James Thomson, the University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist who first isolated and grew human embryonic stem cells, inspiring a generation of researchers, and igniting a furious ethical debate that he would later help resolve, will be retiring in July after more than 30 years with the school.
“I see the devastating effects of this viral infection every day as it leads to death and disability of my patients who were previously leading healthy, active lives,” Dr. Jeannina Smith, medical director of the transplant and immunocompromised host service at the University of Wisconsin, told ABC News. “Omicron was not mild for our patients.”
Ozioma Okonkwo at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
It’s hard enough to deal with one of those—but when there are so many stressful matters orbiting at once? It’s a lot, says Victoria Egizio, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in Madison. “The Russian invasion of the Ukraine is now on top of all of the other anxiety-provoking events that have been unfolding in the world during the last couple of years,” Dr. Egizio tells The Healthy.
With mask mandates lifting once again and some itching to return to normal, the head of UW Hospital’s Transplant Infectious Disease Program called for continued vigilance on behalf of her immunocompromised patients.
Dr. Jeannina Smith, who also teaches in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Medicine, said her patients are “very valuable, vital (and) important members of our society.”
Nonetheless, they are particularly susceptible to COVID-19 as Wisconsin approaches the end of its second full year in the pandemic.
An array of faculty, staff, undergraduate employees, and University of Wisconsin community members gathered over a Zoom call this Tuesday for mobilization around COVID safety and policy on campus. The meeting was organized in direct response to a University announcement that it would allow its indoor mask mandate to expire on March 11th, which falls a day before the school’s spring break. The expiration will take place 10 days after the rest of Dane County, which announced the end of required indoor masking effective at midnight on March 1st.
University of Wisconsin-Madison instructors will be able to recommend their students continue wearing face masks after a campus mask mandate expires March 12. But despite concerns about immunocompromised or otherwise at-risk staff, faculty are being told to masking will now come down to personal choice.
Hundreds of nurses at UW Health picketed in front of the hospital’s emergency room Thursday evening, calling on administrators to recognize their union.
Quoted: Andrea Bill, assistant director of the Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which analyzes state traffic data, said people in all regions of the state are speeding more.
Researchers first tracked an increase in speeding when the pandemic shutdowns in early 2020 caused dramatic reductions in the number of cars on the road. By mid-2021, Bill said, volume in Wisconsin was nearly back to pre-pandemic levels — but average speeds hadn’t come down.
“What I thought would happen was that when the traffic came back to normal, we would see the speeds go back down to where they were before 2020,” Bill said. “And we did not see that in 2021.”
Noted: Brian Levy is an assistant professor of sociology at George Mason University. Karl Vachuska is a research assistant in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their study looked at data in Wisconsin, San Francisco and Seattle.
Madisonians were able to put their trivia knowledge to the test for a good cause Thursday night.
Hundreds of UW Health employees picketed outside UW Hospital Thursday evening calling for solutions to what they call a crisis within the healthcare system.
UW Health nurses have not had a union since their previous contract expired in 2014. They’ve been trying to change that for two years and rallied Thursday across from American Family Children’s Hospital in support of the effort.
Have you ever wondered how to ask your sexual partner if they have an STI? Or where to find sexual health resources on and around campus? Well, The Daily Cardinal and Sex Out Loud have the answers to these questions, and more, for you.
Noted: Research from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Wisconsin-Madison indicates a proposed ban on abortion after six weeks could affect women who don’t know they’re pregnant yet, preventing them from getting an abortion later after pregnancy is confirmed through a test.
“I think it’s important for policymakers to know there may be essentially no time between when a person discovers they are pregnant, the missed period, and fetal cardiac activity,” said Jenna Nobles, professor of sociology at the UW-Madison. “It’s particularly true for people with unpredictable cycles, which is more common in young people, Hispanic people and people with common medical conditions.”
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and other universities recently published the findings of a four-year study called Baby’s First Years, which looked at the impact of “poverty reduction on family life and infant and toddlers’ cognitive, emotional, and brain development.”
“The White House and CDC are in a no-win position,” said David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin. “Not only is there not a one-size-fits-all solution that they can recommend to the entire country, but there are a spectrum of reasonable options given a receding Omicron surge in late winter.”
University of Wisconsin System officials say they plan to end their campus mask mandates by spring break.
UW System interim President Tommy Thompson announced Wednesday that widespread vaccinations and waning case numbers on system campuses and across the state justify the move.
Quoted: “The sad truth of endometriosis is that very often young girls who complain of pain or painful periods are told that everyone’s periods are painful; just live with it,” said Bala Bhagavath, UW Health’s fertility clinic’s medical director of Generations of Fertility Care.
The 26 University of Wisconsin System campuses will begin lifting masking requirements as soon as March 1 and no later than spring break, outgoing System President Tommy Thompson announced Wednesday.
Chancellor Rebecca Blank announced Wednesday that the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s current on-campus mask mandate will be extended to March 11. The decision follows an announcement made earlier in the day by the UW system that all on-campus mask mandates will be allowed to expire in early March.
The University of Wisconsin announced in an email that its mask mandate will expire March 12, the day spring recess begins.
According to a statement issued by interim president Tommy Thompson Wednesday morning, the reversal will come by spring break at the latest. Those dates vary by campus, with UW-Madison’s recess beginning March 12.
UW-Madison will lift its mask mandate when spring break starts March 12, a move criticized by some on campus as too soon to begin easing up on the COVID-19 safety measure.
More than one in five employees at UW Health will soon see larger paychecks as the administrators announce they plan to increase its base wage this spring.
UW Health is increasing its minimum hourly wage from $15 to $17 in May, a move that affects more than 20% of employees, the organization said Wednesday.
Video: UW Health’s chief quality officer Dr. Jeff Pothof joins Live at Four to talk about the latest COVID-19 headlines.
Ivermectin’s popularity can be traced, in large part, to two men: Dr. Pierre Kory, a former critical-care specialist at the University of Wisconsin, and Dr. Paul Marik, the former chief of critical care at Eastern Virginia Medical School. The duo formed the FLCCC in April 2020, along with six other doctors and two former journalists.
UW Health is offering congenital heart disease patients an alternative to open heart surgery. Doctors believe the new therapy will improve the quality of life and recovery time for the many patients living with the disease, including local youth hockey coach Cole Hefty.
UW Health workers must receive a booster by May 2. Failure to comply could result in job termination.
UW Health providers, staff, students and volunteers are required to get a COVID-19 vaccine booster by May 2, the organization said Wednesday. About 96% of staff are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, following a requirement announced last year. UW Health and UnityPoint Health-Meriter announced vaccination requirements in August after SSM Health, including St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, did so in June 2021.
UW Health workers will soon be required to have received an extra dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. On Wednesday, the health system announced it would require booster shots for its providers, staff, students, and volunteers starting in early May.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies reproductive health said the findings of a recent news story highlighting potential fraud among Milwaukee’s prenatal care coordination companies were “really atrocious and really horrific.”
Tiffany Green, an assistant professor in the departments of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology, specializes in racial disparities within reproductive health.
As a new subvariant of the omicron strain of COVID-19 emerges in Wisconsin, UW Health says vaccination and good public health practices are critical at shortening this phase of the pandemic.
’The situation is dire,’ UW Health nurse says.
“We can’t use a crystal ball to see what COVID-19 will bring us next, but we do know the now approved vaccines for COVID-19 work against these variants when we are fully vaccinated,” Dr. Nasia Safdar, a UW Health infectious disease specialists, said in a statement. “We can do our parts to prevent prolonging this pandemic by getting vaccinated and getting our booster shots.”
Quoted: Choosing day care doesn’t inherently harm a baby, but stress — whether related to the separation or worries about the quality or cost of care — can hinder their development, said Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of human development and family studies.
“Babies are often really sensitive to what’s going on,” she said.
Since babies require high-quality, lower-stress care, Poehlmann-Tynan said, policymakers should consider how best to support a child’s transition to family life.
A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison explains how hibernating animals use bacteria in their gut to maintain muscle density over the winter. The findings could lead to solutions for people with muscle-wasting disorders or astronauts headed on prolonged journeys into space.
Hannah Carey is a professor emeritus at UW-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine and an author of the study. She said scientists have known for years that ruminant animals, like cows and sheep, are able to recycle their own nitrogen as a way to build muscles while eating a low protein diet. Nitrogen is a vital building block of amino acids and proteins.
A subvariant of omicron that could spread more rapidly than the original omicron has been detected in Wisconsin.
A case of the subvariant, known as BA.2, was detected the week of Jan. 16 in Wisconsin, according to an online dashboard maintained by the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Unlike other public employees affected by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10, which banned collective bargaining except for cost-of-living pay increases, UW Hospital workers are not state or municipal employees. When the hospital became a public authority separate from the university in 1996, it acquired its own special status. How Act 10 and other laws apply to that status accounts for most of the legal arguments over whether UW Health, one of the largest employers in Dane County, can recognize the union for collective bargaining.
Noted: Statewide, 69 percent of people are aware that global warming is happening, according to a 2020 University of Wisconsin-Madison report which said people are “eager” to hear from health professionals.
Quoted: “Everything we do alters the selective pressures on the virus,” said Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If you wear a mask, then it pays for the virus to sit and wait. If you go to big parties and don’t wear a mask, it will favor viruses that are more aggressive, and that make you sicker so that they can move into new people faster.”
“The virus is like a horror movie villain,” said Thomas Friedrich, a professor of pathobiological sciences at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine. “Every time you think it is dead, it comes back.”
Justin Giebel, 25, is a registered nurse in UW Health’s COVID ICU. Recently he’s had to work five night shifts in a row and then stay on for a day shift because the hospital was short-staffed by seven nurses. Many nurses Giebel works with have panic attacks at work, have needed to take leaves of absence or just left nursing altogether, he said.
The health care workers have partnered with the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a national think-tank housed on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which works to build and support worker-centered partnerships, said director of the center Joel Rogers.
Noted: “The pandemic exacerbated a long-term trend,” said Patrick Remington, an emeritus professor with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Population Health Sciences, on WPR’s “Central Time.”
Alcohol is pervasive in Wisconsin culture. A 2019 report called “The Burden of Binge Drinking in Wisconsin” from the UW-Madison Population Health Institute found the state’s rate of binge drinking to be higher than the U.S. overall.
Noted: Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Institutes of Health published their study late last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, in which they analyzed a total of 1.6 million menstrual cycles, using anonymized data self-reported through a smartphone app by 267,000 people.
They found 22% of the people in their study had menstrual cycles that vary by a week or more, a finding that is consistent with other research on the topic, said Jenna Nobles, a UW-Madison demographer who led the study. Nearly all the study’s subjects identified as women, she said.
“Less than 1% of cycles are 28-day cycles with day 14 ovulation, even though that is the stylized version of menstruation that we all learn about,” she said.
Nobles conducted the research with UW-Madison graduate student Lindsay Cannon and NIH emeritus investigator Allen Wilcox, who is a physician and a renowned scholar of reproductive epidemiology. Wilcox’s previous research has served as the foundation of knowledge around topics including when in the menstrual cycle people get pregnant and how likely it is that people will have miscarriages.
“Fish oils, like any nutritional supplement, are not regulated by the FDA the way prescription drugs are, so you can never be quite sure of what you’re getting,” says James Stein, M.D., a professor of cardiovascular research at the University of Wisconsin. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re dangerous; it just means you might not be getting all you’ve paid fo
Quoted: Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer for UW Health, said that helps eliminate a lot of the bias that may otherwise be present.
“To have folks studying medications, really any medications, within the confines and safety of a well-conducted clinical trial, that’s how we learn things in science,” said Pothof. “Those kinds of studies are welcome, although hard to do and time-consuming and resource-consuming.”
“I don’t think there is sufficient public discourse on what the big picture implications of this kind of technology becoming available [are],” said Dr. Karola Kreitmair, assistant professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jake Baggott, executive director of University Health Services at UW-Madison, describes campus preparations for students starting the spring 2022 semester as COVID-19’s omicron surge continues.
Here’s what guests on the Jan. 21, 2022 episode had to say about returning UW-Madison students in the midst of the Omicron surge, whether it has yet to peak in Wisconsin, medical ethics involved in treating COVID-19 patients and why the state figures so prominently in the national politics of election practices.
Cancer researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are getting help from a unique partner on campus – sharks.
Dr. Aaron LeBeau, an associate professor of pathology and lab medicine, and radiology, at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, will be leading the shark-based cancer research. It is currently the only research of its kind in the world.
Quoted: The outcome of patients across the country depends not only on the condition they have, but also their health and the care they receive. In a widely shared social media post before Christmas, a longtime ER nurse at University Hospital in Madison described in stark terms how the facility was overflowing with sick — and mostly unvaccinated — COVID-19 patients and the toll it takes on staff and other patients.
“I know that sometimes when I say goodbye to these people, I’m never going to see them again. Because they’re going to die. They’re never going to make it out of this place,” the nurse, identified only as Sue, said. “It’s hard. We have nurses leaving this profession. They’re burned out. They’re overworked.”
“The authors were incredibly thoughtful in how they approached the data and considered other variables,” said Dr. Nathaniel A. Chin, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the study. “They compared cataract surgery to non-vision-improving surgery — glaucoma surgery — and controlled for many important confounding variables.” Dr. Chin is the medical director of the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
The University of Wisconsin — Madison has indicated COVID vaccinations are required for any “student hourly employees” regardless of one’s remote status, and Prince George’s Community College in Maryland confirmed to TND that regardless of learning modality – in-person, hybrid, online – all students and faculty are required to show proof of vaccination.
Since the condition is so rare, Houser needed to be cared for by a neurosurgeon who was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. After about a week and a half in the intensive care unit at St. Vincent’s, Houser was still unable to be transferred because there were no open beds at UW Madison for her.
New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows balance training using video games changed the brain structure of adolescents with autism and helped improve balance, posture and the severity of autism symptoms.
Brittany Travers, a UW-Madison occupational therapy professor and Waisman Center lead researcher, said she and her colleagues are interested in finding ways to better interventions that improve the motor skills of individuals with autism. She said prior research has shown balance control appears to plateau earlier in kids with autism than those without. As people age balance becomes more of a challenge for everyone, Travers said.
“But the speculation is that autistic individuals may be more at risk for falls and later in life if these balance challenges are not addressed,” Travers said.
Quoted: “We’re likely to see more infections, and those breakthrough infections can be quite serious,” said Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program. “I think any place where outbreaks are likely to happen – and certainly long-term care facilities are places where that can happen – we should be concerned.”
UW Health nurses were sounding the alarm on working conditions before COVID-19 strained the health care system to the brink.
The three largest University of Wisconsin System campuses are reporting spikes in positive cases of COVID-19 weeks before the start of spring semester classes. While some of the state’s smaller, private colleges push start dates back, UW campuses say they’re starting on time and in-person.
UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank told a faculty committee during a Monday meeting that she didn’t know what percentage of the campus community is boosted beyond those who received it at University Health Services. The university will be encouraging students and staff to report if they have been boosted off-campus to get a better picture of booster status across UW-Madison.
