Health News Stories
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Mr. McCourry, a former U.S. Marine, had been crippled by post-traumatic stress disorder ever since returning from Iraq in 2004. He could not sleep, pushed away friends and family and developed a drinking problem. The numbness he felt was broken only by bouts of rage and paranoia. He was contemplating suicide when his sister heard about a novel clinical trial using the psychedelic drug MDMA, paired with therapy, to treat PTSD. Desperate, he enrolled in 2012. PTSD is a major public health problem worldwide and is particularly associated with war. In the United States, an estimated 13 percent of combat veterans and up to 20 to 25 percent of those deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan are diagnosed with PTSD at some point in their lives, compared with seven percent of the general population. There is growing evidence that MDMA — the illegal drug known as Ecstasy or Molly — can significantly lessen or even eliminate symptoms of PTSD when the treatment is paired with talk therapy. Last year, scientists reported in Nature Medicine the most encouraging results to date. The 90 participants in the study had all suffered from severe PTSD for more than 14 years on average. Each received three therapy sessions with either MDMA or a placebo, spaced one month apart and overseen by a two-person therapist team. Two months after treatment, 67 percent of those who received MDMA no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis, compared with 32 percent who received the placebo. As in previous trials, MDMA caused no serious side effects.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the healing potentials of mind-altering drugs from reliable major media sources.
In October 1995 ... the Scottish Office commissioned a research project from the Aberdeen-based Rowett Research Institute into the effect of GM crops on animal nutrition and the environment. This included, for the first time, feeding GM potatoes to rats to see if they had any harmful effects on their guts, bodies, metabolism and health. A former senior Scottish Office official involved in commissioning the project told the Guardian there was "little regard" at the time for research into the human nutritional and environmental consequences of GM foods. Dr Arpad Pusztai, a senior research scientist at the Rowett, beat off 28 other tenders to coordinate the project. The preliminary results of Dr Pusztai's work had begun to show unexpected and worrying changes in the size and weight of the rats' bodily organs. The team found liver and heart sizes were decreasing. Worse still, the brain was getting smaller. There were also indications of a weakening of the immune system. Granada TV's World in Action approached Dr Pusztai and ... with the institute's consent he gave an interview. Dr Pusztai told ITV viewers that he would not eat GM food. He found it "very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs. We have to find [the results] in the laboratory," he insisted. Two days later Dr Pusztai was summarily suspended and forced to retire by the Rowett Institute's director, Professor Philip James, who had personally cleared the interview with Granada.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on GMOs from reliable major media sources.
It’s no secret that exercise, even in small doses, can improve your mood. Researchers even have a name for it: the feel-better effect. And while any physical activity — a walk, a swim, a bit of yoga — can give you an emotional boost, we wanted to create a short workout video specifically designed to make people happy. What would a “joy workout” look like? I’m a psychologist fascinated by the science of emotion. I’ve also taught group exercise classes for more than 20 years. To design a happiness workout, I turned to the research I leverage in those classes, to maximize the joy people get from moving their bodies. Imagine fans erupting when their team clinches a playoff spot. Researchers have identified several movements like this that are recognizable in many cultures as inspired by joy: reaching your arms up; swaying from side to side, like concertgoers losing themselves in the music; other rhythmic movements, such as bouncing to a beat; or taking up more space, like dancers spinning, arms outstretched. These physical actions don’t just express a feeling of joy — research shows they can also elicit it. The resulting eight and a half–minute Joy Workout lets you test these effects yourself. It leads you through six joy moves: reach, sway, bounce, shake, jump for joy and one I named “celebrate” that looks like tossing confetti in the air. I based these moves on research and on the movements that produce the most joy in my classes, among people of all ages and abilities.
Note: Watch a video of the the Joy Workout at the link above. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
Two weeks ago, with no outcomes data on COVID-19 booster shots for 5-to-11-year-olds, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) vigorously recommended the booster for all 24 million American children in that age group. The CDC cited a small Pfizer study of 140 children that showed boosters elevated their antibody levels–an outcome known to be transitory. When that study concluded, a Pfizer spokesperson said it did not determine the efficacy of the booster in the 5-to-11-year-olds. But that didn't matter to the CDC. Seemingly hoping for a different answer, the agency put the matter before its own kangaroo court of curated experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Committee members ... emphasized the importance of a universal booster message that applies to all age groups. Most remarkably, it didn't seem to matter to the CDC that 75.2 percent of children under age 11 already have natural immunity, according to a CDC study. Natural immunity is certainly much more prevalent today, given the ubiquity of the Omicron variant since February. CDC data from New York and California demonstrated that natural immunity was 2.8 times more effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times more effective in preventing COVID infection compared to vaccination during the Delta wave. These findings are consistent with dozens of other clinical studies. Yet natural immunity has consistently and inexplicably been dismissed by the medical establishment.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources.
Public health initiatives in the United States are suffering from a crisis of trust. Recent polls show that only a third of the public trusts insurance and pharmaceutical companies, while just 56 percent trust the government health agencies that are meant to regulate these industries. Another survey during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that only around half of Americans have a "great deal" of trust in the CDC, while a mere third have such trust in the Department of Health and Human Services. When the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 were made available to the public free of charge, a national conversation began about "vaccine hesitancy"–the phenomenon of Americans choosing not to be vaccinated even when incentivized and, in some cases, coerced. Americans had watched public health experts lie, misdirect, ignore evidence and yield to professional pressure. Few wanted to be their guinea pigs. Not all the COVID-19 gaslighting was the fault of the media or politicians - much was implemented by experts abusing their apolitical position of trust. The experts ... including Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, insisted on the most asinine and evidence-free preventative measures, including facial coverings, lockdowns and social distancing. Their insulated role as health advisers enabled them to manipulate health policy in ways that benefited only themselves. The most stark example was the corruption of data collection at the Center for Disease Control–a scandal that crashed public trust to a new low.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
Professor John Lorber ... was not jesting totally when he addressed a conference of pediatricians with a paper entitled "Is your brain really necessary?" "There's a young student at this university," says Lorber, "who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain." The student's physician at the university noticed that the youth had a slightly larger than normal head, and so referred him to Lorber, simply out of interest. "When we did a brain scan on him," Lorber recalls, "we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid." Startling as it may seem, this case is nothing new to the medical world. A substantial proportion of patients appear to escape functional impairment in spite of grossly abnormal brain structure. Lorber concludes from these observations that "there must be a tremendous amount of redundancy or spare capacity in the brain, just as there is with kidney and liver." He also contends that "the cortex probably is responsible for a great deal less than most people imagine. For hundreds of years neurologists have assumed that all that is dear to them is performed by the cortex, but it may well be that the deep structures in the brain carry out many of the functions assumed to be the sole province of the cortex."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and the mysterious nature of reality from reliable major media sources.
American hospitals have been living with serious drug shortages for more than a decade. Most days, nearly 300 essential drugs can be in short supply. It's not a matter of supply and demand. The drugs are needed and the ingredients are easy to make. Pharmaceutical companies have stopped producing many life-saving generic drugs because they make too little profit. Yet, year after year, the government stays on the sidelines as companies take drug production offline - and doctors worry the shortages are compromising patient care. Neonatologist Dr. Mitch Goldstein treats the most vulnerable patients. Many ... premature and sick babies have undeveloped digestive systems, so Dr. Goldstein keeps them alive with intravenous nutrients, many of which are in short supply. Antony Gobin heads the pharmacy at Loma Linda Hospital. He told us shortages of basic drugs are a constant worry. "We were dealing with shortages long before COVID," [he said]. "They're all very old, fundamental drugs that every hospital in the country needs and uses." Drug shortages can kill. In 2011, when norepinephrine, an old, low profit drug used to treat septic shock, was in short supply, hundreds of people around the country died. Middlemen, the group purchasing organizations and drug distributors take their cut. The drug manufacturers end up with just a small fraction of what the patient pays. Many have simply stopped making the least profitable drugs.
Note: For more, see this article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption and health from reliable major media sources.
The evidence suggests that broad mask mandates have not done much to reduce Covid caseloads over the past two years. Today, mask rules may do even less than in the past, given the contagiousness of current versions of the virus. From the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a paradox involving masks. As Dr. Shira Doron, an epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, puts it, “It is simultaneously true that masks work and mask mandates do not work.” To start with the first half of the paradox: Masks reduce the spread of the Covid virus by preventing virus particles from traveling from one person’s nose or mouth into the air and infecting another person. You would think that communities where mask-wearing has been more common would have had many fewer Covid infections. But that hasn’t been the case. In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks. Because masks work and mandates often don’t, people can make their own decisions. Anybody who wants to wear a snug, high-quality mask can do so and will be less likely to contract Covid. That approach — one-way masking — is consistent with what hospitals have long done. Patients, including those sick with infectious diseases, typically have not worn masks, but doctors and nurses have.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
Did Omicron spread less in the parts of the U.S. where social distancing and masking were more common? The answer is surprisingly unclear. Nationwide, the number of official Covid cases has recently been somewhat higher in heavily Democratic areas than Republican areas, according to The Times’s data. That comparison doesn’t fully answer the question, though, because Democratic areas were also conducting more tests, and the percentage of positive tests tended to be somewhat higher in Republican areas. No single statistic offers a definitive answer. Over the past three months, the death rate in counties that Donald Trump won in a landslide has been more than twice as high as the rate in counties that Joe Biden won in a landslide. Interventions other than vaccination — like masking and distancing — are less powerful than we might wish. Although masks reduce the chances of transmission in any individual encounter, Omicron is so contagious that it can overwhelm the individual effect. There is a strong argument for continuing to remove other restrictions, and returning to normal life, now that Omicron caseloads have fallen 95 percent from their peak. If those restrictions were costless, then their small benefits might still be worth it. But of course they do have costs. Masks hamper people’s ability to communicate, verbally and otherwise. Social distancing leads to the isolation and disruption that have fed so many problems over the past two years — mental health troubles ... and more.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
Microplastic pollution has been discovered lodged deep in the lungs of living people for the first time. The particles were found in almost all the samples analysed. The scientists said microplastic pollution was now ubiquitous across the planet, making human exposure unavoidable and meaning “there is an increasing concern regarding the hazards” to health. Samples were taken from tissue removed from 13 patients undergoing surgery and microplastics were found in 11 cases. The most common particles were polypropylene, used in plastic packaging and pipes, and PET, used in bottles. Two previous studies had found microplastics at similarly high rates in lung tissue taken during autopsies. People were already known to breathe in the tiny particles, as well as consuming them via food and water. Workers exposed to high levels of microplastics are also known to have developed disease. Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time in March, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year. The research, which has been accepted for publication by the journal Science of the Total Environment, used samples of healthy lung tissue.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources.
Marcia Herman-Giddens first realized something was changing in young girls in the late 1980s, while she was serving as the director for the child abuse team at Duke University Medical Center. During evaluations of girls who had been abused, Dr. Herman-Giddens noticed that many of them had started developing breasts at ages as young as 6 or 7. “That did not seem right,” said Dr. Herman-Giddens. A decade later, she published a study of more than 17,000 girls who underwent physical examinations at pediatricians’ offices across the country. The numbers revealed that, on average, girls in the mid-1990s had started to develop breasts — typically the first sign of puberty — around age 10, more than a year earlier than previously recorded. The decline was even more striking in Black girls, who had begun developing breasts, on average, at age 9. Studies in the decades since have confirmed, in dozens of countries, that the age of puberty in girls has dropped by about three months per decade since the 1970s. A similar pattern, though less extreme, has been observed in boys. No one knows what risk factor — or more likely, what combination of factors — is driving the age decline or why there are stark race- and sex-based differences. Obesity seems to be playing a role. Researchers are also investigating ... chemicals found in certain plastics and stress. The girls with the earliest breast development in [a] 2009 study ... had the highest urine levels of phthalates, substances used to make plastics more durable.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources.
Hospitals are buckling under the strain of nursing shortfalls and the spiraling cost of hiring replacements. For Watsonville Community Hospital ... those costs became too much to bear, and contributed to the facility’s bankruptcy this month. The shortages are most acute at hospitals like Watsonville that rely on government funding to treat poorer patients. “This is like survival stakes,” said Steven Shill, head of the health-care practice at advisory firm BDO USA. Winners are “whoever’s highest on the food chain and who has the biggest checkbook.” The staffing companies ... are “really, really, really gouging hospitals.” St. John’s, in a remote corner of Queens, treats some of the city’s poorest and sickest patients. “This is the worst nursing shortage that I have witnessed in my career,” Maureen May, a 30-year veteran of the pediatric ICU. The pain spreads beyond nurses. A report by human-resources firm Mercer this year estimated a shortfall of 3.2 million lower-wage workers, such as nursing assistants and home health aides, by 2026. Employers will also need to hire more than 1.1 million registered nurses in that period, Mercer said. Hospital labor costs rose 12.6% in October over the year-ago period. Two-thirds of nurses surveyed by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses said their experiences during the pandemic have prompted them to consider leaving the field. And 21% of those polled in a study for the American Nurses Foundation said they planned to resign within the next six months.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and health from reliable major media sources.
About 20m acres of cropland in the United States may be contaminated from PFAS-tainted sewage sludge that has been used as fertilizer, a new report estimates. PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds used to make products heat-, water- or stain-resistant. Known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t naturally break down, they have been linked to cancer, thyroid disruption, liver problems, birth defects, immunosuppression and more. Dozens of industries use PFAS in thousands of consumer products, and often discharge the chemicals into the nation’s sewer system. The analysis ... is an attempt to understand the scope of cropland contamination stemming from sewage sludge, or biosolids. Regulators don’t require sludge to be tested for PFAS or closely track where its spread, and public health advocates warn the practice is poisoning the nation’s food supply. Sludge is a byproduct of the wastewater treatment process that’s a mix of human excrement and industrial waste, like PFAS, that’s discharged from industry’s pipes. EPA records show over 19bn pounds of sludge has been used as fertilizer since 2016 in ... 41 states. It’s estimated that 60% of the nation’s sludge is spread on cropland or other fields annually. The consequences are evident in the only two states to consistently check sludge and farms for PFAS contamination. In Maine, PFAS-tainted fields have already forced several farms to shut down.
Note: Read more about the toxic "forever chemicals" accumulating in our environment. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and health from reliable major media sources.
Massachusetts General Hospital wouldn’t seem like a natural fit for a center devoted to mind-altering drugs. But this week, MGH launched the Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics to study the potential of psilocybin and other psychoactive drugs to treat conditions such as depression, addiction, trauma, and more. The new center at MGH signifies that the field of psychedelic therapy has arrived. Inspiration came from the search for ways to ease the misery of patients whose mental illness is resistant to traditional treatments. Psychedelics are known to facilitate “plasticity” in the brain, increasing its capacity for change, and [director Jerrold] Rosenbaum said his team wanted to understand how these agents “move the brain to change in a way that can address many of the most anguishing forms of human suffering.” The MGH center combines the disciplines of psychiatry, brain imaging, genomic medicine, and chemical biology. Some of the initial work involving patients will use psilocybin and be directed at rumination — the stuck, repetitive thought patterns that underlie several conditions, from addiction to obsessive-compulsive disorder. The future of the center’s research is boundless, since psychedelics’ role in neuroplasticity and neuritogenesis — the ability to build new synapses — may be useful in palliative care with terminally ill patients as well as in combatting neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Note: This article is also available on this webpage. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on mind-altering drugs from reliable major media sources.
For 40 years the United States Public Health Service has conducted a study in which human beings with syphilis, who were induced to serve as guinea pigs, have gone without medical treatment for the disease and a few have died of its late effects, even though an effective therapy, was eventually discovered. The study was conducted to determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body. It is too late to treat the syphilis in any surviving participants. The experiment, called the Tuskegee Study, began in 1932 with about 600 black men mostly poor and uneducated, from Tuskegee, Ala., an area that had the highest syphilis rate in the nation at the time. Four hundred of the group had syphilis and never received deliberate treatment for the Venereal Infection. A control group of 200 had no syphilis and did not receive any specific therapy. As Incentives to enter the Program, the men were promised free transportation to and from hospitals, free hot lunches, free medicine for any disease other than syphilis and free burial after autopsies were performed. The Tuskegee Study began 10 years before penicillin was found to be a cure for syphilis and 15 years before the drug became widely available. Yet, even after penicillin became common, and while its use probably could have helped or saved a number of the experiment subjects, the drug was denied them. Senator William Proxmire ... called the study “a moral and ethical nightmare.”
Note: Read more about the disturbing history of government and industry experiments on human guinea pigs. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.
Guns overtook car crashes to become the leading cause of death for US children and teenagers in 2020. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that over 4,300 young Americans died of firearm-related injuries in 2020. While suicides contributed to the toll, the data shows that homicides form the majority of gun-related deaths. More than 390 million guns are owned by US civilians. According to the research - which was published this week in the New England Journal Medicine - the rise in gun-related deaths among Americans between the ages of one and 19 was part of an overall 33.4% increase in firearm homicides nationwide. The overall rate of gun deaths of all reasons - suicide, homicide, unintentional and undetermined - among children and teenagers rose by 29.5%, more than twice that of the wider population. "We continue to fail to protect our youth from a preventable cause of death," said a research letter. The rate of gun-related deaths per 100,000 residents rose among both men and women and across ethnic demographics between 2019 and 2020, with the largest increase among black Americans. In past years, gun-related deaths were second only to car crashes as the leading cause of death among young Americans. Incidents of drug overdoses and poisonings rose 83.6% between 2019 and 2020, and now are the third leading cause of death in that age group.
Note: Could frustration caused by the lockdowns have anything to do with this? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
Levels of vaccine hesitancy among physicians may be higher than expected, with 1 in 10 primary care doctors not believing that vaccines are safe, according to a new survey. Among 625 physicians, 10.1% did not agree that vaccines were safe; 9.3% did not agree that vaccines were effective; and 8.3% did not agree that they were important, Timothy Callaghan, PhD, of Texas A&M School of Public Health [said]. The high proportion of hesitancy among primary care doctors "was certainly a surprise for us," Callaghan told MedPage Today. "We found that concerns about vaccines in general were far more widespread in the physician population than we might have expected." Confidence in vaccines among physicians was still higher than in the general public, as were rates of COVID-19 vaccination, with only 5.2% still unvaccinated at the end of the survey in May 2021. But high levels of vaccine uptake among doctors could have more to do with employer regulations or perceived risks of their workplace environment, Callaghan said. Callaghan and colleagues conducted their survey from May 14 to May 25, 2021 among 625 physicians in family medicine, internal medicine, or general practice. They were asked how strongly they agreed with questions about safety, effectiveness, and importance of vaccines, among other factors. Only 67.4% strongly agreed that vaccines are safe, just 75% strongly agreed they are effective, and only 76% strongly agreed they're important, the researchers found.
Note: For more on this, explore this article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning of an accelerating mental health crisis among adolescents, with more than 4 in 10 teens reporting that they feel “persistently sad or hopeless,” and 1 in 5 saying they have contemplated suicide. The findings draw on a survey of a nationally representative sample of 7,700 teens conducted in the first six months of 2021. They were questioned on a range of topics, including their mental health, alcohol and drug use, and whether they had encountered violence at home or at school. Although young people were spared the brunt of the virus ... they might still pay a steep price for the pandemic, having come of age while weathering isolation, uncertainty, economic turmoil and, for many, grief. In October, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health, saying that its members were “caring for young people with soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidality that will have lasting impacts.” In December, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued an advisory on protecting youth mental health. “The pandemic era’s unfathomable number of deaths, pervasive sense of fear, economic instability, and forced physical distancing from loved ones, friends, and communities have exacerbated the unprecedented stresses young people already faced,” Murthy wrote. “It would be a tragedy if we beat back one public health crisis only to allow another to grow in its place.”
Note: This article fails to mention that the steep decline was not caused by COVID, but was largely due to the effects of the lockdowns. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and health from reliable major media sources.
Arthur Evans, CEO of the American Psychological Association (APA), says viewing the world as unsafe can be a symptom of trauma. "I think for a lot of people, the idea of having a mental health challenge is there's something inside of me that's wrong," he said. "And I think the idea of trauma helps people to understand that, no, this is something that is happening to me and how I'm responding is a natural response." For Lanny Langstrom, the early months of the pandemic were filled with stress. "I was desperately trying to stay away from, like, this thing that I thought was going to kill me at any second," he said. He recalls worrying that if he died from COVID, his 6-year-old daughter might not remember him. He was so stressed that he eventually called a mental health hotline, and they suggested he seek therapy — something he'd never done before. To his surprise, his therapist told him his symptoms were consistent with trauma. These feelings of anxiety and stress are becoming increasingly common in the pandemic, Evans said. "We absolutely are experiencing a mental health tsunami," he said. "And we expect that it will grow even more ... so we haven't even crested this tsunami yet." A survey by the APA found a significant increase in the demand for mental health treatment in 2021. Trauma usually presents months, sometimes years after an event, says Tamar Rodney ... at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing. She said that even as the pandemic eased, there was still a risk for trauma-related effects.
Note: This article fails to mention that much of this mental health problem was caused by the effects of the lockdowns. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and health from reliable major media sources.
Be aware: That COVID-19 test kit in your home could contain a toxic substance that may be harmful to your children and you. The substance is sodium azide, and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center's Drug and Poison Information Center has seen a surge in calls about exposures to the chemical since more people started self-testing for COVID-19 at home. Fifty million U.S. households have received some version of the test kits, although it's not clear how many contain sodium azide. The government has sent 200 million of the kits, with about 85% of initial orders filled. The chemical is colorless, tasteless and odorless, and it is mainly used in car airbags and as a pest control agent. Ingesting it can cause low blood pressure, which can result in dizziness, headaches or palpitations. Exposure to it can also cause skin, eye or nostril irritation. Large amounts of exposure to sodium azide can cause severe health threats, leading to convulsions, loss of consciousness, lung injury, respiratory failure leading to death, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention notes. "Sodium azide is a very potent poison, and ingestion of relatively low doses can cause significant toxicity," Poison Control said. "The extraction vials do look like small squeeze bottles. Some people may accidentally confuse them with medications." Several poison centers throughout the United States have reported sodium azide exposures from the COVID-19 test kits.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and health from reliable major media sources.
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