It has been a very trying time for all of us across the planet, with COVID-19 still lurking around as new variants pop up, while having to also deal with the growing spread of monkeypox. As for me, I’ve had a couple of bad colds since the start of the pandemic, but one was before commercial testing was available (maybe COVID? But probably not!), and the other was more recent and was definitely not COVID (lucky me!). In fact, I have to say that because of certain choices I have made to avoid the big bad disease as well as other preventable diseases, this has been the least I’ve experienced illness in quite some time.

Reaching the golden years doesn’t always feel so golden. As we age, disease, injury, and other stress factors from the environment will damage our bodies' cells. Most cells may be able to repair that damage, while our immune system usually clears those damaged cells through a process called apoptosis.^[1] However, if cellular repair and clearance is not effective, the residual damaged cells will further weaken the immune system and deteriorate other biological processes. Is there a possibility that we can avoid this cellular damage and improve the health of older people? A cellular state known as senescence might hold the key to this question.^{[1, 2]} During senescence, the damaged cells irreversibly stop dividing and resist being removed. ^[3] Researchers have shown that determining senescence biomarkers could lead to new therapies for the inflammatory disease caused by senescence in older people.^[4]

It seems like decades since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic shut down the world economically and socially, and even now we are not fully out of the woods. The COVID-19 coronavirus continues to persist, hovering on the cusp of becoming an endemic disease after having caused over one million deaths in the United States alone out of over six million deaths worldwide since the first reported cases in 2019. Although the various coronavirus vaccines have conferred some level of herd immunity across the globe, the danger of mutations causing variants that might escape vaccine protection is real, so continued vigilance and best practices are key to returning to normalcy. Perhaps our resolve as a global community and as a species will be tested in short order as the monkeypox outbreaks surge.