Health

Many families who feared that the new coronavirus would affect their health ended up dreading its effect on something seemingly even more difficult to protect: the well-being of their relationship.

What are mRNA vaccines? How do they work?

We all know that vitamins are good for us. Many of us take supplements to boost the supply of vitamins in our bodies. However, it wasn’t until 1912 that Polish biochemist Casimir Funk actually came up with the concept of vitamins, which he called "vital amines."

Although they are constantly improving their preparedness for crises and disasters, modern societies find themselves powerless in the face of a growing threat: transnational crises.

Our brain develops, unfortunately, a quirky response to nicotine. It shouldn’t really be there. It shouldn’t be in your breath, let alone you reacting to it, let alone you smoking anything or vaping anything. We shouldn’t even be near it.

What would it be like to eat 8,6 kilograms of food in a single meal? Although it seems absurd to try and fit so much food into one’s stomach, a 23-year old model from London conducted just such an experiment in 1981.

The term “natural” is not always regulated and does not guarantee that a product is healthy.

Many had not yet finished clearing away the leftovers from the New Year's Eve table, almost no one had returned to work, politics was still numb and journalists yawned with boredom because almost nothing of interest had happened on 2 January 2015.

These days we all need to hear good news—that life will soon return to normal and that we will be able to return to the troubles of yesterday, which now seem small to us. In the meantime, our lifestyle has seen changes that we could not have imagined just a few weeks ago.

Any large-scale phenomenon, such as a pandemic, activates our instinct to preserve our state of being—especially when we feel like we are losing it.

As the crisis caused by the new coronavirus deepened and spread, it was to be expected that the phenomenon would be framed in apocalyptic terms. It is something that tends to occur in such contexts.

The great challenge facing the world’s leaders right now is identifying an optimal response to a disease bearing several characteristics that make it difficult to combat.

A famine of biblical scale is already looming on the horizon, says David Beasley, director of the World Food Program. More than 30 developing countries could be affected by the scourge – 1 million people are already affected. It's not just people going to bed hungry, Beasley insists, explaining that it's a state of emergency where outside help is the only hope.

Do we need to wait for the results of longitudinal scientific studies, extending to decades, to know if vaccines are safe?

We do not know what 2020 would have looked like without a pandemic, but we already know that some losses could have been prevented. And, if the future lies in the spectrum of pandemics, as the WHO warns, we should learn all the lessons that can be learned from this long journey.