CU Anschutz In The News

"The American Academy of Neurology proposes putting into law only three specific criteria for the determination of death by neurologic criteria. ACP opposes putting only three criteria into law because doing so would be overly narrow and privileges certain brain functions over others," says Dr. Matthew DeCamp, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who helped write the ACP guidelines. "The whole-brain standard is a firmer biologic foundation for determining death."

The industry also favored reputable scientists who were considered scientifically conservative, for generally wanting to see a larger body of evidence than their peers before reaching conclusions. Among them is Dr. Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, who has a long history as an epidemiologist and researcher. A 1995 review produced by tobacco company Philip Morris concluded that his reputation "as an authority in pulmonary medicine and epidemiology" was "probably due at least in part to his scientific conservatism."

Dr. Eric Simoes, from the Children's Hospital Colorado, worked with Pfizer and has been working on RSV prevention for decades. He calls this approval fantastic news. "My only hope is that we can get these vaccines not only in the U.S., but also to children in developing countries that need it the most," says Simoes.

Questions about the accuracy of provider directories persist. Dr. Neel Butala, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, found that fewer than 20% of more than 449,000 physician listings had consistent address and specialty area information across five large insurers' directories, according to a research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on March 14.

Asturias, an infectious disease pediatrician with the University of Colorado, had grown up pretty close to that spot and, like Rojop, he witnessed how poverty, malnutrition and a lack of medical care created repeated cycles of disease battering his community.

"We're trying to focus on pathogens that just happen to be in the blood that the mosquito happened to suck up," says Dr. Dan Olson, a research director at FunSalud and a pediatric infectious disease doctor at the University of Colorado's School of Medicine.

There's a good chance you don't even need to use medicine, says Dr. Sean O'Leary, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children's Hospital Colorado, as well as the chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). "These medicines are not curative. They don't alter the duration of the illness or anything like that. They are essentially purely for comfort," he tells NPR.

Dr. Monica Federico, a pediatric pulmonologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children's Hospital Colorado in Denver, started an asthma program at the hospital several years ago. About a fifth of its appointments proved no-shows. The team needed something more granular than patient satisfaction data to understand why.