The coronavirus has been a far deadlier threat in New Orleans than the rest of the United States, with a per-capita death rate twice that of New York City. Doctors, public health officials and available data say the Big Easy's high levels of obesity and related ailments may be part of the problem.

"We're just sicker," said Rebekah Gee, who until January was the health secretary for Louisiana and now heads Louisiana State University's healthcare services division. "We already had tremendous healthcare disparities before this pandemic - one can only imagine they are being amplified now."

Along with New York and Seattle, New Orleans has emerged as one of the early U.S. hot spots for the coronavirus, making it a national test case for how to control and treat the disease it causes. Chief among the concerns raised by doctors working in the Louisiana city is the death rate, which is twice that of New York and over four times that of Seattle, based on Thursday's publicly reported data.

More than 100 horses have died from African Horse Sickness (AHS) in Thailand, government data showed, in the Southeast Asian country's first instance of the illness that only affects animals.

"This disease has just occurred in Thailand. We've never had it in the past," director-general of the Department of Livestock Development, Sorawit Thanito, said on Thursday.

The government has quarantined sick horses to limit the spread of the disease, Sorawit said.

At least 131 horses have died across four provinces, latest government data showed.

An interview transcript with a medical doctor/viral genome scientist.

While conducting some online research on SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19), I came across a video interview with Dr. Pekova, a Czech medical doctor, molecular biologist, and geneticist with an extensive research portfolio.

In an interview with TV channel T3, Dr. Pekova states that the genome sequence of SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19) is unlikely to be natural, and its characteristics suggest it was genetically engineered.

Dr. Pekova is the head of the research team at Tilia Laboratories, that has developed a more efficient, faster, and less expensive test to detect SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19). The laboratory has offered the test methodology to labs around the world for free.

So often we hear that it is totally normal for people to succumb to ailments and issues as they age. Despite the fact that even our recent ancestors didn't seem to suffer a complete degradation of their bodies as they aged, today we're told that chronic diseases are just a consequence of living longer (even though, on average, we're only living 5 or so years beyond what our previous generations lived).

How much of what we consider 'normal aging' is actually the consequence of a lifetime of poor or misguided dietary habits, toxic exposure from the environment or a lack of healthy physical exercise? What about our backward education and never being taught the proper way to deal with our emotions? It seems unlikely that human beings were designed to degrade into a non-functional diseased mess as we age, succumbing to chronic disease and physical debility.

Join us on this episode of Objective:Health as we look into the science of aging. How can we separate the real effects of aging from the consequences of unhealthy living?


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Facilities have postponed non-urgent procedures to prepare for COVID-19 patients

Some viable organs have not been recovered from deceased donors in Ontario in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as hospitals in the province temporarily scale back procedures that aren't deemed essential, according to a leading transplant specialist in Toronto.

Hospitals across the province have hit pause on many transplant procedures, involving both live and deceased donors, unless the recipient patient's life is considered to be at risk.

Organs from a deceased donor need to be transplanted quickly after death, but since some transplant procedures are now on hold, viable organs are not being "procured" from deceased donors' bodies.

A recently released survey from Mattress Firm revealed some disturbing facts about sleep patterns in America, as shown in this short video. This is important since the effects of sleep deprivation can range from mild to devastating.

For instance, the Anchorage Daily News¹ recounts the story of third mate Gregory Cousins, who had slept a mere six hours between 8 p.m. on March 22, 1989, until just after midnight on March 24, when he ran the supertanker Exxon Valdez aground.

The accident devastated 23 species of wildlife and nearly 1,300 miles of coastline habitat. Many people may remember that the skipper of the ship was allegedly drunk (a jury later acquitted him of the charge), but what most don't know is that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that sleep deprivation was an important factor in this accident. In fact, it not only was a known issue on the Valdez, but across the board in the shipping industry.

The huge burden of obesity and other chronic conditions among people in the U.S. puts most of us at direct risk.

Public health measures to slow the spread of Covid-19 have already taken a staggering toll on the economy, with the prospect of worse to come. The strategy at the heart of prevention, physical distancing, will continue to be tremendously disruptive to society.

With businesses facing bankruptcy, schools closed and sports events canceled, President Trump and others have now asked: Is the cure worse than the disease?

According to this way of thinking, we should refocus our efforts on those most at risk for complications from coronavirus, the elderly and people with chronic disease, so that others can soon return to a semblance of normal life.

More than 90% of the legal marijuana products offered in medical dispensaries are much stronger than what clinical studies have shown that doctors recommend for chronic pain relief, according to a study published in the March 26 online edition of the journal PLOS ONE.

To many that may seem like a good thing, but just the opposite is true.

"We know that high-potency products should not have a place in the medical realm because of the high risk of developing cannabis-use disorders, which are related to exposure to high THC-content products," said the study's lead author, Alfonso Edgar Romero-Sandoval, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of anesthesiology at Wake Forest School of Medicine, part of Wake Forest Baptist Health.

"Several earlier studies showed that levels of up to 5% tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) -- the main psychoactive compound in marijuana that provides pain relief as well as intoxication -- were sufficient to reduce chronic pain with minimal side effects."

The goal of this study was to evaluate the advertised THC and CBD content of legal cannabis products to determine their suitability for medicinal use, and to compare the potency of the products offered in medical and recreational programs.

"My little angel" is how Christopher Jerry describes his daughter Emily.

At just a year and a half, Emily was diagnosed with a massive abdominal tumor and endured numerous surgeries and rigorous chemotherapy before finally being declared cancer-free. But just to be sure, doctors encouraged Chris and his wife to continue with Emily's last scheduled chemotherapy session, a three-day treatment that would begin on her second birthday.

On the morning of her final day of treatment, a pharmacy technician prepared the intravenous bag, filling it with more than 20 times the recommended dose of sodium chloride. Within hours Emily was on life support and declared brain dead.

Three days later she was gone.

Sadly, Emily's case is not unique. According to a recent study by Johns Hopkins, more than 250,000 people in the United States die every year because of medical mistakes, making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.

Other studies report much higher figures, claiming the number of deaths from medical error to be as high as 440,000. The reason for the discrepancy is that physicians, funeral directors, coroners and medical examiners rarely note on death certificates the human errors and system failures involved. Yet death certificates are what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rely on to post statistics for deaths nationwide.

In announcing the most far-reaching restrictions on personal freedom in the history of our nation, Boris Johnson resolutely followed the scientific advice that he had been given. The advisers to the government seem calm and collected, with a solid consensus among them. In the face of a new viral threat, with numbers of cases surging daily, I'm not sure that any prime minister would have acted very differently.

But I'd like to raise some perspectives that have hardly been aired in the past weeks, and which point to an interpretation of the figures rather different from that which the government is acting on. I'm a recently-retired Professor of Pathology and NHS consultant pathologist, and have spent most of my adult life in healthcare and science - fields which, all too often, are characterised by doubt rather than certainty. There is room for different interpretations of the current data. If some of these other interpretations are correct, or at least nearer to the truth, then conclusions about the actions required will change correspondingly.

The simplest way to judge whether we have an exceptionally lethal disease is to look at the death rates. Are more people dying than we would expect to die anyway in a given week or month?

Statistically, we would expect about 51,000 to die in Britain this month. At the time of writing, 422 deaths are linked to Covid-19 — so 0.8 per cent of that expected total.

On a global basis, we'd expect 14 million to die over the first three months of the year. The world's 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 per cent of that total.

These figures might shoot up but they are, right now, lower than other infectious diseases that we live with (such as flu). Not figures that would, in and of themselves, cause drastic global reactions.