Virnig, who joins UF on July 11, currently serves as a professor in the division of health policy and management at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and as director and lead of the school’s Strategic Global Public Health Programming, where she guides efforts with partner universities in Thailand, India, Mexico and Ghana.

“Dr. Virnig brings a long and distinguished record of leadership, research, teaching, mentoring and service to her new role,” said David R. Nelson, M.D., senior vice president for health affairs at UF and president of UF Health. “The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, like never before, the value and impact of the College of Public Health and Health Professions’ research, education and service endeavors on the health of Floridians and beyond. I look forward to watching the college’s continued growth and development under Dr. Virnig’s leadership.”

“Very few people who carry MRSA know they have it, yet we have found a distinct link between people with undetected MRSA and premature death,” said the study’s lead author Arch G. Mainous III, Ph.D., a professor in the department of health services research, management and policy at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions, part of UF Health, the university’s academic health center.

The findings suggest that routine screening for undetected MRSA may be warranted in older people to prevent deaths from infection.

In related news

Since August 2020, Prins has conducted 25 site visits, 50 virtual meetings and countless email exchanges with staff across UF to offer best practices for lowering the risk of COVID-19 transmission during events and in inside spaces. It’s a collaborative process, Prins said, as many UF entities create individual safety plans that she can build upon with guidance related to physical distancing and cleaning procedures.

“I’ve been so impressed with how hard everyone is working to do whatever they can to give students things to do while trying to be as safe as possible,” Prins said. “It’s been great to work with amazing people who have put so much thought into what they’re doing and how they can do it safely.”

Prior to these findings, which are in pre-print and have not undergone peer review, the virus had been detected in aerosols, but there was a lack of direct evidence that the particles were actually viable (culturable), so to date the World Health Organization and other public health agencies have not emphasized aerosol transmission in their public health protection and mitigation guidance.

A team of UF researchers, led by John Lednicky, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Environmental and Global Health, and Chang-Yu Wu, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences, found that SARS-CoV-2 in aerosols can be cultured, sparking the need to reevaluate current safety protocols to reduce transmission in indoor spaces.

Now a team of virologists and aerosol scientists led by John Lednicky, Ph.D., a microbiology and virology research specialist within the University of Florida‘s College of Public Health and Health Professions, has produced exactly that: confirmation of the infectious virus in the air.

In the study, people living with high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease — conditions that can result in hospital visits if not managed effectively at home or with a patient’s primary care doctor — saw double-digit drops in hospital admissions compared with patients who did not teach their instructions back to their health-care provider.

“For patients with these conditions, most of their care happens at home,” said Young-Rock Hong, a doctoral student in health services research at the University of Florida’s College of Public Health and Health Professions and the lead author of the study, which appears in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. “Teach-back helps doctors identify what information patients are lacking, or what they misunderstood, so they can correct it.”

The study, conducted with UF professors Michelle Cardel and Carla Fisher and colleagues from the University of Texas, the New York Academy of Medicine and the University of Alabama,  looked at five years of nationwide health care data from the Longitudinal Medical Expenditure Panel Survey.

“This paper demonstrates that out of four major brain networks, the integrity of communication within CON at rest is associated with cognitive performance in older adults,” said Woods, associate professor of clinical and health psychology at UF’s College of Public Health and Health Professions. “Specifically, more coherent communication within CON is associated with better cognitive performance in older adults, particularly in domains that are susceptible to decline as we age: memory, attention and executive function.”

This is significant considering many people will regain one-third to one-half of the weight they lost within a year after participating in a weight loss program. 

“Providing extended care for the treatment of obesity can help solve one of the major problems that confront obesity management: weight gain after treatment ends,” said Michael G. Perri, Ph.D., the study’s lead investigator and dean of the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions, part of UF Health. “We’ve found that we can slow down and decrease the amount of weight regain people experience and we can do that effectively via telehealth. We can also significantly increase the proportion of people who are in the category of being very successful in managing their weight over the long run.”

New research might explain the mechanism behind a constellation of odd COVID-19 symptoms, such as strokes in young people, delirium, purple toes and children with Kawasaki-like vascular inflammation.

John Lednicky, Ph.D., a microbiology and virology research specialist within the University of Florida‘s College of Public Health and Health Professions, contributed to a new study that supports growing evidence of COVID-19 being more than a viral respiratory illness. It’s also an infectious disease of the vascular system, the research team says.