Virus World

Finland on Thursday paused the use of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine for younger males due to reports of a rare cardiovascular side effect, joining Sweden and Denmark in limiting its use.  Mika Salminen, director of the Finnish health institute, said Finland would instead give Pfizer's vaccine to men born in 1991 and later. Finland offers shots to people aged 12 and over. "A Nordic study involving Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark found that men under the age of 30 who received Moderna Spikevax had a slightly higher risk than others of developing myocarditis," he said. Swedish and Danish health officials had announced on Wednesday they would pause the use of the Moderna vaccine for all young adults and children, citing the same unpublished study.  Norwegian health officials reiterated on Wednesday that they recommended men under the age of 30 opt for Pfizer's vaccine. The Finnish institute said the Nordic study would be published within a couple of weeks and preliminary data had been sent to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for further assessment.

The EMA's safety committee concluded in July that such inflammatory heart conditions could occur in very rare cases following vaccination with Spikevax or the Pfizer/BioNTech Comirnaty jab, more often in younger men after the second dose. Regulators in the United States, EU and the World Health Organization have however stressed that the benefits of shots based on the mRNA technology used by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech in preventing COVID-19 continue to outweigh the risks. A Moderna spokesperson said late on Wednesday it was aware of the decisions by the Swedish and Danish regulators. "These are typically mild cases and individuals tend to recover within a short time following standard treatment and rest. The risk of myocarditis is substantially increased for those who contract COVID-19, and vaccination is the best way to protect against this." Italy's Health Minister Roberto Speranza told reporters Italy was not planning to suspend the Moderna vaccine and said European countries should work together more closely to coordinate better. "We have to trust international authorities, starting with EMA which is our reference agency and has expressed very clear judgments on the matter," he said.

Starting Wednesday, Finland launches a coronavirus-sniffing-dog pilot program at Helsinki Airport. The voluntary tests will reportedly deliver results in seconds, will require no contact with the dogs and take less than a minute of travelers' time. The voluntary canine tests will deliver results within 10 seconds, and require less than a minute of travelers’ time, said Anna Hielm-Björkman, a researcher at the University of Helsinki who is using the trial to gather data. Researchers in other countries, including the United States and the United Arab Emirates, are studying canine coronavirus tests. But the Finnish trial is among the largest in scale and furthest along. In Dubai, health officials this summer began using dogs to analyze sweat samples from randomly selected air travelers, with more than 90% accuracy, according to initial results.

Changes in health can affect the way people smell, researchers say. Dogs long have been valued for their ability to sniff for drugs and bombs, and have proved able to detect cancers, infections and other health problems. Researchers at the University of Helsinki this year found indications that dogs can detect the virus. Scientists say only large-scale trials, such as the one to begin Wednesday, can demonstrate how effective the method will be in practice. As in Dubai, the dogs to be deployed in Helsinki will sniff sweat samples and will not come into contact with travelers. People who agree to the test will swab their necks to produce a sample, to submit through an opening in a wall, said Hielm-Björkman. Regardless of whether they test positive, they will be urged to take a standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) COVID-19 test so researchers can monitor the dogs’ accuracy. All tests are free for travelers arriving at the airport. Hielm-Björkman said the dogs, according to preliminary research, may be better at detecting coronavirus infections, which can cause the illness COVID-19, than PCR and antibody tests. They “can also find [people] that are not yet PCR positive, but will become PCR positive within a week,” she said. Virpi Perälä, a representative for Evidensia Elainlaakaripalvelut, a network of veterinary clinics that funded the first stage of the trial, during which the initial cohort of dogs were trained, said more funding would be needed to grow the project, depending on initial results.

Out of the 16 dogs trained, four are ready to work. Six others are still in training, with another six found to be unsuitable for a noisy airport environment. Experts have warned that canine tests, however effective, can be difficult to scale. Training is time-consuming and expensive. Even so, researchers are optimistic that it will come to play a roll, even if it cannot alleviate the demands on the world’s strained testing systems. One of the aims of the upcoming trial, said Hielm-Björkman, is to gather observations on how long the dogs can work in shifts. “You see very easily on a dog when it starts to get tired,” she said.