News
Schaffner explains the difference in Bronchitis and pneumonia
Nov. 21, 2018—Bronchitis and pneumonia are both infections that affect your airways. They can have similar symptoms that often blur into each other. There’s not a bright line between bronchitis and pneumonia,” says William Schaffner, MD, an infectious diseases specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. But there are differences. For starters, there’s location. Pneumonia affects...
Buntin to Study Needs of Vulnerable Children
Nov. 21, 2018—Vanderbilt University is getting a $1.25 million grant to research the needs of some of Tennessee’s most vulnerable children. According to the school, the Policies for Action Research Hub at Vanderbilt will develop recommendations for helping the children of immigrant families and children with prenatal exposure to opioids. Melinda Buntin is chair of the Department...
Buntin to lead Policies for Action Research Hub
Nov. 19, 2018—Experts from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s Department of Health Policy and Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development are joining efforts to establish a Policies for Action Research Hub at Vanderbilt to better understand and develop recommendations to address the needs of some of Tennessee’s most vulnerable children, including children in immigrant families...
MPH Alumnus Patel in new Health IT leadership role
Nov. 7, 2018—Neal Patel, MD, MPH, professor of Clinical Pediatrics, associate professor of Biomedical Informatics and VUMC’s Chief Health Information Officer, will succeed Kevin Johnson, MD, MS, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) and Senior Vice President of Health Information Technology in the role of HealthIT leader while Johnson continues to serve...
MPH’s Stevenson: Nonprofit Versus For-Profit Senior Care
Nov. 2, 2018—When it comes to senior care – whether trying to discern what level of care is needed, or picking a specific nursing home – there’s no shortage of considerations for individuals and their loved ones. So, it could be easy to overlook ownership status: namely, whether a facility is for-profit or nonprofit. “In general, the...
Research team led by MPH Alumnus seeks to identify immune response to influenza
Nov. 2, 2018—Vanderbilt researchers, as part of the International Human Vaccines Project, are searching for the key to lasting protection against influenza by examining naturally protecting cells found in bone marrow. The work is part of a new comprehensive evaluation of the human immune system’s response to influenza led by Buddy Creech, MD, MPH, director of the...
MPH Alumna Reports on Hepatitis A Virus Outbreaks
Nov. 2, 2018—During 2017, CDC received 1,521 reports of acute hepatitis A virus (HAV) infections from California, Kentucky, Michigan, and Utah; the majority of infections were among persons reporting injection or noninjection drug use or homelessness. Investigations conducted by local and state health departments indicated that direct person-to-person transmission of HAV infections was occurring, differing from other...
MPH grad weighs in on Warren’s DNA test results
Oct. 26, 2018—As a geneticist and a member of the Navajo Nation, Krystal Tsosie, M.P.H., Ph.D. candidate, has some thoughts on the senator’s announcement.
MPH’s Starnes: Community-driven health efforts saving lives in Lwala
Oct. 26, 2018—Eleven years after two Vanderbilt University medical students established a health care organization in an impoverished area of Kenya, the death rate for children under 5 years old has been cut in half, according to researchers from Kenya and the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH). Their findings, reported last month in the online science...
NPR: MPH’s Schaffner Stresses the Need for Flu Shots
Oct. 26, 2018—Following a winter in which more than 80,000 people died from flu-related illnesses in the U.S. — the highest death toll in more than 40 years — infectious disease experts are ramping up efforts to get the word out. The U.S. vaccination rate hovers at about 47 percent a year. This is far below the...
World Flu Pandemic Still Possible, MPH’s Schaffner comments
Oct. 26, 2018—One hundred years ago, death came with astonishing speed and horrifying agony. Some influenza patients admitted to a Boston hospital on the morning of October 1918 were dead by the evening, their bodies turning blue from lack of oxygen. Hospitals reported an average 100 deaths a day, overwhelming morgues. Vanderbilt University infectious disease specialist William...
MPH’s Schaffner: No Medicine Against West Nile as Tennessee Continues to Report Cases
Oct. 26, 2018—The Volunteer State has seen 151 human cases since 2010, according to data from the Tennessee Department of Health. That number includes the nine seen so far in 2018, although those numbers are not yet final. At its most serious, it can cause encephalitis, Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical...
MPH’s Shrubsole and team receives Cancer Moonshot Award
Oct. 26, 2018—A trans-institutional team of researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Vanderbilt University has received an $11 million Cancer Moonshot grant to build a single-cell resolution atlas to map out the routes that benign colonic polyps take to progress to colorectal cancer, the third most common cancer among both men and women in the United...
Mapping Histoplasma capsulatum exposure with MPH team
Oct. 26, 2018—Histoplasmosis is a common lung infection caused by microscopic fungal spores that reside in soil. Most people who inhale the spores don’t get sick, but for those with weakened immune systems, the infection can become severe. About 90 percent of Middle Tennessee residents have had histoplasmosis exposure in their lifetime.
MPH alumni and faculty find that diabetes drug may prevent cancer
Oct. 26, 2018—A drug commonly used to treat type 2 diabetes might help prevent patients from developing liver cancers. In a study published this month in the journal Cancer Causes & Control, Harvey J. Murff, MD, MPH, and colleagues including Christianne Roumie, M.D., M.P.H., Carlos Grijalva, M.D., and Marie R. Griffin, M.D., M.P.H., found that patients taking...