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  • 2022-02-05 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Woman’s Brain ‘Leak’ After a COVID Swab Test? (en)
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  • Since nasal swabs have become commonplace for COVID-19 testing, the fears around them have also grown, resulting in certain incidents becoming exaggerated and distorted as a result. One particular incident involving a woman in Iowa back in 2020 generated headlines and questions from our readers, with claims that undergoing a swab resulted in a leak from the woman's brain through her nose. This so-called leak was a result of a very rare preexisting condition, and not because the swab was able to actually pierce the brain. The Mirror claimed in October 2020 that a COVID test caused the woman’s brain to leak. That particular case was reported in the medical journal JAMA Otolaryngol Head & Neck Surgery, in October 2020. After a woman swabbed herself for COVID-19 before undertaking a hernia operation, fluid began leaking from her nose, she developed a headache and started vomiting. The report identified the fluid as cerebrospinal fluid, which is the protective lining around the brain and spine. The report concluded that they had never encountered a case like this before, and the leak was not caused by the swab itself, but by the woman’s preexisting condition, which was a skull base defect: Another similar case was reported in a September 2021 report in JAMA. In that instance, the COVID-19 swab resulted in an extremely rare cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leak caused by the test. The report concluded: A LiveScience report added important context highlighting how rare such a case was: ... only a handful of CSF leak cases linked with COVID-19 tests have been reported worldwide since the pandemic began, out of the hundreds of millions of COVID-19 tests conducted. According to a report in The Conversation, which was also published on this website, the woman’s skull defect was very rare, and one in 10,000 babies are born with a defect like this, but the rate at which it occurs in adults is unknown. Carl Philpott, Professor of Rhinology and Olfactology, University of East Anglia, advised in the article: Given that the woman’s and even the man’s conditions are both very rare, and the first of such incidences recorded, we rate this claim as a Mixture. (en)
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