Carl D’Angio, M.D., co-author and Chief of the Division of Neonatology at URMC.

“Academic medical centers have been taking best-practices, applying them, and disseminating them to a wider and wider group nationally,” said D’Angio.

Collective improvement in care in a variety of areas has contributed to the change in outcomes, according to D’Angio. “When we look at survival at almost any group of infants, it’s a bundle of factors. There are similarities and differences in the way they’re treated at various centers, but there are elements where we’ve collectively moved forward, such as ventilation, nutrition and hydration.”

When infants are born at 22 or 23 weeks, nearly every organ is immature, with the lungs and the brain being among the systems most at risk, according to D’Angio.

In addition to studying survival outcomes, the paper assessed the health of severely pre-term infants after two years, including effects such as neurodevelopment, cerebral palsy, vision, hearing, rehospitalizations, and need for assistive devices. Slightly more than 8% had moderate to severe cerebral palsy, 1.5% had vision loss in both eyes, 2.5% needed hearing aids or cochlear implants, and 15% required mobility aids such as orthotics, braces, walkers, or wheelchairs.

Nearly 49% had no or only mild neurodevelopmental impairment, about 29% had moderate neurodevelopmental impairment and roughly 21% had severe neurodevelopmental impairment.

This study — and overall improvement in outcomes — can help clinicians provide clear information in discussions with families when babies are born extremely pre-term.

“We as clinicians support parents in a shared decision-making process when babies are born at the limits of viability,” said D’Angio. “The imminent delivery of an extremely premature infant is a major stressor for families. An important part of helping parents cope is presenting the data we have and letting parents know what to expect in the long-haul. This latest study is positive news for shaping those discussions and providing a more optimistic probability for good outcomes.”

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Materials provided by University of Rochester Medical Center. Original written by Scott Hesel. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The research, conducted by the University of Maine, University of Maine at Augusta, University of Vermont and Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada, attempted to understand how society can accomplish major, transformative social change, particularly the kind of social change necessary to tackle the growing problem of climate change.

The researchers studied a behavior that benefits groups, but does not spread without policy support, such as a costly measure to mitigate the effects of climate change. They created a mathematical model using an innovative combination of epidemiological and evolutionary techniques, which simulates a society where agents live in groups and adopt the beneficial behavior of peers — behavior that, given the right conditions, can spread virally, but not if the institutional costs are too high.

The model considers factors like the prevalence of adopters and non-adopters in a group; the diffusion of behaviors, both within the group and globally; the strength of institutions supporting the behavior and facilitating its spread; and the cost of those institutions.

“Our model is unique because it combines behavioral change and policy change in a single system, and encourages us to think about social change in a richer way. Large-scale social change is not just policy or behavior, but the emergence of a new self-reinforcing system that combines both. This allows us to ask new questions, such as ‘how would a new pattern of behavior and policy spread?'” says Timothy Waring, associate professor of social-ecological systems modeling at the University of Maine and co-author of the study.

The results showed that both behavioral change and policy change are required to achieve large-scale social change — and that they need to happen together. Though neither can get the job done on its own, policy change is especially critical.

The researchers found that sometimes the beneficial behavior can spread too far. In some cases, the spread of behavior beyond groups with supporting policy can reduce its perceived success and slow the spread of the policy, thereby limiting beneficial social change overall.

The simulation suggests that projects that involve both bottom-up viral spread of behavior and top-down policy change may be the best type of solution for large sustainability issues like climate change because they serve as an example and can spread between groups to influence major change.

“For example, let’s say a state wants to spread participation in a new organic composting law which would benefit towns,” Waring says. “To make the system work, the collected waste must be purely organic material. But contributing pure organic waste takes effort for households, so the behavior does not take off on its own. This is a common problem for policy implementation. But if towns experiment with systems to help support and spread the behavior, the successful town programs can spread between towns along with household contributions, resulting in effective, large-scale change.”

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, lead author on the study and associate professor at the University of Vermont, says, “Our model can help figure out how to balance bottom-up and top-down effects so that new solutions can scale. For example, it can help determine when we should promote a behavior like composting all over the country to normalize it and when we should instead focus on a local well-funded pilot project to show the potential benefits of composting.”

Waring said that in future research, the team aims to apply these types of models to all sorts of beneficial social change, particularly the challenge of tackling climate change.

The study was published in the Royal Society Open Science on March 23, 2022. The research is part of track 2 of UMaine’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) project.

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Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Texas Tech University found that although the number of flash droughts has remained stable during the past two decades, more of them are coming on faster. Globally, the flash droughts that come on the fastest — sending areas into drought conditions within just five days — have increased by about 3%-19%. And in places that are especially prone to flash droughts — such as South Asia, Southeast Asia and central North America — that increase is about 22%-59%.

Rising global temperatures are probably behind the faster onset, said co-author and UT Jackson School Professor Zong-Liang Yang, who added that the study’s results underscore the importance of understanding flash droughts and preparing for their effects.

“Every year, we are seeing record-breaking warming episodes, and that is a good precursor to these flash droughts,” he said. “The hope and purpose [of this research] is to minimize the detrimental effects.”

The research was published in Nature Communications. The study was led by doctoral student Yamin Qing and Professor Shuo Wang, both of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Flash droughts are relatively new to science, with the advancement of remote sensing technology during the past couple of decades helping reveal instances of soil rapidly drying out. This serves as the telltale sign of the onset of a flash drought and can make drought conditions appear seemingly out of the blue.

As the name suggests, flash droughts are short lived, usually lasting only a few weeks or months. But when they occur during critical growing periods, they can cause disasters. For example, in the summer of 2012, a flash drought in the central United States caused the corn crop to wither, leading to an estimated $35.7 billion in losses.

In this study, the scientists analyzed global hydroclimate data sets that use satellite soil moisture measurements to capture a global picture of flash drought and how it has changed during the past 21 years. The data showed that about 34%-46% of flash droughts came on in about five days. The rest emerge within a month, with more than 70% developing in half a month or less.

When they examined the droughts over time, they noticed the flash droughts happening more quickly.

The study also revealed the importance of humidity and variable weather patterns, with flash droughts becoming more likely when there’s a shift from humid to arid conditions. That makes regions that undergo seasonal swings in humidity — such as Southeast Asia, the Amazon Basin, and the East Coast and Gulf Coast of the United States — flash drought hot spots.

“We should pay close attention to the vulnerable regions with a high probability of concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity,” said Wang.

Mark Svoboda, the director of the National Drought Mitigation Center and originator of the term “flash drought,” said the advancement in drought-detecting technology and modeling tools — such as those used in this study — has led to growing awareness of the influence and impact of flash droughts. He said the next big step is translating this knowledge into on-the-ground planning.

“You can go back and watch that drought evolve in 2012 and then compare it to how that tool did,” said Svoboda, who was not part of the study. “We really have the stage well set to do a better job of tracking these droughts.”

The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.

Researchers from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering have developed a novel and flexible solution to address the problem. Their additively manufactured tile-based approach can construct on-demand, massively scalable arrays of 5G+ (5G/Beyond 5G)enabled smart skins with the potential to enable intelligence on nearly any surface or object. The study, recently published in Scientific Reports, describes the approach, which is not only much easier to scale and customize than current practices, but features no performance degradation whenever flexed or scaled to a very large number of tiles.

“Typically, there are a lot of smaller wireless network systems working together, but they are not scalable. With the current techniques, you can’t increase, decrease, or direct bandwidth, especially for very large areas,” said Tentzeris. “Being able to utilize and scale this novel tile-based approach makes this possible.”

Tentzeris says his team’s modular application equipped with 5G+ capability has the potential for immediate, large-scale impact as the telecommunications industry continues to rapidly transition to standards for faster, higher capacity, and lower latency communications.

Building the Tiles

In Georgia Tech’s new approach, flexible and additively manufactured tiles are assembled onto a single, flexible underlying layer. This allows tile arrays to be attached to a multitude of surfaces. The architecture also allows for very large 5G+ phased/electronically steerable antenna array networks to be installed on-the-fly. According to Tentzeris, attaching a tile array to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is even a possibility to surge broadband capacity in low coverage areas.

In the study, the team fabricated a proof-of-concept, flexible 5×5-centimeter tile array and wrapped it around a 3.5-centimeter radius curvature. Each tile includes an antenna subarray and an integrated, beamforming integrated circuit on an underlying tiling layer to create a smart skin that can seamlessly interconnect the tiles into very large antenna arrays and massive multiple-input multiple-outputs (MIMOs) — the practice of housing two or more antennas within a single wireless device. Tile-based array architectures on rigid surfaces with single antenna elements have been researched before, but do not include the modularity, additive manufacturability, or flexible implementation of the Georgia Tech design.

The proposed modular tile approach means tiles of identical sizes can be manufactured in large quantities and are easily replaceable, reducing the cost of customization and repairs. Essentially, this approach combines removable elements, modularity, massive scalability, low cost, and flexibility into one system.

5G+ is Just the Beginning

While the tiling architecture has demonstrated the ability to greatly enhance 5G+ technologies, its combination of flexible and conformal capabilities has the potential to be applied in numerous different environments, the Georgia Tech team says.

“The shape and features of each tile scale can be singular and can accommodate different frequency bands and power levels,” said Tentzeris. “One could have communications capabilities, another sensing capabilities, and another could be an energy harvester tile for solar, thermal, or ambient RF energy. The application of the tile framework is not limited to communications.”

Internet of Things, virtual reality, as well as smart manufacturing/Industry 4.0 — a technology-driven approach that utilizes internet-connected “intelligent” machinery to monitor and fully automate the production process — are additional areas of application the team is excited to explore.

“The tile-architecture’s mass scalability makes its applications particularly diverse and virtually ubiquitous. From structures the size of dams and buildings, to machinery or cars, down to individual health-monitoring wearables,” said Tentzeris. “We’re moving in a direction where everything will be covered in some type of a wireless conformal smart skin encompassing a communication system or antenna that allows for effective monitoring.”

The team now looks forward to testing the approach outside the lab on large, real-world structures. They are currently working on the fabrication of much larger, fully inkjet-printed tile arrays (256+ elements) that will be presented at the upcoming International Microwave Symposium (IEEE IMS 2022) — the flagship IEEE conference in RF and microwave engineering. The IMS presentation will introduce a new tile-based large-area architecture version that will allow assembly of customizable tile arrays in a rapid and low-cost fashion for numerous conformal platforms and 5G+ enabled applications.

The HIV epidemic has been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic but represents a critical and ongoing threat to human health with an estimated 1.5 million new infections in the last year alone.

Drug developers and research teams have been searching for cures and new treatment modalities for HIV for over 40 years but are limited by their understanding of how the virus establishes infection in the human body. How does this small, unassuming virus with only 12 proteins — and a genome only a third of the size of SARS-CoV-2 — hijack the body’s cells to replicate and spread across systems?

A cross-disciplinary team at Northwestern sought to answer that very question.

In the team’s new study, published today (April 1) in the journal Nature Communications, scientists used a new CRISPR gene-editing approach to identify human genes that were important for HIV infection in the blood, finding 86 genes that may play a role in the way HIV replicates and causes disease, including over 40 that have never been looked at in the context of HIV infection.

The study proposes a new map for understanding how HIV integrates into our DNA and establishes a chronic infection.

“The existing drug treatments are one of our most important tools in fighting the HIV epidemic and have been amazingly effective at suppressing viral replication and spread,” said Northwestern’s Judd Hultquist, a co-corresponding author. “But these treatments aren’t curative, so individuals living with HIV have to follow a strict treatment regimen that requires continual access to good affordable health care — that’s simply not the world we live in.”

Hultquist said with more understanding of how the virus replicates, treatments could one day become cures.

Hultquist is associate director of the Center for Pathogen Genomics and Microbial Evolution at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and serves as an assistant professor of medicine in infectious diseases at Feinberg.

A method without compromise

Before now, studies have relied on the use of immortalized human cancer cells (like HeLa cells) as models to study how HIV replicates in the lab. While these cells are easy to manipulate in the lab, they are imperfect models of human blood cells. Additionally, most of these studies use technology to turn down the expression of certain genes, but not turn them off entirely as with CRISPR, meaning scientists can’t always clearly determine if a gene was involved in helping or suppressing viral replication.

“With the CRISPR system, there’s no intermediary — the gene is on or off,” Hultquist said. “This capability to turn genes on and off in cells isolated directly from human blood is a game changer — this new assay is the most faithful representation of what’s happening in the body during HIV infection that we could easily study in the lab.”

In the study, T cells — the major cell type targeted by HIV — were isolated from donated human blood, and hundreds of genes were knocked out using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. The “knock-out” cells were then infected with HIV and analyzed. Cells that lost a gene important for viral replication showed decreased infection, while cells that lost an antiviral factor showed an increase in infection.

From there, the team validated the identified factors by selectively knocking them out in new donors, where they found a nearly even break of newly discovered pathways and well-researched ones.

Moving toward a cure for HIV

Hultquist said their findings represented a “perfect split” of novel and known factors to know they were doing something right.

“This is a really great proof-of-concept that the steps and processes that we took to perform the study were robust and well thought out,” Hultquist said. “That nearly half of the genes we found were previously discovered increases confidence in our dataset. The exciting part is that over half — 46 — of these genes had never before been looked at in the context of HIV infection, so they represent new potential therapeutic avenues to look into.”

The team is excited about further developing this technology to enable genome-wide screening where they independently knock out or turn on every gene in the human genome to identify all potential HIV host factors. These data would represent a critical piece in the puzzle, which would bring them even closer to curative strategies.

The study was a collaboration between Hultquist at Northwestern and Alexander Marson and Nevan Krogan at the University of California, San Francisco.

This research was supported by a Mathilde Krim amfAR grant using funds raised by generationCURE (109504-61-RKRL); NIH/NIGMS funding for the HIV Accessory & Regulatory Complexes (HARC) Center (P50 GM082250); NIH funding for the study of innate immune responses to intracellular pathogens (R01 AI120694 & P01 AI063302); NIH funding for the Third Coast Center for AIDS Research (P30 AI117943); NIH funding for the UCSF-Gladstone Institute of Virology & Immunology Center for AIDS Research; NIH funding for the UCSF Medical Scientist Training Program; several NIH/NIAID grants for HIV research (K22 AI136691, R01 AI165236 and R01 AI150998); and an NIH/NIDA grant (DP2 DA042423-01).

A new study now supports this idea, which Dudley calls the “drunken monkey” hypothesis.

The study was led by primatologist Christina Campbell of California State University, Northridge (CSUN), and her graduate student Victoria Weaver, who collected fruit eaten and discarded by black-handed spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) in Panama. They found that the alcohol concentration in the fruit was typically between 1% and 2% by volume, a by-product of natural fermentation by yeasts that eat sugar in ripening fruit.

Moreover, the researchers collected urine from these free-ranging monkeys and found that the urine contained secondary metabolites of alcohol. This result shows that the animals were actually utilizing the alcohol for energy — it wasn’t just passing through their bodies.

“For the first time, we have been able to show, without a shadow of a doubt, that wild primates, with no human interference, consume fruit-containing ethanol,” said Campbell, a CUSN professor of anthropology who obtained her Ph.D. in anthropology from Berkeley in 2000. “This is just one study, and more need to be done, but it looks like there may be some truth to that ‘drunken monkey’ hypothesis — that the proclivity of humans to consume alcohol stems from a deep-rooted affinity of frugivorous (fruit-eating) primates for naturally-occurring ethanol within ripe fruit.”

Dudley laid out evidence for his idea eight years ago in the book, The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol. Measurements showed that some fruits known to be eaten by primates have a naturally high alcohol content of up to 7%. But at the time, he did not have data showing that monkeys or apes preferentially sought out and ate fermented fruits, or that they digested the alcohol in the fruit.

For the newly reported study, the CSUN researchers teamed up with Dudley and UC Berkeley graduate student Aleksey Maro to analyze the alcohol content in the fruits. Maro is conducting a parallel study of the alcohol content in the fruit-based diet of chimpanzees in Uganda and the Ivory Coast.

“It (the study) is a direct test of the drunken monkey hypothesis,” said Dudley, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. “Part one, there is ethanol in the food they’re eating, and they’re eating a lot of fruit. Then, part two, they’re actually metabolizing alcohol — secondary metabolites, ethyl glucuronide and ethyl sulfate are coming out in the urine. What we don’t know is how much of it they’re eating and what the effects are behaviorally and physiologically. But it’s confirmatory.”

The study, which appeared this month in the journal Royal Society Open Science, was conducted at a field site, Barro Colorado Island in Panama, where Dudley has often conducted research and where he first began thinking about the role of ethanol in animal diets and how that might play into our enjoyment and abuse of alcohol.

The researchers found that the fruit that spider monkeys sniffed and took a bite out of routinely had alcohol concentrations of between 1% and 2%, about half the concentration of low-alcohol brews The ripe fruits they collected were from the jobo tree, Spondias mombin, and were a major component of the spider monkey diet. But the fruit also has been used for millennia by Indigenous human populations throughout Central and South America to make chicha, a fermented alcoholic beverage.

The researchers also collected urine from six spider monkeys. Five of the samples contained secondary metabolites of ethanol.

“The monkeys were likely eating the fruit with ethanol for the calories,” Campbell said. “They would get more calories from fermented fruit than they would from unfermented fruit. The higher calories mean more energy.”

Dudley said that he doubts that the monkeys feel the inebriating effects of alcohol that humans appreciate.

“They’re probably not getting drunk, because their guts are filling before they reach inebriating levels,” he said. “But it is providing some physiological benefit. Maybe, also, there’s an anti-microbial benefit within the food that they’re consuming, or the activity of the yeast and the microbes may be predigesting the fruit. You can’t rule that out.”

The need for the monkeys’ high caloric intake may similarly have influenced human ancestors’ decisions when choosing which fruit to eat, Campbell said.

“Human ancestors may also have preferentially selected ethanol-laden fruit for consumption, given that it has more calories,” she said. “Psychoactive and hedonic effects of ethanol may similarly result in increased consumption rates and caloric gain.”

Today, the availability of alcohol in liquid form, without the gut-filling pulp of fermenting fruit, means it’s easy to overindulge. The idea that humans’ natural affinity for alcohol is inherited from our primate ancestors could help society deal with the adverse consequences of alcohol abuse.

“Excessive consumption of alcohol, as with diabetes and obesity, can then be viewed conceptually as a disease of nutritional excess,” Campbell said.