Medicine & Health

More than 100 School of Medicine students have been volunteering to help local health departments perform case investigations and contact tracing, essential public health strategies to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have found that genes that confer the power to destroy tetracyclines are widespread in bacteria that live in the soil and on people.

A $1.5 million grant to the Brown School will provide state-of-the-art training for 18 early-career researchers in Uganda to strengthen the capacity of research institutions in the country to address HIV/AIDS and its burden on child and adolescent mental health.

The childhood obesity rate in the United States may increase by 2.4% if school closures continue into December, finds a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Blood tests for antibodies against the COVID-19 virus are becoming more available, but no test is perfectly reliable, so results must be carefully interpreted, Washington University School of Medicine experts say.

Washington University School of Medicine is one of more than 30 genome sequencing hubs worldwide participating in a study to sequence the DNA of young, healthy adults and children who develop severe COVID-19 despite having no underlying medical problems.

Trish Kohl and Lora Iannotti, associate professors at Washington University’s Brown School, have received a five-year $3.2 million grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health to study stunted growth and development in children in Haiti.

Spanish-speaking students and faculty at the School of Medicine have collaborated with community leaders to create and disseminate information in Spanish about the novel coronavirus for the St. Louis region’s Latino population.

An in-home monitoring program for COVID-19 patients who are not sick enough to be hospitalized has been launched by the School of Medicine and BJC HealthCare. By keeping close watch over COVID patients, doctors hope to identify signs of deterioration early so that they can intervene and, ideally, keep more people out of the hospital.

In the COVID-19 wards of Barnes-Jewish Hospital, where Washington University physicians are fighting an exhausting battle against a new, baffling and sometimes lethal disease with the help of the hospital’s nurses, other medical professionals and support staff.