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.

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.

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.

Sunrise ceremony organized by the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion calls for strength, guidance and protection during the new academic year.

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.

ASTEC Assistant Director Dave Biffar brings an innovative, interdisciplinary and experiential approach to next-generation health care education.

Seeking to unravel the biological complexities of this increased risk, Roberta Diaz Brinton, director of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center for Innovation in Brain Science and Regents Professor of Pharmacology, has been awarded a $15.1 million grant from the National Institutes on Aging, a division of the National Institutes of Health. The grant will allow Brinton to continue research to reveal the transformations in the brain that occur during female midlife aging that lead to greater risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

Racial disparities aside, researchers are working hard to unravel what might be driving increases in colorectal cancer among Gen Xers and millennials, looking at everything from heightened exposure to pesticides and hormone-mimicking chemicals in the environment, to early overuse of antibiotics, to lack of vitamin D-generating sunlight. “There are so many different candidates, and there is a lot of speculation in the field,” says Nathan Ellis, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Arizona Cancer Center who studies colon cancer risk.