CU Anschutz In The News

A good option: a mask made of two layers of a thick-weave fabric with a built-in pocket where you can place a filter, says May Chu, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health who co-authored a paper published on June 2 in Nano Letters on the filtration efficiency of household mask materials. ... "If you go to Walmart, you look for Oly-fun, which is the brand name of that fabric. It's also called spunbond," says Chu, who's a scientific adviser to the World Health Organization and helped craft its recent detailed guidance on cloth masks.

As for cloth masks, the protection depends on what they're made out of and how well they fit. But with the right combination of materials, you can create a cloth mask that offers protection to the wearer in the 30% to 50% range or more, says May Chu, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health who co-authored a paper published on June 2 in Nano Letters on the filtration efficiency of household mask materials.

Dr. Cecilia Sorensen in an editorial in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine calls this new mysterious form of kidney failure "a sentinel disease" in the era of climate change. "We know that climate change is exacerbating a lot of different human diseases. It exacerbates cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease," says Sorensen, an emergency medicine physician who also teaches at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "But this is one of the first identified where we can say this disease probably wouldn't have occurred if it weren't for the extreme global temperatures."

University of Colorado professor Heather Coats studies the health impact of biographical storytelling. She notes a 2008 study found that radiologists did a more thorough job when they were simply provided a photo of the patients whose scans they were reading. "They improved the accuracy of their radiology read," Coats says. "Meaning [fewer] misspelled words; a better report that's more detailed." Current research is investigating whether storytelling might have a similar effect on clinical outcomes.

Victoroff is a co-founder of the Colorado coalition, along with Dr. Emmy Betz, an emergency room physician and public health researcher at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who focuses on suicide prevention. Betz has been affected by gun suicides in her own family, including one just recently — a cousin in his 20s. "That's still pretty raw for many of us," Betz says. "For me, happening in the midst of the work that I do, it made me pause and think about, 'Do I want to keep doing this work? And how could I have not done more to prevent it?' "According to Betz, it hasn't been hard within the coalition to find common ground on suicide prevention. "Shame on us in public health for not doing this sooner," she says.

Many grief counselors are praising Obama for illuminating — and normalizing — miscarriage, helping families cope with their own loss. "What a gift," said Helen L. Coons, a clinical health psychologist specializing in women's behavioral health at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Miscarriage, or the loss of a pregnancy before 20 weeks, is so common that Americans often stay quiet about their pregnancies until after the first trimester, when the majority of miscarriages occur. Improvements in early pregnancy detection and the use of fertility treatments have increased the likelihood that couples learn they have miscarried, when they once might not have even known they were pregnant.

Dr. Emmy Betz, who studies guns and dementia at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, suggests that families draw up a firearms agreement — a kind of advance directive for guns. The conversation, Betz says, might include questions like "Who do you want to be the one to say, 'I think it's time'? Who do you want to give [your guns] to? Is it your family member? Is it Joe down at the gun club? So that you're still the one making the decision. Even if when the time comes, you're not aware of what's happening."

Dr. Amanda Dempsey, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, talks about why some people are hesitant to get their children vaccinated.