UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription to view. See more UCLA In the News.
Coronavirus may have reached L.A. earlier than previously thought | Los Angeles Times
Researchers from UCLA and their colleagues at the University of Washington documented an unmistakable uptick in patients seeking treatment for coughs. The increase began the week of Dec. 22, 2019, and persisted through the end of February.… “A significantly higher number of patients with respiratory complaints and diseases starting in late December 2019 and continuing through February 2020 suggests community spread of SARS-CoV-2 prior to established clinical awareness and testing capabilities,” wrote the team led by Dr. Joann Elmore, who is both an internist and professor of health policy and management at UCLA. (Also: Washington Post, Fox News, Xinhua, Fresno Bee, City News Service, MyNewsLA, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Earth.com, Scienmag, ScienceDaily, KTTV-TV, KNBC-TV and KABC-TV.)
Californians stunned by fast-moving blazes | USA Today
While it’s easy to say that anti-logging policies driven by environmentalists are to blame, human-caused climate change is the real problem, said Glen MacDonald, a UCLA distinguished professor of geography, ecology and evolutionary biology and an international expert on climate change and wildfires… “This has gone way past the point of asking ‘Are we seeing it?’” MacDonald said. “This should not be a surprise. We’ve been seeing this ramping up over the 21st century. It’s like that old movie Groundhog Day.”
What California wildfires may do to human health | KCRW-FM’s “Press Play”
“Air quality has just been getting worse every day.… It’s just all over California,” says Dr. Reza Ronaghi, pulmonologist at UCLA Medical Center. He says that even if you don’t see or smell smoke, micro millimeter-sized particles still exist in the air. How do the tiny particles affect your health? “They cause irritations in our lungs. So you may get a burning sensation in the back of your throat. You may end up getting a cough. You may get some burning sensation in your chest. … Sometimes if it gets into your eyes, you may get some runny eyes, some kind of runny nose.”
The day the sky turned orange | Bloomberg CityLab column
Emanuel Maidenberg, a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, studies the stress caused by natural disasters. When you are entirely surrounded by scenes of a catastrophe in progress, he tells me, “it’s hard to escape the presence of that threat.… [The images are] an additional source of distress because you see it, which is not something that typically happens with other natural disasters.” (Maidenberg was also interviewed on KCRW-FM.)
California’s orange sky is the most unnerving sight | Guardian (U.K.) opinion
UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who tweets regularly about weather and climate said on Wednesday morning, “Everyone is so far beyond capacity right now, and there so much else going on, that I don’t think the collective bandwidth exists right now to process what [is] happening. I really do feel like we’re running a marathon at sprint pace right now. It is deeply exhausting.” (Swain was also quoted in the New York Times.)
Understanding how nursing home workers spread the virus | New York Times
A recent report by the National Bureau of Economic Research that looked at geolocation data found that 7 percent of smartphones appearing in a U.S. nursing home also appeared in at least one other elder facility, even after visits by patients’ friends and family members were restricted… “What our research is suggesting is that the real culprit here, epidemiologically, appears to be shared staff,” said Keith Chen, professor of behavioral economics at the U.C.L.A. Anderson School of Management and a lead author of the report.
Learning pods help kids bridge social divide | USA Today
Pods generally consist of three to 10 students. These smaller groups essentially create a social bubble, letting younger students have much-needed play time, according to Dr. Carlos Lerner at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “We are starting to see the impacts of social isolation, including increased anxiety,” Lerner says. “The isolation and the overall disruption in routines are combining to create issues for kids, and schools haven’t had the time to replace it with a well-thought-out plan.”
How to celebrate Halloween during COVID-19 | Los Angeles Times
“Viruses don’t take holidays,” said Anne Rimoin, professor of epidemiology at UCLA’s School of Public Health. “Until the community has low transmission rates, lots of things won’t be back to normal. The way a virus transmits doesn’t change because we’re in holiday mode. In fact, it often makes us less cautious because our guard is down. We have to accept the fact that the virus is dictating the precautions we have to take.”
Los Angeles eases up on Halloween guidance | Associated Press
Not letting kids trick-or-treat is “an overreaction,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, professor of medicine and public health at University of California, Los Angeles. “It doesn’t surprise me, but it’s disappointing that we continue to make policy recommendations that are not based on the evidence,” Klausner said Wednesday. He said the data show that children are at very low risk of transmitting the virus to adults. “There’s very little evidence showing that controlling infection in children has any benefit to controlling epidemic overall,” Klausner said.
Interferon-gamma guides response to cancer immunotherapy | Medical Xpress
A new study by researchers at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center sheds light on how interferon-gamma (IFN-y), an immune response-stimulating signaling molecule that helps activate immune cells, guides the treatment response in people with advanced melanoma who are treated with one of the leading immunotherapies—immune checkpoint blockade… “What the data shows is that immune checkpoint blockade therapy works when a preexisting immune response against the cancer can be amplified,” said senior author Dr. Antoni Ribas, professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and director of the Tumor Immunology Program at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Ranking Starbucks breakfast items by nutritional value | Mel magazine
For advice, I asked Dana Hunnes, senior dietitian at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, to help me rank an assortment of Starbucks breakfast items by how healthy they are — from kinda healthy to dessert…. Immediately, Hunnes notes that every Starbucks breakfast option is “either too high in sodium, too high in sugar, contains too many processed ingredients, like white flour, or contains far more meat and cheese than I’d like to see.”