Effects of a healthy lifestyle intervention and COVID-19-adjusted training curriculum on firefighter recruits.

There are knowledge gaps regarding healthy lifestyle (HLS) interventions in fire academy settings and also concerning the impacts of the pandemic on training. We enrolled fire recruits from two fire academies (A and B) in New England in early 2019 as the historical control group, and recruits from academies in New England (B) and Florida (C), respectively, during the pandemic as the intervention group. The three academies have similar training environments and curricula. The exposures of interest were a combination of (1) an HLS intervention and (2) impacts of the pandemic on training curricula and environs (i.e. social distancing, masking, reduced class size, etc.). We examined the health/fitness changes throughout training. The follow-up rate was 78%, leaving 92 recruits in the historical control group and 55 in the intervention group. The results show an HLS intervention improved the effects of fire academy training on recruits healthy behaviors (MEDI-lifestyle score, 0.5 ± 1.4 vs. - 0.3 ± 1.7), systolic blood pressure (- 7.2 ± 10.0 vs. 2.9 ± 12.9 mmHg), and mental health (Beck Depression score, - 0.45 ± 1.14 vs. - 0.01 ± 1.05) (all P < 0.05). The associations remained significant after multivariable adjustments. Moreover, a 1-point MEDI-lifestyle increment during academy training is associated with about 2% decrement in blood pressures over time, after multivariable adjustments (P < 0.05). Nonetheless, the impacts of pandemic restrictions on academy procedures compromised physical fitness training, namely in percent body fat, push-ups, and pull-ups.

Interplay Between Air Travel, Genome Integrity, and COVID-19 Risk vis-a-vis Flight Crew.

During air travel, flight crew (flight attendants, pilots) can be exposed to numerous flight-related environmental DNA damaging agents that may be at the root of an excess risk of cancer and other diseases. This already complex mix of exposures is now joined by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The complex exposures experienced during air travel present a challenge to public health research, but also provide an opportunity to consider new strategies for understanding and countering their health effects. In this article, we focus on threats to genomic integrity that occur during air travel and discuss how these threats and our ability to respond to them may influence the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of range of severity of the symptoms. We also discuss how the virus itself may lead to compromised genome integrity. We argue that dauntingly complex public health problems, such as the challenge of protecting flight crews from COVID-19, must be met with interdisciplinary research teams that include epidemiologists, engineers, and mechanistic biologists.