In The News

(Commentary by Dr. William Petri, professor of medicine) So, how do you stay safe when you’re away from home and you’ve really got to go? As a medical doctor and epidemiologist, I study infectious diseases involving the gastrointestinal tract. Here are four things to pay attention to when it comes to any public restroom.

Doctors and researchers who study the link between race and health also worry the seemingly relentless onslaught of brutal news is having a secondary effect: dialing up already-persistent stress levels within African Americans, making them even more vulnerable to illness and disease. Agreed, says Dr. Gail Christopher, executive director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity. She points to a study of women with Arab names in California following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when many in the Arab-American community were harassed. That someone like Christopher, an African Ameri...

Large public universities and elite private colleges will also undoubtedly suffer financial hardship from the pandemic – James Ryan, president of the University of Virginia (which has a nearly $10 billion endowment) says the university will have to “tighten our belts, just like other organizations and universities across the country” – but those schools aren’t currently in danger of closing forever. COVID-19 may come and go, but the uncertainty plaguing students at small colleges across the country is here to stay.

Last week, we spoke with Molly O'Dell of the Roanoke-Allegheny Health District about the numbers, and she pointed out numbers about COVID-19 cases and deaths don't always match the same datasets recorded at the state level. But the data discrepancy goes further than that and, one expert says, with serious consequences. “The fact is, I don’t think there’s any question we could have saved lives if we could have acted more responsible, you know, in a way that was more coordinated earlier on,” said Philip Bourne, dean of the newly created School of Data Science at the University of Virginia.

Winning the primary outright – and avoiding a runoff – could give a boost to the Democratic nominee, although some political insiders argue that facing voters multiple times can help keep candidates sharp and keep the electorate engaged.  “The runoff dynamic in Georgia maybe adds another extra step that the Democrats have to be very careful about planning for,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan newsletter from the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

(Subscription required) The coronavirus has parked multitudes on their sofas, where many have gone half-mad reading rants from advanced-studies graduates of the University of Twitter. Matthew Crawford’s “Why We Drive” is the perfect antidote. Mr. Crawford, a senior fellow at UVA and the author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft” (2009) and other works of social philosophy, has written a thoughtful, entertaining and substantive work about the joys of driving – and about the attempts by various scolds to relegate that joy, and similar expressions of independence, to the junkyard of history. 

In the United States, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which is the major law for health data regulation, applies only to medical providers, health insurers and their business associations. Its definition of “personal health information” covers only the data held by these entities. This definition is turning out to be inadequate for the era of the Internet of Bodies. Tech companies are now also offering health-related products and services, and gathering data. Margaret Riley, a professor of health law at the University of Virginia, pointed out to me in an i...

Two UVA researchers are working on a project to help people who have suffered large amounts of tissue loss. The researchers are a biomedical engineer and a mechanical engineer, and they are creating a custom-designed tissue incubation system, or bioreactor, to automate the growth of muscle stem cells into tissue patches that can be implanted.

University of Virginia students who lost their summer internships due to COVID-19 are now helping area businesses transition online in the wake of the pandemic. The Central Virginia Small Business Development Center is teaming up with UVA for the Propel Management Consulting Program. The projects will target Fluvanna, Louisa, Orange and Greene counties.

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George F. Will joins UVA law professor Saikrishna Prakash for a conversation on Prakash’s new book, “The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against Its Ever-Expanding Powers.”

UVA’s Aynne Kokas discusses how Beijing is successfully using images of U.S. protests as domestic propaganda. Mainly used to push back on U.S. critiques of Chinese human rights violations, the propaganda is extremely effective among casual viewers of news and state-owned media. 

Dr. Taison Bell is both an infectious-disease and a critical-care physician at UVA – exactly the sort of doctor one wants when contending with a hyper-contagious virus that sends people to the ICU. He said that, as a black man, he’s been disturbed but not surprised by both the most recent examples of police brutality and the disproportionate coronavirus death toll among African-Americans. Watching the current protests, Bell has wanted to join them; at the same time, he has worried about how they may worsen the pandemic. 

A UVA law professor said the law is written quite broadly. “And while it does not specifically denote the closing of businesses, it does certainly give the governor wide discretion to do what needs to be done in the face of an emergency,” said professor Rich Schragger. As for Dillon’s claim that the governor’s order infringes on a person’s right to assemble under the First Amendment, Schragger doesn’t agree. The right has to be connected with the exercise of speech, he said. “It protects a right of collective protest, not a right to eat in a restaurant or operate a restaurant,” he said.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has named the district as a target the party wants to pick off. But in an email, John Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at UVA, warned that flipping the seat might not be easy. His organization rates the seat “Likely Republican,” and he noted that in 2018, Fitzpatrick was reelected even as Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey carried the district by double digits. “That type of crossover vote is impressive,” Coleman said.

“What tales or myths about America do we cling to in the face of social upheaval? I think that’s what we’re struggling with here,” says Shilpa Davé, a UVA media studies scholar who teaches about representations of race and gender in media and popular culture. “Who gets to pursue these ideals? That’s what’s in contention,” she says.

A team of researchers from UVA, the University of Stuttgart and Koc University in Istanbul, have 3-D-printed multi-material parts with multidirectional stiffness gradients. By combining their expertise in materials engineering and digital processing, the researchers were able to create sets of cellulose-based filaments with varying mechanical and rheological properties, despite having similar compositions. The materials were then used in conjunction with each other to program specific deformation profiles into complex parts.

Researchers say common components of our daily diet, such as amino acids, may increase or decrease the effectiveness and toxicity of the drugs used for cancer treatments. “The first time we observed that changing the microbe or adding a single amino acid to the diet could transform an innocuous dose of the drug into a highly toxic one, we couldn’t believe our eyes,” said Eileen O’Rourke of UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences and the UVA School of Medicine’s Department of Cell Biology. 

In a famous study conducted a few years ago at the University of Virginia, participants were led one at a time into a completely bare room with all distractions removed. They had no phone, no books, no screens – and they weren’t allowed to take a nap. Electrodes were fitted to their ankles and they were left alone for 15 minutes. It was an opportunity to kick back and relax for a short while. So, how did it go? Well, before being left alone, participants were shown how to press a computer key which was wired up to a machine that delivered an electric shock. You might suppose that hav...

An online program will be launched for high school students to develop successful leaders through unique case studies, social enterprise Aspire Impact said. The program, which will be offered online this year, is in academic partnership with UVA’s Darden School of Business.