Health Sciences In The Media

Last year's influenza season turned out to be the mildest on record, but health experts have renewed warnings that a ‘twindemic’ – in which flu and COVID-19 cases simultaneously rise and overwhelm hospitals – may be possible this year. “Last year, we didn’t have a very big flu season because people were using masks and that decreased the flu season activity. If we do the same thing this year and we wear masks as much as we can, then the flu season will not hit us as hard as years prior," said Ricardo Correa, MD, endocrinologist and associate professor of medicine at the College of Medicine – Phoenix.

Arizona is already starting to see cases of the flu. "I think this is something that tells us in terms of the flu numbers that we could have an earlier flu season this year. So if people were thinking about when to get their flu shot, sooner rather than later, especially if they're in more higher-risk populations," 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.

Concerns about waning immunity from the Covid-19 vaccines have led to calls for booster shots. But a decrease in antibodies over time is normal and protection against severe disease and death remains strong even as protection against infection decreases. "The quality of antibodies in the body improves over time. It takes way fewer of them to protect you," said Deepta Bhattacharya, PhD, an immunologist at the College of Medicine – Tucson.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $1.67 million to researchers at five institutions to study potential links between coronavirus vaccinations and menstruation. A study at the University of Arizona that began this past May is already 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. "The coronavirus vaccines are not the first vaccines to lead menstruators to report changes to their cycles, according to," according to Leslie Farland, ScD, MSc, an assistant professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

Navajo County continues its effort to understand the plague of drug overdose deaths. “Substance abuse is a symptom of mental illness, not a lifestyle that people choose. Our community lacks critical mental health care, so many people with mental health issues self-medicate with alcohol and other substances. This pattern, which leads to substance abuse, is preventable with medical treatment,” according to a report on trends by the University of Arizona Health Sciences.

Daniel Derksen, MD, director of the UArizona Center for Rural Health, shares the state's current rural health outlook.

The latest COVID-19 surge appears to be slowing — especially in the highly vaccinated portions of Apache and Navajo county. However, public health experts worry that the new, far-more infectious delta strain has spread rapidly among children — unlike the strains responsible for the last big peak in January. Dr. Joe Gerald, MD, PhD, associate professor of public health policy and management at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, has reported a “profound” change in the number of kids getting infected by the Delta variant.

A feature on a cancer survivor references the involvement of sarcoma specialist James Warneke, MD, a professor in the Department of Surgery at the College of Medicine – Tucson, in the patient's treatment.

Many in the U.S. are still swayed by misinformation, but the latest numbers suggest that over time, trust in science is growing. Even then, it’s important to remember that “vaccines are one of the best strategies we have, but it’s not a risk eliminator. It’s a risk reducer," said Saskia Popescu, PhD, MPH, MA, an infectious disease epidemiologist and adjunct professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

Antibody levels—one of the easiest immune metrics to measure—slip downward over the course of several months, before roughly leveling off. That’s perfectly normal, Deepta Bhattacharya, PhD, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, told me. “You have a big increase at the beginning, then a decline.” Consider the alternative: If humans never quieted any of the immunological furor that follows infections and simply kept accumulating antibodies for every pathogen we came across, we’d all have burst a long time ago.