Can You Be Re-Infected After Recovering From Coronavirus? .

Can You Be Re-Infected After Recovering From Coronavirus? Here's What We Know About COVID-19 Immunity.Troubling headlines have been cropping up across Asia: Some patients in China, Japan and South Korea who were diagnosed with COVID-19 and seemingly recovered have been readmitted to the hospital after testing positive for the virus again. Because SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was only discovered a few months ago, scientists are still trying to answer many big questions related to the virus and the disease it causes. Among them is whether patients can be reinfected by the virus after they seem to recover from the symptoms. With other coronavirus strains, experts say the antibodies that patients produce during infection give them immunity to the specific virus for months or even years, but researchers are still figuring out if and how that works with COVID-19. The answer has huge implications for the spread of the disease, since researchers believe it will continue to crash across the world in waves, hitting the same country multiple times. Can you get re-infected after recovering from COVID-19? There remains a lot of uncertainty, but experts TIME spoke with say that it’s likely the reports of patients who seemed to have recovered but then tested positive again were not examples of re-infection, but were cases where lingering infection was not detected by tests for a period of time.

MEAT SAFETY.

A simple, rapid test to help ensure safer meat. Scientists now report a simple method that uses nanotubes to quickly detect spoilage. It could help make sure meats are safe when they hit store shelves. Transporting meats and seafood from the farm or sea to the market while they're still fresh is a high priority. But telling whether a product has gone bad isn't a simple process. 

Current strategies for measuring freshness can be highly sensitive to spoilage but require bulky, slow equipment, which prevents real-time analysis. Some newer methods designed to speed up the testing process have fallen short in sensitivity.

 Yanke Che and colleagues wanted to develop one simple test that could deliver both rapid and sensitive results. The researchers turned to highly fluorescent, hollow nanotubes that grow dim when they react with compounds given off by meat as it decomposes.

 To test the nanotubes, the team sealed commercial samples -- 1 gram each -- of pork, beef, chicken, fish and shrimp in containers for up to four days. When they exposed the portable system to a teaspoon of vapor emitted by the samples, it reacted in under an hour, fast enough to serve as a real-time measure of freshness. The researchers also found that if the tubes' glow dulled by more than 10 percent, this meant a sample was spoiled. Story source;American Chemical Society.