Archive For The “Israeli Medicine” Category
Israeli scientists have developed a “sniff test” that they say can predict the likelihood that an unconscious brain-injured person will regain consciousness in the future.
The study, conducted by researchers from the Weizmann Institute at the Loewenstein Hospital Rehabilitation Center in Ra’anana, observed how patients who were defined as unconscious and unresponsive reacted to smells with a change in their nasal airflow pattern, Weizmann Institute said in a statement last month.
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The findings were published in the scientific journal Nature in late April.
According to the study, 100 percent of the unconscious brain-injured patients who responded to the “sniff test” later regained consciousness during the four-year study period.
The scientists believe that this simple, inexpensive test can aid doctors in accurately diagnosing and determining treatment plans according to the patients’ degree of brain injury.
Dr. Anat Arzi, who began the research during her doctoral studies in the group of Prof. Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Neurobiology Department, and continued it as part of her postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychology, explained why it is important to determine the patient’s degree of consciousness.
Dr. Anat Arzi led the sniff test research. Courtesy.
One of the challenges in patients with severe brain injury is that “it’s really difficult to tell sometimes whether the person is conscious or unconscious,” she tells NoCamels.
So how do you know if someone is consciously aware following a severe brain injury? This is the task, Dr. Arzi says. The gold standard diagnostic tool to assess patients with a disorder of consciousness is the Coma Recovery Scale (Revised) she explains. This is a battery of tests that are conducted in order to see if the patient has any type of behavioral response to stimuli. Responses include eye movements, turning the head towards a sound, or tone of voice, or a response to pain.
Dr. Arzi describes the differences in levels of consciousness: the patient could be in a vegetative state — unresponsive and unaware of themselves and the external environment — or minimally conscious, meaning they have partial preservation of conscious awareness.
“Because it’s so challenging, the misdiagnosis rates could be relatively high,” she tells NoCamels, noting that current diagnostic tests can lead to incorrect diagnosis in as much as 40 percent of cases.
“Misdiagnosis can be critical as it can influence the decision of whether to disconnect patients from life support machines,” said Dr. Arzi sin a Weizmann Institute statement.
With regard to treatment, “if it is judged that a patient is unconscious and doesn’t feel anything, physicians may not prescribe them painkillers that they might need,” she explains.
How does the sniff test work?
Dr. Arzi says there are ways to can scan the brain activity of the patient through an MRI or an EEG (Electroencephalogram) that can uncover cases where the person appears unconscious but is actually conscious.
The problem is that “these procedures are relatively expensive, and many times require that the patient would have to move to another location, which could be complicated or risky for some patients,” she notes.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
The Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) said on Tuesday that it completed a “groundbreaking scientific development” toward a potential treatment for COVID-19 based on an antibody that neutralizes SARS-CoV2, the coronavirus that causes the disease.
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The Israeli Ministry of Defense speaking on behalf of the institute emphasized that this achievement could potentially develop into a treatment for COVID-19 patients but that the development was not a vaccine.
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The IIBR is a governmental research center specializing in biology, chemistry and environmental sciences that falls under the jurisdiction of the Prime Minister’s Office. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tapped the secretive institute in early February to begin development on producing a vaccine. In early April, the center reported “significant progress” and trials on animals.
The institute has also been involved in plasma collection from Israelis who have recovered from COVID-19 to research antibodies, proteins made by the immune system that can attack the virus.
“This is an important milestone, which will be followed by a series of complex tests and a process of regulatory approvals,” the ministry said in a statement, adding that the process could take several months given “the nature of this breakthrough.”
The development has three key parameters, according to the IIBR: first, the antibody is monoclonal (lab-made identical immune cells that are all clones of a unique parent cell), and contains a low proportion of harmful proteins; second, the institute has “demonstrated the ability of the antibody to neutralize the coronavirus”; and third, the antibody was specifically tested on SARS CoV2.
“Based on comprehensive scientific publications from around the globe, it appears that the IIBR is the first institution to achieve a scientific breakthrough that meets all three of the aforementioned parameters simultaneously,” the ministry said on Tuesday.
The Ness Ziona-based institute is now pursuing a patent for its development, according to the announcement, after which it will approach international manufacturers.
Meanwhile, a study in the Netherlands published this week in Nature Communications also claimed that a human monoclonal antibody neutralized SARS-CoV-2, and SARS-CoV, in a lab setting.
“Monoclonal antibodies targeting vulnerable sites on viral surface proteins are increasingly recognized as a promising class of drugs against infectious diseases and have shown therapeutic efficacy for a number of viruses,” the scientists of this study wrote.
The antibody known as 47D11, targeted the spike protein that gives the coronavirus its name and shape, and “exhibited cross-neutralizing activity of SARS-S and SARS2-S,” according to the researchers.
These neutralizing antibodies “can alter the course of infection in the infected host supporting virus clearance or protect an uninfected host that is exposed to the virus,” and the 47D11 antibody can either alone or in combination with pharmaceuticals and therapies, offer potential prevention and/or treatment of COVID-19, according to the study.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
Israeli researchers said on Sunday that they developed a testing method for COVID-19 that they say is up to 10 times faster and more cost-effective than the methods currently used to analyze samples.
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Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) said the test relies on an existing, well-known process to extract genetic material (RNA and DNA) using magnetic beads, common in genomic labs, but uses a special buffer solution to accelerate and ameliorate binding. The method was developed by Professor Nir Friedman at Hebrew University’s Institute of Life Sciences and School of Engineering and Computer Science and Professor Naomi Habib at HU’s Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Science.
Since COVID-19 testing requires RNA material, Professor Habib tells NoCamels that the test uses an existing product based on magnetic beads, which come with a prepared buffer solution. Then, an in-house mixture concocted by the Israeli scientific team is added to prepare the beads to extract the RNA molecules.
The method also helps to mitigate the country’s test shortage due to a deficit of chemical reagents. Magnetic beads are the only item in the protocol that needs to be imported from overseas, but they can be recycled and used again.
“So we don’t need to actually change anything along the pipeline, just in the lab itself, we developed a ‘plug-in’ solution, so instead of doing the RNA extraction using commercial kits, which are really hard to obtain these days because there’s a shortage worldwide, they could use our solution with the magnetic beads. We’ve already adapted it to fit [with the testing process]; we’ve optimized the buffers, the different liquids, the volumes, and there’s a robotic application that works with 96 samples [at a time],” Professor Habib tells NoCamels.
“Usually, in laboratory conditions, we work with very clean samples, but here we have samples gathered in the field, in clinical settings, so we really had to make this process work with the way samples are being gathered today in Israel and other places in the world,” she says
The method yields a result within 20-30 minutes, whereas regular testing takes 2-4 hours, she tells NoCamels.
The protocol has been published online “for anyone to use,” she explains. The idea was to take something that they “knew could potentially work, making it less expensive by making it lab-made, and making it work specifically for RNA samples collected via swab test.”
The method was validated at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem where it is now “fully operational,” the scientists say.
“Our COVID-19 test significantly reduces labs’ dependence on external factors,” Prof. Friedman said in a university statement. “To date, we’ve tested hundreds of clinical samples from Hadassah Hospital and our results were identical to those found by the kits currently being used.”
The next step is to scale up, Professor Habib tells NoCamels. “This method can be adopted widely because it will work with any swab sample around the world,” she says. It may also allow for an increased rate of simultaneous tests, tens of thousands of samples instead of the current rate of thousands, to be analyzed.
She indicates that the team has already fielded calls and requests from abroad.
Habib and Friedman teamed up with 15 researchers and lab students from the university to develop their method.
“It’s very moving to see a large group of researchers so dedicated to finding a solution to our current crisis, one that will get Israel—and hopefully the rest of the world—back to normal,” Habib said in the university statement.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
Learn more about Diane Israel. Also, see Diane Israel on LinkedIn.
Carice Witte is the founder and executive director of SIGNAL, a Sino-Israel think tank focused on researching Chinese foreign policy and China-Israel relations, as well as advising policymakers in Israel and abroad on strategy.
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In the midst of this coronavirus pandemic, testing is central to bringing the virus under control to save lives and end the economic devastation. It may thus seem peculiar to hear that Clalit’s CEO, Johanan Locker, recently rejected the Israeli government’s $25 million deal with China’s state-owned conglomerate, BGI, to supply equipment for 10,000 tests a day. His decision is reminiscent of actions by Israel’s Commissioner of Capital Markets Dorit Salinger, who blocked numerous Chinese state-owned enterprises from purchasing Israel’s leading insurance companies Phoenix and Clal in 2016 and 2017 for similar reasons. Mr. Locker’s reasoning: protecting the data of his company’s 4.9 million patients.
Against the backdrop of increasing tensions between China and the US, the issue of data protection has taken center stage. The US has been warning governments around the world against implementing Huawei 5G because of potential back doors that provide access to sensitive information. Most US allies share these concerns and are not even considering implementing the full range of Huawei 5G equipment – despite it being the only company worldwide currently able to offer this end-to-end solution. Instead, they are conducting exhaustive review processes to decide if they will implement even the peripheral networks produced by Huawei. In most cases, the core networks are already off-limits.
In February this year, Angela Merkel’s CDU party backed a strategy paper that seems to have eliminated the distinction between core and peripheral, deeming all aspects of a network subject to breach. The German strategy paper focuses on the issue of trust. It essentially bars 5G rollout by ‘untrustworthy’ companies. Trust, in this case, is defined by whether the company is subject to state influence. To address the 5G issue more robustly, the paper recommends that Germany not put undue reliance on a single supplier; it should support the “building of an internationally competitive safe 5G network.”
Mr. Locker’s concerns reflect a broader awareness that China’s government is actively seeking to acquire people’s data through their business ventures. The CCP’s efforts to access sensitive information and personal data is no secret. Its recently passed cybersecurity law requires “network operators to store select data within China and allows Chinese authorities to conduct spot-checks on a company’s network operations.” Many have voiced concerns over these data controls and the increased risks of intellectual property theft.
America has been particularly worried about these developments. In 2019, the US government turned a lot of heads when it revoked the acquisition of dating site Grindr by Chinese firm Kunlun, after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) assessed that access to the personal data of the users constituted a potential national security risk. Cybertheft of personal data was the focus of the February 2020 decision by the US Justice Department to charge four members of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with the 2017 Equifax breach that resulted in the theft of personal data of about 145 million Americans.
While corporate cyber theft is a serious problem, as seen in the case of the British firm Cambridge Analytica –which gained access to data of tens of millions of Facebook users – government access to private information is an entirely different story.
Of course, China is not the only country seeking to acquire private data. It is well known that governments have methods of gaining access to personal information, as exemplified by the Edward Snowden leaks. A 2014 investigation into whether the United States’ National Security Agency eavesdropped on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone calls, serves as another compelling example.
Russia has long been suspected of repeatedly hacking American databases – with accusations ranging from interfering in the 2016 US elections to complaints by Bernie Sanders this year of Moscow helping his campaign.
And yet despite these truths, it seems that China is being singled out for privacy concerns when its state-owned enterprises seek to provide valuable goods and services.
Just as Huawei has the only end-to-end solution for 5G, BGI is one of the very few companies worldwide able to provide the necessary quantity and quality of testing for COVID-19. This is emblematic of the success of China’s long-time investment in research and development. Over the past decade, China has directed significant resources toward cultivating the skill and talent necessary to take the lead in advanced technologies. China’s 2001 and 2006 five-year plans emphasized the development of National Champions. These companies receive easier access to financing, preference in government contract bidding, and special status in protected industries. In return, they help advance China’s strategic aims.
As a China-based state-owned enterprise (SOE), BGI would certainly fail Germany’s “trust” test as defined by its new strategy paper; because under Chinese law, SOEs are fully subject to party/government scrutiny. All data stored on the BGI’s servers would thus be available to China’s leadership upon request.
The same system that produced these comprehensive solutions remains opaque and authoritarian – characteristics that do not inspire trust with friends in the international community, particularly in the West. It’s often said that trust is built over time, but China has virtually burst onto the international stage over the last few years of Xi Jinping’s presidency. The world is not used to China taking a leading role in global affairs. While many may criticize the US for its international relations practices and geopolitics, US actions do not generate many surprises. For the good and the bad, the international community mostly knows what to expect from American leadership.
China is an unknown quantity with a system and style of leadership very unfamiliar to the West. It has no track record of global leadership. There are those who question the degree to which China’s domestic policies are indicative of how a China-led system might look. Ultimately, these questions generate the very mistrust that caused Israel’s largest HMO to turn down the opportunity for thousands of tests rather than exposing 4.6 million Israeli medical profiles to China’s government.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
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If Chemi Peres has one regret, it’s that he didn’t travel enough or live abroad for an extended period of time. The 61-year-old son of the late Israeli president Shimon Peres, a prominent figure in Israel’s tech ecosystem and chairman of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, says travel and knowledge of other cultures and languages “contribute to a better society and a better world.”
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While this wanderlust is unrelated to the global coronavirus pandemic currently upending life as we know it here in Israel and across the world, Peres does say that more travel would have afforded him the opportunity to better promote his most important message — the power of collective innovation.
“There is a lot of power in our ability to innovate and in our ability to be entrepreneurs and to change the world for the better. We are transitioning from an old world where greatness and strength and wealth came from the land and from natural resources, to a new era where the source of power, the source of greatness, is coming from brainpower, from the mind,” he explains.
No single country can address the pandemic separately without collaboration from other countries, he says, just like “nobody can deal with climate change by themselves; it’s a new age.”
Peres may not have traveled as much as he would have liked – and there’s no telling when he might be able to in the near future – but he has seen and done a great deal, with a career that spans aerospace, technology, and finance. He co-founded Pitango Venture Capital in 1996, a firm that has invested in some 250 global high-tech companies, including disruptive Israeli-firms such as Via, Taboola, AppsFlyer, Drivenets, and DouxMatok. He sits on the board of directors of a number of those companies. Over the years, Pitango has become one of Israel’s largest VC firms to date, and recently raised $250 million in a second growth fund during a global crisis
“We believe that even during the turbulent times of Coronavirus, keeping a long-term strategy and investing in exceptional teams, will enable [us] to keep building big companies out of Israel,” Pitango announced in a Facebook post last week.
Peres has also served as the chairman of the executive committee of the Peres Center for Peace, first established in 1996 by his father Shimon Peres – the Nobel Prize-winning elder Israeli statesman who advocated for peace with the Palestinians and Israel’s neighbors, one of the architects of the country’s peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, and a former prime minister and president. The center rebranded as the Peres Center for Peace And Innovation after the establishment of an innovation wing for Israel, one of Peres’ flagship projects before his passing in 2016 at 93. Shimon Peres was a champion of Israeli technologies and Israeli startups.
Shimon Peres addresses a gathering of the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem in 2010. By Michael Thaidigsmann – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17614119
Shimon Peres addresses a gathering of the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem in 2010. Photo by Michael Thaidigsmann – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
The innovation center officially opened its doors in October 2018 in an inauguration ceremony attended by diplomats and executives from across the world. Last year, the center welcomed more than 75,000 guests from around the world — including government representatives, business leaders, founders, and members of the public — who wanted to learn from the Israeli innovation model.
The visitors’ wing highlights Israeli innovation through the ages, drawing on advanced technologies for highly visual platforms and interactive displays showing life-changing, cutting-edge tech developments. The center also hosts an exhibition of products or services from ground-breaking Israeli firms and runs innovation programs that draw from Israel’s diverse communities.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
Leading Israeli tech entrepreneur Amnon Shashua, CEO of Mobileye and senior vice president at Intel Corporation, met with a Knesset special committee on Tuesday to discuss an “exit strategy” that he believes will allow the country to overcome the current coronavirus outbreak, avoid a recession, and resume economic activity within months.
Shashua, a co-founder of the Jerusalem-based firm that builds visual-assistance technologies for autonomous vehicles, and was sold to Intel for $15 billion in 2017, presented the plan to the Knesset Special Committee on Dealing With the Coronavirus. It includes steps to slowly bring some of the population out of self-isolation and reopen businesses.
The plan was first published last week on the online platform Medium in a post called, “Can we Contain COVID-19 without Locking-down the Economy?” The post was co-authored by Shai Shalev-Shwartz, a computer science professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and CTO of Mobileye.
“I think that our message that ‘an exit strategy is required’ was well heard and the reaction of the proposed approach was overall positive,” Prof. Shalev-Shwartz tells NoCamels in an email on Wednesday morning. “The initial reaction of the decisionmakers was good. Now is the time to plan the next steps, and I believe that the ‘exit strategy’ should be transparent.”
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“Quarantine the high-risk and gradually release the low-risk population to achieve a managed herd immunity of that population,” they wrote in the post. “The managed phase is designed to allow the health system to cope with the expected number of severe cases.”
According to the pair, anyone aged 67 or older, “which represents the retired segment of society,” is considered part of the high-risk group. The low-risk group is “the remainder of society which is released to their daily routine while following certain distancing protocols that are aimed at slowing the spread.”
While the high-risk group would have to be quarantined for a longer period of time — as the low-risk group reaches a herd immunity level — the economy could remain largely undisrupted, they wrote.
It is also when this herd immunity is reached that the high-risk population can “gradually” be released from quarantine.
Prof. Shalev-Shwartz tells NoCamels that implementing the strategy could have the low-risk population getting back to normal “immediately.”
“We estimate that herd immunity will be developed in about a month. Once it will happen, the “high-risk” population can also get back to normal,” he said.
Shashua told Israeli financial daily Calcalist that executing this strategy could have the economy running and a majority of the population out of isolation in as little as three months
“On the other hand, if you say that we are going to have three difficult months, that the country will hand out grants so that the economy doesn’t collapse, but after that, it will all be over, people will be able to accept that,” he said.
According to the post, the issue would then be how to manage the release of the population from quarantine so as not to overwhelm the health system, not when will there be an exit.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
Israeli scientists at the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) have found that a combination of two existing antiviral drugs for Gaucher disease appears to inhibit the growth of SARS CoV-2, the virus that leads to COVID-19 and may work against other viral infections, including a common flu strain.
This article was originally posted by NoCamels.com. See Featured article: Artificial Intelligence.
The IIBR is a governmental research center specializing in biology, chemistry and environmental sciences that falls under the jurisdiction of the Prime Minister’s Office. During the pandemic, announcements have been issued by the Defense Ministry.
According to a press announcement on Tuesday, scientists at the secretive bio-defense lab-tested an analog of the FDA-approved drug Cerdelga, and an analog of a second drug, Venglustat, currently in advanced trials. They found that, in combination, the drugs led to a significant reduction in the replication capacity of the coronavirus and to the destruction of the infected cells.
The two drugs are used to treat Gaucher disease, an inherited genetic condition most common in people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent that leads to the buildup of fatty substances in certain organs, particularly the spleen and liver, and can affect their function. The disease can also lead to skeletal abnormalities and blood disorders, In rare cases, Gaucher disease can also lead to brain inflammation, according to the Mayo Clinic. The disease is unrelated to COVID-19.
The Israeli researchers tested the drugs on mouse models using four different RNA viruses: Neuroinvasive Sindbis virus (SVNI), an infection transmitted via mosquitos that can lead to years of debilitating musculoskeletal symptoms; West Nile virus (WNV), also a mosquito-borne disease that can cause neurological disease and is potentially fatal; Influenza A virus, a strain of the flu; and SARS-CoV-2.
The researchers found that the two drugs were effective in all four cases. They work by inhibiting glucosylceramide synthase *GCS), an enzyme involved in the production of glucocerebroside, a lipid that accumulates in the tissues of patients affected with Gaucher disease. In the lab setting, they inhibited the replication of the viruses, and in the case of mice infected with SVNI, increased their survival rate.
In the case of COVID-19, the drugs “have an antiviral effect on the SARS-CoV-2 clinical isolate in vitro, with a single dose able to significantly inhibit viral replication within 24–48 h.”
The two drugs are currently being tested for their effectiveness in treating animals infected with the coronavirus.
The study, published in bioRxiv, has not yet been peer-reviewed. The authors are all from the IIBR’s Department of Infectious Diseases
The data suggests that “GCS inhibitors can potentially serve as a broad-spectrum antiviral therapy and should be further examined in preclinical and clinical trial,” the scientists wrote, adding that repurposing approved drugs can lead “to significantly reduced timelines and required investment in making treatment available.
“Treatment of a new disease such as COVID-19 using an existing, approved drug may serve as an effective short-term solution considering that one of the major challenges in addressing such a pandemic is the length of time it takes for both the research and approval phases of new drugs,” the Defense Ministry wrote in the announcement.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
If all goes as planned this Friday, Israel will become the first developed country to impose a second nationwide COVID-19 lockdown to try and curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. While the prime minister announced earlier this week that rising infection rates leave no choice but to initiate another shutdown, a new study by the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research shows the coronavirus chaos in Israel won’t abate until there’s a national coronavirus strategy.
This article was originally posted by NoCamels.com. See Featured article: Artificial Intelligence.
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“We’re stumbling into the second lockdown instead of entering it with clear entrance and exit strategies. The government has not put forth any coherent policy detailing their long term strategy for dealing with a pandemic that will continue to be highly contagious and deadly,” pending a vaccine, Professor Dan Ben-David, an economist at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Public Policy and head of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, tells NoCamels.
Israel has created an awkward name for itself during this COVID-19 health crisis. On the one hand, this country’s entrepreneurs are wowing the world with adaptive tech solutions for the healthcare arena that can be found in use in hospitals the world over.
On the other hand, the country’s lack of strategy for navigating this deadly virus has become a warning for others around the world as to what happens when you don’t have a plan and try to return to “normal” too quickly.
Israel’s first coronavirus lockdown
In late February, the first novel coronavirus cases were recorded in Israel. In March, Israel became one of the first countries hit by the coronavirus crisis to go into a national lockdown. The news showed horrors in Italy, Spain and then New York as they battled against the novel coronavirus.A graph by the Shoresh Institution showing the daily deaths from COVID-19 and the percentage of daily positive results from COVID-19 tests in Israel.
“We can’t avoid a worldwide pandemic. When we closed the country in the spring, we had the opportunity to prepare for the future. We knew that there wasn’t going to be a vaccine until the end of the year, at least, and we knew that the virus wasn’t going to get any less infectious,” Ben-David tells NoCamels. “We could have planned for this in advance.”
In April, the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research put out an outline of how Israel could utilize its unique features to get rid of the virus within its borders. A number of other “exit strategy” plans were penned by scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs on how to emerge from the lockdown.
According to the report, Israel’s health system entered the COVID-19 pandemic with the developed world’s most overcrowded hospitals, a small healthcare workforce, and the highest mortality rates from infectious diseases than other developed countries due to continued neglect and mismanagement of its healthcare system.
“In the first wave, we reacted as we did because we had no choice. Not only are we the number one country in the developed world in terms of people dying from infectious diseases, we’re 69 percent above the number two country, we’re on a different graph altogether,” Ben-David says.
“When this thing hit, this is the Uber of infectious diseases, we’re already in a terrible situation in this regard, we had no choice but to clap down before we outdid Italy.
But while the citizens of Israel stayed at a social distance, for the most part, the government acted against their own regulations.
“When people saw on the news the alternative is Italy, Spain, New York, it was clear why we need to be closed down. But we also saw during Passover that the country’s leaders are ignoring the same rules they force on us, so maybe it’s not so serious,” says Ben-David.
The “yihye beseder” (“it will be okay”) attitude, so deeply rooted in Israeli culture and which is anything but comforting, started to creep back into the daily conversation – both from a governmental point of view and amongst citizens. “There’s no reason to believe ‘yihye beseder’ but that’s the way things operate,” says Ben-David.
The Shoresh report shows that 198 people died from COVID-19 in April, and that number fell to 69 in May and 35 in June. Today, there are over 3,100 new recorded infections daily and over 1,100 people have died of the disease. More than 500 people are currently in serious condition.
“When we closed things down, that was our opportunity to prepare and get rid of the virus within Israel. That was the first thing that should have been done and didn’t get done. And then on May 26, when things were at their best, the prime minister went out and said, ‘go enjoy life.’ There was no contingency plan. The virus didn’t stop becoming contagious or deadly,” he says, noting in the report that following the prime minister’s public green light for the population to return to its daily routines infections shot up, reaching eight percent in August. Unsurprisingly, compliance has also changed and it will be interesting to see how the population reacts to a second lockdown.
“The situation has changed in the second wave. While predominantly Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] municipalities are still among the most infected municipalities, they have been joined at the top of the distribution by many Arab-Israeli municipalities with very high infection rates,” write Ben-David and Prof. Ayal Kimhi, authors of the Shoresh study, Anarchy at the helm with COVID-19 on deck.
“The difference between the first and second waves may be rooted in behavioral changes. The complete lockdown during the first wave yielded a sense of emergency resulting in higher compliance with government orders almost everywhere – except the religious boarding schools – including in the Arab-Israeli sector. The evidently-too-rapid exit from the lockdown alongside the very inconsistent and contradictory government policies and statements has since led to considerably less compliance during the second wave. This was particularly true in the Arab-Israeli sector, with mayors of several large Arab-Israeli towns publicly testifying to this effect,” the authors write.
‘Governmental anarchy’
The study’s authors warn that Israel is on the verge of self-implosion because of what they call government anarchy.
“Israel’s governmental anarchy is occurring during one of the worst crises in Israel’s history. Cabinet meetings, held weekly even during periods of wars, are being habitually canceled week after week. No budget for the country is in the offing while the country’s top civil servants from across the spectrum, from the economic through the health to the law enforcement and judicial systems are coming under increasing personal attacks by the very politicians who appointed them,” they write.
Case in point was the July appointment of Prof. Ronni Gamzu, CEO of Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, to lead the country’s efforts in combatting the virus – five months after the COVID-19 outbreak in Israel. “The government is still unwilling to define what powers and what authority Gamzu has to actually deal with the epidemic. As a result, there is an incessant flow of contradictory directives by leading cabinet ministers – not to mention persistent calls for his resignation from top politicians from the ruling party – that undermine his ability to manage the government’s efforts,” reads the report.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Sheba Medical Center in February 2020, as the hospital prepares to care for 11 Israelis back from a coronavirus-stricken cruise ship. Photo: Haim Zach / GPO
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Sheba Medical Center in February 2020, as the hospital prepares to care for 11 Israelis back from a coronavirus-stricken cruise ship. Photo: Haim Zach / GPO
SEE ALSO: Israeli Data Scientist Suggests ‘End of Coronavirus Peak’ Is Near
“We don’t know where our leadership wants to go, how they want to get there – and there are some fairly clear indications that for the past six and a half months since this [pandemic] hit Israel, the person leading the country has extraneous interests that override any of his thinking in this regard,” Ben-David tells NoCamels.
“So we’re like a national pinball machine, bouncing from one directive that smacks us to the next, and hoping that someone will save us from Israel’s worst governance vacuum during its worst health crisis and economic recession on record,” he charges.
And the ostensibly comforting catchphrase “yihye beseder” is not encouraging.
An Israeli data scientist from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has suggested that the “end of the coronavirus peak” is just weeks away.
Professor Mark Last, a BGU professor at the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering and head of the university’s Data Science Research Center, tells NoCamels that a data model he created based on both daily deaths attributed to coronavirus, reported by the Israeli Ministry of Health, and published results of serological tests (tests that look for antibodies) indicates that, in a few weeks, coronavirus infection rates will begin to decline. Furthermore, according to the model, another lockdown is not necessary and herd immunity is imminent.
This article was originally posted by NoCamels.com
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“Soon we should have enough people in the population who were at some stage infected with the coronavirus and these people have antibodies,” he says. “We should have enough people to cause a decline in the daily number of new infections. That’s the thing — according to my model, it should happen within the next few weeks. I cannot say exactly when, it’s an estimation, but that’s the forecast.”
When pressed further, Prof. Last said it could happen as soon as two to three weeks, but he cannot give an exact time.
“I cannot say exactly in 10 days, it’s going to happen. I don’t have such accurate data.”
“Lockdown is the perfect solution to stop the pandemic if you can keep it forever,” Prof. Last says, “But every day of a lockdown has some kind of cost associated with it. And the benefit would be very short because after it ends, everything goes [back to normal], and then we have more cases when things reopen.”
Israel was one of the first countries hit by the coronavirus crisis to go into a national lockdown for about five weeks between March and April before reopening in May. But during the lockdown, the country’s unemployment rate skyrocketed to over 25 percent, with over a million people out of work at the time.
Herd immunity
Herd immunity occurs when a large percentage of the population becomes immune to a disease, which makes the spread of disease from person to person unlikely, according to the Mayo Clinic.
According to his calculations, Prof. Last suggests that herd immunity is around the corner because “we need 1.16 million people with antibodies in order to achieve herd immunity and we are very close to that number.”
Last says that a report based on tests conducted by a Health Ministry team, initial serological tests indicate that only one in 10 of Israel’s coronavirus cases is actually confirmed.
“Their conclusion was that the ratio of the actual number of infected people to the number of confirmed cases is 10 to one,” he explains, “So you can take the total number of confirmed cases reported this morning, something like 114,000 and you multiply it by 10 and you get an estimated number of people with antibodies of the total number of people who were infected.”
He says this assumption is based on international research that has certain populations being given antibody blood tests to show who had the virus at some point.
Prof. Last noted that international research suggests that the number varies between five and 10, according to antibody blood tests that show who had the virus. Thus, he says Israel’s one in 10 ratio is quite reasonable.
“If the number is larger, it means that there is a larger amount of people who are infected and probably they have no symptoms, they’re not aware of the fact that they’re infected,” he says.
While no one can know the actual number of infected cases in the country unless the entire population is tested every day, Prof. Last says that according to these numbers “we now have slightly above one million people with antibodies in Israel and we need at least 1.2 million.
Mortality rate
Prof. Last’s data model predicts the country’s mortality rate, the number of daily death cases attributed to COVID-19, and it can be evaluated by comparing a predicted cumulative number of deaths in Israel, and the actual number.
“In my testing experiments, I found out that this model stays pretty accurate for a relatively long period of time. I’m talking about at least a few weeks and even longer in Israel. “We have excellent numbers. It’s not related to my model, but generally we have excellent numbers in terms of the mortality rates for criticially ill patients.”
While the numbers may seem high — the death toll in Israel currently stands at 922, according to figures from the Health Ministry (Hebrew) — Prof. Last admits that his data model has been fairly accurate.
“On August 4, my model predicted 929 death cases by Aug. 31,” he said.
Prof. Last also says that Israel’s health system has managed to keep the percentage of deaths from COVID-19 to under one percent, out of the total number of confirmed cases, while other countries had higher rates such as Italy with 16 percent and Sweden with 14 percent.
“The average daily mortality rate is not going up for probably about two months now,” he explains. “If you look at the so-called number of confirmed cases, it is also very stable.”
Earlier this month, the Ministry of Health announced that it had undercounted Israel’s COVID-19 deaths and that it had failed to include 53 fatalities at senior living homes during July and August in its official count.
For Prof. Last, this was a good sign. He had believed that there was some strange discrepancy, which gave him doubts about the reliability of his model.
“Then, one day, they announced that actually some cases were not reported initially, and I put the new numbers on the curve. And I see that the predictions and the actual numbers aligned together,” he tells NoCamels, “After they corrected the reporting, my model became much more accurate.”
Prof. Last remains cautiously optimistic about the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel.
“I don’t think we need any significant change in the current policy, in the current restrictions,” he tells NoCamels, “But we should get used to these restrictions because probably we’ll have to live with these restrictions for quite some time.”
“We are heading in the right direction,” he adds in a BGU statement, “but it is important not to relax our restrictions or get overconfident.”
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
Israeli scientists are suggesting that an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease may help children with autism, according to an extensive study published last month in the academic journal Translational Psychiatry.
The study was led by Professor Illana Gozes of the Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry at Tel Aviv University and included researchers from Tel Aviv University, the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer Hospital, and research institutions across Europe (the biotechnology institute BIOCEV in the Czech Republic, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, the University of Antwerp in Belgium, and the University Hospital Centre in Zagreb, Croatia).
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Prof. Gozes is a leading neuroscientist and an expert in the field of tauopathy (one of the leading pathologies in Alzheimer’s disease), a pathology characterized by deposition of the protein Tau in the brain. It is found in neurodegenerative diseases, the most common being Alzheimer’s disease.
The study in question looked at protein deposits found in the postmortem brain of a seven-year-old child with autism from Croatia. The child had ADNP syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum characterized by intellectual disability, and impaired communication and social interaction. The syndrome causes a deficiency or malfunctioning of the ADNP protein, which is essential for brain development.
Twenty years ago, the activity-dependent neuroprotective protein ADNP was discovered and characterized in the laboratory of Prof. Gozes. She and her team learned that ADNP is vital for brain formation and presents one of the leading mutated genes that cause ADNP syndrome, a condition within the autism spectrum. Prof. Gozes also linked ADNP to Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.
“ADNP protects against electrical blockades and we need the electricity in order for our brain to function. We realized it might be a very important protein and when we [took it out] of animals, there was no brain. So it is essential for the formation of the brain,” Prof. Gozes tells NoCamels.
It was only after the ADNP protein was created that researchers realized that autism could be determined by genetics. That was when they discovered that if a child is born with one mutation in a very critical gene, it can cause autism.
“When ADNP syndrome was discovered some six years ago,” Prof. Gozes says, “suddenly, ADNP became a leading gene to cause the de novo mutation [genetic alteration] which is found in children within the autism spectrum.”
Upon examining the brain of this seven-year-old child and comparing it to the brain of a 31-year-old adult with no preexisting conditions, the researchers found deposits of the tau protein in the child’s brain tissues.
“When we compared the postmortem ADNP syndrome brain tissues to tissue from the brain of a young person without ADNP syndrome, we found deposits of the tau protein in the ADNP child, a pathology that characterizes Alzheimer’s disease,” Prof. Gozes explained in a Tel Aviv University statement.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com