Fighting COVID-19: What’s in a Name?

While the COVID-19 virus has infected over 3 million people in the United States of America, Asian Americans face unique unfair treatment due to COVID-19. In America, many anti-Asian incidents have been reported, and the FBI warns of increased hate crimes to Asian Americans due to COVID-19. Americans and high-level politicians use inappropriate names, such as “Chinese Virus,” for the COVID-19 virus, which fuels racism and xenophobia. In this Experience piece, we discuss the harm of referring to the COVID-19 virus based on the geographic location where it was first identified

Characterizing and Diminishing Autofluorescence in Formalin-fixed Paraffin-embedded Human Respiratory Tissue

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1369/0022155414531549Tissue autofluorescence frequently hampers visualization of immunofluorescent markers in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded respiratory tissues. We assessed nine treatments reported to have efficacy in reducing autofluorescence in other tissue types. The three most efficacious were Eriochrome black T, Sudan black B and sodium borohydride, as measured using white light laser confocal Ʌ² (multi-lambda) analysis. We also assessed the impact of steam antigen retrieval and serum application on human tracheal tissue autofluorescence. Functionally fitting this Ʌ² data to 2-dimensional Gaussian surfaces revealed that steam antigen retrieval and serum application contribute minimally to autofluorescence and that the three treatments are disparately efficacious. Together, these studies provide a set of guidelines for diminishing autofluorescence in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded human respiratory tissue. Additionally, these characterization techniques are transferable to similar questions in other tissue types, as demonstrated on frozen human liver tissue and paraffin-embedded mouse lung tissue fixed in different fixatives.NIHNIAI