Shanghai a city of 26 million shuts down tunnels, bridges and highways in a covid lockdown to begin mass testing.Oil dropped almost 3% in response.
The damage was equivalent to at least an extra year of aging, Gwenaëlle Douaud, an associate professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Oxford and the paper's lead author, told NBC News.
The recommended Daily Value (DV) for vitamin D is 800 international units (IU), or 20 mcg per day for all adults and children over 4 years old. For children aged 1–3, it's 600 IU or 15 mcg per day (1).
With the exception of fatty fish like salmon, which contains 447 IU in a 3-ounce (85-gram) serving, very few foods are good sources of vitamin D. Instead, most vitamin D is made in your body when your skin is exposed to the sun (2).
Many people don't meet the recommendations for vitamin D. In fact, one study found that 25% of Canadians don't meet their needs through diet alone (3).
People who live in northern latitudes where sunshine is limited in the winter, as well as those who don't spend much time in the sun, often have lower blood levels of vitamin D (2, 3).
Other factors, such as having obesity or underweight, being physically inactive, and having certain genetic mutations, can also put you at risk of having lower vitamin D levels (4).
Taking a supplement and using fortified foods like vitamin D milk are good ways to increase your intake and blood levels of vitamin D.
Vitamin D Milk: Everything You Need to Know (healthline.com)
In some countries, including Canada and Sweden, vitamin D is added to cow's milk by law. In the United States, it's not mandated, but most milk manufacturers add it voluntarily during milk processing (5).
It has been added to cow's milk since the 1930s when the practice was implemented as a public health initiative to reduce rickets, which causes poor bone development and deformities in children (6).
While milk doesn't naturally contain vitamin D, it's a good source of calcium. These two nutrients work well together, as vitamin D aids calcium absorption into your bones, thus helping strengthen them.
The combination of calcium and vitamin D also helps prevent and treat osteomalacia, or soft bones, which accompanies rickets and can affect older adults (7, 8).
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows manufacturers to add up to 84 IU per 3.5 ounces (100 grams) of vitamin D3 to cow's milk and 84 IU per 3.5 ounces (100 grams) of vitamin D2 to plant-based milk alternatives (9).
Drinking vitamin D milk increases the amount of vitamin D people get and improves levels of vitamin D in the blood (5).
Studies in Finland, where vitamin D milk has been mandatory since 2003, found that 91% of milk drinkers had vitamin D levels at or above 20 ng/ml, which is considered sufficient according to the Institute of Medicine (7, 10).
Prior to the fortification law, only 44% had optimal vitamin D levels (7, 10).
SUMMARYVitamin D milk is enhanced with vitamin D during processing. This vitamin is added because it works with the calcium in milk to strengthen your bones. Drinking vitamin D milk can also help boost your vitamin D levels.
Drinking milk that contains both calcium and vitamin D is recommended as a way to strengthen your bones and prevent rickets and osteomalacia (8).
However, large studies don't show that it helps prevent osteoporosis, which is characterized by a thinning of the bones, or bone fractures in older adults (11, 12).
Still, having higher levels of vitamin D is linked to important health benefits — and they extend beyond improved bone health.
Vitamin D is needed for proper cell growth, nerve and muscle function, and a healthy immune system. It likewise helps reduce inflammation, which is thought to contribute to conditions like heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and cancer (2).
Studies that have compared vitamin D levels with disease risk suggest that having lower blood levels of the vitamin is linked to a higher risk of a wide range of chronic diseases, while having adequate or higher levels seems to result in a lower risk (13).
A major risk factor for heart disease is a cluster of conditions known as metabolic syndrome. It includes high blood pressure, insulin resistance, excess abdominal weight, high triglycerides, and low HDL (good) cholesterol.
People who have higher levels of vitamin D tend to have less severe metabolic syndrome and a lower risk of heart disease (13).
Additionally, higher levels of vitamin D are linked to healthier blood vessels (14).
A study in nearly 10,000 people found that those who got more vitamin D from supplements or diet — including fortified milk — had higher blood levels of the vitamin, less stiffness in their arteries, and lower blood pressure, triglyceride, and cholesterol levels (14).
Because vitamin D plays a major role in healthy cell division, development, and growth, it's thought that it may also play a role in preventing the growth of cancer cells.
Research that looked at vitamin D levels and cancer risk in 2,300 women over the age of 55 found that blood levels greater than 40 ng/ml were associated with a 67% lower risk of all types of cancer (15).
Furthermore, Australian scientists who followed 3,800 adults for 20 years found the same benefit for breast and colon cancer, but not all types of cancer (16).
Though these studies looked only at vitamin D levels and not how the vitamin was obtained, a review of studies investigating the link between dairy milk and cancer found that it was protective against colorectal, bladder, stomach, and breast cancer (17).
Low vitamin D levels are often observed in those with autoimmune diseases, including: (18)
Under the natural origin theory, the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, would have originated in an animal and traveled to humans either directly or through an intermediate host animal.
This natural spillover has precedent. For example, researchers traced the first Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003 back to bat caves in China's Yunnan province, and the likely intermediary host animals were masked palm civets that tested positive for the virus.
The trouble with drawing the same conclusion for COVID-19 is that no one has identified an animal that has tested positive for the novel coronavirus that caused the global pandemic.
It's not for a lack of trying. Investigators tested more than 80,000 animals in China, including hundreds linked to the Huanan seafood market associated with the early cases of COVID-19, but "no positive result was identified for SARS-CoV-2," the World Health Organization (WHO) study on the origins of COVID-19 says.
"They tested an unprecedented 80,000 animals covering 209 species, including wild, domestic and market animals … and they found no infections in animals," Muller, the professor emeritus, told Fox News Digital.
"They found nothing. But instead of drawing a scientific conclusion from that, the World Health Organization came up with excuses."
The controversial World Health Organization (WHO) study on the origins of COVID-19 says the most likely scenario was a transmission from bats to an unknown host animal to humans, while the lab leak is "extremely unlikely." But even the WHO has backtracked and admitted it was too quick to rule out the lab theory and has revived its investigation.
During past coronavirus epidemics, such as SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2013, there was evidence of extensive human infection from animals prior to the virus mutating to become transmissible between humans and sparking the pandemic, Muller said.
Investigators tested more than 9,000 human biological samples – including blood, plasma and throat swabs – that were stored at hospitals and blood banks prior to the pandemic, Muller said, citing data from the WHO report.
It was expected that between 100 and 400 would be positive for SARS-CoV-2, based on the natural outbreak experiences with SARS and MERS, Muller said. But in this case, zero tested positive.
"There is no evidence of multiple animal-to-human transmissions," said Dr. Steven Quay, a physician and founder of Atossa Therapeutics.
Muller and Quay have worked together on studying coronavirus origins and have presented their findings to Congress and in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
The lack of evidence of pre-pandemic infection and genetic purity of the virus suggests COVID-19 wasn't a natural spillover from animals, but a lab-acquired infection, the scientists say.
Quay, who is writing a book on why COVID-19 originated from a lab, said SARS-CoV-2 has a unique trigger on its surface called a furin cleavage site and a unique code in its genes for that site, called a CGG-CGG dimer. This combination has never been found naturally and therefore points to a lab-manipulated virus, he says.
Since 1992, in gain-of-function research experiments, laboratories have inserted furin sites into viruses repeatedly, Quay said. The end result is supercharged, more infectious viruses, he said.
"These gene jockeys have put in a furin site into a virus that didn't have one in the laboratory," Quay told Fox News Digital. "Eleven out of 11 times it makes it more effective, more transmissible, more lethal -- all the bad things you'd want. So if you want to juice up a virus and make it more infective or make it go from bats to humans, putting in a furin cleavage site is a great idea."
and 7 points...
10 reasons why scientists believe coronavirus originated from lab in Wuhan, China | Fox News
The lab leakers tend to be more interested in biosecurity, transparency, and human hubris. They exhibit an admirable drive to follow the money, to upend centralized power, to overturn academic hierarchy, and to expose the injustices of oppressive governments. Some are China hawks. By and large, they have not done virus-hunting field or lab work.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-case-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-theory
