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Superspreading events have distinguished the COVID-19 pandemic from the early outbreak of the disease. Now, research from Harvard University, Tulane University, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital finds that a critical factor in these and other transmission events is the propensity of certain individuals to exhale large numbers of small respiratory droplets. The researchers found that age, obesity and COVID-19 infection all correlate with a propensity to breathe out more respiratory droplets.
Understanding the source and variance of respiratory droplet generation may lead to effective approaches to reducing COVID-19 infection and transmission.
“Respiratory droplet generation in the airways varies between people depending on their phenotype,” said David Edwards, Associate in Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and co-author of the study. “While our results show that the young and healthy te
Obese and aged having covid-19? You can be a super spreader
According to the Global Burden of Disease study released in 2016, close to a third of the world’s population 2.2 billion people are classified as obese or overweight. Photo: iStock
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NEW DELHI :
Obese and aged can be super spreaders of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes covid-19, a research by Harvard University has shown.
Obesity, age and covid-19 infection correlate with a propensity to breathe out more respiratory droplets that are key spreaders of the virus, said researchers at Harvard University MIT conducted in association with Tulane University and Massachusetts General Hospital, US.
Scientists and public health experts have long known that certain individuals, termed “super-spreaders,” can transmit COVID-19 with incredible efficiency and devastating consequences.
Tulane University will fund three new multidisciplinary Research Centers of Excellence focused on personalized medicine, sex differences in medicine and emerging infectious diseases all distinct research challenges relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The centers are a new effort launched by the Office of Research to mobilize investigators from different fields of study across the university to focus on specific, complex research challenges facing society.
“Tulane Research Centers of Excellence will focus on convergence research, which is research driven by a specific and compelling problem that also deeply integrates investigators from different schools, backgrounds and expertise,” said Dr. Giovanni Piedimonte, vice president for research. “Given the global impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the first cycle of the program will fund centers that initially focus on aspects of COVID-19, but their research missions are broad enough to continue well past the pandemic.”
The National Institutes of Health has selected Tulane National Primate Research Center to lead a new partnership between the seven federally funded National Primate Research Centers to combine their efforts to accelerate promising COVID-19 vaccine and drug research.
The NIH contract, awarded at $1.7 million for the first year, has the potential to reach up to $6.5 million over a four-year funding period.
Tulane will play a leading role in coordinating the evaluation of promising COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics for COVTEN (Coronavirus Vaccine and Therapeutic Evaluation Network). The partnership will standardize research protocols and methods of data collection, share preliminary data and best practices across centers, and minimize the use of nonhuman primates by having single control groups across multiple studies. The centers, which normally conduct research independently, aim to harmonize their studies to provide more useful comparative data.