“These vaccines are so effective and so good at preventing you from getting sick and preventing you from making other people sick that life does really return to normal,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof.
The Boot Camp for New Dads at American Family Children’s Hospital started a few years ago, but it was moved virtually during the pandemic.
UW Health is holding a support group for fathers with an interactive boot camp. The company launched the “Boot Camp” for dads in 2019, and is a one-time three hour workshop for first-time dads to ask questions and talk with more experienced fathers. “Most of the classes for the, for new parents has been focused around mom. So this is a class or a workshop that’s focused around fathers. And it’s run by fathers for fathers,” program director Will Housley said
UW Health experts said that because of the pandemic, donations have significantly declined, however the hospital has enough for now but with pandemic restrictions being lifted, this could lead to more injuries which calls for the need for more blood.
Conversations continue over how to get the vaccine to vulnerable communities.
Dr. Paula Cody, UW Health adolescent medicine specialist, explained that it is important for parents to look for warning signs in adolescents when it comes to these disorders.
“This is a national trend we are seeing locally as well with patients between the ages of 12 and 18,” UW Health adolescent medicine specialist Dr. Paula Cody said. “It will be important for parents to look for warning signs.”
A UW doctor will soon have a special place in American medical history. Dr. Laura McDowell will become the first person in the nation to complete a residency training program as an OB-GYN specifically focusing on caring for women in rural places.
The residency program was started in September of 2016 to combat the nationwide shortage of obstetricians and gynecologists, according to UW Health and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
When Dr. Laura McDowell finishes her obstetrics and gynecology training at UW Health this month, she will be the first person in the country to complete such a residency program focused on caring for women in rural areas.
Dr. Vivian is a professor in the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy and president of African American Health Network (AAHN), where she pushes for equity in underserved communities, with a specific emphasis on diabetes.
Written by Sarah Halpern-Meekin, an associate professor at La Follette School of Public Affairs and the School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Eva Vivian’s passion for health equity continues to change lives in her community and for that, the Wisconsin Institute for Healthy Aging (WIHA) recognized her work with the 2021 Healthy Aging STAR Award for Health Equity at a recent virtual ceremony.
The award – one of five presented in conjunction with the 2021 Healthy Aging Summit on June 4 – recognizes and honors individuals that improve health, wellness and access to care in communities throughout Wisconsin.
Dr. Vivian is a professor in the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy and president of African American Health Network (AAHN), where she pushes for equity in underserved communities, with a specific emphasis on diabetes.
Quoted: That the decision to get a COVID-19 vaccine often includes a political dimension is a predictable result of the policy response to the pandemic as it unfolded over an exceptionally tumultuous period in American politics, according to Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s not surprising that people’s attitudes toward vaccination can line sometimes with political beliefs because the disease has been discussed in those arenas,” Sethi said.
National polling conducted over spring 2021 has shown eagerness for the vaccines among Democratic voters, while Republican voters have indicated tepid enthusiasm, with a distinct difference between men and women. But simple partisanship doesn’t tell a complete story about who is open to getting vaccinated.
“It’s even more pointedly about the Biden-Trump difference,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at UW-Madison and director of the university’s Elections Research Center.
Burden noted that voters’ preference in the 2020 presidential election “is far more predictive [of their vaccination views] than a person’s race, or age, or income, or just about any other thing that might be asked in a survey.”
The spot released Thursday, produced by UW Health, features the Republican Walker placing a Zoom call to Doyle, a Democrat. Both are in their personal offices and never appear in the same room together.
Dr. Jeff Pothof, UW Health’s chief quality officer, joins the call at the end to encourage everyone to get their shot.
UW Health, an academic medical system that is affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, which is behind the public service announcement, moved to cut the ad as the state attempts to address a sharp disparity in vaccination rates in different counties. In Wisconsin, some counties are seeing less than 30 percent vaccination rates while others are nearing 70 percent.
Marquette University’s announcement Monday makes it the third private institution in the state to impose a vaccine mandate as the University of Wisconsin System continues its stance of encouraging but not requiring vaccination.
Morgridge Institute for Research Virology Director Paul Ahlquist identifies both research advancements and social science as the key to tackling the next pandemic.
Marquette University, Wisconsin’s latest private college, will require students to get vaccinated against the coronavirus before attending classes this fall, the Milwaukee school announced Monday.
Republicans who control the Legislature want to ban requiring COVID-19 vaccines on University of Wisconsin campuses, but UW System President Tommy Thompson says that won’t be happening anyway.
A new center at UW-Madison will be studying health disparities in Wisconsin and beyond. Its early work will look at health outcomes in the state’s different neighborhoods. We talk with a doctor leading the research about the big questions she’s hoping to answer.
Dane County officials released a public statement on May 18 announcing that all health orders regarding COVID-19, including mask mandates and indoor gathering limits, will be lifted starting June 2. The announcement comes 10 months after Dane County Health officials implemented their first public health order.
Pfizer’s vaccine is the only one available for children ages 12-15. Dr. Hartman, who studies the COVID-19 vaccines and is the principal investigator for UW Health’s AstraZeneca trial, said Moderna’s vaccine should become available for kids soon.
Republicans in the state legislature have approved education funding that’s more than a billion dollars short of what Gov. Evers proposed. We get the latest. Then, we talk about how a lifeguard shortage is affecting the state’s pools. And, we talk about an effort by UW-Madison to research health disparities.
Schools in the University of Wisconsin System pledged to return to in-person learning next fall. At a meeting of the UW System Board of Regents on Thursday, individual school chancellors gave more details about what that will look like.
If you’re feeling more forgetful lately, you’re not alone. There’s growing research that shows that the pandemic has impacted our memory.
Memory development expert at UW-Madison Haley Vlack explains how pandemic stress and social isolation have negatively impacted our memory and how we can get it back.
“It turns out the pandemic is pretty much the perfect storm for forgetting. Many of the experiences that we’ve been going through over the past year, cause forgetting. For example, loosing our normal routine,” said Vlack. “Many of us have been multi-tasking. We’ve been challenged with care-taking and work all at the same time. We’ve been socially isolated.”
Across the state, local public health agencies are dropping their public health orders and mask mandates. The moves come as vaccination rates across the state climb, and as hospitalizations steadily decline.
But, just because public health orders have been dropped doesn’t mean we’re entirely in the clear.
For more, our producer Jonah Chester spoke with Ajay Sethi, an Associate Professor of Population Health Sciences at UW-Madison.
Wisconsin employers couldn’t require employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, and so-called vaccine passports would be prohibited under GOP-backed bills that received a public hearing at the state Capitol Wednesday.
Another proposal would prevent the University of Wisconsin System from requiring COVID-19 vaccines or testing.
“Our outlook continues to improve, but there are still too many people yet to be vaccinated to feel completely safe as a whole,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Dr. Sethi said he wouldn’t be surprised to see an increase in cases within communities with low vaccination rates, but he didn’t expect the kind of surge the country saw last summer.
UW Health has donated $100,000 to the new Black Business Hub in Madison to invest in minority-owned businesses, the Urban League of Greater Madison announced Tuesday.
The Wisconsin Partnership Program at the UW School of Medicine and Public will provide up to $2 million to improve Black maternal and infant health through a new grant program.
Dane County residents could cast aside their face masks and gather without limits Wednesday after nearly 15 months of COVID-19 restrictions. But experts said that while the pandemic has clearly eased up here and around the country, the threat is not over. “The ‘officially over’ likely will be when the world sees a decline like the U.S. has seen,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director for infection control at UW Health. “That isn’t likely anytime soon.”
UW Health, the county’s largest private employer, says it has encouraged those who can to work remotely throughout the pandemic and will continue to support telecommuting into the future. “At UW Health, remote work is not confined strictly to non-clinical roles,” said spokeswoman Emily Kumlien. “As telehealth and video visits become a major component of UW Health’s patient care, many providers are now able to perform much of their work outside of a hospital or clinic setting as well.”
After months of county-wide caps on gatherings, capacity limits and face covering requirements, COVID-19 restrictions in Wisconsin’s second-biggest county have come to an end.
Isolation, job losses and economic uncertainty are major causes for more patients seeking services, UW Health director of behavioral health services Beth Lonergan said. Others, particularly people of color, have sought treatment following the death of George Floyd and the protests over police brutality and racial injustice, said Myra McNair, executive director of Anesis Therapy.
Restricting dietary intake of certain amino acids may reduce obesity and diabetes while increasing longevity, even though many athletes build muscle and derive other health benefits from supplements of the compounds, UW-Madison research suggests.
Quoted: Wisconsinites have bifurcated politics, said Mike Wagner, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Rural and Republican Wisconsinites value independence, hard work and feeling respected, but tend to distrust urban centers and government institutions. They are also more likely to live in less information-rich environments, Wagner said, including cities without daily newspapers. This has spilled over into Wisconsinites’ response to the pandemic.
“The best predictor of skepticism about vaccines, from our early analyses, is a belief that the election was stolen from President Trump,” Wagner said.
The University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute has released its 2021 County Health Rankings and found that every county in Wisconsin has a high percentage of excessive drinkers.
Wisconsin is the only state in the country where every county reported excessive drinking among 23% of its adult population or higher.
A new center at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health seeks to examine how a person’s environment and social conditions impact their health down to the molecular level.
The Covid-19 pandemic continues to impact communities of color at a disproportionate rate, and UW-Health vaccine educators are working to curb hesitancy. 44 percent of White Wisconsinites have at least one dose, compared to just 23 percent of Black Wisconsinites.
University of Wisconsin officials warned a Republican-backed bill aiming to bar employees from performing or assisting with abortions as part of their work would pose “a serious threat to the future of our ob-gyn residency training program.”
Dr. Matt Anderson, senior medical director at UW Health, said those still vulnerable to COVID-19 should continue to follow the public health guidance that has gotten them through the bulk of the pandemic so far.
Quoted: While some estimates suggest communities can reach herd immunity when around 70 percent of the population is vaccinated, Dr. Matt Anderson, UW Health senior medical director of primary care, explains it isn’t an on-off switch.
“It’s really hard to say at what point we’ll reach it as though it’s a critical threshold,” Anderson said. “It’s more of a gradual decline in the case rates that we’ll see as we have more and more people being immune, and the best immunity is through vaccinations.”
Ajay Sethi is a professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is faculty director of Master of Public Health Program. He said it will be clear that communities have reached herd immunity when there are no longer outbreaks of COVID-19 despite people returning to pre-pandemic daily activities like going maskless to concerts, sporting events, movie theaters, or restaurants without social distancing.
“In order for this to happen, most everyone will need to have protective immunity from either vaccination or past infection, but immunity from the latter may not be as long-lasting or durable,” he said.
Quoted: Health experts highlight that incarcerated individuals are at higher risk for COVID-19 outbreaks due to a limited ability to social distance and other societal factors, said Dipesh Navsaria, a physician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
“People who typically are in carceral settings like jails and prisons (that) are disproportionately people of color, people with lower educational attainment and people who come from backgrounds of poverty, trauma, stress, and are often subject to racial bias and discrimination,” said Navsaria. “And all of these elements tend to play into just being at higher risk.”
Quoted: Evers’ bid to bolster Medicaid is less an “expansion” and more of a “restoration,” according to Donna Friedsam, a researcher with UW-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty.
Friedsam says that, prior to the Affordable Care Act, Wisconsin’s medicaid program covered parents and caretaker adults at up to double the federal poverty level.
“So, when the ACA came along, it said all states should cover everybody, no matter who they are, up to a certain level of 138% of the federal poverty level,” she told WORT. In 2021, 138% of the federal poverty level is about $17,700 for a single person.
The nurses at UW Hospitals and Clinics have been among the greatest heroes of the coronavirus pandemic that is finally beginning to ease after an often overwhelming year of infection and death, testing and treatment, recovery and vaccination. Nurses have been widely praised for their humanity, for their caring, for their sacrifices. We have no doubt about the sincerity of those words. But now it is time to honor these heroes with something more than words. They need a place at the bargaining table.
All University of Wisconsin System and UW health workers would be banned from performing abortions or training others to perform abortions under a Republican bill up for a public hearing Wednesday in a state legislative committee.
Nearly a year and a half after nurses at UW Health failed to get union recognition from management, they are supporting a bill from two Madison Democratic lawmakers that would give them input on workplace conditions.
The last of the University of Wisconsin’s spring graduates will get their diplomas this weekend, capping off a year of unprecedented disruptions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. With a sudden shift to online classes and heavy social restrictions aimed at preventing outbreaks, some students say they’ve felt trapped watching screens in their rooms — and for those returning next fall, they hope campus will feel more normal.
Noted: A 2018 study lead by University of Wisconsin, Madison professor of pediatrics Dr. Megan Moreno found that some companies were flouting regulations on marketing, with social media posts that appeal to teens and promote therapeutic benefits.
The study noted around 1% of social media posts appeared to directly target teens, with one post explicitly showing a young person in the promotion, with several others using well-known cartoon characters, Reuters reported.
UW Health was ranked as the best hospital in the state for avoiding performing unnecessary tests and procedures to its patients, according to one study.
The driving question that launched my career in psychology nearly four decades ago feels especially salient in this moment: Why are some people more resilient to life’s slings and arrows than others?
Written by Dr. Richard J. Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds.
Social work professor Tova Walsh interviewed dozens of mothers who gave birth early in the pandemic. She herself had a baby in March 2020, just as Wisconsin’s stay-at-home orders went into effect. What she learned is that it’s been an unusual time for new parents, to say the least.
UW-Madison continues to require masks while indoors, while riding a campus bus and when in a university vehicle with at least one other person. An announcement on an updated mask policy is expected next week, university spokesperson John Lucas said.
Dr. Christopher Olsen at the School of Medicine and Public Health at UW-Madison said, “The virus SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19 disease is only distantly related to common bovine coronaviruses. While not impossible for there to be some level of cross-recognition of this new virus by antibodies to bovine coronavirus (they are in the same overall subsection of the coronavirus family), I would expect it to be very limited.”
Reports of depression and anxiety went up six fold during the pandemic, according to Boston College researchers. “The pandemic has really caused the burden of negative mental health outcomes to skyrocket,” said Cody Wenthur, an assistant professor of pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. “We have a real need for new therapeutics and increased access to the effective treatments we already have.”
Dr. Jim Conway, pediatric infectious disease specialist and medical director for immunization programs at UW Health, echoed this advice Wednesday and said there was no reason to wait to get any vaccination, ranging from shingles to the flu.
After speaking with a patient, Dr. Jeannina Smith became aware of the lack of Black hair products at the hospital. From there, two nurses, Ann Malec and Nicole Vlasak, took the lead, which led to UW Health making hair oil, hair bonnets, hair picks, bristle boar hair brushes and cocoa butter cream available to patients.
UW-Health officials said the decision to lift the mask mandate on June 2 is not too early, it’s right on time.
