Tuesday, April 8

HEALTH & WELLNESS

High School Health Workers A Medical School And Georgia Students
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HEALTH & WELLNESS

High School Health Workers A Medical School And Georgia Students

As part of his training to become a certified community health worker, 10th-grader Malachi Ward needed to monitor family or community members—checking their vital signs and setting health goals. When Ward first asked his mother, Fayron Epps, if he could monitor her, she expressed ambivalence. Epps considered herself to be in good health. Although she didn’t have a primary care physician, she always attended her annual women’s health checkup and, despite the occasional headache, felt fine. She agreed to be a study participant because Ward needed five people to monitor. “I was like ‘OK, you can monitor me, but you’re not going to find anything’,” she recalls. Except Ward did find something. “I was really taken aback,” Epps admitted. Her blood pressure was dangerously high. Over the course...
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Coronavirus control measures aren’t pointless – just slowing down the pandemic could save millions of lives
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

Coronavirus control measures aren’t pointless – just slowing down the pandemic could save millions of lives

Anywhere from 20% to 60% of the adults around the world may be infected with the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19. That’s the estimate from leading epidemiological experts on communicable disease dynamics. Even the best-case scenario using those numbers means nearly 40,000,000 adults will be infected in the United States alone. Some people may start to feel fatalistic in the face of those kinds of statistics. There are no vaccines and no specific treatments for people who get sick. What’s the point of fighting something that’s bound to happen anyway? Why not just let the epidemic run its course? But public health officials and medical professionals have been advocating for rapid and decisive efforts to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 as much an...
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How a tech-based program on health brought African American kids and parents together
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HEALTH & WELLNESS

How a tech-based program on health brought African American kids and parents together

The mere act of growing up brings special challenges to young African Americans, particularly those living in rural areas. Resources there are often limited, compared to what’s offered in the city. There’s more chronic poverty and economic stress, and less of almost everything else: employment opportunities, public transportation, recreational facilities, families with discretionary income, and health care, both physical and mental. There are bright spots, however, as I’ve learned from over 20 years of research. One was the caregiving practices of many African American families. That nurturing has helped their children avoid major problems, including behaviors that place them at risk for HIV/AIDS and unplanned pregnancies. With that in mind, I developed the Strong African American Famili...
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What to expect as colleges and universities move classes online amid coronavirus fears: 4 questions answered
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

What to expect as colleges and universities move classes online amid coronavirus fears: 4 questions answered

Rising concerns about the spread of the new coronavirus have led a growing number of colleges and universities to cancel in-person classes and move them online. Vanessa Dennen, who studies teaching and learning on the web, discusses what going online will mean for college students and instructors. 1. How hard will it be? Moving classes online in the midst of an emergency isn’t unprecedented. It’s been done before with local disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. But contending with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, is a different situation. This is a global problem. A sudden shift to temporary or long-term online learning poses a challenge for brick-and-mortar universities to quickly scale up their online learning offerings under less than ideal conditions. It w...
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Predicting the coronavirus outbreak: How AI connects the dots to warn about disease threats
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AI, COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS, TECHNOLOGY

Predicting the coronavirus outbreak: How AI connects the dots to warn about disease threats

Canadian artificial intelligence firm BlueDot has been in the news in recent weeks for warning about the new coronavirus days ahead of the official alerts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. The company was able to do this by tapping different sources of information beyond official statistics about the number of cases reported. BlueDot’s AI algorithm, a type of computer program that improves as it processes more data, brings together news stories in dozens of languages, reports from plant and animal disease tracking networks and airline ticketing data. The result is an algorithm that’s better at simulating disease spread than algorithms that rely on public health data – better enough to be able to predict outbreaks. The company uses the t...
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Why public health officials sound more worried about the coronavirus than the seasonal flu
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS, VIDEO REELS

Why public health officials sound more worried about the coronavirus than the seasonal flu

The spread of the new coronavirus, which has infected over 80,000 people worldwide and resulted in the death of more than 3,000, has raised alarms around the world. At the same time, the seasonal influenza, known as the flu, causes severe illness in between 3 million and 5 million people, with hundreds of thousands of deaths every year worldwide. With so many fewer cases than the flu, what explains the dramatic response to COVID-19 and worry around the globe? And how would a person know whether seasonal influenza-like symptoms are COVID-19? As an epidemiologist, here’s how I look at these questions. Difficult to distinguish The first thing to realize is that the emergence of the novel coronavirus isn’t a rare “black swan” event. Rather, this is a product of evolution; there have been ab...
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Natural supplements can be dangerously contaminated, or not even have the specified ingredients
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HEALTH & WELLNESS

Natural supplements can be dangerously contaminated, or not even have the specified ingredients

More than two-thirds of Americans take dietary supplements. The vast majority of consumers – 84% – are confident the products are safe and effective. They should not be so trusting. I’m a professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Connecticut. As described in my new article in the Annals of Pharmacotherapy, consumers take real risks if they use diet supplements not independently verified by reputable outside labs. What are the risks? Heavy metals, which are known to cause cancer, dementia and brittle bones, contaminate many diet supplements. One study of 121 products revealed 5% of them surpassed the safe daily consumption limit for arsenic. Two percent had excess lead, cadmium and aluminum; and 1% had too much mercury. In June 2019, the Food and Drug Administration seized 300...
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Minority patients benefit from having minority doctors, but that’s a hard match to make
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HEALTH & WELLNESS, Journalism

Minority patients benefit from having minority doctors, but that’s a hard match to make

In today’s America, minority patients still have markedly worse health outcomes than white patients. The differences are greatest for black Americans: Compared to white patients, they are two to three times as likely to die of preventable heart disease and stroke. They also have higher rates of cancer, asthma, influenza, pneumonia, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and homicide. For many of them, structural racism and unequal treatment remain a contributing factor to disease and death. I am a physician who studies health disparities and ways to improve health care delivery. My work focuses on people of color, including those who are black and indigenous. Improving health care delivery for these groups of people is a complicated and multi-layered task, but solutions exist. One of them is to increase th...
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The secondhand smoke you’re breathing may have come from another state
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HEALTH & WELLNESS

The secondhand smoke you’re breathing may have come from another state

Scientists estimate that each year in the U.S., outdoor air pollution shortens the lives of about 100,000 people by one to two decades. As it turns out, much of this pollution originates not in a person’s own neighborhood, but up to hundreds or even thousands of miles away in neighboring states. And, absent strong federal regulations, there’s very little Americans can do about it. In a study published on Feb. 12, we used state-of-the-art modeling to estimate the number of air pollution-related deaths that combustion emissions – those from any kind of burning, from cook stoves to car engines to coal power plants – from each state have caused in every other state over the past 14 years. On average, 41% of these air pollution deaths in the U.S. resulted from what we call “secondhand smok...
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US workplaces are nowhere near ready to contain a coronavirus outbreak
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

US workplaces are nowhere near ready to contain a coronavirus outbreak

The new coronavirus has spread rapidly around the globe since its discovery late last year in China. It has now infected more than 20,000 people worldwide and killed over 400, prompting travel bans, citywide quarantines and mass hysteria. To combat its spread in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has offered some seemingly straightforward advice: “Stay home when you are sick.” That’s easier said than done for the tens of millions of workers in the United States who don’t have paid sick days or who operate in a “tough-it-out” workplace culture. This gap is a big problem when a disease like the coronavirus can be spread with as little as a cough. As someone who researches work, I’ve been wondering: Do these workplace norms and policies help our companies cope...
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