As the third winter of the coronavirus pandemic looms in the northern hemisphere, scientists are warning weary governments and populations alike to brace for more waves of COVID-19.
Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of the UW Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and Adjunct Professor of Global Health, is quoted.
Among the potential solutions that have been proposed to lower the number of fatalities in heat waves is the naming and categorizing of extreme heat events.
Kristie Ebi, Professor of Global Health and of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the UW, is quoted.
People around the world are dying from heat exposure. A few cities and towns — from Phoenix and Miami here in the U.S. to Athens, Greece — are responding by hiring “chief heat officers.” It’s a step to the future of local heat resilience as the climate continues to change.
Kristie Ebi, Professor of Global Health and of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the UW, is quoted.
The Washington State Department of Health has released a new report showing that COVID-19 reinfection rates are rising as the new BA.5 strain becomes the most infectious yet.
Dr. Keith Jerome, Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology in the UW School of Medicine, is quoted.
"It is with a heavy heart that I ponder the media accounts of yet one more mass shooting in America. This one in Highland Park is different from Uvalde or Buffalo, however. I grew up on the North Shore of Chicago. It happened in the familiar," writes Helen Donnelly Goehring.
Research from Dr. Jürgen Unützer, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Adjunct Professor of Global Health, is referenced.
When an unprecedented heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest last July, emergency rooms sought any way possible to lower the core body temperatures of patients coming in droves with heat-related ailments. Many emergency departments in the region began putting people in body bags filled with ice to help safely adjust their temperatures. But despite their lifesaving efforts, around 1,000 excess deaths occurred from the brutal heat.
Kristie Ebi, Professor of Global Health and of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at UW, is quoted.
As if we didn’t have enough contagious viruses to worry about, monkeypox is now the latest unwelcome term to enter our daily lexicon. Even before we learned about the first U.S. cases of the disease in May, the way the European outbreak was framed by the media and public health officials was eerily familiar.
Stephaun Wallace, Clinical Assistant Professor of Global Health at UW, is quoted.
A protein-based COVID-19 vaccine that went through clinical trials at the UW Medicine Virology Research Clinic could soon be available in the U.S. The Food and Drug Administration this week authorized Novavax’s vaccine for emergency use in adults 18 and older. A green light from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is needed before Americans can get the two-dose vaccination.
Dr. Scott McClelland, Professor of Medicine, of Global Health, and of Epidemiology at UW, is quoted.
The climate crisis is pushing weather to the extreme all over the world, and temperatures in the northern latitudes have been particularly sensitive to these changes. So meteorologists at the Met Office — the official weather forecast agency for the United Kingdom — dove in to the super long-range climate models in the summer of 2020 to see what kind of temperatures they’d be forecasting in about three decades.
Kristie Ebi, Professor of Global Health and of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, is quoted.
Researchers from the University of Washington looked at the data from death and census records to estimate life expectancy for Black, white and Hispanic Americans over a three-decade span from 1990 to 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic reversed a promising trend in life expectancy by widening the gap between white and Black Americans.
Dr. Gregory Roth, Associate Professor of Global Health and Medicine-Cardiology, is featured.