UCLA in the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription. See more UCLA in the News.
“Powering through” COVID can worsen health toll | Los Angeles Times
Dr. Timothy Brewer, a UCLA professor of medicine and epidemiology, urged patients to pay attention to the signals from their bodies, even if an infection initially seems mild. With COVID-19, “people can do well for about 10 to 12 days and then get very sick,” Brewer said. “Just because you did well in the first week doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to do well in the second or third week.”
Medical examiners’ relationships with police | ABC News
In a report published earlier last month by two labs at UCLA, the Carceral Ecologies Lab and the BioCritical Studies Lab, researchers reviewed the autopsies in 59 cases of death in Los Angeles County jails between 2009 and 2019. Of those, 26 “natural death” cases that were reviewed, 65% were Black and 23% were Latinx. They found that 85% of the “natural death” cases involved inmates with an alleged history of mental illness and more than half included evidence of “physical violence on the body.”
California’s latest COVID surge | New York Times
Experts predict that without tighter rules or behavioral changes, the hyper-transmissibility of BA.5 will lead to a continued surge in cases in the coming weeks in California. There will also most likely be a modest increase in hospitalizations and deaths, said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, Fielding School of Public Health.
Gun laws and the Illinois shooting | The Hill
Yet even with a stronger national model and better implementation, Eugene Volokh, the University of California, Los Angeles’s expert in firearms regulation policy, argued that the black market for firearm purchases provides a loophole that is not easy to crack down on. “People ask could this have been stopped with a red flag law? And the answer is nobody could be sure if it could be stopped. At most, what a red flag does it is causes the seizure of a weapon and prevents somebody from lawfully buying a weapon in the future,” he said, adding that someone could then just go buy a gun illegally.
UCLA expert’s ‘Safeguarding Democracy’ project | Politico
A leading elections expert is launching a project at UCLA School of Law to promote democratic norms and “free and fair” elections in the U.S. Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA’s law school and one of the most prominent election law commentators in the country, is launching the “Safeguarding Democracy Project” … in part as a response to efforts to undermine confidence in U.S. elections by former President Donald Trump and his allies, including calls to “decertify” the 2020 election. (Hasen is quoted.)
Climate crisis makes border crossing more perilous | Independent
An ever hotter planet is also forcing more and more people to make the trek north as some Latin American countries face worsening droughts and hurricanes. “The irony is that you’ve got people who are who are fleeing a place like Honduras because of climate change,” Jason De León, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles tells The Independent. And when they arrive at the US–Mexico border, he adds, they run right into the impacts of climate change once again.
Flawed devices miss COVID diagnoses | Politico
Inaccuracies in pulse oximeter readings for people of color may have contributed to the pandemic’s toll … “Biases can really occur anywhere in the chain, from the laws of physics to sensors to data that gets stored to algorithms that process the data and even finally, humans that interpret the algorithms,” said Achuta Kadambi, an engineering professor at UCLA. “There are definitely steps being taken. But there’s still a long way to go.”
Fresno looks at transportation spending plans | Fresno Bee
No other California city has its own special tax for transportation, according to Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. If Fresno leaders decide to create a plan with more funding for transit, bike lanes, and walking paths, it could make them more competitive for state funding, he added. “Over the past few years, the state has shifted from funding highway capacity expansions to funding public transit and active transportation,” Matute stated in an email.
Whitewashing slavery isn’t education; it’s propaganda | MSNBC
Though the law Texas passed last year mandates that slavery be taught as a deviation from America’s founding, UCLA scholar Kyle T. Mays emphasized in “An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States” that “the foundations of the United States, its current power and wealth, were built on enslaved African labor and the expropriation of Indigenous land.” These realities cannot be sugarcoated.
Transgender woman’s birth certificate dispute | CBS News
According to UCLA’s Williams Institute, which does research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy, an estimated 3,900 transgender people age 13 and older live in Montana. One of those people is Howard.
How grief can affect those battling heart failure | HealthDay News
Dr. Gregg Fonarow is director of the Ahmanson-University of California, Los Angeles Cardiomyopathy Center. Though not involved in the study, Fonarow noted that prior to the Swedish research, “studies in many general populations have shown that the death of a spouse or other close family member is associated with an increase in mortality.” But he added that none of those previous investigations focused solely on heart failure patients.
Facial feminization surgery leads to better mental health | Scienmag
A UCLA study offers the first evidence that transgender patients who receive gender-affirming facial feminization surgery reported better mental health after their procedures … According to Dr. Justine Lee, UCLA’s Bernard G. Sarnat Professor of Craniofacial Biology, gender-affirming facial surgery is frequently classified by insurers as a cosmetic procedure, in part because of a lack of evidence that the procedure improves patients’ quality of life.
Can antibiotics help you avoid an appendectomy? | City News Service
A UCLA study shows selected patients with appendicitis who have outpatient antibiotic management can avoid surgery and hospitalization, it was announced Wednesday. Dr. David Talan, professor of emergency medicine and of medicine/infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, is the co-principal investigator of the study that recommends the decision on how to approach an appendicitis procedure should be considered between patient and doctor. (Also: KABC-TV.)
Gardens and gardening this week | Orange County Register
The UCLA Botanical Garden on the corner of Hilgard and Le Conte Avenues is open seven days a week with free admission and is home to a phenomenal collection of bromeliads. You will find them growing primarily in two areas: in the central, bottom part of the UCLA garden and in the drought tolerant plant section in the garden’s upper northeast corner.
Scholars debate age of Philippine rice terraces | CNN Philippines
In late May, the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Philippine Consulate General in LA launched an ethnographic exhibit entitled “Breaking Myths: Food Feasts and the Ifugao” at the Philippine Consulate’s General Community Hall. Organized by [Stephen] Acabado, who is now the director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the Ifugao dxhibit displayed photos of the Ifugao Terraces and other Ifugao ethnographic materials. This exhibit aimed to curb racially motivated discrimination targeting Asian communities by promoting a better understanding of Philippine history through archaeological and ethnographic research conducted by the Ifugao Archaeological Project.
