Pediatric diabetes research is an area that hits close to home for Kristen Nadeau, MD, MS, professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. A member of the Prairie Band of Potawatomi, Nadeau worked on two Native American reservations in medical school and observed a rising medical problem within the population.
“I anticipate that we will see this crisis grow in the fall as kids return to school and are trying to adjust to making up for a year of lost development,” said Jenna Glover, a child psychologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado [and assistant professor of psychiatry at CU School of Medicine].
"Really hard to tell that just by looking at the Colorado data all by itself," said Glen Mays, professor of public policy for the Colorado School of Public Health. Colorado's weekly vaccination totals show a decline in vaccinations leading up to, and even after, Polis' contest announcement on May 25. The week of the announcement saw a 35% drop in vaccinations. The following week -- the week of Memorial Day -- the drop was 21% from the week prior. The week of June 6, however, saw an 11% increase, followed by a drop again.
“The days of that being a profitable, desirable business? It’s a lot tougher than it was a decade or two ago,” said Gina Moore, an associate dean at the University of Colorado’s School of Pharmacy. “You come out of eight years of college – four years of undergraduate and four years of pharmacy school –with pretty significant student loan debt. It’s very hard to go to a rural community where you don’t make any money.”
Point: Dr. Matthew Wynia, a Professor in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health and Director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities, located on the Anschutz Medical Campus: I’m not usually a fan of lotteries — they’re a tax on people who are bad at math, my math teacher once joked. But unlike a lottery, which requires buying a ticket, entry into the COVID-19 vaccination sweepstakes is automatic and free for everyone who gets the vaccine. Here’s why I’m in favor of them.
"The effective treatments for severe obesity in adolescents are really just one: That is bariatric surgery," says Dr. Thomas Inge, a director of adolescent bariatric surgery at Children's Hospital Colorado [and CU School of Medicine professor] and a lead scientist on a multiyear National Institutes of Health study tracking young bariatric patients. "The unwritten story here is the remarkable disparity between the number of teenagers that are eligible for the surgery versus the number that are getting it."
Those counties shouldn’t count on it, according to Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “If counties have low vaccination rates, now is the time to address that, especially with the delta variant,” she said.
Sean O’Leary, a pediatrician and a professor at the University of Colorado [School of Medicine], told me that families that include both kids under 12 and people who can’t be vaccinated or are at high risk for severe COVID-19 might want to be extra mindful of their kids’ exposure, because they could pass it to someone who’s not protected. He also cautioned that “we don’t really have good data yet” on how severe the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which is on track to quickly become dominant in the U.S., is in children, though it does seem to be more transmissible among people of all ages.
