WDAM - U.S. health officials have reported 971 measles cases so far this year, the highest tally in 27 years, and experts say it's not clear when the wave of illnesses will stop. "What's causing these outbreaks is lack of vaccination," said HPM Chair Mark Roberts.
WPXI - Antivaxxers left negative business reviews for Kids First Pediatrics after they posted a social media video encouraging HPV vaccination. So, they teamed up with researchers at Pitt including Beth Hoffman (BCHS '19, '23) who found that we have to "...start thinking about how to deliver tailored messages that really get at all of these concerns we're seeing."
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES - Using super-sensitive microscopic imaging, a team of scientists led by HuGen's Quasar Padiath has made a fundamental biological discovery that explains the structure of the nuclear envelope and gives tantalizing clues as to how cells squish through narrow openings without springing a leak. The findings also could be key to untangling the mechanisms underlying several genetic diseases.
WPXI - Pitt researchers are looking to lessons learned about Zika when preparing for the possibility of Rift Valley Fever virus, noting that it's important to develop therapies and vaccines now. "We saw the ffects of Zika when it got into a larger population and so our work highlights the need to really do more investigation into what would happen in pregnant women infected with [Rift Valley] virus," said IDM's Amy Hartman, who also pointed out ...
FOX NEWS - "It's not about innovation, it's about inflation in existing products," explains Inmaculada Hernandez (HPM '16). "They are the same companies that operate in other countries and they don't show this behavior and that's because in other countries they are lucky to have this regulatory environment that prevents them from doing this."
Post-doctoral researcher Robert Coulter (BCHS '17), BCHS's Jessica Burke, and Sara Baumann (BCHS '19) tried using a video approach to share highlights of Coulter's recent research on how welcoming school environments reduce drinking among both LGBT+ -identified students and their heterosexual counterparts.
Dean Donald S. Burke's third annual address to the school on the state of the nation's opioid overdose epidemic looks at one of the most pressing issues facing our region. Burke highlights his team's research recently published in Science ( Changing dynamics of the drug overdose epidemic in the United States from 1979 through 2016 ), as well as details Pitt Public Health's efforts to confront the crisis and how you can get involved. Click...
WPXI - TV - We've long heard that an aspirin a day can help lower the risk of heart disease. A new study using participants from Pittsburgh suggests that isn't always the case. The study looked at 19,000 people worldwide, including 178 people from Pittsburgh. "People who took aspirin and people who did not take aspirin had an equal likelihood of having a long healthy life," said EPI's ANNE NEWMAN.
ALZHEIMER'S ASSOCIATION - The first dementia prevalence data from a large population of lesbian, gay, and bisexual older adults was reported at the 2018 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Chicago by JASON FLATT (BCHS '13) and colleagues. "We really need to think about providing more LGBT affirming services that are going to meet people where they're at but also acknowledge who they are," said Flatt.
UPMC HEALTH NEWS – In the late 1990s, new and highly potent anti-HIV drugs emerged— including protease and reverse transcriptase inhibitors—which could for the first time control HIV infection. For this 1998 World AIDS Day, Pitt IDM AIDS researcher Charles Rinaldo and the late Bridget Murtagh of the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force address transmission, drug resistance, and the radically prescient question of whether HIV could be cured.
In Sen Toomey's weekly e-newsletter, he announces that the Senate Finance Committee adopted his amendment, the Encouraging Appropriate Prescribing for Victims of Overdose in Medicare Act, to require Medicare to notify a doctor if their patient has suffered a non-fatal opioid overdose. Toomey references a study by experts including JULIE DONOHUE, HPM professor, in his discussion about the need to inform doctors of patient overdoses.
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%."
Providers are financially incentivized to improve the quality and value of care they provide. Risk adjustment can allow researchers to account for the variation in patient characteristics that would predict differences in spending and outcomes, independent of the performance of the provider. ERIC ROBERTS (HPM) concludes that risk reduction could prevent the risk of quality providers serving sicker and poor patients from being penalized
Doctoral candidate, DIANA DeLUCIA (IDM '19), presented some of her dissertation research on how the cholesterol levels in immune cells might be impacting HIV infection and disease progression to AIDS. It was found that antigen-presenting cells in nonprogressors have lower cholesterol levels which is associated with their inability to pass virus on to other cells.
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On behalf of BCHS doctoral student, SARA BAUMANN (BCHS '19), JESSICA BURKE presented their work in combining filmmaking with community based participatory research. They developed collaborative filmmaking to study chlaupadi in Napal. “It is a local practice where women are banished to sheds during menstruation.” This technique was an effective way to generate knowledge about the menstrual practices and involve participants in the process.
SisterFriend and the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences hosted an event to encourage discussions about menstrual hygiene in the region and to raise awareness about it as a critical public health issue. Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, the author of Periods Gone Public , gave a talk about her first-hand account in the fight for menstrual equity.