About 90% of prospective drugs are pulled in clinical trials, and the vast majority of the time that’s because they weren’t effective, as opposed to a commercial reason, a May 2021 paper by the University of Virginia’s Ekaterina Khmelnitskaya found.
An international team of scientists says timely vaccination is very important ahead of the flu season. According to a release, the findings came from a collaboration between the UVA School of Medicine and the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil. The researchers found that poor timing of influenza vaccination campaigns in the semi-arid region of Brazil led to an increase in premature births, lower birth-weight babies, and the need to deliver more babies by cesarean section.
With flu season approaching in the United States, new research from an international team of scientists testifies to the importance of timely vaccination: Poor timing of influenza vaccination campaigns in the semi-arid region of Brazil led to an increase in premature births, lower birth-weight babies and the need to deliver more babies by cesarean section, the researchers found. The findings, from the UVA School of Medicine and longstanding collaborators at the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil, come as the United States rolls out annual flu vaccines amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Podcast) Lana Swartz, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, discusses cryptotwitter and her book “New Money: How Payments Became Social Media.”
UVA experts believe the worse of the pandemic’s fourth wave — blamed on the highly transmissible delta variant — has passed, but cases remain elevated.
UVA Medical Center researchers identified the Mu variant in the genomic surveillance that they track, said Bryan Lewis, a research associate professor at UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute, who developed the COVID-19 projection model for Virginia. “We’ve seen some evidence that Mu is having trouble out-competing Delta,” said Lewis.
(Audio) For many, Elizabeth Holmes was the embodiment of the girlboss brand of feminism. Her relentless ambition, status as the youngest female self-made billionaire and as a female CEO in the male-dominated Silicon Valley made Holmes a role model for many women in tech. Now years later, her trial defense portrays a drastic contrast to the image of the empowered, all-knowing CEO. Has feminism played a role in shielding Holmes from criticism and accountability? Anne Coughlin, a UVA professor of law, helps parse this out.
(Subscription required) What UVA basketball is under Tony Bennett, what it was built upon throughout the previous 12 seasons: continuity, collectivity, mutual long-term growth. Virginia players tend to come to campus as (relatively and variably) unheralded but promising talents; they often leave only after four seasons (and maybe a redshirt year thrown in), ready to embark on successful professional hoops careers. They progress through the program in studied increments. There’s just one problem: Are we sure men’s college basketball still works like this?
While experts agree that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have proven to be extremely effective, scientists around the world are trying to build a better vaccine. Some say a more universal vaccine targeting multiple families of coronavirus could prevent another outbreak. Researchers at UVA, the University of California-Irvine and UNC Chapel Hill are already testing or studying universal protection. It’s a quest to develop one shot to rule them all.
Kevin Pritchard made his offseason desire clear: The Indiana Pacers president of basketball operations wanted someone to emerge as a locker room leader and he wasn’t sure whether that player was on the roster at the end of last season. By the time training camp opened, Pritchard thought he had found an answer in [UVA alumnus] Malcolm Brogdon.
Chris Cornelius looks at the contemporary art sculpture that has become the centerpiece of the plaza outside Lawrence University’s Mudd Library, its shape pointing purposely northwest toward what is now the home of the Menominee Nation, and wonders what conversations it might spark. “I would hope the Indigenous community here on campus would see it as a place to gather, to have as a physical symbol that they are being acknowledged, and to open those conversations up about how land was acquired and who was Indigenous to it and how do we begin to reconcile that with one another,” said Cornelius,...
“You can’t take the politics out of politics,” says University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato. “I don’t blame the commissioners really because they’re simply defending the interest of the party that appointed them or elected them.”
Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, attributed today’s divisions to a confluence of factors – the coronavirus pandemic and related economic downturn, former President Trump’s tendency toward sowing division, 24/7 news coverage and social media. She described the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol as the type of “violent disunity” last seen during the Civil War era. “All of these relate to and develop and perpetrate the divisions that we now see, so that it’s very hard for any president to try to bridge those gaps,” Perry said.
The playbook for the legal world is different from the political world. And in the political world, “every time a president does something controversial, it becomes a building block for future presidents,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies presidential powers.
In jurisprudence, “true threat” has a specific meaning. “Vociferous dissenting speech at a school board meeting is protected,” said law professor Douglas Laycock at the University of Virginia School of Law. “Disrupting the meeting and making it impossible to continue probably is not. Threatening the school board with physical violence definitely is not.”
“With COVID, it is estimated that because of how many patients delayed screening for cancer, that means that there were going to see more patients present with more advanced cancers in the future. And the former head of the National Cancer Institute estimated that there will be about 10,000 excess deaths from colon and breast cancer because of the lack of screening,” said Dr. Joan Schiller, adjunct professor at the University of Virginia, board member at the Lung Cancer Research Foundation, and OUCH member. Like with COVID-19, screening disruptions caused by climate change could spell worse ou...
“The ties that bind have grown tighter for those navigating COVID together,” said Wilcox, a survey adviser whose professional titles include director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. “On the downside, all the uncertainty, trials and tribulations made people not currently in a family a bit more cautious.”
Many young adults see marriage as “nice,” but not a priority and view their 20s as a time to focus on education, work and fun, said Brad Wilcox, a survey adviser whose titles include director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and senior scholar at the Institute for Family Studies. He notes that when young adults delay marriage and starting a family, they become less likely to do either.
One challenge to overall fertility is that so many couples wait longer to get married and start families, said Brad Wilcox, an Institute for Family Studies scholar who directs the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and was a survey adviser.
Climate change and other human actions are erasing wetlands and the benefits they come with. Hurricanes, which scientists expect climate change to make more severe, flood wetlands with ocean water storm surges that kill plants with too-salty conditions. Meanwhile, rising sea levels, which are advancing between three and almost five millimeters a year in the Chesapeake, inundate the plants with water and drown them in place, said Elliott White Jr., a coastal wetlands researcher at the University of Virginia.