COVID

• "We developed the programs because we recognized a need for them in the senior adult community.
• "We developed the programs because we recognized a need for them in the senior adult community," Michael Yublosky said.
• After teaching seniors about using the Zoom platform and interacting with them, he and his wife expanded into educating participants about online safety and privacy issues.
• "Learning about technology to stay connected with loved ones, access important services, manage finances, and healthcare online, is important for seniors," Liss said.

• But what exactly is your metabolism?
• Everything you expose your body to – from lifestyle to an airborne virus – influences your physical characteristics, such as your blood pressure and energy levels.

Metabolism is energy conversion

• At the chemical level, energy metabolism begins when the three macronutrients – carbohydrates, fats and protein – are broken down atom by atom to release electrons from chemical bonds.
• Simply put, a primary role of metabolism is to convert chemical energy into electrical energy and back into chemical energy.

• I am a biochemist who studies the various networks of metabolism that are used as your body changes.
• My team and I have been able to define specific traits of metabolism, such as the presence and amount of certain metabolites – products made from breaking down macronutrients – across a wide range of conditions.

Elite athletes define the upper limits

• Elite athletes offer a prime population to study metabolic function at its best, since their network of molecular and chemical reactions must be finely tuned to compete on the world stage.
• Traditionally, lactate threshold has been a critical measure of athletic performance by pinpointing exercise intensity when lactate starts to rise in muscles and blood.
• When comparing the lactate thresholds of a group of elite cyclists, we found that the cyclists with higher thresholds had markers of better mitochondrial function.

Dysfunctional metabolism in diseases like COVID-19

• Your metabolism also changes if you get an acute illness such as COVID-19.
• In contrast to elite cyclists, COVID-19 patients have an impaired ability to burn fat that appears to persist with long COVID.

Burning fat uses a lot of oxygen. COVID-19 damages the red blood cells that deliver oxygen to organs. Because red blood cells have a limited ability to repair themselves, they might not function as well during the remainder of their roughly 120-day life span. This may partially explain why COVID symptoms last as long as they do in some people.

Blood donors define the middle

• Blood donors, coming from every walk of life, also have a diverse range of biological traits as a study population.
• My team and I looked at blood from over 13,000 blood donors to shed light on their metabolic diversity.
• We found that blood from donors with higher levels of kynurenine was less likely to restore hemoglobin levels in transfusion recipients compared with donors with lower kynurenine levels.

In addition to his appointment at the University of Colorado, Travis Nemkov is an Affiliate Investigator of Vitalant Research Institute and a co-founder of Omix Technologies.

• Cases are highest in Queensland and New South Wales, with more than 1,000 recorded in each state.
• The last time Queensland recorded more than 1,000 cases in three months was the first quarter of 2013.
• So what is whooping cough, why are cases rising now, and how can you protect yourself?

It’s most dangerous for babies

• The initial symptoms of whooping cough resemble other cold and flu-like symptoms.
• However, as the disease progresses into the second week, the coughing fits become worse and more frequent.
• After or between bouts of coughing, patients may gasp for air and produce the characteristic “whoop” noise.
• Immunity from these vaccines wanes over time, so it’s also recommended adults receive a booster, particularly those who may come into frequent contact with babies.

Why are cases rising now?

• Due to COVID measures such as border closures, social isolation and masks, the number of cases declined dramatically during 2020–23.
• In Australia, cases have been particularly high during this outbreak in children aged 10–14.

A potential superbug

• Most vaccines used in Australia and other developed countries stimulate your immune system to recognise and target three to five components of the bacteria.
• These mutations make the bacteria look slightly different to the one used in the vaccine, helping it better hide from the immune system.

• But in 2008, a new strain appeared in Australia that no longer produced pertactin, one of the components targeted by the vaccine.
• This means your immune system, like a detective, has one less clue to recognise the bacteria.
• Read more:
  Low vaccination and immunity rates mean NZ faces a harsh whooping cough winter – what needs to happen

What next?

• Greater tracking of whooping cough strains, like we do with COVID, is needed to inform future vaccine design and treatments.
• Importantly, although the bacteria is evolving, current vaccines are still very effective at preventing serious disease and reducing transmission.

Laurence Don Wai Luu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• That’s the change that month in what the Bureau of Statistics calls the consumer price index “excluding volatile items”.
• The items it excludes (because they are often affected by supply disruptions) are fruit, vegetables and fuel.
• Up until late 2022, the consumer price index was calculated only four times a year, and even that was a herculean feat.

A ten-fold increase in data

• But in the last few years the use of supermarket scanner data, “web scrapping” to collect online prices, and data feeds direct from the computers of rental agents and all sorts of other businesses have cut costs enormously and increased the number of prices collected each quarter almost ten-fold to 900,000.
• That’s just one of the ways in which an explosion of previously-inaccessible data is transforming the way the bureau goes about its job and is set to make statistics that used to be only fairly reliable suddenly very reliable.

Retail figures set for the chop

• And the retail survey was always a pretty rough-and-ready way to find out what we spent in shops.
• It covers far more retail outlets than the retail survey ever did, as well as spending on services and spending overseas, and it divides spending into categories based on the type of merchant.
• It’ll replace the retail survey from the middle of next year.

Millions instead of thousands

• While payroll numbers can’t tell us everything the employment survey does (they can’t yet tell us the hours people work and whether are looking for work) they cover millions of Australians instead of thousands, and come out weekly.
• For more than a century it has surveyed farmers to find out what they are growing.
• Read more:
  You can't fix it if you can't see it: how the ABS became our secret weapon

Big data, timely insights

• A lot of the so-called administrative data provided to banks and other organisations isn’t sorted in a way that makes it useful.
• The more it succeeds, the less it will need to bother us and the better the information it will produce.
• In February, the consumer price index excluding volatile items did not change, meaning in that particular month, inflation was zero.

Peter Martin is Economics Editor of The Conversation.