Category: Health

Some doctors are urging the return of masking mandates at hospitals. Dr. Kaitlin Sundling is a UW Health pathologist and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health. She is trying to gather public support for overturning UW Health’s decision in early May to scale back its mask mandates.

“It really is a mistake to take that protection away and to put both patients and health care workers at risk,” she said.

Jessica Calarco, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had a similar take. “This idea of ‘doing the work,’ is just the latest manifestation of the kind of self-improvement culture that has long permeated American society and that is closely linked to America’s obsessively individualistic bent,” she told me via email.

In recent months, hospitals have stopped requiring people to wear masks in their facilities. We speak with a Dr. Kaitlin Sundling, an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the UW–Madison, who is among many health care workers calling for universal masking in medical facilities because of the risks facing workers and patients.

“If you’re drinking one to two drinks (per day) because it’s good for you, it doesn’t necessarily increase the length of your life,” said Dr. Patrick Remington, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison medical school. “There’s no evidence in this large, well-designed study of a life-extending benefit.”

“During the pandemic almost everything Covid related, whether it was vaccines or testing or treatment was all covered by the government. Basically, it was all subsidized that starts to go away. Now, what’s covered depends on who your insurer is, or if you have insurance,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer at UW Health.

UW Health psychologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain said Mother’s Day can be an emotional trigger for many.

“Almost in anyone’s life, there are going to be years where Mother’s Day is really challenging,” Mirgain said.

Shilagh Mirgain, a health psychologist for UW Health, says reframing how you view the day may help you still enjoy it and work through those hard feelings.

“Reframing the focus of this holiday can be an effective way to celebrate all the positive attributes of motherhood you may not have experienced yourself as a child or missed out on as an adult,” she said.

“Certainly fewer people are dying than were dying in the beginning of the pandemic, but we’re still losing over 200 Americans a day,” says Prof. Tiffany Green, a health economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I hope the average person in Wisconsin doesn’t see the ending of the emergency declaration as the ending of the pandemic,” says Prof. Ajay Sethi, a UW-Madison epidemiologist.

Dr. Mark Moss, an allergist at UW-Madison’s School of Medicine is the station master of the university’s pollen counting site, which is part of a nationwide network of such stations. He’s been the station master for 13 years, and the university has pollen counts going back into the 1990s.

“Over the past two decades, there has been two clear changes: the beginning of the season in the spring starts earlier and the end of the season in the fall goes later,” Moss said.

Quoted: “I feel like we hear about new places that have PFAS every day,” said Christy Remucal, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of engineering who studies the chemicals and did not participate in the study.

Interview with Dr. Patrick Remington, a professor emeritus in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, about the results of a new review of 107 other studies, and its conclusions about whether low-level alcohol drinking extended people’s lives.

Jenny Higgins, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Collaborative for Reproductive Equity and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, said the biggest takeaway from the report was that these declines were not balanced out by increases in the number of abortions happening in states where abortion access is less restricted.

“One of the things that people had expected after Dobbs was that states like California would get an influx of people … states with relatively few restrictions,” Higgins said. “What the #WeCount report shows is that we haven’t seen the flooding into those states.”