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: “What’s happening to monarchs is like a death by a thousand cuts,” said Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.
Quoted: Trump lost Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes in 2020. It was a key state to his re-election and one that he won in a historic victory in 2016 that a Republican hadn’t pulled off in decades. The state is key to any new run for president, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Wisconsin is one of the states where he falsely claims to have been robbed of victory, so the recent Supreme Court decision gives him yet another opportunity to explain why his loss wasn’t actually a loss,” Burden said.
“Nearly two years after an election that every judge and security expert deemed to be proper, Trump’s continual fixation has an air of desperation.”
Dr. Claire Wendlund, a medical anthropologist at UW-Madison and a former practicing ob-gyn, said a pregnant woman might have cancer that can make abortion necessary. Radiation and chemotherapy to treat cancer can be destructive to the fetus, but delaying treatment might be life-threatening to the woman, depending on the type and stage of cancer, Wendlund said.
Noted: While some families don’t mind dividing labor in this normative way, with moms controlling the scheduling, other hetero couples would prefer to make scheduling more egalitarian. So I called Allison Daminger, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who studies how couples divide labor, to see if she had any thoughts about how to divide this work.
Daminger suggested two potential ways to help divide scheduling. One is a shared family email address or calendar. The latter is a tool my husband and I use — he’s more proactive than a lot of dads, and has organized many a playdate, but I still do more than half of the scheduling. The other is dividing tasks by area. For example: “Partner A does the school stuff and Partner B does extracurriculars,” Daminger suggested. Or Partner A does the dentist appointments and Partner B does the pediatricians’ appointments. It might help to specialize because then you can build relationships and learn all the peripheral information you may need, Daminger said — you’ll know how long the dentist appointments take and how your kid responds to them, and you’re the one who always interacts with the staff.
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.
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. Elizabeth Salisbury-Afshar, an addiction medicine physician with UW Health who treats people with alcohol and substance use disorders, argued a “one size fits all” method — like Madison’s approach — can be effective, but it also can add “barriers at every turn,” especially if only one piece of a problem is addressed at a time.
’Using the correct pronouns when referring to trans, nonbinary and gender expansive youth is nothing less than life sustaining and nothing more than basic decency,’ UW Assistant Professor says.
Quoted: “It ends up being a win-win,” said Tim Baye, a professor of business development at UW-Madison who studies carbon markets. “The farm has a different revenue stream. The quality of the nutrients are better.”
Quoted: “As a human, my heart breaks that we have not mustered the political will to meet the climate crisis with the urgency that is required,” said Andrea Dutton, a climate researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, via email.
Quoted: There is no consensus among religions on these questions. In fact there is no consensus among Muslims, says Asifa Quraishi-Landes, a professor of U.S. constitutional law and modern Islamic constitutional theory at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Quranic verses can be interpreted in many ways and “Muslims simply select whichever sharia school of thought they want to follow,” she wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “That means it is normal for some Muslims to oppose abortion while others insist on its legitimacy.”
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.
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.
Quoted: For University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center director, Barry Burden, Democrats are in trouble if 2022 remains a referendum on Joe Biden.
“If Trump enters the race, then 2022 could transform into a contest between Joe Biden and Trump, which could help soften the blow for Democrats,” Burden said. “Trump is also likely to derail attention, campaign dollars, and the agenda from his fellow Republicans.”
“At the same time, Trump will energize some supporters who would otherwise sit out the midterm election, particularly those with lower levels of education tend to vote less in nonpresidential election years,” Burden countered.
Noted: This is the second year on the job for Patrol Officer Nicole Schmitgen. She patrols Madison’s Central District around the state capitol and part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. She says while people think policing is about guns and drugs and driving fast, it’s more about communication and helping people.
University of Wisconsin law professor Keith Findley is a member of Madison’s Police Civilian Oversight Board. He says there’s a plethora of research that shows women on the force have a positive impact on police departments and communities. He says they are often better at communicating and de-escalating tense situations.
“They are sued less frequently than their male counterparts,” Findley says. “They make fewer discretionary arrests, especially of non-white residents. They use force less frequently and excessive force less frequently than their male counterparts.”
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.
Quoted: “Abortion has a kind of special place in American politics,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden. “It’s an issue that does not go away and the Supreme Court has essentially guaranteed that it will be a front-page matter this year — and I think that does play for suburban voters in a particular way.
Quoted: Sarah Halpern-Meekin, UW-Madison associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, and Tiffany Green, UW-Madison associate professor in the departments of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Trump’s continual fixation on delegitimatizing the outcome of the 2020 election overlooks the fact that Republicans did well down ballot that year.
“Many supporters of Donald Trump remain incredulous that he could have lost Wisconsin. They view Biden as a weak candidate and point to big crowds at Trump’s rallies and his online followings as evidence that he should have won,” Burden said. “Assuming there was election fraud is a way to keep those beliefs in tact.”
The Horticulture Division at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says bright indirect light and consistently warm temperatures are the keys to keeping your Schlumbergera thriving. As is the best water drainage possible, considering that left to their own devices in nature, these epiphytes will literally hang from a cliff where moisture retention is an unheard of environmental possibility. A well-cared-for, happy holiday cactus can be part of your family’s history for a century. It will thank you for the attention it receives by offering more and more flowers with each passing season.
A named source like Bernard is a good start, said Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. If the Star had other sources, it may not have wanted to provide them at the risk of identifying the victim, she said.
On Friday, President Joe Biden signed an executive order seeking to firm up some abortion protections, including data privacy. According to data experts, the reversal of Roe v. Wade opened up more cracks for sensitive information to fall through.
“The reversal of Roe, the Dobbs decision, just again brought lots and lots of new people to the realization that we don’t actually have much data privacy and that can be a problem,” said Dorothea Salo.
It’s been on the mind of Salo, Distinguished Faculty III at UW Madison’s Information School, before the Roe decision.
“Right now the legal landscape really doesn’t control this,” she said. “Here in Wisconsin, there have been a couple of bipartisan data protection bills in the Senate and the Assembly and they just haven’t gone anywhere.”
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.
Quoted: The moon reaches its closest point to Earth every 27 days, Jennifer Stafford, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in an interview last month. A full moon occurs every 29½ days.
What makes summer special for moon-gazing, Jim Lattis, director of UW-Madison Space Place said in an interview earlier this summer, is that full moons are lower in the sky. During the summer season, the sun is higher, and the moon is lower, making the moon especially picturesque.
It will appear biggest when it’s lower in the sky, near the horizon — just after rising, or just before setting — due to a scientific phenomenon called “the moon illusion.”
Even before the Supreme Court decision, there was evidence that some people tried to self-manage abortions with things like herbs, physical trauma and uterine trauma, said Jenny Higgins, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Ajay Sethi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, still works at home, and avoids eating with strangers indoors. He masks in crowded places, but at home, as contractors remodel his bathrooms, he has decided not to—a pivot from last year. His chances of suffering from the virus haven’t changed much; what has is “probably more my own fatigue,” he told me, “and my willingness to accept more risk than before.”
“The reversal of Roe, the Dobbs decision, just again brought lots and lots of new people to the realization that we don’t actually have much data privacy and that can be a problem,” said Dorothea Salo. It’s been on the mind of Salo, Distinguished Faculty III at UW Madison’s Information School, before the Roe decision.
UW Health’s Dr. Bill Hartman joins Live at Four to talk about the latest COVID-19 news.
At the second Dairy Exchange of the year sponsored by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, cheesemakers and allied industry people gathered to hear a dairy market update from Mark Stephenson.
As it turns out, it will be the last market update Stephenson will present as he will be retiring from his post as director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin. Fortunately he was able to impart some good news to dairy farmers.
Quoted: Rob Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in election and constitutional law, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier this year that there is no legal way for state lawmakers to decertify the 2020 election
“At this point, the bell cannot be unrung,” he said.
Howard Schweber, a UW-Madison political science and legal studies professor who is an expert in constitutional law, also said the fact that officials elected in 2020 have held office for more than a year “makes the whole thing even more preposterous.”
Noted: The moon reaches its closest point to Earth every 27 days, Jennifer Stafford, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in an interview last month. A full moon occurs every 29½ days.
The Buck Moon name is rooted in Indigenous history.
Native Americans, Stafford explained, attribute wisdom and reverence to the moon and use it as a way of tracking the seasons.
Wisconsinites have the weight of the nation’s problems on their minds heading into the 2022 midterm elections, a nod to a state whose voters might be pivotal to the balance of power in the U.S. Senate this fall.
That was a key finding of the La Follette Policy Poll, a written survey sent to 5,000 state residents last fall, which asked about the issues that matter to them most and the problems they most want solved. Nearly 1,600 responded.
“The main goal was taking a pulse on what are the policy topics Wisconsinites care about most with the hopes of steering our elected officials and candidates toward those topics,” said Susan Webb Yackee, a professor of public affairs and director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison.
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.
New variants of COVID-19 are reminding us that the pandemic is not over. UW Health’s Chief Quality Officer Dr. Jeff Pothof, said two new variants are much more transmissible – even among those fully vaccinated or with prior infection.
“It’s really easy to catch COVID-19 with, you know, BA-5 or BA-4,” Pothof said. “With these variants that are so contagious, it really probably comes down to a matter of, you know, minutes, or maybe even seconds of being in close proximity to someone who’s shutting this virus for you to get infected.”
Dr. Bill Hartman from UW Health says the main symptoms of this variant are sore throat and nasal congestion.
Quoted: Dr. Dan Shirley, medical director of infection prevention at UW-Health, says the Naegleria fowleri amoeba thrives in warm water, you aren’t likely to contract it in Lake Michigan. “Usually late in the summer, in smaller bodies of water like ponds and small lakes where the water temperature can get warmer than usual,” he said.
Interview with Robert Yablon, an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Law School.
Quoted: Peter Carstensen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, who specializes in antitrust law and energy law, predicts the situation will improve but change will be slow.
“My expectation is prices are going to stabilize in a downward trend,” he said. “It’s not going to be a huge drop, but it’s going to continue to go down.”
Carstensen said that’s because domestic production is increasing and drivers will likely decrease their miles, slowing demand. Despite that, he said other problems will keep costs high.
“The capacity to do things inexpensively is just not there,” he said. According to Carstensen, supply chain issues, the need for new wells, limited refinery capacity and the crisis in Ukraine will be roadblocks to easing the burden on drivers.
Friday morning, President Biden signed an executive order that provides some protection for emergency medical care access to women who seek abortions in states that ban it, like here in Wisconsin. But it does not undo the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
“I mean this is a lot of smoke, but not a whole lot of heat,” said Ryan Owens, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He says the president does not have the power to legalize abortion nationwide.
“The reality is in order to get any effective change on this you’d have to look at changing legislation,” said Owens.
Quoted: Ion Meyn, an assistant law professor at the University of Wisconsin, called the cases against Wells and others in Fond du Lac County “a real abuse of (prosecutorial) discretion.”
Toney did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or answer emailed questions. But in a statement to Wisconsin Watch, he said attorney ethics rules prevent him from commenting on a pending case.
“Elections are cornerstone (sic) of our democracy which must be defended at every turn, not just when you agree with the law or the politics,” he wrote. “I want people (to) exercise their right to vote and ensure they do so lawfully. Wisconsin law requires someone to register to vote where they live, not where they receive mail. That is made clear on voter registration forms.”
Noted: “You’ll know you’re in the tension zone when you’re heading north and … oaks that are dominant in southern Wisconsin, such as bur, black and white, meet up abruptly with red and white pine as well as paper birch and tamarack swamps that are more characteristic of the north,” writes David Mladenoff in the Fall 2012 issue of Grow magazine, a publication of the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Quoted: “I think there needs to be that follow up, and that follow up needs to be much quicker,” said Ryan Poe-Gavlinski, director of the Restraining Order and Survivor Advocacy Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “In restraining order cases, they do that firearms surrender hearing two weeks out, but why are we not doing them within 48 hours?”
“They’re not just going to be pretty pictures necessarily,” said Dr. Michael Maseda, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s going to be scientific information that is probably fundamentally new.”
“I’m not anti-CBD,” said Barry Gidal, a professor of pharmacy and neurology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who co-wrote the study and worked as a consultant for the Epidiolex manufacturer. “There needs to be oversight so that patients know what they are getting.”
If a person suffers a burn, Lori Mickelson from UW Health’s Burn and Wound Center has some tips.
Jordan Ellenberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who has written books about math and reasoning, described it this way: “In some counterfactual universe, what is the probability that this thing, which has already happened in our universe, happens?”
Fish is a popular food in Wisconsin whether it’s part of a Friday night fish fry or a staple for Wisconsin tribes. However, a new study finds around only half of people surveyed in the Great Lakes region know about fish advisories that set limits on how much is safe to eat.
The study was published in June in the journal Science of the Total Environment. Researchers from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and University of Wisconsin-Madison found around 5 million people ate more fish than recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The agency recommends no more than two meals or 12 ounces of fish per week.
A Supreme Court ruling will limit the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. We learn more about the legal and environmental impacts.
Interview with Steph Tai, law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Only about half the people living in the Great Lakes region are aware of fish consumption advisories that warn people to limit their meals of fish, according to a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, also found that an estimated 5 million people across the region exceeded the general recommended fish intake of two meals, or 12 ounces per week, as suggested by the Environmental Protection Agency for all fish, including those purchased in stores.
Written by Susan Webb Yackee, a professor of public affairs and director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison.
Meanwhile, Leslie Bow, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin, described blackfishing as “a racial masquerade that operates as a form of racial fetishism” to CNN that same month.
