This holiday weekend, AAA expects over 100 million Americans to travel. But state health leaders urge unvaccinated people to reconsider.
“If they’re not [vaccinated], really, it’s important that folks do not try to gather,” Dr. Jeff Pothof said.
According to the UW Health Chief Quality Officer, only a group of people who are fully vaccinated with a booster shot should get together during Christmas time.
Quoted: “If you’re vaccinated and boosted, holiday celebrations for the most part pose really low risk,” UW Health Chief Quality Officer Dr. Jeff Pothof said.
For unvaccinated people, that’s not the case. If someone gets vaccinated or boosted now, they won’t be fully protected by Christmas Day, but Pothof said some protection is better than none.
“The best day to get your booster shot, if you haven’t gotten it, is today, as soon as possible,” Pothof said.
Quoted: “We’ve entered a convergence of timing here of cases are rising,” said. Dr. Dan Shirley, an infectious disease physician with UW Health. “There’s this kind of variant question, and obviously the holiday season is an important time to get together.”
With older children or adults who have spent years trying to pinpoint the cause of their conditions, speed is not as vital, he said. That’s why genome sequencing for patients at the new Undiagnosed Genetic Disease Clinic is done at UW-Madison’s Biotechnology Center, which can run so-called “long-read” sequencing that can provide even more answers. UW plans to study up to 500 patients at the clinic over five years, with the goal of diagnosing rare disorders and discovering new disease genes.
Noted: Zuckerman dedicates nine pages to Jon Wolff, an mRNA pioneer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Medicine. In 1990, Wolff and several colleagues published an article about “the first successful use of mrna” that could be used as a vaccine, as it ultimately was for Pfizer and Moderna.
Noted: A recent count by Cooperative Children’s Book Center School of Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that “books about white children, talking bears, trucks, monsters, potatoes, etc. represent nearly three-quarters of children’s and young adult books published in 2019.” In other words, vegetables, animals, monsters, and aliens had more visibility in books than brown or black characters.
UW-Madison researchers say study of four nurse sharks swimming in a campus lab aquarium holds promise in developing a more effective treatment for COVID-19. The study involved examining the properties of the antibodies of the three-foot long, juvenile sharks after drawing their blood.
The UW Board of Regents on Monday increased salary ranges for top leaders between 5% and 32%, a move that will give them more negotiating power amid two high-profile searches for the next University of Wisconsin System president and UW-Madison chancellor.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents has approved increasing salary ranges for top university positions in order to match ranges at peer institutions. The vote Monday came after UW System interim President Tommy Thompson said he favors smaller, successive increases for top executive pay ranges.
A study released by UW-Madison economist Noah Williams says eliminating the personal income tax and raising the sales tax would jump start Wisconsin’s economy.
Noted: Written by Robert Yablon, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and faculty co-director of the Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
Noted: “Just Be Claus” is Joosse’s 55th book published for kids. Originally from Grafton, she started telling stories in grade school and later studied creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After having her own children, she was inspired by them to write children’s books.
The Wisconsin men’s basketball team is searching for a new opponent for Thursday at the Kohl Center after Morgan State notified the Badgers on Monday that it can’t travel due to COVID-19 complications within its program.
While the majority of his University of Wisconsin men’s basketball teammates focused on resting and finishing finals during a scheduled week off between games, Vogt traveled to Mayfield to help his community after much of the city was devastated by a tornado Dec. 10.
Chayla Edwards is a defender with the NCAA national champion University of Wisconsin women’s hockey team, where she played in all 21 games during the championship campaign.
As academics engage with and learn from communities, the benefits of community engagement—more valid, compelling and informative scientific discovery—will continue to become apparent. Ultimately, the motivations driving community-engaged scholarship coalesce around a desire to improve the quality of one’s research, which should be a career-long goal for all of us in academia.
-Kristen Slack is a professor of social work and affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is also the founder of Prof2Prof, an interdisciplinary platform for sharing research scholarship as well as instructional tools, resources and strategies for higher education. Visit their FAQ page for more details on how to use Prof2Prof to heighten the discoverability of your academic scholarship, broadly defined, and to learn from peers within and across disciplines, continents and academic roles.
Shorter incubation periods generally lead to more infections happening in less time, because people are becoming more contagious sooner, making onward transmission harder to prevent. Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me he still wants more data on Omicron before he touts a trim incubation. But “it does make sense,” he said, considering the variant’s explosive growth in pretty much every country it’s collided with. In many places, Omicron cases are doubling every two to three days.
Although millions of monarchs used to arrive in California each fall, this year’s tally is still an encouraging sign. It indicates that monarchs, like many insects, can recover quickly under the right conditions. “They lay hundreds of eggs,” Karen Oberhauser, a monarch expert and professor of entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison, told Vox in December. “Good conditions can lead to quick increases in their numbers.”
Graves was the star of the first national championship won by a UW varsity women’s team; a two-time Olympian and five-time national rowing team member. She died Sunday.
