WESA-FM - "[That's] a big loophole there in terms of potentially not having people covered who are sick," said board chair IDM and EPI's Lee Harrison.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL - Studies show that variants including Delta can partially evade immune response from infection and vaccination. "Give the virus time and opportunity, we don't know what will arise," said IDM's John Mellors chief of infectious diseases at UPMC.
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE - "I'm hopeful that this will help to start improving the vaccine uptake among employees in the long-term care workforce, because we really need to get those numbers up," said David Nace (EPI '95), chief medical officer of UPMC Senior Communities and an expert in long-term care and flu programs.
PITTWIRE - Substantially more people in the U.S. with opiiod use disorder are receiving evidence-based treatment for the disease, but there are still considerable gaps in care along racial lines, according to the largest analysis to date of opioid use disorder among Medicaid recipients. The results of the study with HPM Chair Julie Donohue as co-author were published in JAMA and proivde actionable insights for policymakers and medical providers....
MEDPAGE TODAY - The proportion of people with opioid use disorder who received buprenorphine (Buprenex), methadone, or naltrexone (Revia) increased from 47.8% to 57.1% in an exploratory serial cross-sectional study by HPM Chair Julie Donohue and colleagues.
THE ATLANTIC - "The FDA specifically does not really worry about those larger societal issues and doesn't really worry about cost," HPM's Wallid Gellad said. Instead, the agency is judged by how many drugs it can approve.
TODAY - "This is such an important paper," said BCHS' Elizabeth Miller, chief of the division of adolescent and young adult health at the UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. "The real take home message is, if you are counting on pediatricians to have this conversation, it's not happening."
MEDICAL XPRESS - States that legalize recreational marijuana experience a short-term decline in opioid-related emergency department visits, particularly among 25- to 44-year olds and men, according to analysis led by HPM's Coleman Drake.
NATIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD INDICATORS PARTNERSHIP - Harnessing interdisciplinary expertise and perspectives, the Black Equity Coalition in Pittsburgh successfully used data to advocate for programs and policies to decrease racial disparities in COVID-19 response and created a forum to tackle other health inequities. "Seeing something happen right away was extremely different from the past - that we saw a problem, advocated for things to be fixed, and...
EPI's Elsa Strotmeyer (EPI '00, '97) along with Anne Newman (department chair), and Jane Cauley, received a renewal on their NIH/NIA T32 in the Epidemiology of Aging. They appreciate the participation of all of their colleauges and their support of the epidemiology of aging at Pitt. "We will be recruiting for the pre-doctoral positions from the epidemiology PhD students and plan to have a wide search for one post-doctoral candidate, with priorit...
Sara Baumann is a graduate of BCHS from 2019 and the newest member of the BCHS faculty. Her research focuses on harnessing visual, arts-based, and mixed methods for global health research. She shares a bit about what she's working on, her favorite BCHS memory, and the restaurant she has on speed dial.
RESCORP - Research Corporation for Science Advancement will bring together a multidisciplinary group of early-career researchers to address the global threat to human health from animal-borne infectious diseases as part of its new Scialog initiative, Mitigating Zoonotic Threats. IDM's Amy Hartman with the Center for Vaccine Research has been selecteed as one of the 2021 fellows. Congratulations!
The Hill District and Homewood are similar and different in various ways. They're similar in the sense that they've been relatively stable over time and they have predominantly Black populations but they have very different histories overtime," explains EPI's TIffany Gary-Webb, assocaite dean for diversity and inclusion and associate director of the Center for Health Equity in this video from a RAND Corporation series.
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE - PItt developed the free online database Pitt+Me, a centralized hub for those intereested in academic research to find studies for whch they're well-suited so they can dive right into some science.
A team at Pitt Public Health that is pioneering the use of film in community health research and practice recently received funding to launch a new project with deep emotional implications. Drs. Jessica and Sara Baumann will be working with the Pediatric Palliative Care Coalition and clinicians from Pitt's School of Medicine on teh "End-of-Life and Grief Experiences Among Families: Harnessing the Power of Participatory and Visual Research" proje...
KDKA - "The age group is15-25 - younger and drugs and alcohol...people getting out of lock down now and not being in school and not being in jobs," explained BCHS' Gina Brooks. After a year without school or direction, many of these young people with easy access to guns have turned to drug use and drug sales. street crime often resulting in murder she explained along with BCHS' Richard Garland. They both work on the Violence Prevention Initiativ...
HEALTH AFFAIRS - There is currently an opportunity for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to help consumers enroll in better Marketplace coverage in 2022. By adjusting how returning Marketplace enrollees are automatically re-enrolled in coverage, CMS can nudge more enrollees into plans that offer them both lower premiums and reduced cost sharing. HPM's Coleman Drake and colleagues outline steps to improve consumer plan selection tha...
HPP DEBATED - BCHS' Sara Baumann (BCHS '19) talks about a recent article in the journal Health Policy and Planning, Is criminalization the answer? Perspectives of community members and police on menstrual seclusion policy in Far-West Nepal. The study was completed by an interdisiplinary Pitt team including Baumann, BCHS's Jessie Burke, and BCHS students Monica Merante, Chris Wiltrout, and Trevor Cutlip.
HEALTHLINE - The plan is still vague, so it's "hard to tell (yet) who will actually be affected," Alexandra Glynn (HPM '23) told Healthline. She does feel there are ways that it could be beneficial, pointing out that people with high copays and deductibles tend to skip tests and regular physical exams. That means many delay medical care until treatment may be more expensive. Lowering the age could mean access to earlier detection and treatment. ...
UPMC - The COVID-19 pandemic "waves" that North Americans experienced over the past year and a half had interconnected patterns that moved through space and time — and they weren't just limited to the U.S. New research from Pitt Public Health shows the waxing and waning COVID-19 case counts traveled across North American county, state and county borders with seemlingly little regard for politics and public health mandates, much like a storm can ...