What’s new in healthcare? Here are some of the most interesting, under-the-radar stories from Yahoo News partners this week.
“You absolutely do not need permission from someone who is dead”
What does the future of grief and loss look like? An AI company called You, Only Virtual is creating chatbots modeled after deceased loved ones. Its founder, Justin Harrison, told “Good Morning America” that he hopes people won’t have to feel grief at all.
You, Only Virtual scans text messages, emails, and phone conversations between an individual and the deceased to create a chatbot that composes original written or audio responses that mimic the voice of the deceased and model the relationship and rapport the two shared in life.
The company, founded in 2020, hopes to offer a video chat option later this year, “and eventually offer augmented reality that allows interaction with a three-dimensional projection,” GMA reported.
Harrison, who used the technology to create “a virtual mother” after his mother died, dismissed potential privacy concerns raised by using personal conversations to build a chatbot without the deceased’s consent.
“You absolutely don’t need permission from someone who’s dead,” he said. “My mother might have hated the idea, but this is what I wanted and I’m still alive.”
WHO says number of mosquito-borne diseases could reach record highs thanks to global warming
The World Health Organization said on Friday that dengue cases could reach record highs this year, thanks in part to global warming, which has allowed mosquitoes and the viruses they carry to multiply faster, Reuters reported.
The WHO warned earlier this year that dengue is the world’s fastest spreading tropical disease and poses a “pandemic threat”, with about half the global population now at risk.
Most cases are asymptomatic, but symptoms of dengue may include fever accompanied by nausea, rash, or pain, which usually resolve within two to seven days. About one in twenty people who get dengue develop severe dengue, which can lead to shock, internal bleeding, and—in less than 1 percent of people—death.
Gene variant may be the reason some people test positive for the virus without COVID symptoms
Scientists involved in a study published Wednesday have identified a gene that could explain why some COVID-positive people never develop symptoms.
The study enrolled 29,947 volunteer bone marrow donors — “because high-quality genetic data were already available for this group,” the Washington Post reported — and asked them to use smartphones to track their own coronavirus infections and any symptoms over nine months, including whether they took a weekly COVID test. Over the course of the study, 20% of patients who tested positive and reported no symptoms carried a variant of the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene called HLA-B*15:01. Participants who carried two copies of the variant “were more than eight times more likely to remain asymptomatic than those who carried other HLA variants.”
Researchers hope this discovery could lead to further innovations in vaccines and treatments.
“As we’ve all learned, preventing COVID infection has been harder than we thought,” said Jill Hollenbach, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-author of the study. “If we could design a vaccine that might not stop you from getting infected, but could handle the infection so well that you don’t have any symptoms, I would personally be very happy about that.”
Long-term COVID ‘brain fog’ could age brain by a decade, study says
The ‘brain fog’ associated with long-term COVID-19 may be the cognitive equivalent of aging 10 years, PA Media reported.
Participants in a King’s College London study were tested on memory, attention, reasoning, processing speed and motor control. Researchers found that those whose test scores were most affected by COVID were participants who had experienced COVID symptoms for 12 weeks or more; and in that group, the effect of the virus on test accuracy was “similar in magnitude to the effect of a 10-year increase in age.” When a second round of testing was conducted, on average almost two years after the participants’ first infection, there was no significant improvement in scores.
“Our findings suggest that in people who lived with long-term symptoms after COVID-19, the effects of the coronavirus on mental processes such as the ability to remember words and shapes are still noticeable, on average almost two years after their initial infection,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Nathan Cheetham.
“However, the finding that COVID had no effect on performance in our tests in people who felt fully recovered, even if they had had symptoms for several months and could be considered long-term COVID patients, was good news.”
