PITT WIRE - The National Security Education Program has recognized 8 Pitt students with Boren Awards. Doctoral student, SARA BAUMANN (BCHS '19), received a Boren Fellowship for study of the Nepali language at Cornell University for summer 2018 to support her work in community-based participatory research using Collaborative Filmmaking to further examine menstrual practices in Nepal this fall.
One Pitt Public Health student has been selected as a 2018-19 Pittsburgh Schweitzer Fellow. JOHN CORDIER (HPM '18) aims to address health and education gaps faced by youth in urban schools by working with high-school students during after-school programs. He leads health clubs to address health issues and empower the students to be leaders in addressing community health issues.
On May 21, 2018, Healthy Start Inc.’s 2018 Annual Cheryl Squire Flint Cultural Sensitivity Symposium, “This Woman’s Work: Exploring Maternal Mortality and Morbidity,” brought together experts on the public health issue of maternal morbidity and mortality, and related topics such as the life course perspective, disparities, traumatic birth experience, post-partum depression, prevention, and more.
IDM's DERRICK MATTHEWS explains Pitt Public Health's work on HIV/AIDS and where we are today. "If your’e a black gay man in the U.S., you have a one in two change
in your lifetime of becoming HIV positive…short of the cure that we’re looking for, the biology is way ahead of the social implementation science."
IDM's DERRICK MATTHEWS demystifies infectious diseases and microbiology with a basic overview of the fields, how they are practiced, and how disease is spread.
HUGEN's RYAN MINSTER talks about how his interest in body composition and obesity led him to Samoa. "Polynesians and Micronesians have some of the highest rates of overweight and obesity in the world." He and his lab explored genetic factors that could be leading to increases in weight in a sample of Samoans.
Much of the work being done in epidemiology is about translating data into practice, explains EPI's ASHLEY NAIMI. One way of doing that is through causal inference. "Causal inference is not actually about providing causality from observational data. It’s about identifying the conditions that we need in order to infer causality.” He also discusses his work with aspirin and whether it can help with fertility and child birth.
In this talk, JULIE DONOHUE discusses five key factors about the Affordable Care Act. She touches on medicaid expansion, which increased insurance coverage in the U.S. for over 20 million people, and she talks about the uninsured rate. "[The ACA] has led to the biggest reduction in the uninsured in history and we have the lowest level of uninsured that we’ve ever recorded at about 10%."
JOURNAL OF VIROLOGICAL METHODS - BURKE, MARQUES, and colleagues discuss anti-dengue NS1-specific IgG and IgG3 as potential biomarkers of long-term and recent (less than 6 months) DENV infections, respectively.
THE LANCET - MARQUES and BURKE comment about two Zika vaccines in clinical development and describe the challenges ahead.
PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE - Magalhaes, Braga, Cordeiro, Oliveira, Castanha, Maciel, Amancio, Gouveia, Peixoto-deSilva Jr., Peixoto, Britto, Lima, Lima, and Marques detected the tail end of a Zika epidemic in 2015-16 which was displaced by a chikungunya epidemic. Few dengue cases were identified despite a high number of official dengue notifications in the area during this period. Here they show the important epidemiological features of these cas...
On Sunday, April 29, Pitt Public Health welcomed over 200 graduates into the school's alumni community at our annual Convocation. “Our alumni cohort is now 7,000 people deep, since the school’s founding 70 years ago. Our impressive alumni give the school an international network of influence and the ability to impact a huge spectrum of public health issues,” said Senior Associate Dean ELEANOR FEINGOLD.
WIKITRIBUNE - The White House released a rough plan to rein in drug prices that included price transparency. The argument is that drug companies might shy away from raising prices if they knew the public was watching. "Just notifying us whether there’s a price increase, that’s not really going to have any effect,” says HPM's WALID GELLAD. “Many of these state laws also have very low fines if they don’t report this data.”
THE HOSPITALIST - In October 2015, CMS implemented its first meaningful policy to attempt for addressing sepsis, however, not everyone has embraced it thus far. “Sepsis is indeed a critical public health problem, and it’s appropriate and valuable that Medicare and other policy makers are focusing on sepsis,” said HPM's JEREMY KAHN. "But at 85-pages long, it really is an enormous effort for hospitals to adhere to this measure."
PUBLIC SOURCE - At first, some were skeptical about the African Healing Garden in Larimer. Too often outside forces dropped projects into the neighborhood without knowing the people there. However, EPI's HEATHER ENG says the garden is a “bridge” for the people that live there. Sharing Facebook posts of its progress has "helped us all have something that we can talk about with enthusiasm and appreciation.”
Environmental Health News - Pittsburgh would be an ideal place for further study on the links between air pollution, asthma, and autoimmune disease, says EOH chair SALLY WENZEL. "There's a lot of evidence now that what you breathe may impact your lungs in many ways, and could actually start an autoimmune process. That's a link we haven't fully explored in this region yet."
EMS1 - Many EMS agencies are reporting record numbers of overdose-related 911 responses and unprecedented amounts of naloxone being administered during resuscitative efforts. Many systems are turning to new mobile integrated health care and community paramedicine approaches to help. DAN SWAYZE (BCHS '09) shares the 5 things community paramedics should know to be effective.
ANTIVIRAL RESEARCH - McMillen and Hartman discuss the historical role of Rift Valley Fever (RVF) as a biological weapon and conclude with an outline of the important unanswered questions for ongoing research into this important zoonotic disease.
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE - Suicides in Allegheny County have increased 66 percent over just eight years from 2010 to 2017. The increase is far higher than the 25 percent national increase, or the 30 percent increase in Pennsylvania over 18 years between 1999 and 2016. “This is really upsetting to me because for so long our [suicide] rates were going down,” said HUGEN's LISA PAN.
BIOS student, HUANG LIN (PhD '21), won the prize for best poster presentation at SAGES 2018, the Symposium on Advances in Genomics, Epidemiology, and Statistics conference. Huang presented his work on developing a novel methodology for analyzing microbiome data. The title of his poster was "Analysis of Differential Abundance of Taxa in Microbiome Studies Using An Off-Set Based Linear Regression."