CU Anschutz In The News

Colorado became one of the early states to begin pushing for rules requiring health care workers get flu vaccines. And in general, the rules have been a success, according to Dr. Matt Wynia, the Director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus and an early supporter of the state regulations. “They found it to be extremely successful when you just tell people, 'Look you gotta do this,' then people do it,” Wynia said.

Dr. Emmy Betz is a professor at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. She recently worked with gun shop owners, firearms trainers and public health researchers to create a resource for safe gun storage. She said the new money is significant because it’s the first time in a long time funds have been dedicated to this kind of research. “People are dying and people are being hurt and we need science to figure out how to stop it,” Betz said. “And that's not about gun control. That's about saving people's lives.”

A new study from the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus found that low-income mothers enrolled in the Baby & Me Tobacco Free program in Colorado saw preterm births drop between 24 and 28 percent. For these mothers, neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admissions also fell, between 25 and 55 percent.
 

Emmy Betz, an emergency physician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who focuses on firearm injury prevention, said a central tenet of responsible firearm ownership is preventing access to that weapon to kids and other unauthorized people. “We know that kids are curious, kids are often impulsive, their brains are not fully formed,” Betz said. “As adults, one of the things we need to be doing is making sure that they don’t have access to dangerous things. “It can be with a trigger lock, a cable lock. There are lots of different ways to do that. But the main thing is it shouldn't just be hidden somewhere,” she said.

Emmy Betz is an emergency physician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where her research focuses on preventing suicide by gun."Seventy-six percent of firearm deaths in Colorado are suicides," Betz said. We need to be talking about those." In the conversation, Betz discussed mental health stigmas; extreme risk protection orders (so-called 'Red Flag' laws), which allow judges to temporarily confiscate guns from those who pose an imminent risk; and hospitals' ability to combat mental illness. The question is, does the United States have a gun epidemic?

CU Anschutz researchers found that choline can help expecting women protect the brains of their unborn children from problems caused by the flu and other viruses in the mother.

Researchers at CU Anschutz have zeroed in on a chromosome location that might help explain the high rates of asthma in people of African descent.

So, how should recreationalists evaluate the relative risks? While she was a graduate student at the University of Colorado’s School of Public Health, Lauren Pierpoint helped research high school sports injuries. Every time she is asked about risks, she tell people she “doesn’t have the answer.” For years, the research project thoroughly tracked injuries in practice and competition. They used athletic trainers as data reporters. Pierpoint said there’s nothing comparable for outdoor sports. “Most outdoor recreational sports that a Coloradan would be interested in almost all of them have no good data,” she said.