In a joint message, Access Community Health Centers, Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin, Stoughton Health, SSM Health, UnityPoint Health-Meriter, UW Health and Madison’s Veterans Hospital said they wanted to remind people that masks are still required in their facilities.
“I think there does have to be some type of forethought as people come back to campus in the middle of this,” said Medical Director for Infection Prevention at UW-Madison, Dr. Dan Shirley. “It’s really keeping up to date and thinking about some of these factors leading to the spread of Monkeypox.”
In 2007, only two years after the 1918 flu sequence was completely decoded, influenza researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Tokyo and the University of Wisconsin described, in a paper in Nature, how he and his colleagues used the sequence to create live, infectious 1918 flu viruses. To demonstrate that these really were flu viruses, they infected 7 macaques with them. Not surprisingly, the macaques got severely ill, and the scientists eventually euthanized all of them.
People hospitalized with COVID-19 in the first 20 months of the pandemic were more likely to die if they had active cancer but not if they had a past history of cancer, according to a large new study led by UW-Madison researchers.
Chemotherapy and other treatments can suppress immune systems and cancer can deplete other physical reserves, making it harder to fight infections like COVID-19, said Dr. Margaret Nolan, the UW-Madison scientist who headed up the study.
An antibody drug decreased asthma attacks by 27% in Black and Hispanic children and adolescents who have severe asthma, are prone to asthma attacks and live in low-income urban neighborhoods, a federally funded study led by UW-Madison researchers found.
Medications like mepolizumab have “revolutionized” treatment for adults with severe asthma, but data in children and diverse populations had been limited, said Dr. Daniel Jackson, a UW School of Medicine and Public Health professor of pediatrics who led the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Noted: That is why rather than skyrocketing, food insecurity rates remained largely unchanged during the pandemic, said Judi Bartfeld, project coordinator for the Wisconsin Food Security Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said the “robust” federal response kept people fed, despite widespread unemployment.
Power was fully restored to UW Hospital Saturday evening after a malfunction to one of the building’s electrical transformers caused the emergency department to divert patients for more than five hours while power to “critical” infrastructure and equipment ran on a backup generator.
Over 80 UW Madison staff members and community members have signed an open letter calling for increased COVID protections on the UW-Madison campus.
“These changes in recent years have prompted approaches that are beginning to make a real impact on improving the care and outcome of children with diseases thought incurable 10 years ago,” says Paul Sondel, the Reed and Carolee Walker professor of pediatric oncology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and a pediatric oncologist for more than 40 years. “Nevertheless, while we are seeing new progress, we know there is still a long way to go to be able to cure all children with cancer.”
Good sleep habits are important for both kids and adults, but they’re especially important for kids so they can get the most out of school, according to Dr. Rachna Tiwari, pediatric sleep specialist, UW Health Kids, and clinical assistant professor, UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Tiwari says kids who don’t get enough sleep may struggle with focus or be irritable.
For more than two and a half years, UW Health Nurses have asked for their union to be recognized. They said having a union would allow them to “have a seat at the table” in advocating for themselves, their patients and their community.
Emily Kumlien, UW Health Press Secretary told 27 News:
“At UW Health, we encourage our nurses to make their voices heard. Hundreds of them are doing that through our shared governance system of nursing councils, driving the continuous improvement that makes us not just a great place to work, but the #1 hospital in Wisconsin 11 straight years.”
Noted: Beyond Usona, the Midwest has been waking up to psychedelic medicine’s potential. UW-Madison and University of Michigan both started research centers for psychedelic drugs in 2021. Ohio State launched such a center earlier this year. University of Chicago has a leading researcher in the field in Harriet de Wit. And the Medical College of Wisconsin has one of the best serotonin-based pharmacology researchers in John McCorvy.
It’s not talked about much, but it’s more common than you may think, according to University of Wisconsin experts. The condition affects approximately 10% of men per decade of life (i.e., 40% of men in their 40s, 50 percent of men in their 50s, 60% of men in their 60s).
The Supreme Court’s controversial Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which was released on June 24, has led to vast disparities in reproductive healthcare access between states. In Wisconsin, the reversal of Roe v. Wade allowed the state’s 173-year-old abortion legislation to be enforced.
Some colleges have, or plan to make, abortion medication available … the University of Wisconsin-Madison is unlikely to follow. As of now, University Health Services (UHS) on campus does not provide abortion medication.
“[Abortion medication] care falls outside the scope of our services. This is not affected by the recent Supreme Court decision,” UHS health communications strategist Sarah Clifford said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison responded with recommendations from Public Health Madison and Dane County (PHMDC) health officials as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared Dane County a “high” community level of transmission as of July 21. This is because of an increase in hospitalizations and confirmed cases around the county.
Quoted: “In the absence of any maternal illness, genetic abnormalities in the fetus — including those that would not allow the fetus to survive outside the womb — do not constitute a life-threatening condition for the mother,” Dr. Lisa Barroilhet, interim chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said in a written statement. “Because the abortion is not being performed to save of the life of the mother, it would not be legal in Wisconsin per the 1849 statute.”
“While UW Health has a resident program that enables recent RT graduates to be hired and begin working under a licensed RT, they are limited in the work they can perform until they obtain a license,” UW Health Press Secretary Emily Kumlien said in a statement. “Though challenges continue, UW Health is working to fill vacancies across the health system.
UW Health’s chief quality officer Dr. Jeff Pothof joins Live at Four to talk about the latest COVID-19 headlines.
Quoted: “Younger generations keep seeing this message of doom and gloom and the end of the world in 12 years, 15 years and so on,” Dominique Brossard, professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. “We know from research in the psychology of risk that if you keep on talking about doom, what you end up doing is fueling a feeling of helplessness, anxiety.”
Quoted: “It’s usually not just contact in passing, but really close skin-to-skin contact, that’s the major risk to spread,” said Dr. Dan Shirley, medical director of infection prevention at UW Health.
Research from the American Chemical Society concluded that the oxalate in soy and foods made from soy might increase the chances of developing kidney stones (via Science Daily). This is because oxalate and calcium are two key components of a type of kidney stone. However, registered dietician Dr. Kristina Penniston told the University of Wisconsin that oxalate-rich foods tend to contain other components that could inhibit kidney stones from forming. Additionally, not getting enough calcium (which is added to some soy milks) can lead to your body absorbing too much oxalate, which can result in calcium oxalate stones.
“In Chicago and New York, in areas where there’s hundreds of cases, there are vaccine programs that are starting to get launched. And Wisconsin is prepared to do that, but there’s some details to work out when there’s sort of an opportunity to do that. Where there’s a lot of cases, we can expect a vaccine program at some point,” Ajay Sethi, a population health sciences professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison said.
The University of Wisconsin Hospitals has been ranked as the number one hospital in Wisconsin by the U.S. News and World Report’s Best Hospital list for the eleventh year in a row.
Quoted: “When we get that high community level CDC indicator, that’s when community-wide masking is really necessary,” said Ajay Sethi, a University of Wisconsin epidemiologist. Even at lower community levels of COVID-19, “people who are especially vulnerable to severe disease should always be wearing their mask indoors,” he added.
For the first time, researchers have learned two cancer drivers are linked together, and some top University of Wisconsin scientists are taking the credit for the incredible discovery.
“It’s an emergent field,” lead author Dr. Mo Chen said as she explored how the two most mutated cancers markers actually work together.
“Science teaches you that you have to be open to things that are unexpected,” UW Health’s Dr. Vince Cryns said of what they found underneath the microscope.
Dr. Nathaniel Chin, who grew up in Watertown and got undergraduate and medical degrees from UW-Madison, planned to specialize in infectious diseases. But during his internal medicine residency at the University of California-San Diego, his father — a family medicine doctor in Watertown — was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
The event, taking place at Capital Brewery in Middleton on August 14, allows for participants to choose from a 50k, 25k or 5k bike ride as well as a 5k run or two-mile roll and stroll that is open to walkers, scooters, wheelchairs, skateboards and dogs!
While it may be clear that doom-scrolling may have a negative effect on your mental health, a new report out of UW Madison shows that it may not just be negative news, but any negative news in excess.
Earlier today, WORT Producer Nate Wegehaupt spoke with Markus Brauer, a psychology professor at UW Madison, about the report.
Written by Andrea Dutton, an international expert on climate change and sea level rise who is a MacArthur Fellow and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Noted: A study by the Medical College of Wisconsin and The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in March 2021 reported that firearm-related homicides in Milwaukee among non-Hispanic African Americans were 14.6 times greater than among white residents. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has also reported that there has been more than a dozen juvenile homicides as of late June.
Eight years ago, as John Jartz and his wife drove home to Barrington Hills, Ill., after their first visit with kidney transplant specialists at UW Health, he suddenly became overwhelmed with emotion.
“We found our place,” Jartz told his wife. “It just hit me.”
“My research is [focused on] how to improve access, how to make sure that communities benefit from the research, and how to make life a little easier, at least on the healthcare side,” says Dr. Maria Mora Pinzón, a preventive medicine physician and scientist at the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who focuses her research on improving access to Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD) services within the Latinx community.
Noted: Before the pandemic hit, 1 in 12 Wisconsinites were food insecure — meaning they couldn’t or were uncertain they could get the food they needed. Food insecurity is linked to children struggling more in school, worse health outcomes in all age groups and greater stress on families, according to the Wisconsin Food Security Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “[Infected people] are shedding virus through those blisters during that period, until it sort of scabs over,” said Dr. Ajay Sethi, a population health scientist at the University of Wisconsin. “They’re itchy, they can be painful. When they scab over, you’re no longer infectious. But there’s a several week period when you are infectious. It’s not that different from chickenpox.”
Quoted: UW–Madison clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology Dr. Christine Whelan says this number will reduce the stigma attached to mental health care.
“This an incredibly important and frankly long overdue and much awaited necessary tool in the fight against suicide and to really raise awareness about mental health. So, when we break an arm or have a physical emergency, we might call 9-1-1, and now to have 9-8-8 for a mental health emergency is really finally sending the right message,” said Whelan.
Quoted: “Scientists are developing an Omicron-specific booster, and BA4 and BA5-specific boosters, but you know that process, they must finalize and test them, then get formal approval, so the exact timing is still unknown,” said Dan Shirley, the Medical Director of Infection Prevention at UW Health.
Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer with UW Health, joined FOX6 News Tuesday, July 19 to discuss the latest COVID-19 information, including the BA.5 variant.
UW Health’s chief quality officer Dr. Jeff Pothof joins Live at Four to talk about the latest COVID-19 headlines.
Noted: Djamali became a nephrologist himself and spent more than two decades practicing at the University of Wisconsin Health Transplant Center in Madison.
That’s where he met Jartz, among hundreds of other patients.
Late last year, Djamali decided to leave the UW Health Transplant Center to take a job at Maine Medical Center. But he made another decision around the same time. He would donate his kidney to Jartz.
Beyond Hunger, a new series by Wisconsin Watch produced by University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism students, will launch on July 21 with an evaluation of how pandemic-related programs alleviated a lot of hunger — and what it means for Wisconsin now that those support systems are fading.
Quoted: IUD insertion pain may be another example of the gender pain gap, an adjacent topic that has recently been experiencing a swell of attention. It’s based on the understanding that there is an implicit bias in health care rooted in sexism and racism that has led to the underserving of women in medical settings. Even if your practitioner is another person with a uterus, and a person of color, they are working within a system that still doesn’t adequately legitimize pain experienced by women or marginalized folks.
“The pain gap is particularly pronounced when it comes to gynecological services, because for most of medical history, and up until now, women’s voices about what they are experiencing have been disregarded, minimized and trivialized,” says Leigh Senderowicz, a health disparities research scholar at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Dr. Aji Djamali got to fulfill a unique dream last month. Since studying in France alongside a kidney specialist, Djamali had dreamed of donating a kidney to someone in need of a transplant. That dream continued on after he became a kidney specialist at UW Health.
The 9th annual Roll and Stroll for Pancreas Cancer event will kick off on August 14. Attendees can take part in a 50K, 25K or 5K bike ride, a 5K run or a two-mile roll and stroll.
UW Health explained that the dream started years ago during his medical training in France, where he worked under a kidney transplant specialist he admired. Dr. Djamali later became a kidney transplant specialist himself at UW Health, also serving as the chief of the division of nephrology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Noted: While the country as a whole is facing an obesity crisis, the problem is much more pronounced in some states. To identify the most obese states, 24/7 Tempo reviewed health data from the 2022 County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute joint program.
One of the experts Frederickson enlisted to help chart that path was James Tinjum, the director of the geological engineering program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In addition to helping the city develop an easy-to-understand guide to PFAS for residents, Tinjum and some of his graduate students also launched research in Rhinelander, putting together a map of how water flows and interacts in the water table beneath the city and its surrounding areas.
“It’s a way to draw analysis to what types of compounds are contributing to the ‘fingerprints’ of the wells, whether it’s an organic sludge, (firefighting foam), or a more dispersed pattern of PFAS typical of landfill situations,” Tinjum said. “If we don’t have this information, we don’t know how to fix the problem.”
Quoted: “By definition, chronic fatigue syndrome symptoms must be ongoing for at least six months,” says Dr. Srivani Sridhar, a family physician with UW Health Northern in Rockford, Illinois. “It can last several years or a lifetime without treatment. Symptoms can also wax and wane over months and years.”
Quoted: The ambiguity in Wisconsin’s state abortion ban, for instance, has left doctors like Abigail Cutler, an OBGYN in Wisconsin, in an impossible bind. Wisconsin’s law, written in 1849, allows abortions to “save the life of the mother.” “Where’s that line?” Cutler asks. “How close does a patient need to be? On the brink of death for me to step in and intervene? What if I wait too long and she dies in front of me? Or what if in the eyes of some prosecutor who’s not a doctor, not at the bedside, not staring at the patient bleeding or infected in front of them—to them, what if I intervene too soon, and I’m charged and risk going to prison?”
Quoted: Prof. Tiffany Green, a health economist at the University of Wisconsin who studies health equity, particularly in the area of obstetric and reproductive care, calls expanding access to reproductive health services “crucial and important in helping people to exercise their right to reproductive autonomy.”
At the same time, “it is not a substitute for abortion care access,” she said, adding that she believes that Madison and Dane County officials understand that as well.
Green said it will be important as agencies expand their services that they do so in ways that reach out to the communities they serve and take time to understand and respect their needs and preferences. That will include being careful about scheduling times when they provide their services. It will also include being culturally responsive and respectful to people of color and to other marginalized groups, including transgender and gender-non-conforming people, she added.
It will also include heeding and respecting the contraceptive choices that their patients want to make, rather than “pushing a kind of contraception on them they do not want,” Green said. “There is a history of doing that with Black people.”
Quoted: Medical Director for Infection Prevention at UW Health Dr. Dan Shirley told CBS 58 BA.5, a subvariant of omicron, seems to be the dominant strain.
“It has a little bit better capacity to overcome our immunity,” Shirley said.
It’s hard to resist the urge to spend as much time outside as possible in the summer.
But, experts at UW Health in Madison say it is important to maintain skin safety while enjoying all that sunshine.
“Over the years, we’ve started to bring awareness about skin cancer in general and interestingly enough we are still seeing an increase in incidents of melanoma across the United States,” said Medical Oncologist at UW Health Dr. Vincent Ma.
When Katie Sullivan arrived as a first-year student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison last fall, she encountered one barrier after another to her college education: classrooms with limited accessibility for students in wheelchairs; an elevator that was broken for months, forcing some disabled students to take a freight elevator; buses with only two spots for students in wheelchairs; a professor who she said refused to accommodate her academic needs.
Quoted: “This one-size-fits-all approach is truly devastating for my patients and the doctors who take care of them,” said Dr. Abigail Cutler, a practicing OB-GYN and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-School of Medicine in Madison.
Noted: Once regulations are changed, UW must provide its students with a method to learn abortion procedures out of state to remain an accredited by NACGME.
“While the OB-GYN residents previously had access to clinical training in abortion, that access is now significantly limited,” UW Health said in a statement. “It remains too soon to predict what options we will pursue, but we are focused on training OB-GYN physicians to provide the most comprehensive care possible.”
Noted: According to the study, which was conducted by researchers with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the state Department of Health Services, 92% of the 4,452 adults surveyed said they had eaten fish within the last 12 months, with most of those surveyed reported eating fish they purchased. But because the fish were bought, instead of caught, those consuming the fish were likely to be less aware of the advisories.
Henry Anderson, one of the researchers involved in the study and a professor at the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said to counter the lack of information, states in the Great Lakes region should focus on putting advisory information in areas they know people will be looking.
“You don’t go to the grocery store and go to the fish counter there and point to the salmon or sea bass or walleye and ask what the fish consumption advisory is,” Anderson said.
Noted: The adult smoking rate for Black people living in Wisconsin is 30%, or nearly three times higher than white people in the state at 12%. That 18 percentage point disparity is the widest gap between Black and white smokers in the nation, according to Dr. Michael Fiore, co-author and director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention.
The statistics may give researchers clues about how to reduce those numbers and save lives, Fiore said.
Urologists at UW Health have seen roughly 30 vasectomies per week in the past month, double the number they saw during the same period last summer.
With funding from organizations such as WARF (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation), CUNA Mutual Group, Dane Arts, and the Morgridge Center for Public Service, Karanja and her team were able to bring important conversations to the forefront regarding women of color in STEM fields. These are conversations that Karanja and the Represented Collective look to continue at an event tonight at the Goodman Community Center on Madison’s near east side titled “Legendary: An Evening of Celebration.” It will be a night of cocktails and conversation and commemoration of women in the STEM fields.
With a focus on women of color, the event will feature a group of panelists including Ana Hooker (Senior Vice President & Chief Laboratory Officer at Exact Sciences), Angela Jenkins (Technology Project Manager at American Family Insurance), Ponmozhi Manickavalli Sathappan (IT Manager at CUNA Mutual Group), and Dr. Jasmine Zapata (Chief Medical Officer for Community Health at Wisconsin Department of Health Services, Division of Public Health, and Physician and Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health) who will lead a community discussion regarding issues of representation, professionalism, visibility, microaggressions, macroaggressions, and many other topics that affect the experiences of women across the STEM fields.
Along with being able to hear from the panelists, event-goers will also be able to partake in celebrating the accomplishments of Erika Bullock and Maxine McKinney de Royston who are both assistant professors in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education.
