CU Anschutz In The News

Faculty members at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus collaborated with gun shop owners, firearms trainers and public health researchers at the Colorado Firearm Safety Coalition to develop the resource. Dr. Emmy Betz was a leader on the project and a link between the two entities. She is an emergency physician at CU and the co-founder of the Colorado Firearm Safety Coalition. “This project initially started because we know that when folks are at risk of suicide, it can be a good idea to either lock up the gun or ideally move it outside of the home until the person's feeling better,” Betz said.

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."

In an effort to prevent suicides, local researchers at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus have identified 62 locations in the state where a person can temporarily store their firearms outside of the home during a mental health crisis. Faculty with the Colorado School of Public Health and the CU School of Medicine created an online map of those locations that can be used for residents looking for a place to temporarily store their guns.

Robert Valuck is a professor at the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Director of the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention. “This is one of the ways to do it that’s the most accessible. Methadone clinics are wonderful but there are not that many of them and buprenorphine could be prescribed by virtually any doctor that’s willing to get one day of training,” he said.

By Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health. As a Boulder resident and public health physician, I urge the Boulder City Council to take an action needed to protect Boulder’s youth — pass a policy that bans all flavored nicotine products in all locations. While the Food and Drug Administration took jurisdiction over electronic cigarettes in 2016, action at the national level will likely be delayed for years, and in the meantime communities can take steps to protect youth, as proposed for Boulder.

The Mountain West has some of the highest rates of depression and suicide. Researchers think the mountains, with a lack of oxygen at high altitude, could be interfering with people's mental health.Emmy Betz is an emergency physician and researcher at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She also just wrapped up a stint on the Colorado Suicide Prevention Commission. She says it's really important to look at other factors.

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?

The firms did not test for asbestos or lead. The types of cancer the employees were diagnosed with -- liver, lung and two cases of breast cancer -- aren’t common outcomes for asbestos and lead, said Jonathan Samet, epidemiologist and dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, at the town hall. Because there were no cancers or diseases associated with asbestos or lead, and because the university regularly tests for these components, they weren’t included in the tests. Samet said that the investigation would have been different had the cancers been related to known exposures. He used the example of Legionnaires disease, a type of pneumonia caused by bacteria.