Monday, June 28, 2021
The Community Food Bank will be closed on Thursday and will not offer emergency food distribution at its Tucson location and all other resource centers.
New distribution hours will begin on July 6, from 7 to 10 a.m., Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 3003 S. Country Club.
“We continue to offer drive-thru distribution with the earlier hours offering a little relief for volunteers, staff and Arizona National Guard service members who are working getting food into cars as needed,” said Michael McDonald, CEO of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona.
Masks are optional during outside food distribution hours. People are asked to present a photo ID to receive emergency food.
More information is available at communityfoodbank.org/Locations
PHOENIX – Experts describe “brain fog” as a cognitive dysfunction when your brain isn’t performing in top shape.
Although everyone is susceptible to occasional brain fog, experts say some of the worst cases have been identified in the group known as COVID-19 long-haulers – patients who had the disease and recovered but still can’t “get going” as they did before falling ill.
In February, the National Institutes of Health opened a multifaceted study into “long COVID” and its effects in the United States. Researchers hope to answer such questions as why symptoms are worse and last longer for some patients than others, and does the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 trigger other disorders of the brain and heart.
Two studies in England and Italy showed long-haulers did experience brain fog more commonly than non-COVID-19 patients during the pandemic. Long-haulers coping with brain fog improved over the course of the study.
Dr. Carmine Pariante, a professor of biological psychiatry at King’s College London, told The Guardian brain fog is the “cognitive equivalent of feeling emotionally distressed; it’s almost the way the brain expresses sadness, beyond the emotion” as a response to stress.
Although studies are in their initial stages, researchers don’t think brain fog stems from just one source. A predominant factor, though, is a lack of variety in our daily routine. CNBC reports that brain fog could be “a sign of something underlying, such as a health problem or the consequence of lifestyle choice.”
Doing a lot of the same things every day makes it hard for the brain to differentiate tasks, researchers say, so it essentially goes into an autopilot.
WASHINGTON – Despite gains in some areas, Arizona continued to rank among the worst states in the nation for education, according to the latest version of a national report that measures children’s well-being across several areas.
The 2021 Kids Count report said Arizona was 47th overall in education, down one spot from 46th a year earlier, evidence that “we’re not doing a very good job in Arizona,” experts said.
David Lujan, president and CEO of Children’s Action Alliance, said the low ranking “stems from the lack of investments we’ve seen in education, not only K-12 education but early childhood education, going back for more than 20 years now.”
“We’re seeing the ramifications of that in things like large class sizes, the lack of full-day kindergarten in every school district, and teacher shortages,” Lujan said. “Those things matter when it comes to being able to provide a quality education for students.”
The Kids Count report, prepared annually by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, measures children’s welfare in each state through dozens of data points split between four broad categories: education, economic well-being, health, and family and community.
Overall, Arizona improved slightly, going from 42nd place in last year’s report to 40th in the latest report. But the state did not crack the top half of states in any category. Arizona did best in health, where it finished 28th among states, followed by 35th for economic well-being and 46th in family and community.
And those numbers are likely to get worse in next year’s report, which will include data from the pandemic year of 2020, which did not make it into this report, experts said.
“Providing access to quality health care, child care, education and mental health services must be the focus as we come out of the coronavirus pandemic,” Lujan said.
Sunday, June 27, 2021
Saturday, June 26, 2021
Friday, June 25, 2021
WASHINGTON – The Navajo Nation has yet to record a single case of the Delta variant of COVID-19, but now is not the time for tribe members to let down their guard, Navajo President Jonathan Nez said Wednesday.
Nez spent much of the time during a Washington Post program on public health talking about the Navajos’ success in fighting the pandemic, falling from a national COVID-19 hotspot at one point last year to negligible case numbers today.
But while the tribe has “been very cautious … I think we need to continue to be cautious,” Nez said, in part because of the arrival of the highly contagious Delta variant.
“We have heard updates that the city of Tucson has identified a Delta variant … so we are concerned,” Nez said.
An Arizona Department of Health official said Wednesday that the Delta variant has been found in northern, central and southern Arizona.
“The Alpha variant currently is the predominant strain in Arizona, but we anticipate that there will be an increase in the Delta variant since it appears to be more transmissible than the Alpha variant,” said Steve Elliott, a health department spokesperson.
Arizona Public Health Association Executive Director Will Humble said experts “expect that the Delta variant will be dominant by mid-to-late summer in Arizona.”
“It’s going to take over,” he said. “It’s just outcompeting the other strains. The question is how long it’s going to take.”
But Humble said that despite the high transmission rates health experts have seen for the Delta variant, it will likely not spread as fast as previous variants because of the availability now of COVID-19 vaccines.
