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BBC Inside Science

Predicting Long Covid, and the Global Toll of Antimicrobial Resistance

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.51.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2022

⏱️ 37 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Prof Onur Boyman, Director of department of Immunology at University Hospital, Zurich, this week published a paper in the journal Nature Communications that presents a way of quantifying the risk of a Covid patient going on to develop Long Covid (or PACS as some call it) based on certain symptoms, but crucially also two key biomarkers in the blood. As he explains to Gaia, combining the levels in the blood of two key immunoglobulins (IgM and IgG3) with other pointers, first identified last year, allowed him and his team to make successful predictions as to the relative likelihood his sample group of patients might go on to still be exhibiting symptoms beyond four weeks after infection. Asthma is of particular interest to these researchers, partly because it can share this blood signal of Ig markers. Might it even also shed any light on things such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Dr Claire Steves, of Kings College London, whose previous work on symptom gathering Onur's team have built upon, agrees this is a promising bit of work, and also discusses some other potential clues to the Long Covid mystery. But Covid of course is not the the only major cause of death in the world today. A major paper in the Lancet recently is one of the first deep estimates of the global health burden of Antibiotic Microbial Resistance. And it suggests that 1.25 million people died in the world in 2019 because many bacteria are evolving a resistance to our favourite antibiotics. As Prof Chris Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington who led the massive collaboration explains. The surprisingly huge number points to a massive and growing problem that political and health leaders around the world must address. And finally, the genetics of fingerprints might be a bit better understood thanks to work published in Cell recently. Dr Denis Headon of the Roslyn Institute at the University of Edinburgh talks to Gaia about a huge survey he and colleagues have done looking at the hints certain genes can give as to the types of fingerprints you grow. The genes that seem to govern the general form of your prints are the ones that shape your limb development, rather than skin patterns as perhaps might be expected. And a pro-tip if you want to search the literature for more info on this: use the word "dermatoglyph" rather than the overused and progressively meaningless word "fingerprint". Presented by Gaia Vince Producer Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer Emily Bird Made in Association with The Open University.

Transcript

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Me and Ben Brick are back with a blast.

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I'm trying to make sense of the present day, join me on this journey by pressing play.

0:23.8

Have you heard George's podcast, Chapter 4?

0:27.2

Listen on BBC Sound.

0:29.6

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

0:34.8

Hello, hello.

0:35.8

This is BBC Inside Science, first broadcast on the 27th of January 2022.

0:42.0

Now have we finally found a way of predicting who is at risk of long COVID?

0:47.4

We'll look at the latest insights.

0:50.0

COVIDs far from the only global health burden will also look at the growing problem of antibiotic

0:55.0

resistance, now a leading cause of death, and we've all got a unique set of fingerprints

1:01.5

useful for fingering crime suspects, or for legitimately getting into your devices,

1:06.8

of course, but how is a fingerprint made?

1:10.6

We'll travel back to our embryonic selves.

1:13.4

First, SARS-CoV-2, COVID has rocked our world over the past two years.

1:19.9

It's so far killed at least five and a half million people, and many more have also suffered

1:25.3

from the disease, with a sizable proportion of those experiencing symptoms for months

1:30.7

after their infection.

...

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