Feature Channels: Public Health

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Safety net clinics offer high-quality, comprehensive care at a significant savings compared to doctor offices and other providers

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Rebecca Katz, PhD, MPH, co-director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center, will testify before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations examining the role of U.S. support for the World Health Organization.

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After a day of cannonballs and swan dives, you may find yourself with some water in your ear when you’re drying off. While most of the time, water stuck in your ear is no more than a nuisance, other times water exposure can lead to acute otitis externa—or swimmer’s ear.

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One in three people has a potentially nasty parasite hiding inside their body -- tucked away in tiny cysts that the immune system can’t eliminate and antibiotics can’t touch. But new research reveals clues about how to stop it: Interfere with its digestion during this stubborn dormant phase.

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An intervention at a free clinic that included comprehensive care for hearing was able to provide recycled, donated hearing aids to low-income adults, according to a study published by JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery.

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Scientists at the University of Notre Dame have found that exposure to just 10 minutes of light at night suppresses biting and manipulates flight behavior in the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, the major vector for transmission of malaria in Africa, according to new research.

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Researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health have received a nearly $2.6 million grant for an innovative project that will address the social factors that affect the health of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries in Harris County.

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Understanding and responding to behavioral trends in groups that are at high risk for HIV infection is critical to the development of effective strategies that decrease HIV incidence and improve access to care. New research based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National HIV Behavioral Surveillance (NHBS) system are presented in a special supplement to JAIDS: Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer.

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Dimagi, Inc. and The Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai announced today that they are Grand Challenges Explorations winners, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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The UC Blum Federation has released a compendium of research working toward reducing poverty and improving health for all populations.

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Several critical periods over a human life span – including before birth -- determine when individuals are the most susceptible to environmental toxicants. Researchers will gather at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania this Monday to discuss these “Windows of Susceptibility."

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With a growing consensus in the global health community that Hepatitis C (HCV) could be eliminated, a new report highlights a key missing element needed to achieving complete elimination—adequate surveillance and monitoring—and explains how modest investments would improve lives and save money.

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Health care providers should focus on the overall quality of psychiatric care, depression screening and outpatient services to prevent suicide, not the number of available inpatient psychiatric beds, argue researchers from the University of Chicago and Columbia University in a new statistical analysis.

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The American Cleaning Institute (ACI) will help infection control experts better understand the process and possible results from pending U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decisions on the safety and effectiveness of certain active ingredients used in healthcare antiseptics in early 2018. Dr. Paul DeLeo, ACI Associate Vice President, Environmental Safety, will be part of a team of experts speaking at the 2017 Association for Professionals in Infection Control (APIC) and Epidemiology Convention in Portland, Oregon.

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Can use of hair products have an impact on breast cancer risk for women? That is a question explored by investigators from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Rutgers School of Public Health and other colleagues who examined use of hair dyes, hair relaxers and cholesterol-based hair products in African-American and Caucasian women.

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FSU Professor of Biological Science Hengli Tang will receive $1.8 million from the NIH and serve as the co-lead on a project focusing on zika and West Nile research.

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Studies provide an insight into elder abuse and self-neglect in relationship to its two-year incidence, adult children perpetrators and previous child abuse, levels of physical function, and suicidal ideation.

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The long list of conditions that smoking can cause, contribute to, increase the risk of or worsen runs from high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and stroke to gum disease, arthritis and erectile dysfunction.

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If you have a recipe for homemade mosquito repellent, two New Mexico State University professors want to hear about it.

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Research done at Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source was vital to the process of identifying the structure, which provides a guide for designing a Lassa virus vaccine. Lassa virus is endemic to Africa and kills thousands of people a year; it is particularly deadly for pregnant women.

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Zika viral load and the degree of Zika symptoms during pregnancy are not necessarily associated with problems during pregnancy or fetal abnormalities at birth. The presence of antibodies to previously acquired dengue fever also is not necessarily linked to abnormalities during pregnancy or at birth.

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Scientists have known for decades that smoking cigarettes causes DNA damage, which leads to lung cancer. Now, for the first time, UNC School of Medicine scientists created a method for effectively mapping that DNA damage at high resolution across the genome.

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Jorge Rey, director of the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory, went to the nation’s capital to talk about how organizations can work together to control mosquitoes that transmit – or “vector” -- the virus.

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At a glance: People with low levels of vitamin A living in households with people who have TB were 10 times more likely to develop the disease themselves. The study findings suggest that vitamin A supplementation may offer powerful protection against the deadly disease among high-risk individuals. TB, one of the top infectious disease killers globally, hits especially hard in low- and middle-income countries, where vitamin A deficiencies are common.

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Cornell and Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research scientists have developed a way to produce a protein antigen that may be useful as vaccine for schistosomiasis – a parasitic disease that infects millions of people, mostly in tropical and subtropical climates – according to new research in the journal Protein Expression and Purification, June 2017.

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Vaccines are scientifically proven to save lives and prevent major outbreaks of highly infectious diseases among large populations in a safe and effective way.

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GW Researchers received a $3 million U01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to test the efficacy of a candidate recombinant hookworm vaccine, the next step in their goal to fight hookworm.

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People who regularly use electronic cigarettes are less dependent on their product than those who regularly use traditional cigarettes, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.

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New York State International Training and Research Program Receives $1.5 Million to Conduct HIV Research Training Program in Ukraine

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Michigan Medicine researchers sought to determine how much certain factors affect a patient’s decision to have elective diagnostic tests in the emergency department.

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The National Institutes of Health has awarded researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, The Rockefeller University, The City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY), a $7.5 million grant for the Center for AIDS Research focused on preventing HIV transmission and ending the AIDS epidemic.

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A chemical currently being used to ward off mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus and a commonly used insecticide that was threatened with a ban in the United States have been associated with reduced motor function in Chinese infants, a University of Michigan study found.

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Researchers from Penn Medicine have developed a new urine test, called UrSure, to monitor adherence to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in order to help curb the HIV epidemic and prevent high-risk populations from being infected with HIV.

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For the first time, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill show how the antiviral class of drugs called NS5A inhibitors interacts with the hepatitis C virus, and these findings show a difference between strains of HCV. These results were published in PLOS Pathogens.

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While tobacco control advocates are pushing for "a kind of prohibition" on cigarettes, the cannabis community is doing quite the opposite, researchers say.

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Building on insights from an HIV vaccine regimen in humans that had partial success during a phase 3 clinical trial in Thailand, a Duke-led research team used a more-is-better approach in monkeys that appeared to improve vaccine protection from an HIV-like virus.

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UMB grants licensing rights for new vaccine candidate to Serenta Biotechnology, LLC, whose co-founder, Mark Shirtliff, PhD, professor at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry and the UM School of Medicine.

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A University of Florida entomologist is working with other scientists to detect the Zika virus in minutes, rather than days or weeks, allowing for faster and more targeted mosquito control practices and detection in patient samples.

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The University of Kansas Cancer Center and Children’s Mercy Twitter #NoTobaccoChat focused on changing the way healthcare providers treat tobacco dependence.

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A new study finds that exposure to a widespread outdoor fungus can increase cell damage (oxidative stress) in the airways. This spike weakens the airways’ barrier defense system that, when functioning normally, removes infection- and allergy-causing organisms (mucociliary clearance).

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Officers who work afternoons are twice as likely to be fatigued, which puts them at greater risk for accidents, errors and stress, according to results of UB-led study that won first place in national conference poster competition.

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Medical emergencies cause a high number of vehicle crashes. University of Michigan researchers have teamed up with Toyota to examine whether new vehicle technology could predict — and potentially prevent — such scenarios.

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Almost 1 in 6 of the millions of Americans on the new blood-thinning medications for atrial fibrillation, a common heart condition characterized by an irregular and often rapid heart rate, may not be receiving the recommended dose, new Mayo Clinic research finds.

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In a new study published recently in Tobacco Control, Penn researchers found that health warning labels that include images or Pictorial Warning Labels (PWLs) are more effective in gaining and holding the attention of smokers when the image and the text convey similar risks.

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One of the primary ways physicians diagnose urinary tract infections is with a test that detects bacteria in urine. A new enhanced test detects significantly more bacteria than the standard test, according to a study presented at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans.

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A Georgia State University researcher, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Florida State University, has received a five-year, $7.7 million federal grant to study the consequences of West Nile and Zika virus infections on the human central nervous system.

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In some states, patients who test positive for chlamydia or gonorrhea leave the clinic with not only a prescription for themselves, but also one for their sexual partner — who was not seen by a doctor.