For the first time in history, the Wisconsin Badgers faced the Army Black Knights in football this weekend. After a rocky start to the year, the Badgers won, 20-14. And six games into this season, they seem to be turning the tide.
Megan Moreno, a principal investigator of the Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team at the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Mashable that there’s space to try out what we can to make social media safer. While she thinks the idea of fully eliminating quantitative popularity is “an interesting idea,” she is “not hugely optimistic that it will make a gigantic difference.” That’s because the idea of likes is so engrained in our society already, that the concept will be there if it’s turned off or not. And, she adds, popularity isn’t completely numerical.
Cows also are tested for disease through nasal swabs, however, according to the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So it’s not clear which action is shown in the picture in the post. USA TODAY didn’t find where the image being shared on social media originated.
Now nineteen months into pandemic life, many Americans are struggling to recalibrate their COVID risk. How do we balance needed COVID precautions with considerations of mental health and meaningful social interactions? What will it take to reach the “new normal”—and will we even know when we get there?
To help us break this down, Dominique Brossard, professor of life sciences communication, and population health scientist Ajay Sethi join us for a discussion of risk assessment in the post-vaccination stage, how to negotiate a wide range of feelings about the pandemic, and why it’s still okay to not feel okay.
Dominique Brossard is professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her teaching and research focus on science and risk communication.
Ajay Sethi is an epidemiologist and associate professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he specializes in the study of infectious diseases.
Quoted: Adjusting disease rates for age is a common practice in epidemiology. The practice is crucial for understanding the impacts that a disease like COVID-19 has on a large and varied population.
“We adjust for factors like age because we identify factors like age as being confounders,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: COVID-19 vaccination rates tend to be lower in rural communities, and the same goes for rural areas in Wisconsin. The difference between the most and least vaccinated counties in Wisconsin is as much as 40 percent said Dr. Jonathan Temte, an associate dean with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health who studies vaccine and immunization policy.
Getting vaccinated on campus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison is relatively normal.
“I think is in the best interest of everyone, not just here on campus but in the larger Dane County community for students to be vaccinated,” said Sam Kuchta, a senior at the university.
Iya Khalil, head of the global AI innovation center Novartis, and Anthony Gitter, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of biostatistics and medical informatics, joined Friedel for a discussion on the use of AI in medicine at this year’s Wisconsin Biohealth Summit. The three speakers shared how companies, including Wisconsin’s postsecondary institutions, are using technology to improve human health.
UW Health explained that Crawford, who grew up in Dekalb, Illinois, had a brother with leukemia. Jeff Crawford was treated at UW Children’s Hospital in Madison, which is what it was called in 1975. Her only brother later died of the disease.
Soon after that, these same scientists–Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin–published a paper proving that they had done just that. I wrote another article, asking:
In the past, when a University of Wisconsin-Madison student called emergency services for a mental health crisis, an officer from the University of Wisconsin Police Department would arrive in response.
The first session included Pat Setji, general manager of screening at Exact Sciences; Betsy Nugent, chief clinical research officer at UW Health and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health; and Ayesha Ahmed, general counsel and vice president of human resources at Nexus Pharmaceuticals.
Deaths caused by COVID-19 in Wisconsin surpassed 8,000 a year-and-a-half after the pandemic reached the state. As vaccination levels remain plateued, new medical developments to combat the virus and its deadly disease progress. Infectious disease specialist Dr. Nasia Safdar with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health explains.
Quoted: Megan Moreno, principal investigator of the Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says Haugen’s interpretation of the internal research squares perfectly with other work done on social media, especially Instagram.
“For a certain population of youth, exposure to this content can be associated with diminished body image, or body image concerns,” Moreno says. “I didn’t feel like it was tremendously surprising.”
Quoted: “Natural infection does produce an immune response, but not all immune responses will be durable enough and heightened enough to ward off reinfection at some point,” said Ajay Sethi, faculty director for the Master of Public Health program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine & Public Health. “So the question becomes, which source of immunity will provide more reliable protection — and vaccines afford that.”
On Tuesday WILL sent a letter to University of Wisconsin System President Tommy Thompson, and University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank over the role of three mental health counselors, saying they cannot be assigned to serve only people of color.
In an earlier conversation with CNET about long COVID, Dr. Nasia Safdar, director of infection control at the University of Wisconsin, said, “Vaccination serves two purposes One, of course you want to get it before you have COVID so it protects you from it, but even in the people who have had the infection, anecdotally, it seems that vaccination helps with the symptoms of long COVID.”
Nasia Safdar, the medical director for infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin Hospital: It really shouldn’t. Quadrivalent vaccines have been available and most of us have been getting those for years. There is a high dose flu vaccine that is recommended for people who are older, and the arm tenderness might be a little bit more and it takes a little bit longer to recover.
UW Health confirms most of its workforce complied with the COVID-19 vaccination requirement.
Virtually all of the more than 16,000 people employed by UW Health are following the health care provider’s COVID vaccine requirement, officials announced Monday.
University of Wisconsin oncologist Noelle LoConte has long felt that the link doesn’t get enough attention—even among oncologists. She is the lead author of a 2017 statement on alcohol and cancer from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which calls on these specialists to take the lead in addressing “excessive exposure to alcohol” through education, advocating for policy changes, and research.
Quoted: Still, kids’ risk of severe disease is much lower than that of adults, and doesn’t seem to be any higher with delta than it was with earlier iterations of the virus, said Dr. Greg DeMuri, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s just that there are more cases, so a small percentage of a large number is still a significant number,” he said.
Quoted: Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said leaning on the Wisconsin Emergency Response Plan is important to coordinate different entities but ideally, state officials would adopt an additional statewide plan that focuses on preventing and controlling the spread of the virus to combat the outbreak.
“That’s appropriate in the middle of an emergency, you need to have command and control and have top-down response. … It’s only part of the approach. You need to have a prevention and control plan that accompanies an emergency response plan,” Remington said.
A recent survey by the Wisconsin Center for Nursing and the School of Nursing at UW Madison shows an impending nursing shortage.
Anywhere from 10-20,000 nurses plan to retire in the next 10 years, and that could cause a crisis for the state. Right now many healthcare companies are finding it hard to staff nurses, so many are offering bonuses and high salaries to professionals from out of town.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s University Health Services will now offer a third “booster” shot of the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine to students and employees. UHS is offering the third dose of Moderna or Pfizer to eligible students and employees who are moderately or severely immunocompromised and may have not received adequate production from the first two doses.
Public safety precautions put in place last year to help stem the spread of COVID-19 also caused influenza cases to nosedive.
But that could backfire during this year’s flu season, said Dr. James Conway, associate director for health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute.
“Obviously, we don’t have a lot to go on because the social lockdown and mitigation programs on both sides of the globe have really shut down influenza across the board,” Conway said. “And so, it’s really been sort of an educated guess.”
Some institutions, such as the University of Wisconsin, are still providing housing for those who need to quarantine or isolate. Others, such as the University of Delaware, have some space for students to isolate but encourage students with positive cases to return home if possible.
In honor of Deaf Awareness Month, UW Health is shedding light on the importance of interpreters in the continuing support of people who are Deaf, Hard of Hearing or Deaf Blind.
A UW-Madison study that has tracked flu and other respiratory diseases in the Oregon School District for six years is now also testing students and family members for COVID-19.
Quoted: Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said the opposite is true.
“This has become a pandemic of the unvaccinated, worsened by people taking risks, such as gathering together indoors, without masks,” Remington said. “The vaccine has been very effective in preventing serious illness, and death. The fact that the delta variant is so much more contagious, means that we cannot rely on the vaccine alone, but need to reduce the risks of getting infected and infecting others.”
Group Health has six of its own clinics in the greater Madison area and already lets patients go to 13 other clinics, including seven at UW Health and three at Access Community Health Centers. Under a new partnership with UW Health and UnityPoint Health-Meriter, members will be able to go to 12 more UW clinics and seven at Meriter.
Distance from family and cultural traditions is a common stressor for Latina mothers in the Madison area, said Dr. Patricia Téllez-Girón, a UW Health family medicine provider who treats many Latinas at Wingra Family Medical Center in Madison.
UW Health’s pediatric services now have a new name: “UW Health Kids.”According to a press release, UW Health Kids is care from “infancy to adulthood.” That means everything from basic care, like checkups or vaccinations, to specialty care for complex diseases and preventative care.
’The way I think about it is strength conditioning for the mind,’ director of meditation training at UW Athletics says.
All but one University of Wisconsin System campus met a goal set earlier this year to offer at least 75% of classes in person this fall, UW System officials announced Tuesday.
How, where to get free flu shot.
Student vaccination rates at Wisconsin’s public universities range widely from 91% at UW-Madison to 38% at UW-Parkside, according to figures released Friday.
The mental health student organization is fighting a different kind of stigma this semester.
“Since July, the number of cases in children has increased by 240%, and pediatric cases now make up about 30% of all new cases of COVID-19,” said Dr. William Hartman, Co-Principal Investigator of Pediatric Vaccine Trial at UW Health.
Tuesday marked the fifth day of classes at UW-Madison, a major turning point at the time last school year when university leaders moved all classes online and quarantined its two largest dorms in response to more than a thousand COVID-19 cases.
Yet two men want you to think that ivermectin could be all we need to treat, or even prevent, any COVID-19 case: Dr. Pierre Kory, a former critical-care specialist at the University of Wisconsin medical center, and Dr. Paul Marik, the chief of critical care at Eastern Virginia Medical School.
Interested in the medical field but not sure about med school, or not enthusiastic about taking lots of physics and math? You should consider majoring in Health Promotion and Health Equity. HPHE student Jordan Gao gave us the details of this fascinating field of study.
Medical professionals are urging people who are pregnant or breastfeeding to get vaccinated against COVID-19. According to UW Health, studies have shown that the vaccine is safe and effective for those who are pregnant or nursing.
Dr. Joseph A. McBride says experts expect to see breakthrough cases — which is where a person fully vaccinated against COVID-19 tests positive for the virus. Still, McBride says the vaccine is the most effective tool against the virus because of how well it protects someone being hospitalized or dying from the virus.
Dr. Joseph McBride is an adult and pediatric infectious disease physician at UW Health. He said that no vaccine is 100% perfect in preventing disease, but they are still important in preventing the worst from happening.
New UW-Madison research suggests eating less of some proteins could improve health and longevity. We discuss the study and other advances in nutrition science.
Quoted: Henry Anderson, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of population health and expert on environmental and occupational diseases, said prioritizing paint hazards made sense — particularly for protecting toddlers who can cruise around a house.
“There’s so much more lead in a paint chip than there is in a glass of water,” said Anderson, Wisconsin’s former state chief medical officer. “When there’s an old house, it has paint chipping off the walls, they are crawling around, putting their hands in their mouth — and hands are sticky. And so ingestion of paint chips remains important.”
After six years as a division of UW Health, SwedishAmerican in Rockford will now be an official part of the UW Health system.
SwedishAmerican Health Systems has now fully integrated in the Wisconsin’s UW Health System. The Rockford, IL health system has been recognized as a division of UW Health since 2015, but effective immediately, SwedishAmerican will now be known as UW Health.
UW Health plans to launch the study next week and will use a sample group of about 400 students, staff and teachers from Leopold and Lincoln elementary schools who display COVID symptoms in an effort to determine a more accessible method of testing.
Quoted: National studies show people have been consuming more alcohol, especially women with young children, during the pandemic, said Julia Sherman, coordinator for the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. She said other research has found that people who increased alcohol consumption to cope with natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, didn’t slow their drinking afterward.
“And that is the big question,” said Sherman. “Will the drinking subside as this crisis fades? As we are able to get back to normal or the new normal? Will we all go back to the previous level of alcohol consumption? And based on this other reporting, it’s not as likely as we might hope.”
UW Health Principal Vaccine Investigator Dr. William Hartman. said monoclonal antibody therapy is one of the most successful therapies developed to fight the virus.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying the use of psychedelic drugs to treat PTSD, substance abuse and depression are coordinating efforts through a new Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances.
To kick off the school year, UW-Madison is teaming up with the Red Cross for a major blood drive.It started Tuesday and runs through Thursday at the Nicholas Recreation Center.
Hillary Krieger is a nurse at UW Health and treats COVID-19 patients every day — most days for 12 hours or more.”It’s exhausting, it really is,” Krieger said. “When all is said and done, I leave my house at 6:30 in the morning and don’t get back until 8:30 at night.”
“People are burnt out. People are exhausted,” said Registered Nurse Mackenzie Lee, who joined the staff at UW Health in 2018. “People have compassion fatigue. People who are the nicest people outside of work, they come in, they’re a different person. It’s sad to see. The second surge (of COVID) has only made that 10 times worse.“
On September 2, 2020, participants in Dane County became some of the very first to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Dr. Jeff Pothof, the Chief Quality Officer for UW Health, was one of them.“It was impossible to predict all the twists and turns that would happen in the next 365 days,” said Pothof.
Dr. Lisa Arkin, the Director of Pediatric Dermatology at UW School of Medicine, says working with children and their families is what she was put on this earth to do. A career she only discovered after the terrorist attacks in NYC on September 11, 2001.At the time of the attacks, Arkin was working as a story editor for HBO and Showtime. But on 9/11, she was called in for jury duty.
UW-Madison reported on Thursday that nine out of every 10 members of the campus community are fully vaccinated — even without mandating students and employees to get the shot. “I’m proud of our students and employees for taking this important step to protect themselves and others,” Chancellor Rebecca Blank said in an announcement. “And I’m grateful to our staff, who worked tirelessly to achieve these results.”
Cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a common respiratory virus among children with similar symptoms to COVID-19, are on the rise.
