How to avoid the emergency room during the holidays
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(NEW YORK) — Three states — Louisiana, Kentucky and New Hampshire — are reporting high levels of respiratory illness, including common cold, flu, RSV and COVID, according to the CDC. In addition, children under four are currently experiencing the highest levels of RSV hospitalizations.
Dr. Neil C. Bhavsar, an emergency medicine resident at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit, said that those illnesses come out “roaring” at this time of year because people are staying indoors, coming from all over and spending time with family.
He wants people to know the severity of their illness and where to go so it’s best treated, he said.
“Urgent Care is a quick fix,” Bhavsar said. Typically, it’s best for non-life-threatening conditions that are addressed within 30 minutes to a few hours.
“The ER or the emergency department is for serious injuries, life-threatening illness or something that can become very serious,” he said.
He explains that respiratory illnesses may take a few days to figure out.
“When we’re talking about respiratory illnesses, I would say, if you’re not feeling too well for like two to three days, have a low grade fever, a cough that’s been lingering for a little bit longer than you want, some facial pressure, sinus pressure, congestion, urgent care is your friend,” Bhavsar said.
But he warns that if “your fingertips are blue, your lips are blue, you’re feeling short of breath and you have chest pain” to go to the emergency department. Any child with these symptoms, especially trouble breathing, should be evaluated in an emergency room.
For upper respiratory illnesses, Bhavsar urges people to stay hydrated.
“Drink warm fluids, soup, broths, hot teas, you can try a nasal spray for congestion and honey is a big thing we’ve been doing for a sore throat or a cough,” Bhavsar said. But he warns honey should never be given to infants or anyone less than a year old due to the risk of a severe illness called botulism.
He also recommends steam inhalation and over-the-counter decongestants for respiratory illnesses, but these should not be used for more than 3-5 days in a row.
In addition, Bhavsar said ibuprofen or acetaminophen can help with body aches and chills. Always follow dosing instructions, ages for use, and consult with a physician if uncertain on how to take any these medications.
At least 24 people are believed to be dead and more than a dozen others remain unaccounted for as of Monday morning. Additionally, 105,000 people remain under mandatory evacuation orders and another 87,000 are under evacuation warnings.
Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health care systems in California, said most of its facilities remain open and operational but seven remain closed, including facilities in the cities and neighborhoods of Pasadena, Rosemead, Santa Monica, Canyon County and Sylmar.
Keck Medicine of USC shared an update to its website stating that all affiliated hospitals remain open but at least nine clinics remain closed, including those in Arcadia, Glendale, La Cañada Flintridge and Los Angeles.
Providence health care system, which serves five Western states including California, also announced that some of its outpatient services, such as doctors’ offices, were closed but that its hospitals remain open.
Adventist Health Glendale said in a statement on its website that its hospital and emergency department is operating as usual and patients are not being evacuated. However, some patients with elective procedures are being rescheduled to a later date and all non-essential visitation has been postponed.
“Some patients with elective procedures may be rescheduled for a later date – These patients will be contacted directly by their provider,” the statement said.
As of Sunday afternoon, UCLA Health said clinic operations were “impacted” in the neighborhoods of Calabasas, Malibu, Pacific Palisades and Pasadena. However, it’s unclear from the UCLA statement how many clinics are closed.
“Affected patients will be contacted with additional information. Patients with questions or seeking to reschedule appointments are encouraged to contact their physician’s office or clinic,” UCLA Health stated on its website. “UCLA Health asks that visits to our medical center emergency departments be reserved for urgent and life-threatening medical conditions.”
Some health care centers are working to reopen after being temporarily closed. Cedars-Sinai shared in an update on its website Monday that it was planning to resume non-urgent and non-emergency procedures, some of which it had postponed because of the fires.
“Our Medical Network has reopened most outpatient offices and surgery centers that had been temporarily closed, including locations in Brentwood/West Los Angeles, Los Feliz, Pasadena and Santa Monica. We continue to do everything possible to minimize any disruptions to care,” Cedars-Sinai’s update stated.
Additionally, City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, which has locations in four states including California, said its main campus in Duarte and all of its outpatient clinics are open as staff work to accommodate patients “whose care was impacted over the last few days.”
(NEW YORK) — Meta — the company that operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp –announced on Tuesday it was ending third-party fact-checking.
Some social media policy experts and public health experts are worried that the end of fact-checking could lead to the spread of medical and science misinformation and disinformation. This is especially worrisome as the U.S. is in the throes of respiratory virus season and is fighting the spread of bird flu.
“There’s going to be a rise in all kinds of disinformation, misinformation, from health to hate speech and everything in between,” Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics and open-source intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told ABC News. “[Health] is supposed to be a nonpartisan issue, and … we do see people trying to leverage health [misinformation], in particular, toward a political end, and that’s a real shame.”
“I’m hopeful, but I’m also concerned that this new structure that all the Meta properties are embarking on, it’s just not going to end well,” she added.
The social network giant said it was following the footsteps of X, replacing the program with user-added community notes.
In a press release of the announcement, Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer for Meta, said that the choices about what was being fact-checked showed “biases and perspectives.”
How fact-checking, community notes work
Meta started fact-checking in December 2016. Meta’s fact-checking works by Meta staff identifying hoaxes or by using technology that detects posts likely to contain misinformation. The fact-checkers then conduct their own reporting to review and rate the accuracy of posts.
If a piece of content is identified as false, it receives a warning label and the content’s distribution is reduced so fewer people see it.
Fact-checkers put in place following Donald Trump’s 2016 election win were found to be “too politically biased” and have destroyed “more trust than they’ve created,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted by the company.
By comparison, community notes work by a user adding context to a post that may be misleading. It is then upvoted or downvoted by other users.
Zeve Sanderson, executive director of NYU Center for Social Media Politics, said after the 2016 election, there was immense pressure for social medial platforms, including Meta, to commit resources to combatting misinformation.
Following the election, most posts being fact-checked were to combat political misinformation, according to Sanderson. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this was expanded to combat medical misinformation, he said.
Sanderson said there were a lot of claims going unchecked online because Meta has not had enough fact-checkers to check every post. Additionally, he said some people didn’t trust fact-checkers.
“There were groups of people online who didn’t trust fact checkers, who saw them as biased, often in a liberal direction,” he told ABC News. “This crowd-sourced content moderation program … it’s going to do different things well and different things poorly. We just don’t know how this is actually going to work in practice.”
Meta referred ABC News back to its Tuesday announcement in response to a request for comment on plans for its community notes or potential spread of misinformation.
Spread of misinformation during COVID-19
During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions were exposed to a deluge of information including news, research, public health guidance and fact sheets, which the World Health Organization referred to as an “infodemic.”
People were also exposed to misinformation and disinformation about what treatments work against COVID-19, how much of a risk the virus poses to children and whether COVID-19 vaccines are effective.
A 2023 KFF survey found that most Americans were not sure if health information they had encountered was true or false.
A report from the U.S. Surgeon General in 2021 found that misinformation led to people rejecting masking and social distancing, using unproven treatment and rejecting COVID-19 vaccines.
Experts told ABC News that members of the general public often do not have enough health literacy to determine if they should trust or not trust information they encounter online or on social media.
Squire said sometimes government agencies do not put out information in an “interesting” format, which may lead people to click on “entertaining” content from misinformation and disinformation peddlers.
“Some of these YouTube videos about health misinformation are a lot more entertaining. Their message just travels faster,” she said. “When you’re presenting scientific information — I know this firsthand as a former college professor — that’s a struggle. You have to be pretty talented at it and, a lot of times, where the expertise lies is not necessarily where the most expedient, fun videos are and stuff.”
How to combat health misinformation
Meta’s change comes as the U.S. faces an increase in bird flu cases and continues treating patients falling ill with respiratory illnesses.
As of Jan. 8, there have been 66 human cases of bird flu reported in the U.S., according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It’s also flu season. As of the week ending Dec. 28, 2024, there have been at least 5.3 million illnesses, 63,000 hospitalizations and 2,700 deaths from flu so far this season, according to CDC estimates.
Meanwhile, health care professionals have been encouraging Americans to get their flu shot and other vaccines — including COVID and RSV — to protect themselves against serious disease.
Experts are worried that with the change from fact-checking to community notes that misinformation could spread about the effectiveness of vaccines or how serious an illness is.
“I am concerned about the sheer amount of inaccurate information that’s out there,” Dr. Brian Southwell, a distinguished Fellow at nonprofit research institute RTI International and an adjunct faculty member at Duke University, told ABC News. “That’s something that you know ought to bother all of us as we’re trying to make good decisions. But there’s a lot that could be done, even beyond, you know, the realm of social media to try to improve the information environments that are available for people.”
Southwell said one thing that public health experts and federal health agencies can do is to get an idea of the questions that users are going to have about medical topics — such as bird flu and seasonal flu — and be ready with information to answer those questions online.
To combat being exposed to information, the experts recommended paying attention to where the information is coming from, whether it’s a respected source or someone you are unfamiliar with.
“There are various skills that are important, things like lateral reading, where rather than just evaluating the claim, you do research about the source of that claim and what you can find out about them to understand what some of their incentives or track record might be,” Sanderson said.
“This is obviously something that, sadly, social media platforms are not designed in order to incentivize this sort of behavior, so the responsibility is thrust on users to sort of look out for themselves,” he added.
(NEW YORK) — Kansas is facing the largest recorded tuberculosis outbreak in U.S. history, according to local health officials.
As of Jan. 24, there have been 67 confirmed cases of active TB including 60 in Wyandotte County and seven in Johnson County, according to the Kanas Department of Health and Environment.
Additionally, there are 79 confirmed latent TB cases, including 77 in Wyandotte County and two in Johnson County. Wyandotte County contains part of Kansas City and Johnson County is just southwest of Kansas City.
Cases linked to the outbreak were first reported in January 2024, according to KDHE. So far, there have been two deaths related to the outbreak, both of which occurred last year.
“The current Kansas City, Kan. Metro tuberculosis (TB) outbreak is the largest documented outbreak in U.S. history, presently (since the 1950s, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) started monitoring and reporting TB cases),” KDHE said in a statement. “This outbreak is still ongoing, which means that there could be more cases.”
Health officials say the risk to people living in surrounding counties and to the general public is “very low,” and that the department is following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
TB is a disease caused by a type of bacteria called Mycobacterium tuberculosis, according to the CDC. It is one of the world’s leading infectious disease killers, the federal health agency says.
TB is spread in the air from one person to another. When a person with TB coughs, speaks or sings, germs are expelled into the air — where they can linger for several hours — before another person breathes in the air and becomes infected.
Signs and symptoms include a cough that lasts for three weeks or longer, coughing up blood or phlegm, chest pain, weakness, fatigue, weight loss, loss of appetite, fever, chills and night sweats, according to the CDC.
Some people become infected with TB germs that live in the body for years without causing illness. This is known as inactive TB or latent TB.
People with inactive TB do not feel ill, do not have symptoms and cannot spread germs to other people, the CDC says. However, without receiving treatment, people with inactive TB can develop active TB.
Last year, the U.S. saw more than 8,700 cases of TB, according to CDC data. Although TB cases have been steadily declining since the mid 1990s, rates increased in 2021, 2022 and 2023, with 2023 matching pre-pandemic levels.
There are several treatment regimens for TB disease that may last anywhere from four months to nine months depending on the course of treatment. Health care providers may consider specific regimens for patients with co-existing medical conditions such as diabetes or HIV.
A vaccine, known as Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG), is commonly given to children in countries where TB is common, although it is generally not recommended in the U.S. due to the low risk of infection with the bacteria, variable vaccine effectiveness among adults, and the vaccine’s potential interference with TB tests, the CDC notes. The BCG vaccine often leaves a scar where the recipient was given the shot.