To accommodate the rapid expansion of immunization, the county is planning multiple drive-thru vaccination centers, including one on the University of Arizona Mall. “The University of Arizona succeeded last year in developing one of the country’s most effective operations for providing diagnostic and antibody tests for COVID-19 to our campus and the community, and we are well-positioned to do the same for delivering COVID-19 vaccines,” said Dr. Michael D. Dake, senior vice president for UArizona Health Sciences.

A $1.5 million grant fuels a study to understand the occupational risks unique to female firefighters, including those at the Tucson Fire Department.

Outbreak investigations are where Dr. Kristen Pogreba-Brown thrives.

A cross-campus collaboration spearheaded by the College of Public Health seeks to understand ‘long COVID’ and other coronavirus mysteries.

A new survey has found that interactions between U.S. family medicine residencies and the pharma industry in 2019 continued a decade-long downward trend. The survey by researchers at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, questioned the program directors of 628 family medicine residencies and compared the results to surveys conducted in 2008 and 2013.

Personalized cancer vaccines, where a person’s own cancer cells are deployed to train their immune system to recognize and kill their cancer, appear to be on the cusp of arriving, and academic institutions like the University of Arizona College of Medicine are trying to expedite that.

Spanish-speakers and migrant workers who speak Indigenous languages can be more at risk because they don’t have access to information about the signs of heat illness, said Nicolas Lopez-Galvez, who received his doctorate in environmental science from the University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. His dissertation focused on the effects of extreme heat on farmworkers’ kidney function in Hermosillo, Mexico.

The next free COVID-19 Coalition webinar focusing on what you need to know about the emerging coronavirus variants will be Jan. 26 at 6 p.m. ET. Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist and adjunct professor at the University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, is a panelist.

As vaccinations for COVID-19 continue nationwide, blood donation agencies are stepping up efforts to encourage those who have had the disease and recovered to donate their plasma to help treat the sick. Clinical trials, including one overseen by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, are continuing to determine whether plasma transfusions have real benefits. Dr. Marilyn Glassberg Csete, chief of pulmonary medicine at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine, said more proof is still needed. “They can’t say there is evidence unless there’s a randomized, double-blind, robustly constructed and conducted trial.”

Will vaccines bring life back to normal? “When community transmission rates are very high, as they are now, you will hear of people getting infected even after the vaccines,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson. “But as more and more people get vaccinated, the chances of that happening will drop by a lot. At that point, we can very much look forward to going out to dinner, etc., and still be safe.”