In Colorado, Dr. Matthew Wynia, a bioethicist and infectious disease doctor, is working on a plan that would also assign a score. In his rubric, the first considerations are odds of survival and expected length of treatment. ... “One thing everyone agrees on is that the most morally defensible way to decide would be to ask the patients,” Dr. Wynia said.
“We wouldn’t go nearly as close as China in terms of making those kinds of impositions on civil liberties,” said Glen Mays, professor of health policy at the Colorado School of Public Health. “As you get further down that list, the calculus the governor or state health official will have to make is, do the risks we face justify the economic and personal-freedom costs of adopting measures like canceling large events, closing schools or banning movement,” Mr. Mays said.
“If you don’t have adequate vitamin D circulating, you are less effective at producing these proteins and more susceptible to infection,” says Dr. Adit Ginde, professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the study’s lead author. “These proteins are particularly active in the respiratory tract.”
The results are preliminary, noted Robin Gabriels, program director for neuropsychiatric special care at Children’s Hospital Colorado and a psychiatry professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. “I look forward to the researchers conducting a randomized clinical trial to more definitively determine if equine-assisted activities combined with their curriculum effectively improves motor skills compared to therapeutic riding by itself,” said Gabriels.
Because symptoms can be vague or families may not know if they have risk factors, some experts have argued that testing all kids for celiac antibodies is best. Dr. Marian Rewers, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Stahl’s colleague, regularly sees patients who, in his mind, could have benefited from universal screening.
People who exercise in the morning seem to lose more weight than people completing the same workouts later in the day, according to a new study of workouts and waistlines. Dr. Willis and one of his collaborators, Seth Creasy, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, started brainstorming other possible, perhaps unexpected contributors to the enormous variability to weight loss. They hit upon activity timing.
Living near oil and gas wells may increase a woman’s risk of having a baby with a congenital heart defect. “The greatest suspect is the hazardous air pollutants that are emitted during the production of oil and gas,” said the lead author, Lisa M. McKenzie, an assistant research professor at the Colorado School of Public Health at the Anschutz Medical Campus. As a public health issue, the problem is potentially significant. Other studies have linked living near gas and oil sites to premature births, smaller babies, migraines and fatigue. “About 17 million people live near these sites in the U.S.,” Dr. McKenzie said.
Jonathan M. Samet, a pulmonary disease specialist who is dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, said the most recent studies showed negative health effects well below the 12-microgram standard. “It’s not a hard stop where we can say ‘below that, air is safe.’ That would not be supported by the scientific evidence,” Dr. Samet said. “It would be very nice for public health if things worked that way, but they don’t seem to.”
