Corona

Panel on Covid finds irregularities worth crores, says Karnataka minister

Karnataka Minister H K Patil on Thursday said the Justice John Michael Cunha panel in its report on the COVID-19 management has mentioned irregularities to the tune of crores of rupees' during the previous BJP government in the state. The preliminary inquiry report has been assigned to a team of officers comprising Chief Secretary Shalini Rajneesh, Additional Chief Secretary to the Chief Secretary and some other officers to analyse it and file the report in a month, Patil, who holds law and parliamentary affairs portfolio, told reporters after the cabinet meeting. The minister said Chief Minister Siddaramaiah raised the subject related to Justice Michael D'Cunha commission's report on irregularities during COVID-19 pandemic. The report has been submitted comprising five to six volumes, he added. Justice D'Cunha has mentioned about the irregularities to the tune of hundreds of crores of rupees. There is also reference to the missing files. The report has taken into account the publi

Consumption, high food inflation concern for tea industry: FAITTA chief

Sluggish growth in domestic consumption, rising food inflation and slow recovery of exports post the Covid pandemic are some of the challenges faced by the tea industry, a senior official said. Tea producer associations and the Tea Board India have been concerned over the muted demand growth in the country, he said. The remarks came from Sanjay Shah, chairman of the Federation of All India Tea Traders Association (FAITTA), during its 10th annual general meeting here on Saturday evening. As retailers within the FAITTA fold, we are witnessing the market movements from close quarters. It is a fact that loose tea consumption has been giving way to packet tea, Shah said. Rising levels of food inflation also remain a concern area, as it adversely impacts consumption, he said. Given that incomes do not adjust as fast as prices, high inflation in essentials tend to adversely impact demand for non-essentials. Even within essentials, consumers may shift to lower priced non-premium products,

Institutions built previously incapable of fighting today's challenges: PM

rime Minister Modi highlighted the uncertainty in the current global scenario amid conflicts and other concerns, and said that global governance and financial institutions have been "inefficient"

Recovery in overseas travel by Chinese lags due to costs, visa snags

The Chinese currency has fallen more than 2% against the dollar since the start of the year, raising costs in yuan terms for Chinese travellers abroad

US sanctions 3 Chinese, 3 Thai entities over Covid related cyber fraud

The botnet enabled users to commit widespread cyber-enabled fraud using compromised victim computers that were associated to residential IP addresses

Covid-19 effect: Global healthy life expectancy slumps to 2012 level

According to WHO's latest report, global life expectancy and healthy life expectancy dropped to 2012 levels of 1.8 and 1.5 years, respectively, eradicating a decade of progress

TN govt assures no need for panic amid new Covid wave in Singapore

The new Covid wave in Singapore is a "milder infection" and there was no need for panic and Tamil Nadu has the required infrastructure to face any situation, a top official said on Wednesday. Dr T S Selvavinayagam, Director, Directorate of Public Health and Preventive Medicine (DPHPM), said "there has been no significant (hospital) admissions" in Singapore following the outbreak. "In the last few weeks, it is being reported that there are Covid cases in South Asian countries like Singapore. As far as we (TN) are concerned, there is no need for any apprehension...the Singapore variant, KP.2 is a sub variant of Omicron and has been reported in some parts of India," he said. As many as 290 cases of KP.2 and 34 cases of KP.1, both sub-lineages of Covid-19 that are responsible for surge in cases in Singapore, have been found in India, according to official data. In a video released by the DPHPM, Selvavinayagam said the variant has been "so far giving only milder infection, no severe ...

ICMR distances itself from BHU study on Covaxin, calls it 'poorly designed'

Bharat Biotech had then rebuked the BHU study, saying that its indigenously developed Covid vaccine Covaxin has shown an 'excellent safety track record' in various studies

Over 25,000 new Covid cases in Singapore, minister advises wearing masks

Singapore is seeing a new COVID-19 wave as the authorities recorded more than 25,900 cases from May 5 to 11 even as Health Minister Ong Ye Kung on Saturday advised the wearing of masks again. We are at the beginning part of the wave where it is steadily rising, said Ong. So, I would say the wave should peak in the next two to four weeks, which means between mid- and end of June, The Straits Times newspaper quoted the minister as saying. The Ministry of Health (MOH) said the estimated number of COVID-19 cases in the week of May 5 to 11 rose to 25,900 cases, compared with 13,700 cases in the previous week. The average daily COVID-19 hospitalisations rose to about 250 from 181 the week before. The average daily intensive care unit (ICU) cases remained low at three cases, compared with two cases in the previous week. The MOH said that to protect hospital bed capacity, public hospitals have been asked to reduce their non-urgent elective surgery cases and move suitable patients to ...

Over 30% Covaxin takers suffered from health issues after 1 year: BHU study

Nearly one-third of the individuals who received Bharat Biotech's anti-Covid vaccine Covaxin reported 'adverse events of special interest,' or AESI, according to a one-year follow up study conducted by a team of researchers at BHU. Nearly 50 per cent of 926 study participants in the study complained of infections during the follow-up period, predominated by viral upper respiratory tract infections. Serious AESI, which included stroke and Guillain-Barre syndrome, were reported in one per cent of individuals, the study, which looked at long-term safety of the BBV152 vaccine in adolescents and adults, claimed. Published in the journal Springer Nature, the study comes in the wake of UK pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca admitting its Covid vaccine can cause rare side-effects of blood clotting and lowering of platelet count in UK court. "Close to one third of the individuals developed AESIs. New-onset skin and subcutaneous disorders, general disorders, and nervous system disorders were th

AstraZeneca's anti-Covid drug cuts disease risk in vulnerable patients

The long-acting antibody therapy called sipavibart showed a "statistically significant reduction" in symptomatic Covid-19 cases among immunocompromised patients

Novavax signs Covid-19 license deal with Sanofi, secures business viability

Novavax said it would co-commercialize its Covid-19 vaccine with French drugmaker Sanofi and develop new Covid-19-influenza combination vaccines using Novavax's Matrix-M adjuvant

Covishield side effects: Doctors' group urges to review all Covid vaccines

In the wake of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca admitting in a UK court that its Covid vaccine can cause blood clots in rare cases, a group of doctors on Thursday expressed deep concern over the safety of the Covishield vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India. At a press conference, the doctors, under the banner of the Awaken India Movement (AIM), urged the government to review the science behind all Covid vaccines and audit their commercialisation as well as implementation of active surveillance and monitoring mechanism to ensure vaccine adverse events are identified as early as possible. "The government has wholly ignored the rising number of cases of tragic deaths post-Covid vaccination all the while and continues to promote Covid vaccines as 'safe and effective', without scientific investigation and invoking epidemiology," Dr Tarun Kothari, a radiologist and an activist, said at the press conference. The world is learning about a side effect of the Covid vaccine ...

FLiRT 2024: New group of Covid variants spreads in US; all you need to know

FLiRT, a group of new Covid variants in the Omicron JN.1 lineage, is spreading in the US. KP.2 and KP 1.1 are more infectious than earlier Omicron variants, which, however, have similar side effects

AstraZeneca reaffirms Covid vaccine safety amid rare side effect concerns

This comes in the wake of a recent admission by AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company, that its Covid vaccine Covishield and Vaxzevria "can, in very rare cases, cause TTS

China's top Covid-19 vaccine scientist expelled from Parliament for graft

China's top scientist, who developed the first inactivated COVID-19 vaccine at the height of the pandemic in the country in 2020, has been dismissed from Parliament for alleged corruption. Yang Xiaoming, the chairman of China National Pharmaceutical Group's vaccine subsidiary China National Biotec Group (CNBG), has been stripped of his membership in the National People's Congress (NPC) due to serious discipline and law violations, official media reported here on Monday. The charge of serious discipline and law violations is a common euphemism for corruption under the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) disciplinary practice. Yang, 62, is a veteran researcher who headed the CNBG - a vaccine subsidiary of state-owned Sinopharm - and led a team that developed Sinopharm's BBIBP-CorV vaccine, China's first coronavirus shot approved for general use. Coronavirus first surfaced in the Chinese city of Wuhan in March 2020 and later spread to the world, becoming the pandemic of the century

Besides Covid-19, diabetes and renal disease reduce Indian lifespan

Covid-19 was the leading cause of death in India, as per the study. The age-standardised rate of deaths for both males and females was 156.8 per 100,000 population

No country is fully prepared for future pandemics, says ADB report

India's score on the Global Health Security Index declined from 43.6 in 2019 to 42.8 in 2021. The country's score was lower than others. Japan, Brazil and Russia, meanwhile, recorded an improvement

New covid-19 variant JN.1 dominant in China, check symptoms and more

JN.1, a new COVID variant, has become dominant in China. A total of 6,653 cases were reported last month

Persistent Covid infections may be more common than expected: Report

A high proportion of COVID-19 infections in the general population lead to persistent infections lasting a month or more, according to a study. It has long been thought that prolonged COVID-19 infections in immunocompromised individuals may have been the source of the multiple new variants that arose during the pandemic and seeded successive waves of infection, the researchers said. However, until now, the prevalence of persistentS-CoV-2 infections in the general population and how the virus evolves in these situations remained unknown, they said. The study, published in the journal Nature, used data from the UK Office for National Statistics COVID-19 Infection Survey (ONS-CIS), which tested participants monthly. Of the over 90,000 participants, 3,603 provided two or more Covid positive samples between November 2020 and August 2022. Of these, 381 individuals tested positive for the same variant over a period of a month or longer. Within this group, 54 individuals had a persistent .