Deborah Fuller, University of Washington
To everything there is a season, and for the flu, it’s wintertime. Flu cases peak between December and February, and the flu vaccine is your best defense. Getting the vaccine means you will be less sick even if you get a breakthrough infection.
Matthew Woodruff, Emory University
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s key science advisory panel, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, met on Jan. 26, 2023, to chart a path forward for COVID-19 vaccine policy. During the all-day meeting, the 21-member committee discussed an array of weighty issues including the efficacy of existing vaccines, the composition of future vaccine strains and the need to match them to the circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2, the possibility of moving to an annual-shot model, the potential seasonality of the virus and much more.
US Department of Agriculture
WASHINGTON, Dec. 5, 2022 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today announced its new Agricultural Science Center of Excellence for Nutrition and Diet for Better Health (ASCEND for Better Health) in support of President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot effort to end cancer as we know it.
Evangeline Mantzioris, University of South Australia
Nutritionists will tell you to eat a rainbow of fruit and vegetables. This isn’t just because it looks nice on the plate. Each colour signifies different nutrients our body needs.
Keith Diaz, Columbia University
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
To reduce the harmful health effects of sitting, take a five-minute light walk every half-hour. That’s the key finding of a new study that my colleagues and I published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.
Emily Toth Martin, University of Michigan and Marisa Eisenberg, University of Michigan
The cold and flu season of 2022 has begun with a vengeance. Viruses that have been unusually scarce over the past three years are reappearing at remarkably high levels, sparking a “tripledemic” of COVID-19, the flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. This November’s national hospitalization levels for influenza were the highest in 10 years.
NASA/STScI
Daniel Merino, The Conversation and Nehal El-Hadi, The Conversation
If you want to know what happened in the earliest years of the universe, you are going to need a very big, very specialized telescope. Much to the joy of astronomers and space fans everywhere, the world has one – the James Webb Space Telescope.
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Summary
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is issuing this Health Alert Network (HAN) Health Advisory to notify clinicians and public health authorities of a recent increase in pediatric invasive group A streptococcal (iGAS) infections. In November 2022, CDC was notified of a possible increase in iGAS infections among children at a hospital in Colorado.
John Crimaldi, University of Colorado Boulder
Every time you flush a toilet, it releases plumes of tiny water droplets into the air around you. These droplets, called aerosol plumes, can spread pathogens from human waste and expose people in public restrooms to contagious diseases.
Michael A. Rawlins, UMass Amherst
It’s hard for most people to imagine 6 feet of snow in one storm, like the Buffalo area saw over the weekend, but such extreme snowfall events occasionally happen along the eastern edges of the Great Lakes.
The phenomenon is called “lake-effect snow,” and the lakes play a crucial role.
