London: Scientists have found that organ damage persisted in 59 per cent of long Covid patients a year after initial symptoms, even in those not severely affected when first diagnosed with the virus, according to a new study.
The study also found that 29 per cent of patients with long COVID had multi-organ impairment, with persistent symptoms and reduced function at six and twelve months, it said.
The comprehensive study of organ impairment in long COVID patients over 12 months focused on patients reporting extreme breathlessness, cognitive dysfunction and poor health-related quality of life, it said.
According to the study, of the 536 patients who were studied, 13 per cent were hospitalised when first diagnosed with COVID-19, with 32 per cent of people taking part in the study being healthcare workers.
The study found that of the 536 patients, 331, or 62 per cent, were identified with organ impairment six months after their initial diagnosis. It is published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
These patients were followed up six months later with a 40-minute multi-organ MRI scan (Perspectum’s CoverScan), analysed in Oxford, the study said.
“Symptoms were common at six and twelve months and associated with female gender, younger age and single organ impairment,” said Amitava Banerjee, Professor of Clinical Data Science at the UCL Institute of Health Informatics, UK.
The study reported a reduction in symptoms between six and 12 months, it said.
Extreme breathlessness came down from being reported in 38 per cent of the patients to 30 per cent of patients, the study said, while cognitive dysfunction came down from 48 per cent to 38 per cent.
Poor health-related quality of life came down from 57 per cent to 45 per cent of patients, the study said.
“Several studies confirm persistence of symptoms in individuals with long COVID up to one year.
“We now add that three in five people with long COVID have impairment in at least one organ, and one in four have impairment in two or more organs, in some cases without symptoms,” said Banerjee.
“Impact on quality of life and time off work, particularly in healthcare workers, is a major concern for individuals, health systems and economies.
“Many healthcare workers in our study had no prior illness, but of 172 such participants, 19 were still symptomatic at follow-up and off work at a median of 180 days,” said Banerjee.
The underlying mechanisms of long COVID remain elusive, said the researchers, who did not find evidence by symptoms, blood investigations or MRI to clearly define long COVID subtypes, the study said.
They said that future research must consider associations between symptoms, multi-organ impairment and function in larger cohorts.
“Organ impairment in long COVID has implications for symptoms, quality of life and longer-term health, signalling the need for prevention and integrated care for long COVID patients,” said Banerjee.
SRINAGAR: Under its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Program, J&K Bank presented an amount of Rs 14.40 Lacs to the premier healthcare institution of Jammu and Kashmir for procurement of Platelet/Therapeutic Plasma Apheresis kits for treatment of poor patients suffering from cancer and severe blood dysfunctional diseases.
JK Bank’s Divisional Head Kashmir, Syed Shafat Hussain on Wednesday handed over the cheque to Director SKIMS, Professor Parvez Koul
An official statement reads that in a function organized at SKIMS Soura, the Bank’s Divisional Head Kashmir, Syed Shafat Hussain today handed over the cheque to Director SKIMS, Professor Parvez Koul in presence of Head Paediatric Oncology Department Dr Javed Rasool and Head BU SKIMS, Syed Irfan besides other officials of SKIMS and the bank. Pertinently, the event coincided with the ‘International Childhood Cancer Day’, which is observed on 15th February all over the world to raise awareness about childhood cancer and honours all the children and families experiencing the effects of the disease.
Speaking on the occasion, Syed Shafat Hussain said, “Healthcare is critical for every society and with rise in the number of patients suffering from terminal ailments in J&K, we do feel the need to step in and do our bit. However, as a socially responsible institution, it is a very humble contribution from J&K Bank to SKIMS Srinagar for the patients who cannot afford these kits critical for their treatment.”
“Besides empowering the people financially, J&K Bank has been contributing to the society through its CSR activities meant for helping the economically weaker sections especially in health sector. We believe our little support would help many patients and alleviate the hardships of their families,” an official handout quoted Syed Shafaat Hussain as having said.
According to statement, Director SKIMS Srinagar thanked the Bank for the contribution and expressed hope that amid rising number of patients suffering from such dangerous diseases and dysfunctionalities, the Bank would increase its CSR spend towards healthcare as a large number of the patients hailing from weaker socio-economic background visit SKIMS Hospital for treatment in pediatric oncology every year who find it difficult to afford expensive Apheresis kits containing Platelet/Therapeutic Plasma. “With J&K Bank’s earlier support, we have been able to increase the survival rate among the children suffering from cancer and many of them are today present in this function to collectively thank J&K Bank for their help and support,” he added.
Pertinently, in the last year also, J&K Bank had contributed an amount of Rs. 7.85 lacs to SKIMS for procuring these kits which have been utilized for the treatment of hundreds of poor patients especially children.
The powerful earthquakes that struck central Turkey and northwest Syria just over a week ago are the “worst natural disaster in the WHO European Region for a century,” said Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe.
“We are still learning about its magnitude. Its true cost is not known yet,” Kluge said during a press briefing today.
The WHO’s European Region includes 53 European and Central Asian countries, including Turkey.
More than 31,000 people are confirmed dead in Turkey, and nearly 5,000 lost their lives across the border in Syria, he said, adding that the figures are expected to rise further. He added that 26 million people across both countries are in need of humanitarian assistance.
The WHO launched a $43 million appeal to support the earthquake response, with likely more to come.
“I expect this to at least double over the coming days as we get a better assessment of the massive scale of this crisis and the needs,” Kluge said.
With water and sanitation facilities being hit, concerns are mounting over health issues, including thespread of infectious diseases. Health care facilities have also been gravely damaged.
“According to the Turkish authorities, an estimated 80,000 people are in hospital, placing a huge strain on the health system, itself badly damaged by the disaster,” Kluge said.
“We have initiated the largest deployment of Emergency Medical Teams in the WHO European Region in our 75-year history,”he added. Their goal is to support the damaged medical facilities, focusing on the high number of trauma patients and those with catastrophic injuries.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
SRINAGAR: Following a request from the Kupwara district administration, the Border Security Force used its helicopter to airlift critical patients from remote areas for treatment at larger medical centres.
BSF airlifts 3 critical patients from snow-bound Tangdhar Sector in Kupwara
Apart from evacuation of patients, BSF chopper carried four bodies from Tanghdar to Kupwara for their last rites, which could not be carried out for past five days due to heavy snow fall and closure of road, a BSF spokesperson said.
Tanghdar remains cut off from rest of the Kashmir Valley due to heavy snow accumulation at Sadhana Pass during winter season. Resultantly, the border population suffers due to lack of medical treatment.
As a border guarding force, BSF is not just protecting the Line of Control, but working closely with the civil administration in looking after welfare and emergency needs of border population.
LONDON — Public sector workers on strike, the cost-of-living climbing, and a government on the ropes.
“It’s hard to miss the parallels” between the infamous ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 and Britain in 2023, says Robert Saunders, historian of modern Britain at Queen Mary, University of London.
Admittedly, the comparison only goes so far. In the 1970s it was a Labour government facing down staunchly socialist trade unions in a wave of strikes affecting everything from food deliveries to grave-digging, while Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives sat in opposition and awaited their chance.
But a mass walkout fixed for Wednesday could yet mark a staging post in the downward trajectory of Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, just as it did for Callaghan’s Labour.
Britain is braced for widespread strike action tomorrow, as an estimated 100,000 civil servants from government departments, ports, airports and driving test centers walk out alongside hundreds of thousands of teachers across England and Wales, train drivers from 14 national operators and staff at 150 U.K. universities.
It follows rolling action by train and postal workers, ambulance drivers, paramedics, and nurses in recent months. In a further headache for Sunak, firefighters on Monday night voted to walk out for the first time in two decades.
While each sector has its own reasons for taking action, many of those on strike are united by the common cause of stagnant pay, with inflation still stubbornly high. And that makes it harder for Sunak to pin the blame on the usual suspects within the trade union movement.
Mr Reasonable
Industrial action has in the past been wielded as a political weapon by the Conservative Party, which could count on a significant number of ordinary voters being infuriated by the withdrawal of public services.
Tories have consequently often used strikes as a stick with which to beat their Labour opponents, branding the left-wing party as beholden to its trade union donors.
But public sympathies have shifted this time round, and it’s no longer so simple to blame the union bogeymen.
Sunak has so far attempted to cast himself as Mr Reasonable, stressing that his “door is always open” to workers but warning that the right to strike must be “balanced” with the provision of services. To this end, he is pressing ahead with long-promised legislation to enforce minimum service standards in sectors hit by industrial action.
Sunak has made tackling inflation the raison d’etre of his government, and his backbenchers are reasonably content to rally behind that banner | POOL photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Unions are enraged by the anti-strike legislation, yet Sunak’s soft-ish rhetoric is still in sharp relief to the famously bellicose Thatcher, who pledged during the 1979 strikes that “if someone is confronting our essential liberties … then, by God, I will confront them.”
Sunak’s careful approach is chosen at least in part because the political ground has shifted beneath him since the coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020.
Public sympathy for frontline medical staff, consistently high in the U.K., has been further embedded by the extreme demands placed upon nurses and other hospital staff during the pandemic. And inflation is hitting workers across the economy — not just in the public sector — helping to create a broader reservoir of sympathy for strikers than has often been found in the past.
James Frayne, a former government adviser who co-founded polling consultancy Public First, observes: “Because of the cost-of-living crisis, what you [as prime minister] can’t do, as you might be able to do in the past, is just portray this as being an ideologically-driven strike.”
Starmer’s sleight of hand
At the same time, strikes are not the political headache for the opposition Labour Party they once were.
Thatcher was able to portray Callaghan as weak when he resisted the use of emergency powers against the unions. David Cameron was never happier than when inviting then-Labour leader Ed Miliband to disown his “union paymasters,” particularly during the last mass public sector strike in 2011.
Crucially, trade union votes had played a key role in Miliband’s election as party leader — something the Tories would never let him forget. But when Sunak attempts to reprise Cameron’s refrains against Miliband, few seem convinced.
QMUL’s Saunders argues that the Conservatives are trying to rerun “a 1980s-style campaign” depicting Labour MPs as being in the pocket of the unions. But “I just don’t think this resonates with the public,” he added.
Labour’s current leader, Keir Starmer, has actively sought to weaken the left’s influence in the party, attracting criticism from senior trade unionists. Most eye-catchingly, Starmer sacked one of his own shadow ministers, Sam Tarry, after he defied an order last summer that the Labour front bench should not appear on picket lines.
Starmer has been “given cover,” as one shadow minister put it, by Sunak’s decision to push ahead with the minimum-service legislation. It means Labour MPs can please trade unionists by fighting the new restrictions in parliament — without having to actually stand on the picket line.
So far it seems to be working. Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group representing millions of U.K. trade unionists, told POLITICO: “Frankly, I’m less concerned about Labour frontbenchers standing up on picket lines for selfies than I am about the stuff that really matters to our union” — namely the government’s intention to “further restrict the right to strike.”
The TUC is planning a day of action against the new legislation on Wednesday, coinciding with the latest wave of strikes.
Sticking to their guns
For now, Sunak’s approach appears to be hitting the right notes with his famously restless pack of Conservative MPs.
Sunak has made tackling inflation the raison d’etre of his government, and his backbenchers are reasonably content to rally behind that banner.
As one Tory MP for an economically-deprived marginal seat put it: “We have to hold our nerve. There’s a strong sense of the corner (just about) being turned on inflation rising, so we need to be as tough as possible … We can’t now enable wage increases that feed inflation.”
Another agreed: “Rishi should hold his ground. My guess is that eventually people will get fed up with the strikers — especially rail workers.”
Furthermore, Public First’s Frayne says his polling has picked up the first signs of an erosion of support for strikes since they kicked off last summer, particularly among working-class voters.
“We’re at the point now where people are feeling like ‘well, I haven’t had a pay rise, and I’m not going to get a pay rise, and can we all just accept that it’s tough for everybody and we’ve got to get on with it,’” he said.
More than half (59 percent) of people back strike action by nurses, according to new research by Public First, while for teachers the figure is 43 percent, postal workers 41 percent and rail workers 36 percent.
‘Everything is broken’
But the broader concern for Sunak’s Conservatives is that, regardless of whatever individual pay deals are eventually hammered out, the wave of strikes could tap into a deeper sense of malaise in the U.K.
Inflation remains high, and the government’s independent forecaster predicted in December that the U.K. will fall into a recession lasting more than a year.
More than half (59 percent) of people back strike action by nurses, according to new research by Public First, while for teachers the figure is 43 percent, postal workers 41 percent and rail workers 36 percent | Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
Strikes by ambulance workers only drew more attention to an ongoing crisis in the National Health Service, with patients suffering heart attacks and strokes already facing waits of more than 90 minutes at the end of 2022.
Moving around the country has been made difficult not only by strikes, but by multiple failures by rail providers on key routes.
One long-serving Conservative MP said they feared a sense of fatalism was setting in among the public — “the idea that everything is broken and there’s no point asking this government to fix it.”
A former Cabinet minister said the most pressing issue in their constituency is the state of public services, and strike action signaled political danger for the government. They cautioned that the public are not blaming striking workers, but ministers, for the disruption.
Those at the top of government are aware of the risk of such a narrative taking hold, with the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, taking aim at “declinism about Britain” in a keynote speech Friday.
Whether the government can do much to change the story, however, is less clear.
Saunders harks back to Callaghan’s example, noting that public sector workers were initially willing to give the Labour government the benefit of the doubt, but that by 1979 the mood had fatally hardened.
This is because strikes are not only about falling living standards, he argues. “It’s also driven by a loss of faith in government that things are going to get better.”
With an election looming next year, Rishi Sunak is running out of time to turn the public mood around.
Annabelle Dickson and Graham Lanktree contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Srinagar, Jan 23: Despite constitution of divisional level Prescriptions Audit Committee (PAC), doctors in several hospitals of Jammu and Kashmir aren’t prescribing generic medicines to patients available at the hospital.
Health officials on condition of anonymity told news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO), that doctors at various hospitals are not prescribing generic medicines to the patients so as to give benefit to private clinics and to give their percentage as well.
They said directions given doctors to mention, unit/department name on the prescription is also thrown to the winds so that identity of doctors not prescribing generic medicines won’t get disclosed.
Meanwhile, attendants as well as patients talking to KNO said that the nexus between doctors and private clinics is still active and in order to get benefit doctors are prescribing costly drugs and unnecessary diagnostic tests.
“Unnecessary diagnostic tests/procedures are prescribed and patients are referred to the private clinics/specialists without requirement,” they said.
They added that despite the availability of generic drugs at the hospital, doctors are prescribing costly drugs which are not available at the hospital stores so that patients can get them from private clinics and the doctor will get his share.
A health official acknowledged that drugs are prescribed in contravention to the provisions of Drugs & Cosmetic Act & Regularizations.
He said that the government has already taken a serious note of it and recommendations, highlighting actionable points will be sought from concerned authorities in this regard so that this practice can be stopped fully.
“The prescription Audit report submitted by the Nodal Officer has raised serious issues regarding prescription of patients where doctors are not writing Generic drugs and does not mention the name, unit/department on the prescription.” Medical Superintendent Associated Hospital GMC Anantnag has recently written to all doctors of the hospital.
“Accordingly it is once again intimated to prescribe Generic Drugs for which Jan Aushadhi Kendra and AMRIT Stores are already functional in the hospital so that patients will be benefitted and make proper signatures, write full name and unit/department on each and every prescription.” It reads further.
Notably, Directorate of Health Service Kashmir last year ordered for constitution of divisional level Prescriptions Audit Committee (PAC) and asked Chief Medical Officers and Medical Superintendents to nominate one Nodal Officer besides constituting similar committees at district level.
DHSK had also asked all the CMOs and Medical Superintendents to nominate one Nodal Officer for each district and sub-district hospital and shall collect photocopies of at least 1 percent of prescriptions by doctors in OPDs on a random basis.
CMOs were also asked to constitute district-level PAC comprising doctors on administrative posts, excluding consultants.
“These prescriptions collected by the Nodal Officer shall be scrutinized by PAC whether the prescriptions are written in capital letters with the name of doctor, signature and registration number besides that generic drugs are prescribed and preference is given to the drugs, which are available free in hospital supplies,” DHSK had directed—(KNO)
