When the CDC announced in mid-May that fully vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks in most indoor settings, it felt like a milestone to many Americans. But now that the circumstances have shifted, so should our behavior to deal with them. “The vaccines are highly effective, but we know they’re not perfect, so it’s important to use complementary measures like masking for those areas with higher levels of Covid in the community,” said Saskia Popescu, PhD, MPH, MA, an infectious disease epidemiologist and adjunct professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

A study at the University of Arizona that began this past May is specifically tracking self-reported menstrual experience in a subset of participants in a larger, longer-running study of the effects of the pandemic on health. "We have about 600 women in this reproductive cohort and we're following them for a variety of things, so we're collecting saliva to measure cortisol, we're collecting dried blood spots to measure anti-Müllerian hormones, which is a marker of ovarian reserve," said Leslie Farland, ScD, MSc, an assistant professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

High levels of community spread, a category that currently engulfs almost the entire state of Arizona, puts everyone at some risk, though unvaccinated people not wearing a mask face the most serious risks. "They have no protection against the virus," said Farshad Fani Marvasti, MD, an associate professor and director of the public health, prevention and health promotion curriculum at the College of Medicine – Phoenix.

The Center for Innovation in Brain Science received a $15.1 million grant from the National Institutes on Aging to investigate perimenopausal brain aging.

Research conducted by Joe Gerald, MD, PhD, associate professor of public health policy and management at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, shows the rate of COVID-19 transmission among children is poised to surpass that of older age groups for the first time. “With continued K–12 in-person instruction, plus opening of our major universities, there will be additional pressure on transmission among children and young adults," Dr. Gerald said.

College Researchers Designed Novel Molecular Diagnostics Technology to Monitor the Health of Four Crew Members during First All-Civilian Mission to Orbit

Part one of a two-part series on how the pandemic intensified a sense of purpose and prompted lasting changes in education, research and outreach.

Deepta Bhattacharya, PhD, an immunologist at the College of Medicine – Tucson, explains how COVID-19 vaccines provide lasting immune durability. "The quality of the antibody improves over time. It takes far fewer of those new antibodies to protect you. So I think that worrying about antibody decline is not something that's productive," Bhattacharya says. Note: This content appeared on more than 60 local NPR affiliate websites.