Starting Oct. 6, panel series on “The COVID Effect”

The pandemic has had a widespread effect on our community

Patrick Luce

Academic Health Collaborative and Interprofessional Education and Practice Initiative host health, education experts for important discussion

The University of Rhode Island Academic Health Collaborative and Interprofessional Education and Practice Initiative will again host a series of virtual panel discussions examining the COVID-19 effect. 

The discussions will focus on the mental and behavioral health issues that have become more visible and acute during the past year and a half; the impact of COVID on children; and the long-term effects of the disease for many who have been ill during the pandemic.

The health collaborative and the education and practice initiative have developed the series for students and the public, with the goal of highlighting the importance of interprofessional collaboration in health care, the promotion of inter-agency knowledge and engagement across health and social service organizations, and the importance of public health in improving community health. The panels will include faculty and alumni from URI, and leaders from community-based organizations.

The first discussion, scheduled for Oct. 6, will examine “The Pandemic’s Epidemic: The Crisis in Mental and Behavioral Health.” Overdoses and overdose deaths have increased as many people have turned to substance use to manage the challenges of an abruptly limited lifestyle. Rates of depression and anxiety have risen dramatically, while resources to meet their needs have been limited. 

Why did this happen, and how do health professionals bring clinical and community-based services to the growing number of people coping with these challenges. Health and education professionals serving as panel members are:

Langevin, Cicilline Secure $3.2 Million to Help Eliminate Youth Homelessness in Rhode Island

Tremendous gap in aid for homeless kids in Rhode Island

Congressmen Jim Langevin and David Cicilline today announced that the Rhode Island Continuum of Care (RICoC) will be receiving $3.2 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP). 

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, youth homelessness in Rhode Island has increased 23% since last year, according to RICoC. 

The YHDP funds awarded to RICoC will be used to improve housing efforts focused on youth, with the goal of eliminating youth homelessness in Rhode Island. 

Specifically, the federal funding will go towards building a constituent-informed response for youth experiencing homelessness with focused attention to prevention and diversion. 

The grant will help RICoC expand categorical eligibility for existing programs, institute direct cash support, create safe spaces for subpopulations at disproportionate risk, and create youth-specific emergency shelter, diversion, and crisis services.  

Mutants!!!

Massive numbers of new COVID–19 infections, not vaccines, are the main driver of new coronavirus variants

Vaughn Cooper, University of Pittsburgh and Lee Harrison, University of Pittsburgh

Coronaviruses use RNA to store information, and small changes in that
genetic code can lead to new strains of the virus. 
Vchal/ iStock via Getty Images Plus

The rise of coronavirus variants has highlighted the huge influence evolutionary biology has on daily life. 

But how mutations, random chance and natural selection produce variants is a complicated process, and there has been a lot of confusion about how and why new variants emerge.

Until recently, the most famous example of rapid evolution was the story of the peppered moth. 

In the mid-1800s, factories in Manchester, England, began covering the moth’s habitat in soot, and the moth’s normal white coloring made them visible to predators. But some moths had a mutation that made them darker. Since they were better camouflaged in their new world, they could evade predators and reproduce more than their white counterparts.

We are an evolutionary biologist and an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh who work together to track and control the evolution of pathogens. Over the past year and half, we’ve been closely following how the coronavirus has acquired different mutations around the world.

It’s natural to wonder if highly effective COVID-19 vaccines are leading to the emergence of variants that evade the vaccine – like dark peppered moths evaded birds that hunted them. But with just under 40% of people in the world having received a dose of a vaccine – only 2% in low-income countries – and nearly a million new infections occurring globally every day, the emergence of new, more contagious variants, like delta, is being driven by uncontrolled transmission, not vaccines.

POLL: Voters Continue to Strongly Support Biden’s Build Back Better Agenda, Want Wealth Corporations to Pay Their Fair Share

What's not to like?

McKenzie Wilson, mckenzie@dataforprogress.org, Data for Progress

Not only do a large bipartisan majority of voters support all pay-fors in the budget reconciliation plan — a plurality of Republicans also support each of them, according to a new poll released by Data For Progress and Invest in America. 

Additionally, the poll found that a significant majority of voters support every major initiative in the Build Back Better agenda and want it passed through the reconciliation package.

Voters support the Build Back Better Plan by a +32-point margin, including Democrats by a +78-point margin, Independents by a +25-point margin, and more than a third of Republicans.

Voters also overwhelmingly support every single major provision of the Build Back Better agenda, including the following:

Fear

 

Wingnuts of the week

 

Jim Langevin steps up

Rep. Langevin Votes to Codify Roe v. Wade Protections into Federal Law 

Congressman Jim Langevin (D-RI) voted for H.R. 3755, the Women’s Health Protection Act, to codify the rights and protections guaranteed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision into federal law. 

The bill’s passage comes as Republican-controlled state legislatures seek to impose extreme abortion bans like Texas’s S.B. 8, which does not include exceptions in cases of rape or incest.

“As the right-wing Supreme Court appears to be on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade -- which has been settled case law for decades -- I will not stand idly by as extremist state legislators around the country empower vigilantes to prevent women from accessing constitutionally-protected reproductive care,” said Rep. Jim Langevin. 

“Although I remain personally opposed to abortion, as a matter of public policy, I do not believe that the government should interfere with a woman’s most intimate decisions. At the end of the day, we must put our trust in women to make the best decisions for themselves and their families.” 

After the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Texas abortion ban (S.B. 8) to go into effect, Rep. Langevin wrote an op-ed in the Providence Journal announcing his decision to co-sponsor the Women’s Health Protection Act. The full op-ed can be found here.

Men, jobless and people with mental health diagnoses most vulnerable in 2020 overdose spike

No explanation for gender difference

Brown University

At the same time as COVID-19 has claimed more than 600,000 lives across the United States, drug overdose deaths across the nation reached unprecedented heights.

Rhode Island has been particularly affected: In December 2020, the state had the highest rate in the country of COVID-19 cases and deaths relevant to population; during the first eight months of 2020, the rate of unintentional drug overdose deaths in Rhode Island increased 28% relative to the same period in the prior year.

Researchers at Brown University’s School of Public Health wanted to learn more about the causes of the overdoses during the pandemic, as well as the people affected by them, as scant data were available. They analyzed two years of health data to look for trends and patterns.

According to their study, published on Friday, Sept. 17, in JAMA Network Open, men, individuals who had lost jobs and people with mental health diagnoses experienced the largest increases in rates of overdose deaths during the pandemic. The researchers also found increases in deaths involving synthetic opioids and in deaths occurring in personal residences (compared to a hospital or elsewhere).

Pregnant or worried about infertility?

Get vaccinated against COVID-19

Matthew Woodruff, Emory University

Despite rampant misinformation, studies show that COVID-19 vaccines
are safe for both the mom and baby. 
Marina Demidiuk/iStock via Getty Images Plus

As the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 surges across the U.S., almost 1 in 5 Americans continue to resist getting shots that are widely available, safe and effective – particularly for preventing the most severe outcomes of the virus.

While people have many different justifications for not getting the shot, one particularly insidious bit of pseudoscience has surfaced. It is routinely invoked in the contentious debate over vaccine policy in the U.S. and continues to stir confusion and skepticism toward vaccines in young women across the globe.

This misinformed argument reasons that the coronavirus vaccines could affect fertility in women by mistakenly triggering the creation of antibodies that react with an important placental protein called syncytin-1. 

This protein contains minor similarities to the coronavirus spike protein used in all current COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, the false narrative goes, the immune system will not be able to differentiate between the two and will create antibodies that interfere with proper development of the placenta.

This argument lacks understanding of how the immune system does its job.

As an immunologist who studies COVID-19 infection and the ways it can cause the immune system to turn against itself, this misunderstanding comes up frequently in my conversations with friends, family members and even medical workers who are legitimately concerned about their health and their future ability to have children.

It is completely understandable to have questions about how a new vaccine might affect reproductive health. But the science is clear that getting vaccinated does not put women at risk for infertility. It protects women, their unborn children and their families from a serious disease that, ironically, could in fact affect fertility in men.

Biden Administration Breaks Deal on Big-Game Hunting

Deal with NRA would have allowed Trump sons to keep killing endangered animals

By SARAH OKESON

Donald Jr (left) and Eric Trump posing with a leopard they shot on a hunting trip to Africa in about 2013.

Federal regulators have tossed a last-minute Trump-era agreement with the National Rifle Association about wildlife conservation which critics said was designed to help trophy hunters.

Aurelia Skipwith, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service under Trump, signed the agreement on Jan. 13, just seven days before President Joseph Biden was sworn in.

“The service’s memorandum of understanding with the National Rifle Association was not adequately reviewed by agency staff or the Department of the Interior solicitor’s office,” said an agency spokesperson. “Therefore, the service terminated the agreement.”

The 10-year agreement called for the agency to work with the NRA to develop “science-based strategies” for wildlife conservation. The agreement also called for the Fish and Wildlife Service and the NRA to promote hunter education, expand access to shooting ranges and hunting and promote marksmanship and shooting safety.

The science behind vaccine refusal

For more cartoons by Ruben Bolling, CLICK HERE.

 

"I know I am going to die..."

 

Hummingbirds can smell their way out of danger

Even with tiny noses 

University of California - Riverside

In less time than it takes to read this sentence, hummingbirds can catch a whiff of potential trouble. That's the result of new UC Riverside research showing, contrary to popular belief, the tiny birds do have an active sense of smell.

Researchers have known for some time that vultures have a highly sensitive sense of smell, with some species being compared to "airborne bloodhounds." This is due in part to their large olfactory bulbs -- tissue in the brain that controls smell.

However, hummingbirds' olfactory bulbs are, like the rest of their bodies, extremely small. Earlier studies were unable to demonstrate that hummingbirds showed a preference for the smell of flowers containing nectar. 

In addition, flowers pollinated by birds generally don't have strong odors, unlike those pollinated by insects. For these reasons, scientists did not previously believe the birds possessed the ability to smell things.

When one size really doesn’t fit all

More intensive and personalized strategies may be needed for weight loss

University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing

Modest weight loss can lead to meaningful risk reduction in adults with obesity. Although both behavioral economic incentives and environmental change strategies have shown promise for initial weight loss, to date their efficacy alone or in combination have not been compared.

In a two-year randomized clinical trial, researchers investigated whether financial incentives and environmental change strategies, together or separately, help employed adults with obesity lose weight and keep it off. 

Of note, the strategies tested in this study did not include any individual counseling sessions or classes. While participants across all study groups lost a modest amount of weight, study participants felt they would have benefitted more from intensive guidance such as on-going counseling and coaching. The findings have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Political orientation predicts science denial

Here’s what that means for getting Americans vaccinated against COVID-19

Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University

Protesters at an anti-vaccine rally in Pennsylvania in August 2021. Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Vaccine refusal is a major reason COVID-19 infections continue to surge in the U.S. Safe and effective vaccines have been available for months, but as of mid-September 2021, only 65% of eligible American adults are fully vaccinated. In many areas, a majority of eligible adults haven’t taken advantage of the opportunity to get vaccinated.

In the U.S., polling on intent to get vaccinated shows a massive political divide. Counties that went for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election show higher vaccination rates than counties that went for Donald Trump. Attendees at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s summer meeting cheered the fact that the U.S. didn’t meet Biden’s July 4 vaccination goals for the country.