answers

13Jun

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

WOMENS ISSUES

Tampon Shortage: Senator Seeks Answers From Manufactures

A tampon shortage that has left shelves bare across the country in recent weeks, fueling reports of price increases online for menstrual products, is drawing the attention of Congress. Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, is requesting that manufacturers Procter & Gamble, Edgewell Personal Care, Johnson and Johnson and Kimberly-Clark share by the end of the week how they plan to increase their supplies of tampons, according to a copy of a letter sent Monday and shared exclusively with The 19th. Hassan is also calling for answers on anecdotal reports of price gouging for tampons that have surfaced on Amazon, after Time reported last week that a box of 18 tampons was priced as high as $114 in January. Those reports don’t appear to be widespread yet, but shortages in major reta...

An Epidemiologist Scoured The Latest Research And Has Some Answers To The Question – Do You Need A Second Booster Shot?

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS, IN OTHER NEWS

An Epidemiologist Scoured The Latest Research And Has Some Answers To The Question – Do You Need A Second Booster Shot?

In late March 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized a second booster shot of COVID-19 vaccines for vulnerable populations in the U.S., a move that was soon after endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People ages 50 years and older and certain immunocompromised individuals who are at higher risk for severe disease, hospitalization and death are eligible four months after receiving the initial booster shot. A second booster shot is equivalent to a fourth dose for people who received a Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna mRNA series or a third dose for those who received the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine. In Israel, people in these same vulnerable categories began receiving fourth doses in January 2022. The U.K. recently started administering a four...

An Economist Answers 3 Questions – Who Benefits From A Break On Federal Student Loan Payments?

12Jan

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

EDUCATION, Journalism

An Economist Answers 3 Questions – Who Benefits From A Break On Federal Student Loan Payments?

Although President Joe Biden has extended the pause on federal student loan payments from February 1 to May 1 – a move that includes a suspension of interest on the loans – some advocates want the president to cancel student loan debt altogether. Here, economist William Chittenden illuminates who benefits and who pays when borrowers get a break on paying back their federal student loans. 1. How helpful is this pause to individual borrowers? It depends. 18.1 million borrowers – out of 43.4 million borrowers – were making federal student loan payments prior to the current loan pause. Now, these borrowers will continue to get a break on making payments until May 1, 2022. With an average monthly payment of US$393, the collective direct benefits to these 18.1 million borrowers have been over $...

An epidemiologist answers 6 questions – How effective are vaccines against omicron?

16Dec

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

An epidemiologist answers 6 questions – How effective are vaccines against omicron?

The pandemic has brought many tricky terms and ideas from epidemiology into everyone’s lives. Two particularly complicated concepts are vaccine efficacy and effectiveness. These are not the same thing. And as time goes on and new variants like omicron emerge, they are changing, too. Melissa Hawkins is an epidemiologist and public health researcher at American University. She explains the way researchers calculate how well a vaccine prevents disease, what influences these numbers and how omicron is changing things. 1. What do vaccines do? A vaccine activates the immune system to produce antibodies that remain in your body to fight against exposure to a virus in the future. All three vaccines currently approved for use in the U.S. – the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vacc...

An Immunologist Answers 3 Questions: Should Pregnant Women Get The COVID-19 Vaccine? Will It Protect Against Asymptomatic Infections And Mutated Viruses?

10Nov

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

HEALTH & WELLNESS

An Immunologist Answers 3 Questions: Should Pregnant Women Get The COVID-19 Vaccine? Will It Protect Against Asymptomatic Infections And Mutated Viruses?

This week I was vaccinated against COVID-19 with the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, which brought to mind some frequently asked questions about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. I am a physician, and I just got my first shot of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. William Petri, CC BY-SA I am a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Virginia, where I care for patients with COVID-19 and conduct research on how best to prevent, diagnose and treat this new infection. As I interact with patients in the hospital, some mothers and expectant mothers have asked whether it is safe for them to take the vaccine. Here is what I have said to them. 1) Can I get vaccinated if I am pregnant or breastfeeding? Yes, you can and should get a COVID-19 vaccine if you are either pregnant or breastfeeding. An impor...

Why did women vote for Hitler? Long-forgotten essays hold some answers

19Jun

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

POLITICS

Why did women vote for Hitler? Long-forgotten essays hold some answers

The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in the 1930s came on the back of votes from millions of ordinary Germans – both men and women. But aside from a few high-profile figures, such as concentration camp guard Irma Grese and “concentration camp murderess” Ilse Koch, little is known about the everyday women who embraced the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, known more commonly as the Nazi Party. What little data we do have on ordinary Nazi women has been largely underused, forgotten or ignored. It has left us with a half-formed understanding of the rise of the Nazi movement, one that is almost exclusively focused on male party members. And yet more than 30 essays on the subject “Why I became a Nazi” written by German women in 1934 have been lying fallow in the archives of the Hoove...

During The Pandemic Domestic Violence Calls For Help Increased But Answers Haven’t Gotten Any Easier

21Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY

During The Pandemic Domestic Violence Calls For Help Increased But Answers Haven’t Gotten Any Easier

Domestic violence rose globally in 2020 – so much so that doctors have called it “a pandemic within a pandemic.” The National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice, a team of national experts tasked with assessing the impact of COVID-19 on the justice system, recently estimated that in the United States, domestic violence incidents increased 8.1% on average following stay-at-home orders. Worldwide, the United Nations estimates there was a 20% increase in domestic violence incidents across its 193 member states during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns. We are criminologists with expertise in domestic violence and policing, respectively. To understand whether and how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted calls for help for domestic violence in the U.S., we examined short- and long-term trends in ...

A Doctor Answers Readers Questions – Why Should I Trust The Coronavirus Vaccine When It Was Developed So Fast?

23Dec

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

A Doctor Answers Readers Questions – Why Should I Trust The Coronavirus Vaccine When It Was Developed So Fast?

With a coronavirus vaccination effort now underway, you might have questions about what this means for you and your family. If you do, send them to The Conversation, and we will find a physician or researcher to answer them. Here, Dr. Lana Dbeibo, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine, answers reader questions about the vaccine and compromised immune systems and whether to get the vaccine if a person has had previous adverse reactions to a vaccine. I fully support the use of vaccines, but I worry about possible long-term side effects with the new vaccines. How can anyone say with any confidence there will be no long-term consequences with vaccines that have been developed so rapidly? There are reasons the vaccines were developed rapidly: Firs...

How ‘good’ does a COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine need to be to stop the pandemic? A new study has answers

15Jul

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

How ‘good’ does a COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine need to be to stop the pandemic? A new study has answers

The U.S. is pinning its hopes on a COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine, but will a vaccine alone be enough to stop the pandemic and allow life to return to normal? The answer depends on a how “good” the vaccine ends up being. In a study published July 15 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, my colleagues and I used a computer simulation of every person in the country to show how effective a vaccine would have to be and how many people would have to get vaccinated to end the pandemic. We found that a coronavirus vaccine’s effectiveness may have to be higher than 70% or even 80% before Americans can safely stop relying social distancing. By comparison, the measles vaccine has an efficacy of 95%-98%, and the flu vaccine is 20%-60%. That doesn’t mean a vaccine that offers less protectio...

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

Tony Porter Answers: Can We Build a Better Man?

What is men’s role in the #MeToo movement, and what does a new or nontoxic masculinity look like? Millions of pages have been devoted to demystifying the relationship between men and women, unpacking gendered power dynamics, and more recently, to interrogating toxic masculinity and finding ways to hold some men accountable for their bad behavior. What is now known as the #MeToo movement began more than a decade ago, when activist Tarana Burke launched a conversation around sexual harassment and assault often experienced by women and femmes with the powerful phrase “me too.” But what role do men have to play in ending this epidemic, and divorcing themselves from the toxic masculinity that underlies this behavior? We asked authors, organizers, journalists, and leaders to wei...