Medicine & Health

Tim McBride, the Bernard Becker Professor at Washington University in St. Louis’ Brown School and a leading health economist, said that the coronavirus outbreak will exacerbate problems in Missouri’s public health systems, which were already underfunded relative to most of the rest of the country, as well as issues facing low-income residents with challenges accessing medical care.

We must consider this coronavirus crisis as a wake-up call to prioritize equity and challenge ourselves to consider how to better serve historically underserved communities, says a public health expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

In the first week since COVID-19 was designated a pandemic, requests for food pantries skyrocketed across the United States.  Requests for home-delivered meals more than tripled in the same time period, said a Brown School researcher who tracks calls to the national 2-1-1 helpline.

Soon after a novel coronavirus first appeared, School of Medicine researchers, doctors and staff began preparing for a possible outbreak. Infectious disease physicians started planning how to respond, and researchers got to work finding drugs or vaccines for COVID-19.

Sara Miller, WashU alum, founded SODA, an organ donation advocacy group on campus to educate students.

Parents’ social isolation was linked to self-reported poorer health not only for themselves but also for their adolescent children, finds a study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

The School of Medicine’s Healthy Work Center facilitates research to promote the health of working-age people by focusing on topics such as diet and exercise, cancer prevention and injury avoidance. It’s a rebooted version of the Occupational Safety and Health Research Lab.

Two physicians from the University of Ghana recently wrapped up a monthlong visit to Washington University in St. Louis as part of the Africa Initiative’s faculty exchange.

Similar to treatment resistant depression, there is a subpopulation of those addicted to opioids who do not respond to standard opioid use disorder treatments. In a new paper, an addiction expert at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis suggests a new category for these types of patients: treatment resistant opioid use disorder.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that the strain of Zika that circulated in Brazil during the microcephaly epidemic that began in 2015 was particularly damaging to the developing brain.