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France's Sanofi to buy US group Principia Biopharma for $3.68 bln
France's Sanofi to buy US group Principia Biopharma for $3.68 bln The deal will see Sanofi "acquire all of the outstanding shares of Principia for $100 per share in cash, which represents an aggregate equity value of approximately $3.68 billion", Sanofi said in a statement. https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
First Mediterranean Cruise Sets Sail From Italy After Months-long Coronavirus Hiatus
(ROME) — Cruise ship passengers had their temperatures checked and took COVID-19 tests Sunday so they could set sail on what is being billed as the first Mediterranean cruise after Italy’s pandemic lockdown.
The cruise ship company MSC has made the procedures, for crew as well as passengers, part of its new health and safety protocols. The MSC Grandiosa, which was christened last year, set sail from the northern Italian port of Genoa on Sunday evening for a seven-night cruise in the western Mediterranean.
Anyone testing positive, or with a fever, or having other COVID-19 symptoms was denied boarding, the company said. The crew spent time in quarantine before the start of the cruise.
Earlier this month, the Italian government gave its approval for cruise ships to once again depart from Italy’s ports but limited cruise ships to sailing with 70% capacity.
MSC declined to say how many passengers were sailing on this cruise. Among the port calls for the Grandiosa, MSC’s flagship, are Naples, Palermo, Sicily and Valletta, Malta. (Malta is one of four Mediterranean countries that Italy now requires travelers arriving from to have COVID-19 tests.)
For now, MSC was limiting its guests to the residents of Europe’s 26-nation Schengen visa free travel zone.
Read more: The Key to Europe’s Economic Recovery From COVID-19? Saving the Summer Vacation
MSC said every guest and crew member on board will be given a wristband that “facilitates contactless transactions around the ship as well as providing contact and proximity tracing.”
Cruise ships and the business they bring to many Italian cities during port excursions make up an important segment of Italy’s vital tourism industry. An estimated 12 million cruise ship passengers arrived or departed from Italian ports last year or made port calls in Italy, according to industry figures.
Have You Caught an ‘Emotional Virus’?
Have you ever found yourself suddenly ill at ease? You might feel flustered or agitated. Your heart starts to race, or you catch yourself darting toward the door or to the kitchen to do some mindless comfort eating.
The next time this happens, reflect and ask yourself:
- Who is in the room with me?
- Who did I just talk with?
- What did I just experience?
- What’s going on around me?
Negative emotions from the people around us — including fear, worry, anxiety, and stress — pass from one person to another quickly, often with few or no words, like a highly contagious virus.
If you spend an evening, for instance, social distancing outdoors with stressed-out neighbors who are drinking heavily, do you have a hard time keeping your own drinking in check? Does your workday start out productive but end up derailed from a snarky colleague’s endless rants? If you’re volunteering in your community, do you come home feeling de-energized after being pelted with committee members’ countless complaints?
Even our physical health and our susceptibility to medical diseases are related to the company we keep. What we eat, how much we sleep, how sedentary we are, and how much exercise we get is strongly influenced by the people we choose to associate with.
But why, exactly, does all of this happen?
It’s all in the way we’re hardwired.
The human brain has evolved over many thousands of years to pick up any and all potential threats and negative feelings expressed by those nearby. Neurobiologist Dr. Charles Stevens, a nationally recognized expert at the Salk Institute’s Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory in California, told us, “There’s a neural basis for how we share emotions. Cells in our brain will fire in the same way as the nervous system that we’re watching. Our nervous systems respond similarly. They’re linked — they mirror each other — to whomever we are observing and close to.”
As if tethered by invisible cords, we’re wired to replicate the moods of others — including worry, anxiety, and sadness — just by being in the same room. The positive moods of others are just as easily replicated.
Other research shows that moods can spread among networks of people like a social contagion. Sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and political scientist James Fowler of UC San Diego looked at data from a 20-year study that included information on the social networks of 4,739 people.
Called the Framingham Heart Study, the research followed people from 1983 to 2003. The results were startling: On average, they found that for every happy friend in your social network, your own chance of being happy rises by 9 percent. For every one unhappy friend, your chance of being happy decreases by 7 percent. Happiness — as well as unhappiness — was essentially spread and shared.
Three ways to manage your reactions:
The good news is that, with practice, you’ll become better at detecting — and then avoiding or managing your reaction to — the people around you who are frequently swimming in their own private thoughts or negative states of mind. Conversely, you’ll also be able to better detect those people who lift your spirits and support your goals and move to secure close relationships with them.
Here are three ways to start:
1. Get comfortable saying no. You’re not obliged to give yourself over to others — not your time, not your energy, not your happiness. Give yourself permission to question or say no to situations that pull you down.
This is an especially important skill to practice around authority figures, family, and highly persuasive individuals. Saying no can be as simple as stating, “I wish I could do that, but it’s not possible for me.” Create a simple phrase and rehearse it many times before you meet up with highly demanding people.
2. Mitigate negative interactions when it’s impossible to escape them. It’s not always possible to walk away from difficult people. Workplaces are particularly challenging. You come into direct, prolonged contact with groups of people under stress. In that environment, it’s all too easy to pick up negative emotions, and this can seriously rob you of your agency.
In these situations, try this strategic psychological operations (PSYOP) technique: selectively ignore certain people, and navigate around the drama to keep your mind clear. Instead of engaging, shrug or make a lighthearted joke when coworkers become negative or competitive.
In personal situations, turn to humor. We know one couple who imagine their loud, self-absorbed in-laws as characters in a Woody Allen movie, and they encourage each other to keep talking even when these family members monopolize the conversation. It’s an amusing (and effective) way to keep negative emotions from ruining every holiday dinner.
3. Address your stressors head-on. Sometimes, the tensions we perceive as negative — and about us — have nothing to do with us at all. For example, let’s say your coworker invites you to a Zoom call in preparation for an upcoming sales meeting. He’s curt and visibly frustrated. After a few minutes, you ask, “You seem stressed. Are you concerned about our meeting?”
Your coworker releases a long, deep breath and smiles. “No,” he reassures you. He explains that he’s been juggling back-to-back meetings while homeschooling his kids, and he hasn’t had a break in what feels like ages.
It would have been easy to mistakenly attribute your coworker’s stress to yourself — or speculate that there was impending bad news related to the meeting. The takeaway? Always ask for clarification. Don’t assume that what you’re sensing is directly related to you or that it must continue. Tensions can often be defused, or disappear entirely, simply by facing them squarely.
How the Pandemic Is Taking Its Toll on Our Mental Health
The year 2020 will go down in history as one of the most devastating in history. Hundreds of thousands have died and millions have been hospitalized due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 has changed the lives of so many.
No matter where you live, dealing with the effects of economic and physical lockdowns in a community leads to multiple mental health challenges. After months of living with the coronavirus, many people are getting tired, burned out, and more and more frustrated.
In America, we face a particular challenge. Our federal government has chosen to take a backseat during the pandemic. Instead of leading the charge in fighting it, they have let the individual states choose their own path. This has led to continuing large numbers of Americans exposed to and infected by the coronavirus.
The Pandemic’s Mental Health Toll on Families
In a new survey published in the journal, Pediatrics (Patrick et al., 2020), we learn from a study of 1,011 parents just how much of a toll the pandemic has taken on the mental health of families. Over a quarter of people agreed that their mental health has gotten worse. And it’s no wonder — nearly half of people said they had lost access to childcare, a cornerstone of so many family’s stability.
Large numbers of people — nearly 40% of those responding to the survey — said they are forgoing children’s doctor’s visits out of fear of the coronavirus. The survey, called the Vanderbilt Child Health COVID-19 Poll, was distributed during the first week of June 2020.
The researchers noted:
Loss of childcare, delays in health care visits, and worsened food security were common among families experiencing worse mental and behavioral health.
Disruption in routines can be detrimental for children, especially those already with behavioral health diagnoses. For some children, this is complicated by challenges accessing traditional office-based services and the loss of mental health services that students may receive at school.
This is why so many school officials have been trying to weigh the public health benefits of keeping schools closed with the mental health needs of children. There are no easy answers.
Mental Health-Related Deaths May Rise
We learn from Elisabeth Brier’s reporting that these continuing challenges to our mental health may result in an increase in mental health-related deaths:
In May, the nonprofit Well Being Trust, in conjunction with the D.C.-based Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care, published research that suggests conditions stemming directly from Covid-19—including widespread unemployment, social isolation, dread and a murky future—could lead to an estimated additional 75,000 deaths on top of those caused by physical illness. Fatalities from drug overdoses, alcohol abuse and suicide (otherwise known as “deaths of despair”) is what those on the front lines of mental health are working to combat.
And the mental health challenges and anxiety appear to be even worse in minority communities, which mirrors the disproportionate toll the coronavirus pandemic has taken against these communities:
Dr. Hairston, who also serves as the president of the American Psychiatric Association of Black Psychiatrists, echoes this experience; she’s noted an uptick in patients who are suffering from more severe mental health issues.
“There’s certainly been a surge of patients in crisis,” Hairston explains. “Particularly working with those from underserved communities, there’s added distress about housing, the fear of getting evicted and unstable unemployment stemming from the virus. All of the uncertainty definitely makes a lot of these cases more challenging. It can be difficult to reassure patients.”
Mental Health Consequences of Contracting COVID-19
Additional recently-published research suggests that COVID-19 may come with longer-term mental health consequences. Mazza et al. (2020) looked at the psychiatric health of 402 adults who had survived a COVID-19 infection a month after being discharged from the hospital.
The results were not encouraging. From both a clinical interview and a number of self-report measures, the researchers found that many of the recovered patients suffered from significant psychiatric symptoms:
28% for PTSD, 31% for depression, 42% for anxiety, 20% for [obsessive-compulsive] symptoms, and 40% for insomnia.
Overall, 56% scored in the pathological range in at least one clinical dimension.
In short, it appears from this early research that if you get seriously ill from COVID-19 and require hospitalization, you’d be in the minority to come away from the hospitalization without having significant psychiatric symptoms a month later. To be fair, some have called some of the study’s findings into question.
We’re only starting to understand what the long-term ramifications of a COVID-19 infection are. And while many are focused on potential chronic health problems associated with the disease, this is one of the first studies to look at the possible long-term mental health problems. As quoted in the above article, Dr. Dara Kass at Columbia University Medical Center notes:
“Just because you don’t die, it doesn’t mean that your life isn’t completely affected, and/or you don’t have new chronic disease. We are looking now at lung disease and heart disease and we also need to look at brain disease, and remember these are new chronic diseases that are accumulating as a result of the virus spraying. unrelenting, affecting people who are young and have lives ahead of them.”
It’s important that we acknowledge the toll the pandemic is taking on our mental health, whether or not we ever get COVID-19. Dealing with the constant unknown of what tomorrow may bring, school reopenings, economic insecurity, and not engaging in everyday social activities has an ongoing negative impact in most people’s lives. We’ve moved from an immediate reaction to the pandemic (“Let’s stock up on toilet paper!”) to a more chronic phase, one where the new normal is to get used to not quite knowing what tomorrow will bring.
References
Mazza, M.G. et al. (2020). Anxiety and depression in COVID-19 survivors: Role of inflammatory and clinical predictors. Brain Behav Immun. doi: 10.1016/j.bbi.2020.07.037
Patrick, S.W. et al. (2020). Well-being of Parents and Children During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A National Survey. Pediatrics. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-016824
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