Although their presence in Lancaster County draws thousands of tourists each year, the Amish hold themselves apart from their non-Amish, or “English” neighbors. Crime within the Amish community is exceedingly rare, said Mark Louden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies Amish language, healthcare and legal issues.
“There’ve been more than 20 studies, which have looked at smoking status and COVID-19 complications,” said AMA member Michael Fiore, MD, MPH, MBA, Hilldale Professor of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin and director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. “Whether you measure the outcomes as death or using a severity index, like going to the ICU or being intubated, in more than 80% of those studies, smoking resulted in a statistically significant increase of adverse outcomes.”
“We’re losing jobs because we’re moving towards automation,” said Stephen Deller, a professor and community economic development specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Basically, everyone in the world is susceptible,” said Thomas Friedrich, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But there is no clear line that neatly separates medical research from hospital operations or quality control, said Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And researchers and bioethicists often disagree on what constitutes one or the other.
“Basically, everyone in the world is susceptible,” said Thomas Friedrich, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In addition to possibly contracting the virus from contaminated fingers or brushes, a makeup user also risks exposure to the coronavirus from the products themselves, especially if those products are shared with others or are used outside of the home, said Sarah M. Nehls, an ophthalmologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “The makeup could be potentially contaminated,” she said. “[The coronavirus] has been found on the ocular surface. This is why conjunctivitis [pinkeye] can be an initial symptom of infection.”
The groundwork for Baby’s First Years started in 2013 with prize money from the Jacobs Foundation to Greg Duncan, a professor of education at the University of California at Irvine. Its funding snowballed, thanks to philanthropic institutions, including the Bill and Melinda Gates and Ford foundations, and a grant from the National Institutes of Health. It recruited as lead investigators Katherine Magnuson, professor of social work at University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Kimberly Noble, a neuroscientist at Columbia University.
“We just didn’t have that endurance to see that to the point where cases are now sporadic,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison focused on epidemiology and infectious diseases.
Joy Kirkpatrick is an outreach specialist for the Center for Dairy Profitability at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She thinks farm families will utilize the service, not only for its convenience but also for the anonymity telehealth services provide.
Planting of corn and soybeans was a week ahead of the five-year average this spring. But Jerry Clark, agricultural agent for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension in Chippewa County, said cooler-than-normal temperatures kept crops from growing at the usual pace.
Quoted: “One of the most important things to remember is that teenagers have their own thoughts and feelings about this,” UW Health Pediatrician Dr. Amy Stockhausen said. “But unless you ask and listen, you’re not going to know what those are.”
Quoted: “Teens may react to changes in a variety of ways. It is important for parents to support their child’s emotions without judgement,” said Dr. Amy Stockhausen, a UW Health pediatrician, adolescent medicine expert and associate professor of pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
But Patrick Remington, a UW-Madison emeritus professor and former chief medical officer for Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention in the state Division of Health, said the issue over DHS’ authority is “black and white” on the matter.
With governments and industry injecting billions into the development, testing, and manufacturing of vaccines, scientists say, a vaccine may be available in record time, but it simply may not be fully effective. “We could have vaccines in the clinic that are useful in people within 12 or 18 months,” Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Nature in May. “But we’re going to need to improve them.
“School opening is an engine for all the other respiratory viruses,” said Dr. Jonathan Temte, a UW-Madison family medicine professor and member of the State Disaster Medical Advisory Committee, which met online Thursday. “This is going to be a nightmare for our school districts.”
Quoted: Dr. Nasia Safdar, director of infection prevention and control for UW Health, said masks cannot single-handedly prevent coronavirus spread but are an effective intervention.
“If someone was wearing a mask, it would likely reduce the number of people they would infect,” she said.
The team of researchers was selected in a two-round process. In the first part, the IFCN staff analyzed each proposal to make sure all the requirements were fulfilled. Then a committee composed of three professors — Lucas Graves, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Steen Steensen, professor at OsloMet; and Bente Kalsnes, associate professor at Kristiania University College — evaluated the approved proposals and selected the top submissions. The winners came out of this group.
“It always made sense that this kind of contact might have happened, but demonstrating that it did happen is a different kind of thing,” says John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who did not participate in the study. With the addition of this genomic analysis, “we’re getting to the point where we can find evidence of some kinds of events that were invisible from an archaeological standpoint, and that’s exciting because it means that we now open another window into understanding human interactions and human contacts,” he adds.
“I think it still presents a substantial risk,” said Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease expert at UW-Madison. “Even though we’re a state that has relatively low rates certainly compared to the South and Southwest, the bringing together of people to a lot of different areas is really where you run the risk of introduction and then re-introduction of virus into particular communities.”
Quoted: Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worries there is so much pressure to produce positive results that conditions are ripe for cutting corners. She notes, for example, that in an emergency where people are suffering, there can be resistance to having control groups that don’t get an experimental treatment in a study.
“But it doesn’t work scientifically,” Ossorio said. “It doesn’t produce good enough data that you can actually have any confidence that the test intervention is safe or effective.”
“We have this real brick and mortar view of how clinical research had to happen, and I think COVID has really challenged that,” said Betsy Nugent, the director of clinical trials development for the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health.
Song Gao, an assistant professor of geographic information science at UW-Madison, was among the first to study and map how people’s mobility changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March, Buttenheim and Malia Jones, an epidemiologist at UW-Madison, launched “Dear Pandemic,” a social media group that communicates the latest COVID-19 research.
“The world is just going to be different,” Jones said, “Getting to the point where there’s hopefully a vaccine that’s effective is going to take enough time that I think science will change.”
Quoted: “The sharp drop in May was the result of the COVID-19 virus shutting down schools, universities, restaurants and food-service which caused a big drop in the sales of milk, cheese and butter,” Bob Cropp, a University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension professor emeritus, wrote in a recent column.
University of Wisconsin-Madison engineer Scott Sanders usually spends his time figuring out how gases and particles behave in combustion engines.
But Sanders has turned his expertise to determining how a different type of particle, one that has sickened millions around the world, moves from human mouths covered with masks.
Alta Charo, a University of Wisconsin lawyer and bioethicist, recalled the clamor in the 1990s to get insurers to cover bone marrow transplants for breast cancer until a solid study showed they “simply made people more miserable and sicker” without improving survival.
Bob Benjamin was observing the Milky Way when he noticed something odd.The professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s astronomy department, and co-author of a new study, saw a red, tilted structure that pierced through a hole in the dust at the dark center of the galaxy.
Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worries there is so much pressure to produce positive results that conditions are ripe for cutting corners. She noted that in an emergency when people are suffering, there can be resistance to having control groups that don’t get an experimental treatment in a study.
Quoted: “A mask that is not covering the nose will not stop a person infected with SARS-CoV-2 from contaminating the air in front of them when they exhale. Similarly, a mask covering only the mouth will fail to prevent an uninfected person from inhaling contaminated air. Since it does not take a lot of virus particles to cause infection, a partially worn mask may not be effective enough. This reminds me of when I see people wearing a bicycle helmet without buckling the strap or wearing it so loosely that it doesn’t cover the front of their head. The intention might be there, but there is a higher risk of head injury following an accident if the helmet is unable to do what it is designed to do.”
— Ajay Sethi, PhD, MHS, associate professor, Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
With government and industry pumping billions into vaccine development, testing and manufacturing, a vaccine could be available in record time, say scientists — it just might not be completely effective. “We might have vaccines in the clinic that are useful in people within 12 or 18 months,” Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told Nature in May. “But we’re going to need to improve on them.”
The new “Civic Health in Wisconsin” study by the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison represents the first time civic engagement data has been tracked statewide, said Mary Beth Collins, the center’s director and one of the study’s principal authors. It looks at data on Wisconsinites’ connectedness to their communities using a range of measures, from volunteerism and voting to the amount of time spent with neighbors and friends.
While many people are scrambling to combat flooding and damage to infrastructure, climate scientists are working to find out what has been causing the latest rise in lake levels. According to Jack Williams, a UW-Madison geography professor and climate-change expert, it’s the billion-dollar question.“We can’t yet definitively say,” Williams said. “What we know is that we are seeing increasing temperatures and variability of rainfall, which are both known to be caused by climate change.”
TIME asked 21 historians, including Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology Nan Estad, to weigh in with their picks for “worst moments” that hold a lesson—and what they think those experiences can teach us.
“Halfway through 2020, 786 people in Wisconsin died prematurely, unexpectedly, and separated from family,” said Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “COVID-19 will be a leading cause of death in Wisconsin for 2020. We have not had a new leading cause of death in Wisconsin or the U.S. since HIV/AIDS.”
Health scares always spawn scurrilous stories. But with covid-19, “there’s lots of opportunity for misinformation,” said Dhavan Shah, a professor of mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
At risk is University of Wisconsin-Madison’s plan to welcome students back to campus this fall. Jeff Pothof, University of Wisconsin Health chief quality and safety officer, said if local health officials don’t try to stop the spread of the virus in Dane County, in-person instruction could be called off. “If we’re unable to get on top of this current spike and it continues to accelerate, we may be in a position where it won’t make sense to be holding in-person classes,” he said. “It becomes a risk that most of us shouldn’t be taking with our children.”
Both the city and UW-Madison have similar orders in place to ensure people are distancing properly, which will be especially important come late August when the university’s 30,000 students return to campus. “We have been and will be working to ensure people are abiding by the campus order when they are on campus property,” Marc Lovicott of UW-Madison’s Police Department, said. “We have and will issue citations for blatant and/or multiple violations.”
“It is important for white children to see people of color as being knowledgeable and authoritative,” said Gloria Ladson-Billings, a teacher educator who most recently was on the faculty at UW-Madison. “The stuff we are seeing happening in our streets today is, I think, a direct result of young white people saying, ‘I was never really taught to value these people’s lives.’”
The decision could lead to severe efforts to change electoral rules for political gain, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
If you decide to use your anger, choose something you can control. “Anger is a very energizing emotion—think of it as the opposite of procrastination,” says Evan Polman, an associate professor in the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Remember that anger can give you courage. Use it to ask for a raise, get involved in a cause you care about or get up the nerve to have that difficult conversation you’ve been putting off.
Bron, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was on the hunt for a tiny threat: the black-legged tick. Also known as a deer tick, this arachnid is notorious for its ability to spread illnesses like Lyme disease to humans.
Not so fast. The Pioneer probe sent to Venus in 1978 detected traces of methane in that CO2-filled atmosphere. Methane is a rare chemical to produce without life acting as some kind of intermediary. “People tried to explain it away and they couldn’t,” says Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a former chair of NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, a teacher educator who worked in school districts for years and most recently was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said her own experience bears that out.
Such narrow margins are indicative of how split Wisconsinites are politically, which should translate to the Legislature, said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden.
“We were fortunate that the pandemic hit during the primaries rather than the general election,” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It provided a sort of training ground for states to turn the corner on voting by mail.”
“Many of the protesters want to divert and reallocate funds away from the police into social services and the communities,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Ralph Grunewald. “That makes a lot of sense.”
“(It’s) very difficult to take politics out. When we get new information we filter it through what we already believe,” says Dr. Dietram Scheufele, a science communication professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
B Corp certification isn’t particularly well known among consumers yet, said Neeraj Arora, executive director of the Nielsen Center for Marketing Research at UW-Madison, but he thinks awareness of the certification and its meaning will grow.
“I don’t see how that’s sustainable through the fall election,” professor Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told AFP.”
There will come a point where Biden will need to be a physical presence on the campaign trail, if only to reassure voters he is a real person, in good health and ready to serve.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Microbiology and Immunology Lindsay Kalan said that level of antimicrobial — a broad term for something that can kill bacteria and fungi — use might not have been required, but was part of an early learning curve of treating a new disease.
“Absent these kinds of conversations, the status quo wins,” said Patricia Devine, psychology professor and director of the Prejudice Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And the status quo is being revealed to us to be unacceptable in terms of costing people their lives only because of the color of their skin. That can’t stand.
But Jonathan Kenoyer, an archaeologist and Indus expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, remains skeptical that the chicken arose in Southeast Asia. “They need to get ancient DNA” to back up their claims, he says, because genomes of modern birds may provide limited clues to early events in chicken evolution.
Scholars are brimming with ideas to construct a more generous safety net on a permanent basis, bolstering everything from Medicaid to child care support. Timothy Smeeding, a professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, suggests that the federal government pick up the entire tab for Medicaid, which it now shares with the states.
And this order in particular may have trouble standing up to scrutiny. Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in executive orders, called the language “complete gobbledygook.”
Today, wild garlic is found only in parts of Central Asia, but it may once have grown wild from China to India, Egypt and Ukraine, according to Philipp W. Simon, a research leader at the Agriculture Department’s Agricultural Research Service and a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s department of horticulture. From those ancient beginnings, garlic has traveled the globe to become one of the world’s most important vegetable crops.
Among other things, chronic stress contributes to inflammation and vascular disease, and can even directly damage the brain’s neurons. “This can lead to a slew of health issues, including atrophy in areas of the brain that are key for memory and cognition,” says Megan Zuelsdorff, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing investigating the mechanisms underlying cognitive health and dementia disparities.
El historiador Richard Keller ha escrito Aislamiento letal, una investigación sobre la ola de calor de París de 2003. Le he preguntado por aquella tragedia porque anticipa los dramas climáticos que desgraciadamente están por venir.
“The basis of the deep pelagic food web is actually detritus raining down from the surface waters and filtering down through the water and being scavenged up by all of these different organisms, [including] zooplankton that are living down there scavenging phytoplankton and then being consumed in turn by different larger organisms than that,” said Dr. Harold J. Tobin, Professor of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “We also have many organisms called amphipods. They’re in the same family as krill, and they’re a very, very common zooplankton.”
“We think of masking as this seemingly simple intervention, but it’s rather complex,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Malia Jones of the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studies how the places we spend time affect our health and how diseases spread in those places.
Linn Posey-Maddox, an associate professor of educational policy studies at UW-Madison, said the pandemic exacerbates existing racial inequities in education.
Quoted: It’s not unusual for men to struggle after the birth of a child, says Tova Walsh, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied fathers and parent-child relationships. There are financial pressures, expectations to try to meet and lifestyle adjustments to make.
In the history of family services, fathers have been overlooked and neglected, Walsh says, with sometimes clinical consequences. “Paternal depression is underrecognized,” she says.
Quoted: For the time being, researchers say cats should be a focus, because studies have found they are highly susceptible to the coronavirus and because they are common pets and roam freely in many places. In a study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists infected cats with the virus and found that those cats could infect other cats. No felines showed symptoms, but the amount of virus they shed in nasal swabs was similar to that shed by some humans, said co-author Peter Halfmann, a University of Wisconsin virologist.
“If a human can transmit to a human with this amount of virus being shed, it’s definitely possible for a cat to transmit to a human,” Halfmann said.
