July 2022

A small new study published Tuesday by scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health suggests that the immune response triggered by coronavirus infections damages the brain’s blood vessels and could be responsible for long COVID symptoms.

The paper, published in the journal Brain, was based on brain autopsies from nine people who died suddenly after contracting the virus.

Rather than detecting evidence of COVID in the brain, the team found it was the people’s own antibodies that attacked the cells lining the brain’s blood vessels, causing inflammation and damage.

This discovery could explain why some people have lingering effects from infection including headache, fatigue, loss of taste and smell, and inability to sleep as well as “brain fog” — and may also help devise new treatments for long COVID.

NIH scientist Avindra Nath, the paper’s senior author, said in a statement: “Patients often develop neurological complications with COVID-19, but the underlying pathophysiological process is not well understood.

“We had previously shown blood vessel damage and inflammation in patients’ brains at autopsy, but we didn’t understand the cause of the damage. I think in this paper we’ve gained important insight into the cascade of events.”

The nine individuals, ages 24 to 73, were selected from the team’s earlier study because they showed evidence of blood vessel damage in their brains based on scans.

Their brains were compared to those from 10 control individuals.

The scientists discovered that antibodies produced against COVID-19 mistakenly targeted cells that form the blood-brain barrier, a structure designed to keep harmful invaders out of the brain while allowing necessary substances to pass.

Damage to these cells can cause leakage of proteins, bleeding and clots, which elevates the risk of stroke.

The leaks also trigger immune cells called macrophages to rush to the site to repair damage, causing inflammation.

The team found that normal cellular processes in the areas targeted by the attack were severely disrupted, which had implications for things such as their ability to detoxify and to regulate metabolism.

The findings offer clues about the biology at play in patients with long-term neurological symptoms, and can inform new treatments, for example, a drug that targets the buildup of antibodies on the blood-brain barrier.

“It is quite possible that this same immune response persists in long COVID patients resulting in neuronal injury,” Nath said.

This would mean that a drug that dials down that immune response could help those patients, he added. “So these findings have very important therapeutic implications.”
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There is growing alarm among European and other environmentalists over what they say is governments’ failure to ensure healthy oceans, which are vital for food, jobs, biodiversity and clean air.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls it an “ocean emergency.”

“Global heating is pushing ocean temperature to record levels, creating fiercer and more frequent storms,” he said. “Sea levels are rising, low-lying island nations face inundation, and some 8 million tons of plastic waste enter the oceans every year.”

Those are just some of the threats facing the oceans, which cover 70% of the Earth’s surface. Overfishing, shipping and ocean wind turbines also pressure marine ecosystems.

At an ocean conference in Lisbon last week, Guterres and others called for faster, stronger protection measures. But green groups claim the meeting failed to deliver real progress.

Environmentalists hope for better results next month, when countries resume discussions on a global agreement to protect critical ocean ecosystems.

For some, that includes a ban on deep sea mining, which could start as early as 2023.

While countries like China are exploring mining opportunities, critics claim the practice could destroy fragile seabeds and ecosystems. Those critics include President Emmanuel Macron of France.

“I think we have to create the legal framework to stop the high sea mining, and to not allow new activities putting in danger these ecosystems,” Macron said. “We know almost nothing about the deep sea. We don’t know a lot about the ecosystem. It’s a very complex and slow ecosystem. It takes decades or even more for animals to grow.”

Tobias Troll, marine policy director for Seas at Risk, an umbrella group of more than 30 European environmental associations, said: “Imagine you put these robots down there — it can trigger all kinds of effects on this ecosystem which can trigger up into the food chain.”

In Europe and elsewhere, green groups are pushing countries to meet the ocean promises they’ve already made. That includes the European Union’s 2030 healthy oceans goals. A new environmental report card by six EU nonprofits finds the bloc met just one of eight progress markers last year.

“I think the underlying problem of the situation … is that there is a significant lack of policy coherence around EU legislation around the ocean,” Troll said. “For example, we have the marine strategy framework or the fisheries policy, but they don’t really work together.”

Troll said EU countries are also overselling the progress they’ve made. Marine protection is a case in point, he said, with only a tiny fraction of Europe’s marine habitat truly protected, contrary to official claims.
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Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska on Tuesday became just the second woman to receive the prestigious Fields Medal, described as the Nobel Prize in mathematics.

The 37-year-old Viazovska, received the medal during a ceremony in Helsinki, Finland, along with three other mathematicians: 36-year-old Hugo Duminil-Copin of the University of Geneva, 39-year-old Korean-American June Huh of Princeton University, and 35-year-old British mathematician James Maynard of the University of Oxford.

The International Mathematical Union, which administers the Fields Medal, cited Viazovska, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, for her 2016 discovery that equal-sized spheres can be stacked symmetrically in the eighth dimension and higher. Her discovery proved a theory first proposed by German astronomer and philosopher Johannes Kepler more than 400 years ago.

The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to mathematicians under 40 years old.

The late Maryam Mirzakhani of Iran was the first woman to win the medal in 2014.

The ceremony was initially scheduled to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia during a meeting of the International Congress of Mathematicians. But it was moved to the Finnish capital after hundreds of mathematicians signed an open letter protesting the choice of Saint Petersburg after Russia invaded Viazovska’s native Ukraine in February.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
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