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You swabbed the inside of your nose and performed the at-home rapid antigen test for COVID-19 and thankfully, it was negative. Hold on. Do the test again, says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, whether you have symptoms or not. The FDA said today it “is advising people to perform repeat, or serial, testing following a negative result on any at-home COVID-19 antigen test, to reduce the risk an infection may be missed (false negative result) and to help prevent people from unknowingly spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus to others.” At-home tests detect the antigens from the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes...

The Food & Drug Administration issued a class I recall for a defective COVID rapid test that had been the “benchmark” for testing in the United States. It continues an alarming trend of problems with COVID tests in the United States. “The FDA has classified the recall of this test as a Class I recall, the most serious type of recall,” the government agency said. “The FDA also has issued a warning letter to Innova Medical Group, Inc.” Innova describes itself as “the world’s largest manufacturer of rapid antigen tests and leader in COVID-19 testing solutions globally.” The FDA states...

Viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHF) are acute infections with high case fatality rates, associated with the risk of nosocomial transmission (3). A rapid confirmation of the clinical diagnosis is therefore required by methods such as antigen capture enzyme immunoassay and serologic detection of immunoglobulin M. With the development of PCR technology, it has become possible to rapidly test for viruses that cause VHF (4, 5, 10). We have recently confirmed a case of acute yellow fever with fulminating hepatic failure by reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) (2). In spite of the very high viral RNA concentration in the plasma sample, it initially tested...

Russia waged a disastrous nine-year war in Afghanistan. In its ninth year, is the U.S. faring any better? In 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban government in response to the destruction of the World Trade Center. In 2010, according to a recent poll by the Associated Press, roughly 6 out of 10 Americans disapprove of Obama’s “good war,” which has seen the loss of over 1100 U.S. lives. In September 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, taking its airfields and executing its president, H. Amin. Within 9 years, the Soviets lost close to 15,000 soldiers in the...