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Category: UW Experts in the News

Price for grocies, gas and more are rising at a pace not seen in decades. Your inflation questions answered.

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Appleton Post-Crescent

Quoted: At the beginning of the pandemic, the rate of inflation was almost zero and prices were falling, said Dr. Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs.

In response, the government passed robust support packages — including stimulus checks, enhances unemployment benefits and tax cuts — to boost spending. The spending those programs created was concentrated more on goods than services, Chinn said.

“We have kind of a weird time where people have shifted more towards buying goods and we get a lot of our goods from China and abroad,” Chinn said. “So that means you have this collision, at least in the goods sector, of enhanced demand and not quite enough supply to keep up. And what happens is prices go up. Supply and demand.”

UW Expert: Child Tax Credit End Could Be ‘Devastating’ for WI Families

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WXPR

Wisconsin families may have received their last Child Tax Credit payment for a while, as Congress has missed its year-end deadline to pass President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better framework.

The roughly $2 trillion package would have reauthorized the expanded Child Tax Credit through 2022. Parents received their last credit on Dec. 15, and Timothy Smeeding, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said to get the rest of the aid, they’ll need to file their income tax returns for 2021.

“So, there’s still another $1,500 or $1,800, depending on how old the child is, that will come to them once they file their taxes this next spring,” he said.

How Shark Antibodies Could Aid the Fight Against Coronavirus and Prepare for Future Outbreaks

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Smithsonian Magazine

Nurse sharks (Ginglymostomatidae) are slow-moving, bottom-dwelling predators that stalk prey in warm shallow waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In a new study published in Nature Communications, scientists suggest the sharks could lend a fin in a new, more effective treatment for Covid-19.

‘Drug cocktail’ may be needed as COVID variants attack immune system on multiple fronts

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: “If you’re a virus and you turn off the innate immune system, it’s like a thief cutting off the alarms in a bank in order to sneak in,” said Thomas Friedrich, a professor in the department of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine.

Sick of Wisconsin’s fractious politics? Get involved and help make the system more responsive.

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that running for office is a remedy “as long as it is done in the spirit of genuine public service and not merely to implement a dogmatic agenda.”

He notes: Volunteering on local boards and commissions is “an underappreciated way to contribute and see what good is happening in the public sphere.”

The alien beauty and creepy fascination of insect art

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Knowable Magazine

Noted: Another striking example is the singing shawls made by the Karen people of Myanmar and northern Thailand, says Jennifer Angus, who teaches textile design at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. These woven garments, so named because they’re worn at funeral ceremonies where mourners sing around the clock for several days, sometimes have a fringe made from the shiny, iridescent elytra, or hard outer wings, of jewel beetles. Angus, who grew up in Canada, had never seen anything like it. “I really had trouble believing that it was real,” she says.

The discovery inspired Angus to start incorporating insects into her own work. Her first installation was at a storefront gallery in Toronto, where she arranged hundreds of weevils into a wallpaper-like pattern on the walls. When people walked up to take a closer look, Angus says, “literally, I saw them take a step back as they realized the wallpaper was composed of insects.” The piece created tension, she says, between what people expect when they see a pattern they associate with domestic spaces and the realization that the pattern is composed of bugs, which most people don’t like to find in their homes.

Study finds more than 1M tons of salt is flowing into Lake Michigan each year

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Wisconsin Public Radio

More than 1 million metric tons of salt is flowing into Lake Michigan each year, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The findings come as the state has been making significant strides to reduce salt use on roads to curb pollution.

Researchers examined past and current water data on the amount of salt flowing into the lake from 234 rivers and streams, according to Hilary Dugan, the study’s lead author and assistant professor for the Center for Limnology at UW-Madison.

“There’s a tremendous amount of salt going into the lake each year,” said Dugan. “But because of the volume of Lake Michigan, that concentration is still pretty low.”

Wisconsin’s population growth stagnated over the last year

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: In Wisconsin, there were more deaths than births for the first time since the state began keeping vital records, said demographer David Egan-Robertson of the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

“It’s just been a complete sea change in terms of how we view the population,” Egan-Robertson said.

Republicans could get behind a green jobs program. Just not this one.

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Grist

“If I was an advisor to the Biden White House on communication, the first thing I would tell them was to not use the word ‘climate’ for anything like this,” said Dietram Scheufele, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It erased an idea that resonated across the aisle — “conservation” sounds a whole lot like “conservative” — and replaced it with one “that’s going to make one side cringe,” Scheufele said.

Seeking refills: Aging pharmacists leave drugstores vacant in rural America

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Kaiser Health News

“It’s going to be harder to attract people and to pay them,” said David Kreling, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy. “If there’s not a generational thing where someone can sit down with their son or daughter and say that they could take the store over, there’s a good chance that pharmacy will evaporate.”

Jails and prisons have always struggled to find and keep workers. COVID-19 and a nationwide labor shortage made it worse.

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Recruitment and retention has always been difficult in corrections due to grueling work conditions and lower pay, according to Jirs Meuris, assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“You have a job that’s already difficult to get people to apply to, to join and then to retain those people. And then you add a labor shortage, as well as a pandemic, that’s going to make that job even harder to do,” said Meuris.

Why is Wisconsin a great state for great sausage? (Hint: it’s more than just German heritage)

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Green Bay Press-Gazette

Noted: Jeff Sindelar, associate professor in the meat and science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees 100% with the European influence when it comes to Wisconsin’s sausage skills.

It started with people with strong meat-processing skill sets putting down roots here, but having people who wanted to purchase those foods provided a sustainable market throughout the generations.

Wisconsin was also well-positioned geographically to help carry on those traditions, Sindelar said. Being located between the large population centers of the Twin Cities and Chicago, the latter with its famous stockyards, brought railways to Wisconsin.

Health leaders say only Wisconsinites fully vaccinated with booster shot should gather for holidays

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NBC 26

This holiday weekend, AAA expects over 100 million Americans to travel. But state health leaders urge unvaccinated people to reconsider.

“If they’re not [vaccinated], really, it’s important that folks do not try to gather,” Dr. Jeff Pothof said.

According to the UW Health Chief Quality Officer, only a group of people who are fully vaccinated with a booster shot should get together during Christmas time.

Plan ahead to celebrate holidays safely: Doctors recommend getting tested for COVID-19 before gathering

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CBS 58

Quoted: “If you’re vaccinated and boosted, holiday celebrations for the most part pose really low risk,” UW Health Chief Quality Officer Dr. Jeff Pothof said.

For unvaccinated people, that’s not the case. If someone gets vaccinated or boosted now, they won’t be fully protected by Christmas Day, but Pothof said some protection is better than none.

“The best day to get your booster shot, if you haven’t gotten it, is today, as soon as possible,” Pothof said.

How Long Does Omicron Take to Make You Sick?

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The Atlantic

Shorter incubation periods generally lead to more infections happening in less time, because people are becoming more contagious sooner, making onward transmission harder to prevent. Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me he still wants more data on Omicron before he touts a trim incubation. But “it does make sense,” he said, considering the variant’s explosive growth in pretty much every country it’s collided with. In many places, Omicron cases are doubling every two to three days.

2021 was a pivotal year for octopuses, manatees, wolves, and more

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Vox

Although millions of monarchs used to arrive in California each fall, this year’s tally is still an encouraging sign. It indicates that monarchs, like many insects, can recover quickly under the right conditions. “They lay hundreds of eggs,” Karen Oberhauser, a monarch expert and professor of entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison, told Vox in December. “Good conditions can lead to quick increases in their numbers.”

Economists: Supply-chain woes, pandemic drive recent price hikes

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Wisconsin Examiner

Quoted: The U.S. last experienced rampant inflation four decades ago. “We have very short memories,” says Steven Deller, an economist in the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture & Life Sciences. “We don’t remember what it was like during the 1970s and early 80s, so this is unusual.”

In a recent analysis, Menzie Chinn, an economist at the UW’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, writes that inflation averaged just 1.7% in the last decade, at times “raising concerns that inflation was too low.”

But while the current inflation might have first looked like the economy playing catch-up after prices tumbled early in the pandemic, it has since “overshot the trend,” Chinn adds. Big-ticket purchases — cars, appliances and other so-called durable goods — are showing the sharpest increases, Chinn writes on his blog Econbrowser. High real estate prices and rental costs have also been a factor.

Proteins taken from SHARK immune systems can prevent COVID-19 and variants like Omicron from infecting human cells – but scientists say the treatments won’t be ready until the next outbreak

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The Daily Mail

Antibody-like proteins found in a shark’s immune system could be a natural COVID killer that not only prevents the virus that causes it, but also different variants – such as Omicron that is currently spreading across the globe.

The proteins, known as VNARs, are one-tenth the size of human antibodies, making them small enough to ‘get into nooks and crannies that human antibodies cannot access,’ Aaron LeBeau, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of pathology who helped lead the study, said in a statement.

Climate change could be driving record-breaking December temperatures, storms across Wisconsin

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said stormy days aren’t that rare of an occurrence at this time of the year for the state.

“Even in a normal year, under perfectly normal circumstances, we’d have a nice progression of pretty stormy days, followed by a couple of clear days, followed by stormy,” he said. “But there are a couple of things that might be fueling a little bit of an extra punch for these things.”

Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute for Climatic Research at UW-Madison, said the amount of time where tornadoes are a risk for the state is only going to grow.

“On the whole, we’re not sure how (tornadoes) are going to change in the future, whether they’re going to become more intense, less intense, more common, less common,” he said. “But in a warmer climate, we’ll start to see conditions more favorable for tornadoes earlier in the year, in April or May, and then becoming more common in the fall through November.”

Seeking Refills: Aging Pharmacists Leave Drugstores Vacant in Rural America

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Kaiser Health News

“It’s going to be harder to attract people and to pay them,” said David Kreling, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy. “If there’s not a generational thing where someone can sit down with their son or daughter and say that they could take the store over, there’s a good chance that pharmacy will evaporate.”

Labor shortage or labor reckoning? Wisconsin stakeholders weigh in on job force changes

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: People are quitting their jobs at nearly twice the rate they did before the pandemic. And they’re not in a rush to come back, Michael Childers, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business professor, said.

“Workers are more selective and have that opportunity right now based on the job market. And that almost becomes self-fulfilling. It’s sort of this sustaining cycle that we’re in,” Childers said at Tuesday’s event.

Food prices have gone up in the last year. But Wisconsin producers aren’t necessarily being paid more

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Jeff Sindelar is a meat specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. He said most of the price increases have been in fresh meat products, with more processed items like hot dogs or lunch meat seeing small price growth or none at all.

But Sindelar said the meat industry is “too dynamic” to clearly point to the factor that is driving up prices.

He said farmers are facing increased costs to raise animals. But price changes are more likely to come from the processing companies, which have a greater influence on what consumers pay for products. Sindelar travels the state to work with all sizes of meat processors, and he said they’re seeing higher production costs, too.

“Regardless of where I go, I get the same response: they can’t hire enough people, they have open positions. When they’re trying to produce products, it’s taking them seven days to produce five days worth of product,” Sindelar said. “So 20 to 25 percent more resources to produce the same amount of product as they once did.”

Mark Stephenson, UW-Madison’s director of dairy policy analysis, said mixed market signals for dairy farmers could be keeping prices from increasing as rapidly as other food groups.

“Our future markets are showing that we would expect higher (commodity) prices over the next several months. But we’ve also had a few reports that are kind of pulling back on those reigns a little bit. One of them are the stocks reports,” Stephenson said.

How your tax dollars keep Milwaukee renters in danger from faulty wiring

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: The Journal Sentinel’s findings that tax dollars are going to landlords who fail to fix potentially dangerous electrical violations are “shocking and terrible,” said Mitch, a housing law expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who legally goes by just his first name.

“It would be as if a health inspector found rats at a restaurant and said, ‘Here’s a whole bunch of government coupons that you can use to give out and make your food less expensive — never mind the rats,’” he said.

Mitch, who oversees the UW-Madison Neighborhood Law Clinic, which primarily serves low-income renters, said it’s possible to hold landlords accountable while still protecting tenants.

“We can have safe cars, and people still buy cars,” he said. “We can have regulations on restaurants, and we still have restaurants. We have regulations on banking, and we still have banks. Every industry has regulations, and it still survives.”

The ‘perfect storm’: High inflation rates hit Wisconsin businesses and consumers hard

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: “We’re learning that it’s pretty easy to turn the economy off. But it’s really hard just to flip the switch and turn it back on,” said Steve Deller, a professor in agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“What COVID has done is, among other things, it’s changed the risk-benefit calculation that workers do,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at UW-Madison.

Opinion | Is the University of Austin Just a PR Stunt?

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New York Times

To debate the free speech crisis — or lack thereof — on campuses, Jane Coaston brought together Greg Lukianoff, the president and C.E.O. of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs and the director of the Center for European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mexico’s monarch butterflies are falling victim to a real-life butterfly effect

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Vox

Climate change may be one of the other threats pushing down monarch numbers. It’s messing with weather across their range, which plays a huge role in how many butterflies ultimately arrive in Mexico each year, according to Karen Oberhauser, a monarch expert and professor of entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. It’s getting hotter where monarchs breed, for example, and that makes it harder for them to flourish, she said.

Tanzania must face up to calls for reform if it wants to keep the peace

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The Conversation

The emerging partisan politics and the polarisation it creates is a new threat. It does not provide space for democratic contestation, as opposition parties are restricted from political activities. If unaddressed, the polarisation and increasing grievances could destabilise the country. The future of politics in Tanzania depends on the ability of the policy makers and politicians to take advantage of a more enlightened 2021 citizenry as compared to 1961.

Aikande Clement Kwayu is an Independent researcher & Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Redeeming Justice

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C-SPAN.org

Attorney Jarrett Adams discussed his criminal conviction and exoneration as well as the path to his current legal career. He spoke at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison. (With Steven Wright)

Is the urban-rural divide a myth?

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The Hill

The results of the 2020 presidential election suggest that the divide increased further due to differences in views about the COVID-19 pandemic. An NPR report quoted Kathy Cramer of the University of Wisconsin saying, “There’s this sense that decisions about the pandemic are being made in cities and kind of imposed on rural spaces.”

As medicine aims to close diversity gaps, orthopedic surgery is an outlier

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STAT News

The lack of diversity is painfully obvious to patients as well. When one of her family members needed a serious operation recently, Angela Byars-Winston, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin who is Black, scoured the internet looking for expert orthopedic surgeons who could provide a second opinion. She was struck that nearly all of them were white. “Really,” she told STAT, “there’s hardly anyone that looks like us? In the whole country?”

Most Wisconsin school districts joined state COVID-19 testing program, but parents say testing still comes with challenges

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Greg DeMuri is a pediatric epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has also been advising the Madison Metropolitan School District on its testing program. He said it took some time to get the program up and running, but it’s starting to work well.

“It is very, very useful,” he said. “They are seeing cases there, and detecting cases, and they’re able to keep (sick) kids out of school because of it, so it’s a big asset to the schools and to the community.”

Ron Johnson says mouthwash can kill COVID-19. Manufacturer of Listerine, medical experts say there’s no evidence yet to prove that.

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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quoted: Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said no one is discouraging the use of the remedies Johnson is proposing but the public should know they are not proven to be effective in protecting against COVID-19 infection.

“Things like home remedies, vitamins and supplements, new diets have been advertised to and used by people in our society for decades, centuries even, for all sorts of ailments. No one is discouraging their use, but they do not provide tangible benefit against Covid, and they are not a substitute for vaccination,” Sethi said.

Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program, said the NIH relies on proven treatments.

“Simply put, the NIH and other researchers set a high bar for proving that a treatment is effective. Studies done in the lab or in animals, or clinical anecdotes play an important part in the research process, and lead to hypotheses that are then tested in rigorous, controlled trials,” Remington said.

UW Health offers tips to avoid toy related injuries

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WKOW-TV 27

“Kids love this time of year and they make important childhood memories during the holiday season,” said Rishelle Eithun, the program manager for injury prevention at UW Health Kids. “But we want to offer tips to minimize the risk of injury at home. The last thing a family wants is to spend the holiday in the emergency department because of a toy-related injury.”

In 2021 map fight, what’s old is new

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: The Republican resolution passed the Senate and Assembly on party-line votes, and when Republicans released their maps in October, they were pretty true to its principles.

Because of that, the 2021 map looked a lot like the 2011 map. In the world of redistricting shorthand, this is often referred to as “core retention.” But Rob Yablon, University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor, has a different name for it: “gerrylaundering.”

“‘Gerrylaundering’ is an attempt to perpetuate an existing biased map by carrying forward the existing lines with as little change as you can get away with,” Yablon said.

Wisconsin Republicans Introduce Bill Authorizing Sandhill Crane Hunt

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Sierra Club

The Wisconsin Corn Growers Association and other farmers have been among the most vocal supporters of the SB-620, arguing that the Sandhill Crane is a pest that damages their crops. But  advocates with the DNR and ICF argue that an autumn hunt will not prevent crop damage, which most frequently occurs in the spring. Currently, farmers in Wisconsin can apply for a federal permit that allows them to kill Sandhill Cranes that are destroying crops after nonlethal deterrents have failed. These permits are approved on a limited basis and according to the University of Wisconsin-Extension, there are no data to support that hunting permits are effective in controlling crane damage to corn fields.

Conservationists aim to protect songbird in Wisconsin as its population sees steep decline

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Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Staffen said it’s unclear how many Connecticut warblers have historically been found in Wisconsin. There are around 1.5 to 2 million birds worldwide, said Stan Temple, professor emeritus of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Temple noted Connecticut warblers and other species like spruce grouse and boreal chickadees are occupying the southern edge of their range in northern Wisconsin. Those forest-dwelling species are contending with habitat loss as climate change is causing those forests to shift further north. In the next several decades, the southern limits of the songbirds’ range likely will no longer include Wisconsin.

“So in the long term, assuming that climate change continues unabated, the bird is destined to disappear from the Wisconsin landscape, regardless pretty much of what we do,” said Temple.