How COVID Restrictions Could Lead to an Uptick in Unusual Illnesses; Jeff Bridges was ‘pretty close to dying’ while battling COVID and cancer, and other C-Virus related stories

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How COVID restrictions could lead to an uptick in unusual illnesses: The world might be looking at an unfortunate new normal for how viruses spread.

Doctors and medical experts are seeing a bizarre return of diseases that were mainly on hiatus during the aggressive spread of COVID — and the general population, especially children, are susceptible due to a lack of naturally acquired immunity from isolating in the past few years, Stat News reported.

Medical experts are looking into the possibility of pandemic-born babies having less antibodies — particularly for respiratory illnesses — passed to them from their mothers, according to Hubert Niesters, a clinical virology and molecular diagnostics professor at the University Medical Center, in Groningen, Netherlands.

Even those born before COVID, who went through dramatic isolation by not attending in-person school or daycare, are showing noticeable changes.

While searching for antibodies in young children, an “infection honeymoon” was found in their blood tests, said another Netherlands medical scientist, Marion Koopmans

“You really see that children in the second year of the pandemic have far less antibodies to a set of common respiratory viruses. They just got less exposed,” said Koopmans, who heads the department of viroscience at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.

Scientists are looking into a causality with children having less antibodies and the recent slew of hepatitis that’s infecting kids. It’s possibly caused from adenovirus type 41, an illness that can cause flu-like symptoms in patients. They are weighing the possibility that this highly infectious strand may be a result of weakened immunities. --->READ MORE HERE

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Jeff Bridges was ‘pretty close to dying’ while battling COVID and cancer:

Jeff Bridges reveals he was knocking on death’s door while battling COVID-19 and cancer at the same time.

“The Big Lebowski” star contracted the virus in January 2021 before the vaccine was available, and after chemotherapy had weakened his immune system.

“I was pretty close to dying. The doctors kept telling me, ‘Jeff, you’ve got to fight. You’re not fighting.’ I was in surrender mode,” the 72-year-old actor said in the new issue of People. “I was ready to go. I was dancing with my mortality.”

“I had no defenses,” the non-Hodgkin lymphoma survivor continued. “That’s what chemo does — it strips you of all your immune system. I had nothing to fight it. COVID made my cancer look like nothing.”

Bridges described the past 18 months as “a bizarre dream,” which started with an unusual feeling in his stomach. --->READ MORE HERE

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