According to Dr. Andrei Pozdnyakov, an infectious disease specialist, whooping cough is called the “100-day cough” because it can take a long time to recover from it.
He said in an interview with Gazeta.Ru: “Whooping cough is one of the widespread respiratory diseases, but it is not as highly contagious as chicken pox, influenza, and “Covid-19,” as infection with this disease requires close contact over a long period with the infected person. But a cough can appear. Whooping cough is an epidemic, as a rule, this depends on the intensity of contacts and transmission of infection to groups such as kindergartens, schools, boarding schools, military units, etc. Whooping cough has a long incubation period of 7 to 20 days, against the background of normal temperature and health, at first the person suffers from a cough "Simple, lasts a little more than a week, then becomes bouts."
According to him, the pathogen secretes a toxin that stimulates coughing, which is accompanied by respiratory arrest, convulsive inhalation, and sometimes vomiting after the cough.
He says: “These are exactly the ‘signs’ that indicate whooping cough, which appears in the patient a week and a half after being infected. To treat whooping cough, the person needs to take antibiotics from the first days. But when the cough is normal and without fever and the person feels in a normal state of health, there is no "The doctor prescribes antibiotics for him, and after that there is no benefit from taking them. So the infected person is forced to take medications to reduce the cough, because unfortunately there is no other treatment."
The danger of whooping cough is that during a prolonged coughing attack, breathing interruption (holding of the breath) occurs, which can last tens of seconds.
He says: “Any holding of breathing leads to hypoxia, above all in the brain. Apnea attacks can occur regularly in newborns, due to the incomplete structure of the head, and this is the main danger of this disease: interruption of breathing, hypoxia and disturbance of consciousness.” Even coma. The second danger is the occurrence of pneumonia. Most often it is pneumonia caused by the bacteria Bordetella pertussis, which causes whooping cough, or complications resulting from a bacterial infection, which can even lead to death. For these reasons, whooping cough is considered a serious disease "For young children. Therefore, children under one year of age should be treated in hospital, and for other categories of patients, they can be treated at home."
After the failure of huge experiments the world's leading theory about Alzheimer's disease is in real crisis!
At the beginning of the twentieth century, psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer became the first person to notice strange clumps and tangles in the brain of a person who died of dementia.
Since then, these bands of amyloid beta proteins have become the prevailing hypothesis about the causes of Alzheimer's disease. Despite decades of failed studies, finding ways to get rid of them has remained an obsession.
Now, in two trials, a drug designed to eliminate these sticky plaques failed to preserve the cognitive abilities of people with early Alzheimer's disease, compared with people who took a placebo.
The monoclonal antibody gantenerumab significantly reduced the amount of beta-amyloid in the brain as intended, but this did not translate into improvements in cognitive function.
“Among people with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, gantenerumab resulted in reduced amyloid plaque burden compared with placebo at 116 weeks, but was not associated with slower clinical decline,” the researchers stated in their paper covering the two drug trials.
The findings come as the amyloid hypothesis reaches a critical juncture in its history – with pharmaceutical companies controversially winning approvals for anti-amyloid drugs based on weak evidence.
It also comes on the heels of an investigation by Science magazine, which cast doubt on an early amyloid study.
In each gantenerumab trial, about 1,000 older adults from 30 countries were randomly assigned to receive injections of gantenerumab or a placebo every few weeks for about two years.
Their cognitive abilities were measured on a score from 0 to 18 using the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale-Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB).
Surprisingly, gantenerumab showed no benefits when the FDA fast-tracked two other drugs with similar mechanisms. It is also possible that the two-year gantenerumab trial is too short to show a benefit for patients.
Aducanumab and lecanemab both received accelerated approval from the US Food and Drug Administration on the grounds that they remove beta-amyloid from the brain. But there is still controversy about the benefits for patients.
Concerns have also been raised about three deaths due to brain bleeding and seizures in the lecanemab study. It is not clear to some experts whether this drug is worth the risk.
The results of both trials were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.