A "strange pneumonia" was circulating in northern Italy as long ago as November, weeks before doctors were made aware of the novel coronavirus outbreak in China, one of the European country's leading medical experts said this week.

"They [general practitioners] remember having seen very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people in December and even November," Giuseppe Remuzzi, the director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, said in an interview with the National Public Radio of the United States.

"This means that the virus was circulating, at least in [the northern region of] Lombardy and before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China."

Laura Ingraham had a doctor from New York's Lenox Hill hospital on with her last night who explained that they are already using Hydroxychloroquine to treat acute coronavirus patients and are seeing tremendous results.

Dr. William Grace told Ingraham that they have 100 patients and have had zero deaths after the use of Hydroxychloroquine.

Hydroxychloroquine is the less toxic version of Chloroquine.

As a medical journalist for BBC in the U.K., Dr. Michael Mosley has put a number of different health strategies under the proverbial loupe, including the ketogenic diet, which I interviewed him about in 2014.

In this BBC program, "The Truth About Sleep," which originally aired in 2017, Mosley investigates the health ramifications of insomnia, which is a problem he shares with many others in the world. In it, he reviews the hazards of sleep deprivation, and shares a variety of methods found to improve sleep quality and quantity.

About 70% of Britons feel they get less sleep than they need, and about a third report suffering from insomnia, Mosley says. His own problem has to do with staying asleep. While he has no problem falling asleep initially, he wakes up around 3 a.m. and has a hard time drifting off again. "I'm simply not getting enough sleep," he says.

Prolonged stress can have life-threatening consequences not only for adults but also for children. Research shows adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can predispose them to any number of health problems later in life.

In the early days of mankind's evolution, the stress response saved our lives by enabling us to run from predators or take down prey. Today, however, such dire circumstances are few and far between, yet we still turn on the same "life-saving" reaction to cope with countless everyday situations.

Constantly being in a stress response may have you marinating in corrosive hormones around the clock, which can raise your blood pressure, add fat to your belly, shrink your brain and even unravel your chromosomes.¹

The way oral bacteria sets up shop in our mouths is not unlike how we humans settle into our cities, a new study has found.

There's a reason bacteria are said to live in 'colonies', and the more we learn about how these tiny architects build their communities, the more familiar their behavior seems to us.

A new study following how multiple individual settlers develop into microcolonies has found growth patterns and dynamics that mirror our own urban inclinations.

"We take this 'satellite-level' view, following hundreds of bacteria distributed on a surface from their initial colonisation to biofilm formation," says Hyun Koo from the University of Pennsylvania.

I've been writing a Monday note since 2009. The topic has usually been inspired by what's in the news from a diet or health perspective. Whether the EAT Lancet diet being launched on the world, or the latest epidemiological paper to come out of Harvard - the topic that has made the headlines has been the one most likely to be featured.

This week there is only one health news story and it's the same story worldwide - Coronavirus. I've been reticent to write about it, as the situation is uncertain and continuous, and this note will date faster than any I have written. (Hence why it's coming out early - to be as current as possible). But it is the topic of most interest and so l will approach this topic as I would any other - What are the facts? What does the data tell us? Where best to find more information? I found the note very interesting to research and I hope you find it interesting to read...

We live in a connected world. Not connected by the threads of modern human-to-human telecommunication (though these links have catalyzed big changes), but by our interactions with the plants, animals, mushrooms, microbes, soil and stone, water, air, fire and light with whom we share the biosphere. We became human, and continue to grow, fully embedded in this living, breathing system. The history of our species is written in our genetic code, where we find stories of ancient infections but also keys unlocked by the chemistry of the wild world. Our bodies and spirits remember how to walk on uneven ground, how to stay awake for hours waiting in the woods, how to find some food most days (though some days, none at all), how to handle the bracing chill of the river. And our physiology knows well how to work with bitter iridoids, polyphenols, pungent sulfur compounds, aromatic terpenes: we've known since before becoming human.

We are remembering that it's important to engage with this range of human experience. It started with exercise: best to move once in a while, rather than rest, if you want to maintain good health. Now folks are talking more about putting the body through short bursts of high-intensity exercise, followed by rest and interspersed with gentle aerobic activity. This puts the heart, lungs, muscles, joints and connective tissue through their full ranges of motion and capacity: just the lungs, for example, have the ability to take in more than ten times the air per breath than is needed during rest. Let them, once in a while! If you can, stretch out your stride. Put the body through its operating ranges. The result seems to be greater fitness1.

But this phenomenon isn't limited to exercise. Modulating our sleep schedules and including occasional bouts of sleep deprivation is a new area of research for mental health support2. Periodic fasting or reduced caloric consumption, either on a daily or weekly schedule, may help our digestion and metabolism3. Cold-water therapy, even if it's just part of your shower, puts the body through an experience of temperature range, shifting blood flow and circulation, helping athletes bounce back from tough workouts 4. In all these cases, as with high-intensity physical activity, we see the same features: first, they all expose us to a diversity of signals, situations, and inputs (all of which had relevance in our ancestral past). Second, this diversity of exposure is part of what makes "wellness".

The declining diversity in our diet, when seen through this lens, may be cause for concern. Production has centralized and consolidated into larger facilities focused on a few key botanical species5. Our modern diet also has a homogenous flavor profile based on sweetness and salt -- a "bliss point" identified as most able to keep us coming back for more6. What's missing? Bitterness, of course, but also microbial diversity and secondary plant metabolites (or "phytonutrients"--compounds like polyphenols, polysaccharides, phytosterols, and more). While all these elements are abundant in wild plants7, our palates today seem to prefer the blandly-sweet flavors of what Michael Pollan calls "edible food-like substances"8. With this stuff, digestion never gets to stretch out its stride. That's part of why I am grateful that bitter herbs are easy to find and prepare: they're like the gym for your digestion. Or rather, they're like a trail run on a frosty morning.

Paul Stamets is on a quest to find an endangered mushroom that could cure smallpox, TB, and even bird flu. Can he unlock its secrets before deforestation and climate change wipe it out?

In the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest grows a bulbous, prehistoric-looking mushroom called agarikon. It prefers to colonize century-old Douglas fir trees, growing out of their trunks like an ugly mole on a finger. When I first met Paul Stamets, a mycologist who has spent more than three decades hunting, studying, and tripping on mushrooms, he had found only two of these unusual fungi, each time by accident — or, as he might put it, divine intervention.

Stamets believes that unlocking agar­i­kon's secrets may be as important to the future of human health as Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillium mold's antibiotic properties more than 80 years ago. And so on a sunny July day, Stamets is setting off on a voyage along the coastal islands of southern British Columbia in hopes of bagging more of the endangered fungus before deforestation or climate change irreparably alters the ecosystems where it makes its home. Agarikon may be ready to save us — but we may have to save it first.

Joining Stamets on the 43-foot schooner Misty Isles are his wife, Dusty, a few close friends, and four research assistants from Fungi Perfecti, his Olympia, Washington-based company, which sells medicinal mushroom extracts, edible mushroom kits, mushroom doggie treats, and Stamets' most recent treatise, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. "What we're doing here could save millions of lives," he tells me on the first morning of the three-day, 120-mile voyage. "It's fun, it's bizarre, and very much borders on something spiritual."

A team of researchers unveiled the results of a new study last week that looked at how temperature and humidity may affect the transmission of COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus.

According to the researchers' findings, "High temperature and high relative humidity significantly reduce the transmission of COVID-19." An increase of just one degree Celsius and 1% relative humidity increase substantially lower the virus's transmission, according to the data analyzed by the researchers.

The study is the latest in a limited but growing body of research, not all of which has been peer-reviewed, that examines the effect of weather on the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus, which causes the COVID-19 illness.

I've been warning for the past few weeks so just take a look at the numbers from the W.H.O. and in an "apples to apples" comparison, the Coronavirus has HALF the mortality rate of the seasonal flu when it comes to "death to confirmed cases" ratio.