Category: Global Health Page 1 of 10

Covid-19 is considered a “general pandemic,” but its impacts have been disproportionate along the lines of race and ethnicity. Though vaccines may serve as our best chance to put an end to Covid, the problem of vaccine hesitancy amongst Black people in the U.S. is particularly pervasive and grounded by more than simple mistrust.

Gary Bennett (Ph.D.) discussed the issue of complex determinants of vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans Monday, April 5. Bennett is a Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, Global Health, and Medicine at Duke, as well as director of Duke Digital Health and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.

“At the end of the day, we are dealing with an issue that demands pragmatic attention,” Bennett said, “How do we get shots in arms?” It turns out, the answer is quite complex and historically confounded.

While Black people have experienced much higher burdens from Covid-19 despite contracting the disease at a similar rate to whites, they have been disproportionately vaccinated at lower rates than white people.

“Access matters and it matters a lot,” Bennett said. One clear example of decreased access for Black Americans is that fewer vaccination sites are located in areas with high concentrations of Black people.

However, Bennett said, access does not simply equal place. “How much friction are you creating in this process?” he prompted, pointing to examples of complicated registration systems, inadequate public transportation to vaccine sites, or overall distance from a location. All of these factors already limit who is able to access vaccinations without the added influences of reduced vaccine uptake due to vaccine hesitancy.

A slide from Dr. Bennett’s presentation which outlines the plethora of impactors on access.

Vaccine hesitancy was listed by the World Health Organization as a top 10 global threat in 2019, when vaccines were preventing 2-3 million deaths per year in the pre-Covid era. Though Bennett said that vaccine hesitancy “has been with us for a long time,” there “are real consequences” to continued reluctance and refusal to get vaccinated with heightened risks due to the nature of the pandemic.

Bennett said that many claims around hesitancy blame communities for their inability to access vaccines, but this fails to consider or to change the underlying behaviors that drive hesitancy. Bennett outlined these underlying drivers as 1) mistrust, 2) social norms, and 3) understandable uncertainties.

A slide from Dr. Bennett’s presentation showing the unequal distribution of vaccination sites in Atlanta GA in predominantly white areas.

“It’s not just mistrust of the medical system, it’s mistrust of institutions,” Bennett said, “There’s a lot of reasons for [Black people] to mistrust institutions.” The murder of George Floyd stands as one poignant contemporary example, but “Tuskegee [still] looms large in the minds of Black Americans.” The Tuskegee experiment exploited 600 Black men working as sharecroppers who had syphilis by knowingly withholding treatment and simply seeing what happened to their bodies as a result of the disease for over 40 years.

This experiment was not the first of its kind: Whole body radiation was tested on Black people. Fistula surgery was developed on enslaved Black women by the “father of modern gynecology.” The immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, have been used far and wide to advance science after a sample of her cancerous cervix was unknowingly stolen from her. Modern studies have also shown how different implicit biases of Black patients shape their treatment outcomes due to skewed physician perceptions.

The capital riot, the murder of George Floyd, and the Jim Crow Era all exemplify the pervasive institutionalized racism that erodes Black trust in U.S. institutions of all kinds.

Our social networks are also vitally important to influencing our feelings about receiving the Covid vaccine. In Black communities, Bennett said, fewer people in their networks have gotten vaccinations and those who have received vaccines are less vocal about it leading to a collective lack of interest in receiving vaccinations.

These two factors, paired with understandable uncertainties about the side effects of the vaccine or potentially getting Covid itself, generate the need to change our approaches to vaccine hesitancy and increased uptake amongst Black communities in the U.S.

White people have been disproportionately vaccinated over all other racial/ethnic categories in the U.S.

To do this we need to lead with empathy and appreciate the fact that changing attitudes towards vaccines is a process. “Shaming people is bad,” Bennett said. “Stigmatizing people will actually lead to the converse of what we expect.”

Over time, we can work to correct misconceptions, contextualized uncertainties, and share stories rather than statistics to push people further from vaccine refusal and closer to vaccine demand.

And when more Black Americans are ready, “vaccination should be an easy choice.” By implementing opt-out policies, rather than opt-in and by taking more direct actions like making vaccination appointments for people, Covid vaccines may indeed be the key to ending the pandemic – in an equitable and proportionate way.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Duke Researcher Busts Metabolism Myths in New Book

By Robin Smith

On March 24, 2021

In Biology, Field Research, Genetics/Genomics, Global Health

Herman Pontzer explains where our calories really go, and what studying humanity’s past can teach us about staying healthy today.

Duke professor Herman Pontzer has spent his career counting calories. Not because he’s watching his waistline, exactly. But because, as he sees it, “in the economics of life, calories are the currency.” Every minute, everything the body does — growing, moving, fighting infection, even just existing — “all of it takes energy,” Pontzer says.

In his new book, “Burn,” the evolutionary anthropologist recounts the 10-plus years he and his colleagues have spent measuring the metabolisms of people ranging from ultra-athletes to office workers, as well as those of our closest animal relatives, and some of the surprising insights the research has revealed along the way.

Much of his work takes him to Tanzania, where members of the Hadza tribe still get their food the way our ancestors did — by hunting and gathering. By setting out on foot each day to hunt zebra and antelope or forage for berries and tubers, without guns or electricity or domesticated animals to lighten the load, the Hadza get more physical activity each day than most Westerners get in a week.

So they must burn more calories, right? Wrong.

Herman Pontzer, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke

Pontzer and his colleagues have found that, despite their high activity levels, the Hadza don’t burn more energy per day than sedentary people in the U.S. and Europe.

These and other recent findings are changing the way we understand the links between energy expenditure, exercise and diet. For example, we’ve all been told that if we want to burn more calories and fight fat, we need to work out to boost our metabolism. But Pontzer says it’s not so simple.

“Our metabolic engines were not crafted by millions of years of evolution to guarantee a beach-ready bikini body,” Pontzer says. But rather, our metabolism has been primed “to pack on more fat than any other ape.” What’s more, our metabolism responds to changes in exercise and diet in ways that thwart our efforts to shed pounds.

What this means, Pontzer says, is you can walk 16,000 steps each day like the Hadza and you won’t lose weight. Sure, if you run a marathon tomorrow you’ll burn more energy than you did today. But over time, metabolism responds to changes in activity to keep the total energy you spend in check.

Pontzer’s book is more than a romp through the Krebs cycle. For anyone suffering pandemic-induced pangs of frustrated wanderlust, it’s also filled with adventure. He takes readers on an hours-long trek to watch a Hadza man track a wounded giraffe across the savannah, to the rainforests of Uganda to study climbing chimpanzees, and to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains to unearth the 1.8 million-year-old remains of some of the first people who trekked out of Africa.

His humor shines through along the way. Even when awoken by a chorus of 300-pound lions just a few hundred yards from his tent, he stops to ponder whether his own stench gives him away, and what he might do if they come for his “soft American carcass, the warm triple crème brie of human flesh.”

Pontzer spoke via email with Duke Today about his book:

Q: What’s the lesson the Hadza and other hunter-gatherers teach us about managing weight and staying healthy?

A: The Hadza stay incredibly fit and healthy throughout their lives, even into their older ages (60’s, 70’s, even 80’s). They don’t develop heart disease, diabetes, obesity, or the other diseases that we in the industrialized world are most likely to suffer from. They also have an incredibly active lifestyle, getting more physical activity in a typical day than most Americans get in a week.

My work with the Hadza showed that, surprisingly, even though they are so physically active, Hadza men and women burn the same number of calories each day as men and women in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. Instead of increasing the calories burned per day, the Hadza physical activity was changing the way they spend their calories — more on activity, less on other, unseen tasks in the body.

The takeaway for us here in the industrialized world is that we need to stay active to stay healthy, but we can’t count on exercise to increase our daily calorie burn. Our bodies adjust, keeping energy expenditure in a narrow range regardless of lifestyle. And that means that we need to focus on diet and the calories we consume in order to manage our weight. At the end of the day, our weight is a matter of calories eaten versus calories burned — and it’s really hard to change the calories we burn!

Q: You’re saying that exercise doesn’t matter? What’s the point, if we can’t eat that donut?

A: All those adjustments our bodies make responding to exercise are really important for our health! When we burn more calories on exercise, our bodies spend less energy on inflammation, stress reactivity (like cortisol), and other things that make us sick.

Q: What’s the biggest misunderstanding about human metabolism?

A: We’re told — through fitness magazines, diet fads, online calorie counters — that the energy we burn each day is under our control: if we exercise more, we’ll burn more calories and burn off fat. It’s not that simple! Your body is a clever, dynamic product of evolution, shifting and adapting to changes in our lifestyle.

Q: In your book you say we’re driven to magical thinking when it comes to calories. What do you mean by that?

A: Because our body is so clever and dynamic, and because humans are just bad at keeping track of what we eat, it’s awfully hard to keep track of the calories we consume and burn each day. That, along with the proliferation of fad diets and get-thin-quick schemes, has led to this idea that “calories don’t matter.” That’s magical thinking. Every ounce of your body — including every calorie of fat you carry — is food you consumed and didn’t burn off. If we want to lose weight, we must eat fewer calories than we burn. It really comes down to that.

Q: Some people say that if the cavemen didn’t eat it, we shouldn’t either. What does research show about what foods are “natural” for humans to eat?

A: There’s no singular, natural human diet. Hunter-gatherers like the Hadza eat a diverse mix of plant and animal foods that varies day to day, month to month, and year to year. There’s even more dietary diversity when we look across populations. Humans are built to thrive on a wide variety of diets — just about everything is on the menu.

That said, the ultra-processed foods we’re inundated with in our modern industrialized world really are unnatural. There are no Twinkies to forage in the wild. Those foods are literally engineered to be overconsumed, with a mix of flavors that overwhelm our brain’s ability to regulate our appetites. Now, it is still possible to lose weight on a Twinkie diet (I’m not recommending it!), if you’re very strict about the calories eaten per day. But we need to be really careful about how we incorporate ultra-processed foods into our daily diets, because they are calorie bombs that drive us to overconsume.

Q: If we could time travel, what would our hunter-gatherer ancestors make of our industrialized diet today?

A: We don’t even need to imagine — We are those hunter-gatherers! Biologically, genetically, we are the same species that we were a hundred thousand years ago, when hunting and gathering were the only game in town. When we’re confronted with modern ultra-processed foods, we struggle. They are engineered to be delicious, and we tend to overconsume.

Q: Has the COVID-19 pandemic brought any of these lessons home for you? What can we do to keep active and watch what we eat, even while working from home?

The pandemic has been a tragedy on so many levels — the loss of life, those suffering with long-term effects, the social and economic impacts. The impact on diet and exercise have been bad as well, for many of us. Stress eating is a real phenomenon, and the stress and emotional toll of the pandemic — along with having easy access to the snacks in our kitchen — have led many to gain weight. Physical activity seems to have declined for many. There aren’t easy answers, but we should try to make a point to get active every day. And we can help ourselves make better decisions about food by keeping ultra-processed foods out of our houses. You can’t plow through a bag of chips if you don’t have chips in your cupboard.

Q: You’ve measured the energy costs of activities ranging from taking a breath to doing an Ironman. What is one of the more extreme or surprising calorie-burning activities that you’ve measured, or would like to measure, in humans or some other animal?

A: With colleagues from Japan, I measured the energy cost of a heartbeat – a tricky bit of metabolic measurement! Turns out each beat of your heart burns about 1/300^th of a kilocalorie! Amazing how efficient our bodies can be.

Q: What is something people have questions about that we just don’t know the answer to yet? What would it take to find out?

A: Right now we’re excited about measuring the adjustments our bodies make when we increase our exercise: how exactly does burning more energy on physical activity impact our immune system, our stress response, our reproductive system? It will take a long-term study of exercise to see how these systems change over time.

Robin Smith - University Communications — Robin Smith – University Communications

Centering Patients and Expanding Access in the Opioid Epidemic

By Cydney Livingston

On March 18, 2021

In Behavior/Psychology, Global Health, Policy

We are still in the midst of an opioid epidemic. In 2019, an average of six North Carolinians died each day from unintentional medication or drug overdose. A striking 79% of drug overdose deaths in NC in 2018 involved opioids. This has garnered attention from many organizations and institutions in the state and prompted new concerns relating to patient-centered care.

A Duke Global Health discussion on March 17 concluded that the social response can be aided by a refined focus on mental health, as well as the use of telehealth – the delivery of health care and education remotely through various technologies.

Moderated by Brandon Knettel (Ph.D.), the Duke Global Health Institute panel considered treatment, community engagement, and public policy in addressing the opioid epidemic with panelists Nidhi Sachdeva (MPH), Padma Gulur (M.D.) Hilary Campbell (PharmD, J.D.), and Theresa Coles (Ph.D.)

Sachdeva is a Senior Research Program Leader with the Department of Population Health Sciences at Duke Medical School. Dr. Gulur is a Professor of Anesthesiology and Population Health with Duke Medical School and Executive Vice Chair of the Pain Management and Opioid Surveillance with Duke University Health System. Campbell is director of Sheps Health Workforce Health Professions Data System at UNC-Chapel Hill. Coles is Assistant Professor in Population Health Sciences with Duke Medical School.

(clockwise from top left) Moderator Brandon Knettel, panelists Nidhi Sachdeva, Padma Gulur, Theresa Coles and Hilary Campbell.

Sachdeva opened the panel with a discussion of the Duke Opioid Collaboratory. The Collaboratory currently houses 25 different projects relating to improving data surveillance, health system quality, and public health in the realm of research on opioids.

“We’re losing more and more folks every day,” said Sachdeva. Duke’s projects represent a systems approach to the opioid epidemic, meaning there is lots of valuable overlap and connectivity between projects, and external partnerships that have provided a unique opportunity for academic and community collaboration.

Dr. Gulur stated that Duke Health has seen improvements in opioid use and prescription over the last five to six years: the ambulatory prescribing rate has gone down, fewer patients are requiring high-dose opioids overall, and there has been significant increase in availability to offer medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder. Like Sachdeva, Gulur’s work with Duke’s Pain Management and Opioid Surveillance exists within a larger network of organizations dedicated to the opioid issue.

“We have a very committed and collaborative infrastructure with [other] initiatives in the state,” said Gulur, who added that she is dedicated to making “sure we have all the voices at the table.”

A collective display of the Duke Opioid Collaboratory projects

Simply decreasing opioid prescriptions “doesn’t necessarily work” and solving this issue will not be a quick fix. Campbell said that her own research found that at the same time the “supply side” of opioids was shrinking, the state was “seeing the crisis getting worse.”

Enter telehealth and the need for expanded support to mental health resources. Coles explained their pertinence through discussion of her work with Granville-Vance Public Health. Coles has been working on an expanding project that assesses training, operational challenges, patient centered goals, and success from the patient’s perspective within Granville-Vance’s opioid program.

Coles found that inconsistent funding lead to lapses in access to mental health support and the “dropout of someone there to help [with behavioral health] was challenging for patients.” Telehealth bridges the gaps of inconsistent access. Further, in the case of Coles’ study, it also played a large role in increased access for patients who experienced transportation issues since the investigation took place in conjunction to Covid-19, which lowered patients’ abilities to physically attend the program in-person.

Because “no one person experiences opioid abuse … in a vacuum,” as Sachdeva said, it is important to get a comprehensive “assessment of what a person’s life looks like and their priorities for treatment” before jumping into treatment.

This map displays the concentration of unintentional medication and drug overdose death rates across the 100 counties of North Carolina.

Though the last year living under the Covid-19 pandemic has been difficult for the entire globe, the increased need for access to resources through the internet and various technologies has been positively reinforced. With new understandings of relationships to others and limited physical access to in-person healthcare, telehealth has emerged as a means to resolve decreased access. It can also serve as a way to expand access for populations who have historically suffered from inadequate access to healthcare resources, like rural populations.

Opioids “have and will continue to play a role in pain management,” Dr. Gulur said. However, better efforts to involve patients and their families in decision making around opioids, as well as more fully informed understandings of the potential risks and side effects, is necessary for centering patient priorities in care management.

Sachdeva emphasized a “nothing about us without us” philosophy for approaching the opioid epidemic. This means that the systems of care being changed to address opioid crises must depend directly on people who use opioids. It is important to center “lived experience through the whole thing.” Because each community is different, it is inadequate to make assumptions about “what a community is, what it might need, or what its story is.”

The self-described objectives of the Duke Opioid Collaboratory, which overlaps largely with other initiatives discussed during the panel.

Underlying this work is a question from Dr. Gulur, “What are you trying to treat?”

To treat the opioid epidemic, we need to treat people as complex, multi-dimensional people living complicated lives. Opioid use is only one facet of this narrative, making it pertinent to understand the rest of the story to adequately tackle this problem our nation faces. Mental health and access to care are central to this collective narrative more largely.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Bass Connections Teams Tackling COVID-19 Problems, from Food Security to Voting-by-Mail

By Meghna Datta

On March 8, 2021

In Field Research, Global Health, Policy, Students

Most people at Duke are familiar with Bass Connections, the powerhouse interdisciplinary research program that brings together students and faculty from a wide variety of backgrounds to tackle complex problems.

Like most people, when the country went on COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, team leaders and members within Bass Connections needed to adapt their approach.

Instead of merely adapting, though, some Bass Connections teams saw a problem-solving opportunity. They pivoted to address some of the most pressing problems that the pandemic has created or exacerbated. On Tuesday, March 2^nd, eight teams gathered to present their research at the first Bass Connections Works in Progress Symposium.

Equity and Efficiency of Using Wearables Data for COVID-19 Monitoring was one team that presented at the Symposium.

These teams tackled issues ranging from the ethics of contact tracing to the availability and access to contraception.

One team focused on the issue of food security amongst Latinx populations in Durham. Their presentation was lead by Elaijah Lapay, Faraan Rahim, and Karina Moreno Bueno. The team aimed to tackle three major goals: “How is the pandemic affecting the food security of Latinx residents, and how do environmental public health factors contribute to this population’s risk for COVID-19 infection? How does the incorporation of fresh, local foods mitigate these effects? How is the pandemic affecting the food assistance services locally, nationally, and internationally for the Latinx community?”

Of the Hispanic/Latinx respondents to the 2019 Durham Community Health Survey, 20.9% said they sometimes skipped or limited their meals. Combining that with the fact that 36% of the total number of COVID-19 cases in Durham have been within the Hispanic population, it’s fairly clear that there is a link between food security and health outcomes.

To this end, the Bass Connections team partnered with Root Causes to help advance their project goals through Root Cause’s Fresh Produce Program. Root Causes is an organization started by Duke Medical School students prior to the pandemic that previously provided fresh produce to food-insecure patients at the Duke Outpatient Clinic. But in order to adapt to contactless delivery and new needs due to COVID-19, Root Causes and the Bass team partnered to expand its reach to nearly 150 households in Durham.

Pipeline for Fresh Produce Program, taken from the symposium presentation of Improving Food Security to Increase Resiliency to COVID-19 for Latinx Populations

This expansion was aided immensely by the Duke Campus Farm, which despite the pandemic mobilized to change the produce it grew to be more culturally relevant to the households they were supporting.

In the future, the team hopes to continue to expand their survey data in the Triangle and continue to assess the impact of the Fresh Produce Program.

Another Bass Connections team broadly addressed the challenges COVID-19 posed to the election process, through three sub-projects focusing on absentee balloting, organizing, and overall voter participation. The symposium presentation for the absentee balloting research was lead by Chase Johnson, Emma Shokeir, and Kathryn Thomas.

To hear more about the work of this Bass Connections team, watch the presentation above.

The 2020 election saw more people than ever relying on absentee voting, either by the one-stop process or by voting through mail. However, this team aimed to address the many voters that are disenfranchised because their votes are rejected due to errors in their ballot. While NC courts ruled that voters are required to be notified if their ballot needs curing, the difficulty of curing one’s ballot often dissuades people from even starting the process, leading to those votes not being counted.

The team utilized the app BallotTrax, a company that the North Carolina State Board of Elections hired to track these ballots. The team then focused on phone banking to increase BallotTrax usage, and then analyzed voter outcomes.

In the future, they hope to analyze the effect that BallotTrax outreach had on voting success, the efficacy of BallotTrax for voters in North Carolina, and the efficiency of North Carolina’s vote-by-mail system compared to other states.

A goal of this symposium for many teams was to ask audience members for suggestions on ways to direct their research further. The beauty of seeing research midway through the process is that it opens the door for collaborative thinking, out-of-the-box ideas, and being open about obstacles and mistakes.

This virtual Symposium is a testament not just to Duke’s collaborative research spirit, which is alive and well despite the pandemic, but to the adaptability of Duke student researchers and faculty. There’s no doubt that these eight Bass Connections Teams, among the many other teams part of the program this year, have been generating relevant and impactful knowledge and will continue to do so.

Post by Meghna Datta

Increasing Access to Care with the Help of Big Data

By Cydney Livingston

On February 22, 2021

In Computers/Technology, Data, Global Health, Statistics

Artificial intelligence (AI) and data science have the potential to revolutionize global health. But what exactly is AI and what hurdles stand in the way of more widespread integration of big data in global health? Duke’s Global Health Institute (DGHI) hosted a Think Global webinar Wednesday, February 17^th to dive into these questions and more.

The webinar’s panelists were Andy Tatem (Ph.D), Joao Vissoci (Ph.D.), and Eric Laber (Ph.D.), moderated by DGHI’s Director of Research Design and Analysis Core, Liz Turner (Ph.D.). Tatem is a professor of spatial demography and epidemiology at the University of South Hampton and director of WorldPop. Vissoci is an assistant professor of surgery and global health at Duke University. Laber is a professor of statistical science and bioinformatics at Duke.

Left to right: Andy Tatem, Joao Vissoci, Eric Laber

Tatem, Vissoci, and Laber all use data science to address issues in the global health realm. Tatem’s work largely utilizes geospatial data sets to help inform global health decisions like vaccine distribution within a certain geographic area. Vissoci, who works with the GEMINI Lab at Duke (Global Emergency Medicine Innovation and Implementation Research), tries to leverage secondary data from health systems in order to understand issues of access to and distribution of care, as well as care delivery. Laber is interested in improving decision-making processes in healthcare spaces, attempting to help health professionals synthesize very complex data via AI.

All of their work is vital to modern biomedicine and healthcare, but, Turner said, “AI means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.” Laber defined AI in healthcare simply as using data to make healthcare better. “From a data science perspective,” Vissoci said, “[it is] synthesizing data … an automated way to give us back information.” This returned info is digestible trends and understandings derived from very big, very complex data sets. Tatem stated that AI has already “revolutionized what we can do” and said it is “powerful if it is directed in the right way.”

We often get sucked into a science-fiction version of AI, Laber said, but in actuality it is not some dystopian future but a set of tools that maximizes what can be derived from data.

However, as Tatem stated, “[AI] is not a magic, press a button” scenario where you get automatic results. A huge part of work for researchers like Tatem, Vissoci, and Laber is the “harmonization” of working with data producers, understanding data quality, integrating data sets, cleaning data, and other “back-end” processes.

This comes with many caveats.

“Bias is a huge problem,” said Laber. Vissoci reinforced this, stating that the models built from AI and data science are going to represent what data sources they are able to access – bias included. “We need better work in getting better data,” Vissoci said.

Further, there must be more up-front listening to and communication with “end-users from the very start” of projects, Tatem outlined. By taking a step back and listening, tools created through AI and data science may be better met with actual uptake and less skepticism or distrust. Vissoci said that “direct engagement with the people on the ground” transforms data into meaningful information.

Better structures for meandering privacy issues must also be developed. “A major overhaul is still needed,” said Laber. This includes things like better consent processes for patients’ to understand how their data is being used, although Tatem said this becomes “very complex” when integrating data.

Nonetheless the future looks promising and each panelist feels confident that the benefits will outweigh the difficulties that are yet to come in introducing big data to global health. One cool example Vissoci gave of an ongoing project deals with the influence of environmental change through deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon on the impacts of Indigenous populations. Through work with “heavy multidimensional data,” Vissoci and his team also have been able to optimize scarcely distributed Covid vaccine resource “to use in areas where they can have the most impact.”

Laber envisions a world with reduced or even no clinical trials if “randomization and experimentation” are integrated directly into healthcare systems. Tatem noted how he has seen extreme growth in the field in just the last 10 to 15 years, which seems only to be accelerating.

A lot of this work has to do with making better decisions about allocating resources, as Turner stated in the beginning of the panel. In an age of reassessment about equity and access, AI and data science could serve to bring both to the field of global health.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Invisible No More, the Cervix

By Cydney Livingston

On February 3, 2021

In Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Cancer, Computers/Technology, Engineering, Global Health, Students

How many people have seen their cervix? Obscured from view and stigmatized socially, the cervix is critical to women’s, transgender-men’s, and non-binary folks’ health — and potential reproductive health issues. A team formed through Duke’s Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies (GWHT) has created a device that not only holds immense medical potential but the potential to empower people with cervixes across the globe: It makes visible a previously invisible organ.

Top Row, left to right: Andrea Kim, Wesley Hogan, Gita Suneja. Bottom Row, left to right: Mercy Asiedu, Nimmi Ramanujam

Nimmi Ramanujam (Ph.D.), founder of GWHT and Professor of Engineering at Duke University, heads the team. Mercy Asiedu (Ph.D.), Gita Suneja (M.D.) Wesley Hogan (Ph.D.), and Andrea Kim have all been integral members of the interdisciplinary collaboration. Dr. Suneja is Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and a clinical researcher. Asiedu, former PhD student with Dr. Ramanujam and current postdoc at MIT, was integral to the development of Callascope.

The Callascope allows women and others who have cervixes, along with health professionals, to perform cervical exams without use of traditional examination tools that are larger, cannot be used for self-examinations, and often scary-looking.

When Wesley Hogan, director of Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies and research professor, heard about the idea “she was hooked.” Andrea Kim graduated from Duke University in 2018. Her senior thesis was a 12 minute documentary focused on the Callascope and its potential uses. Following graduation, over the last two years, she expanded the film to a 50-minute piece titled “The (In)visible Organ” that was screened January 14, 2021. Kim moderated a panel with Ramanujam, Asiedu, Suneja and Hogan January 28th, 2021.

Callascope: A handheld device that can be used to conduct cervical screenings. All that’s needed is a smart phone.

The Callascope addresses a dire global health need for better women’s reproductive health. Further, it empowers women as self-advocates of their own gynecological and reproductive health through reinvention of gynecological examination. Cervical cells have an “orderly progression,” says Suneja, we have a “great idea” of how cells become cancerous over time, “with multiple places to intervene.” Cervical examinations, however, are necessary for assessing cervical health and potential disease progression.

Originally from Ghana, Dr. Asiedu was interested in using her engineering skills to develop technology to “improve health outcomes,” particularly in countries like her own, which may lack adequate access to preventative healthcare and could benefit most from Callascope. Many women in underserved countries, as well as underserved areas of the United States, suffer disproportionately from cervical cancer — a preventable disease.

Dr. Ramanujam, who served as a voluntary test-subject for Asiedu’s Callascope prototypes, says that it’s a really important tool “in actually changing [the cervix’s] narrative in a positive way” — it is an organ “that is indeed invisible.”

The hope is that with more awareness about and use of Callascope, cervical screenings, and vaginal health, cervixes may become more de-stigmatized and cultural norms surrounding them may shift to become more positive and open. Dr. Hogan stated that when Ramanujam pitched her the Callascope idea they were in a public restaurant. Hearing Ramanujam say words like “vagina” and “cervix” loud enough for others to hear made Hogan recognize her own embarrassment surrounding the topic and underscored the importance of the project.

The project and the team serve as a wonderful example of intersectional work that bridges the sciences and humanities in effective, inspiring ways. One example was the Spring 2019 art exhibit, developed in conjunction with the team’s work, presented at the Nasher Museum which exposed the cervix through various mediums of art.

Multidisciplinary Bass Connections research teams contributed to this work and other interdisciplinary projects focused on the Callascope. Dr. Asiedu believes documentaries like Kim’s are “really powerful ways to communicate global health issues.” Kim who directed and produced “The (In)visble Organ” hopes to continue exploring how “we can create more cultures of inclusion …when it comes to reproductive health.”

A piece of artwork from the (In)visible Organ art exhibit at Duke’s Nasher Museum in the spring of 2019.

Ramanujam emphasized the need to shift biomedical engineering focus to create technologies that center on “the stakeholders for whom [they] really [matter].” It is multi-dimensional thinkers like Ramanujam, Asiedu, Hogan, and Kim who are providing integrative and inventive ways to address health disparities of the 21st century — both the obvious and the invisible.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Widespread Vaccination Will Depend on Faith in Science

By Cydney Livingston

On December 21, 2020

In Behavior/Psychology, Global Health, Medicine, Science Communication & Education

Two Covid vaccines have been approved via Emergency Use Authorizations. But, many scientists, health professionals, and regulatory members alike are left wondering how to best ensure the American and global public opt-in to getting vaccinated.

During Friday, December 18^th Coronavirus Conversation hosted by the Duke Initiative for Science & Society, honored guests Anthony Fauci (M.D.) and Alan Alda discussed the restoration of faith in public science agencies, moderated by Hank Greely (J.D.). You can view the entire program here (40 min.)

Dr. Fauci has become a household name this year as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force but is more widely regarded as one of the most trusted U.S. medical figures and has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease since 1984.

Mr. Alda, though popularized through his acting career, has been a life-long advocate for science. He hosted PBS show “Scientific American Frontiers,” founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at SUNY Stony Brook, and recently released a podcast titled “Soldiers of Science.” At Stanford, Mr. Greely is director for the Center for Law and Biosciences and the Program in Neuroscience and Society, as well as a Professor of Law.

Anthony Fauci (M.D.) left, Alan Alda center, and Hank Greely (J.D.) right

Greely asked about the public’s current level of trust for science and what must be done to get it “where it should be.” Alda said that there “seems to be this awful fall off of trust in science … at the worst possible time.” But Dr. Fauci pointed out that we have seen the evolution of lack of trust in science over the previous couple of years. The pandemic fell in the middle of extreme American divisiveness, he said, leading to individuals “developing their own set of facts instead of interpreting [actual] data that exists.”

Alda and Fauci both emphasized the need for transparent and clear scientific communication as a main tactic for increasing public faith in science. This includes use of the words “I don’t know,” particularly in response to the question of vaccine longevity, a question Dr. Fauci said will be answered “in due time.”

Alda said scientific communicators should “communicate with audience[s] with respect … with personal contact where trust builds up more quickly.” He pointed out that this means communicators must become more familiar with their audiences, what terms would be best to use, and what their audiences are “ready to hear.” Dr. Fauci added that when someone is “speaking science” to any group, the objective should not be to “impress the [audience] as to how smart [they] are.” The two major objectives laid out by Fauci: 1) Know the audience and 2) know your message, avoiding granularity and inaccessible language.

Greely interjected that the though all three panelists agree on trust in science, they were three white guys “of mature years.” He continued to say that, “One of the saddest ironies [is that] people getting hammered hardest by [Covid] tend to be people from racial and ethnic minorities … those are also [the same] groups of people that have understandable historic reasons to have less trust [in scientific agencies].” How do we reach these groups?

To do this, Dr. Fauci proposed that we need to get messengers for vaccination to “to look like and understand to whom [we] we are delivering the message.” Leaning into an idea by Alda – that we should get celebrities and widely-respected and admired individuals to get vaccinated on television – Fauci described how Surgeon General Jerome Adams got publicly vaccinated Friday morning.

Adams also delivered a message to his “Black and Brown sisters and brothers” in support of vaccination. Dr. Fauci believes more positive messaging like this will be effective. Alda reinforced that “we can’t guess about the people we’re trying to talk to.” We have to know about their biases and cause for hesitancy in order to meet them where they are, as well as address their concerns in genuine, non-condescending ways.

Alda also proposed that individuals snap a quick shot of themselves getting vaccinated and post it to social media as a #vaccie – a play on the #selfie sensation – which Greely said was “brilliant.”

Alda and Fauci concurred that the most powerful proponents of restoring faith in science may lie in the impact of individual civilians who share their trust in and compliance with vaccination amongst family and friends. Fauci said individuals should not “underestimate the impact that they have in their own immediate environment.”

Sandra Lindsay, an Intensive Care Unit nurse in New York, was one of the first people in the U.S. to receive the Pfizer Covid vaccine.

This impact could be either positive or negative, though, as Alda pointed out the problem with social media algorithms. While working on “Soldiers of Science,” he learned that social media sites are designed to “keep your eyeballs on the screen” as long as possible. This means that social media sites keep “showing you what you want to see,” which is your own bias and affirmation that your ideas are correct. If #vaccie starts trending, this might provide necessary momentum for widescale vaccine uptake.

However, because we have become “addicted to [our] bias” and convinced “over and over again that only our view is right,” according to Alda, we must work intentionally to see commonalities across seemingly alienating lines. Reflecting on his work with AIDS, Dr. Fauci suggested that we take what scientific communicators and regulatory bodies learned during that time. “What do we all want?” Fauci said, ”And how do we get there in a way that is synergistic [instead of] opposing?”

In his parting thoughts, Alda stated simply that “science will save us.” It has and will continue to allow us to “counterattack the attacks we get from our mother nature.” Dr. Fauci said that in dealing with the current pandemic, “biomedical research and science has given us something that just a decade ago would have seemed unimaginable.”

“When this is over, and it’s going to be over,” Fauci said, “We’re [going to] look back and say, ‘It was science that got us out of this, pure science.’”

Greely said we have learned a lot about science communication this year – invaluable information that we must carry forward with us.

I, like so many others around the world, can’t wait for my turn to get the Covid vaccine and to kiss 2020 and the pandemic goodbye.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Phase 3 Trials: What We Know About a Covid Vaccine

By Cydney Livingston

On November 10, 2020

In Global Health, Immunology, Medicine

As multiple drug companies in the United States speed towards Phase 3 trials for Covid-19 vaccinations, there remain many unanswered questions about these vaccines.

Moderated by Professor of Law and Philosophy, Nita Farahany (J.D., Ph.D), principal investigators Cynthia Gay (M.D., M.P.H) and Emmanuel (Chip) Walter (M.D.) explored these lingering anxieties in a Science and Society hosted Coronavirus Conversation Thursday, November 6th. Dr. Gay is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolia Chapel Hill (UNC) and Medical Director of the UNC HIV Cure Center. Dr. Walter is a professor of Pediatrics with Duke’s Global Health Institute, as well as a member in the Duke Clinical Research Institute and Duke Human Vaccine Institute. Both Gay and Walter are currently overseeing trials for SARS-COV-2 vaccines.

Moderator Nita Farahany (left) and panelists Cynthia Gay (middle) and Emmanuel (Chip) Walter (right)

Farahany began the conversation by pointing out that though the previous ideal of a vaccine by the US presidential election did not come to fruition, Phizer and Moderna just reached full enrollment for their Phase 3 trials. “[The timeline question] is a million-dollar question,” said Dr. Gay, who is overseeing the Moderna trials at UNC. She said that soon statisticians who have no conflicts of interest with the trials will have a look at the unblinded trial data to see if there are any differences between those who received placebo injections and those who received vaccines. Gay believes this first “peek” may be too early to see a significant signal indicating success of the vaccines. Dr. Walter weighed in, saying that though he hopes “we’ll see something,” he concurs that Dr. Gay’s estimate that no significant signal will be present until January is an accurate one.

As Gay and Walter explained, probed for clarification from Farahany, drug companies undertaking vaccine development enrolled portions of the population at higher risk for contracting Covid — typically on the basis of their form of employment. For example, someone working in healthcare statistically has a higher likelihood of contracting Covid because of increased exposure to environments where Covid-infected persons may be. Vaccine trial groups were either assigned to a placebo or to a vaccine. The drug companies will be able to test the success of the vaccines by evaluating whether those who received the vaccine contract Covid at some statistically significant lower amount than those who received the placebo.

But as Farahany pointed out, a drug company could receive an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for their vaccine before trials are complete, prompting the question: Will Phase 3 trial placebo participants receive the vaccine if their company receives an EUA? Dr. Walter offered that this could be problematic because there would be a lack of long-term data on vaccines and Dr. Gay suggested that because blinding is the best sort of study design, there is tension around this question. However, Walter and Gay both agreed that study participants should be honored for the role they stepped into for these trials. Thus, the timing for the EUA may be the biggest determinant on whether or not placebo-receiving Phase 3 participants will receive the vaccines as soon as they are available or not.

Other concerns focus on the overall safety of the vaccines. All of the current Covid vaccines in development are mRNA vaccines, which have never before been approved for use in humans. Dr. Walter offered that before Covid, some companies were actually poised to start an mRNA vaccine in children for other respiratory pathogens and that mRNA vaccines are “pretty well studied.” Dr. Gay reinforced these notions by stating that she doesn’t have concerns about the vaccine safety, but rather whether or not the vaccines will actually work for the particular strand of virus and “produce enough effective antibodies to have an impact.” If Covid vaccines are successful, they may actually change the direction of vaccinology in a promising way.

Walter and Gay also addressed the concerns of side effects and generally conceded that most of the side effects seen, such as low-grade fevers and injection-site tenderness, are merely side effects seen with any sort of vaccine. As Farahany pointed out, these sorts of symptoms are actually often just a signal that the immune system is working and responding to the vaccine. Dr. Gay said that a lot of the concerns over vaccine side-effects can be thought about as cost-benefit analysis. She says we make these sorts of analyses all day, every day — whether we realize it or not. For Gay, one day of muscle soreness and a slight fever is highly preferential to weeks of potential immobilization from contracting Coronavirus.

The concluding question: How do we ensure trials are met with public trust? “We have to remember we’re in the middle of a pandemic where things really have to move quickly,” Dr. Walter said. He also offered that though this has been the fastest vaccine development he’s ever seen – aside from H1N1 – all of the safety mechanisms in place have provided safety comparable to that we would normally see.

“This is a global tragedy we’re dealing with,” Dr. Gay said. “There is a time to step back and think, ‘Isn’t it amazing that all these [amazing, talented, expert] people are working day and night’ …They’re making it happen to try to get us an answer and some effective vaccines.”

Post by Cydney Livingston

Trust in Gynecology: The Impact of Race & Socioeconomic Status in Women’s Health

By Zella Hanson

On November 3, 2020

In Cancer, Global Health, Lecture, Medicine, Science Communication & Education

Nikki Mahendru’s mother didn’t go to the gynecologist for 45 years — and when she did, she regretted it. Ms. Mahendru felt “decades of anxieties and hesitancy reduced to five minutes of brisk interaction with her provider,” and left convinced that the “realm of women’s health was just not for her.” According to Nikki, a Duke University undergraduate, her mother’s “trust in the system was lost.”

Mahendru joined Dr. Megan Huchko, the director of the Duke Center for Global Reproductive Health, and Dr. Chemtai Mungo, a Fogarty Global Health Fellow and OB-GYN doctor, on the Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies’ October 20 panel “Impact of Race and Socioeconomic Status in Women’s Health and Gynecology.” The panel was moderated by Ashley Deans and Alexandria Da Ponte.

Mahendru went on to detail an experience she had in the clinic with Carmen, a patient who spoke only Spanish and was also new to the gynecologist. The medical translator and Mahendru learned her story: she had been in pain for a year but had kept quiet due to money problems, had worked most of her life to send her kids to college, and was learning English via Rosetta Stone. With the details of Carmen’s story and an “equitable working relationship,” Mahendru and the translator could relay Carmen’s previous history to her provider. But Carmen’s provider knew only of her condition.

Mahendru thinks gynecology done right has the potential to help women love their bodies and take care of their health, but gynecologists must earn the trust of their patients: “Acts of listening help bridge disparities.”

Dr. Huchko stated that throughout history, a male-dominated healthcare landscape saw the depiction of menses as ‘dirty,’ terms like ‘hysteria,’ and an overall lack of female control. The “father of gynecology” James Marion Sims exploited Black women in his development of the field, using unanesthetized slaves as subjects of experimentation. In general, Dr. Huchko sees a trend: “The lessening or decentering of women in women’s health corresponds to more discrimination.” In addition to the decentering of women, Dr. Huchko said that structural and individual factors “produce outcomes that prevent women from getting the care they need.” Like Mahendru, she identified trust as a central issue.

Dr. Megan Huchko, MD, MPH, is the director of the Duke Center for Global Reproductive Health

Dr. Huchko cited an experience in which she bore witness to the unattended consequences of racial bias in medicine. In Niger to repair women’s fistulas, which occur due to lack of postpartum care, Dr. Huchko felt she was attending to the downstream symptom of a much broader issue. She felt uncomfortable when the urogynecologist on her team ignorantly praised Sims without acknowledging his problematic history. Then, she saw this ignorance firsthand.

Making a false assumption about the nature of the case, Dr. Huchko’s team chose to operate on a woman with a mass in her bladder. During the surgery, they realized the mass was a malignant tumor. With an unbiased eye and a complete exam and workup, this would have been clear. But because the team was looking at these women as “one-dimensional,” a woman with stage 4 cancer was subjected to a very invasive surgery that worsened her quality of life.

Dr. Huchko experienced a similar lack of structural competency during her residency, where colleagues openly racially profiled people and overtly discussed disparities in pain tolerances among different ethnicities. Since then, “things have changed,” and she embraces this new culture of “being patient centered, exploring our own biases, and [having] zero tolerance for racial profiling.” She stresses the need for personal education and accountability alongside systemic change. Eventually, this will lead to women feeling “respected, seen, and heard.”

Coming to the US from Kenya, Dr. Mungo quickly came to appreciate the “sheer magnitude” of structural racism and its impact on health and healthcare. Dr. Mungo explained that “mutually reinforcing systems of disadvantage” for people of color, such as food deserts, are both the result and cause of healthcare disparities and result in enduring legacies of disadvantage.

Dr. Chemtai Mungo, MD, MPH, is a Fogarty Global Health Fellow and OB-GYN doctor

Dr. Mungo also observed that with healthcare in the US being so economically driven, the best care is often directed at those with racial and socioeconomic privilege. When she worked in a high resourced (read: white, wealthy) hospital, access to uterus-saving equipment such as interventional radiology meant that she only did one hysterectomy in four years. Doctors at the hospital also came in on weekends to get a person with cancer into the OR immediately.

Now, working at a “safety net hospital,” Dr. Mungo sees a stark difference. With non-existent interventional radiology and more part-time, “less invested” employees, Dr. Mungo has done three hysterectomies in three years — a 75% increase — and sees patients with time-sensitive conditions wait much longer before surgery. This “separate and unequal access to resources” is a cause for concern.

Dr. Mungo also stressed the need to make practices “safe places” for patients of color by increasing minority representation. Dr. Mungo explained that while Black physicians make up only 5% of doctors and 3% of faculty, there is strong evidence that patients who are cared for by someone of their own race or ethnicity have better outcomes. “We live in a racist society,” Dr. Mungo stated, “so we need specific anti-racist policies.”

Dr. Mungo also acknowledged that healthcare providers work within “templates” like 15 minute appointments, and posed the closing question, how can we make patients feel safe and heard within the constraints of modern medicine?

Answering questions from the audience, Dr. Mungo and Huchko discussed medical algorithms that are based on race, like the VBAC calculator and GFR.

Dr. Mungo indicted these algorithms as “an example of how institutionalized some [racial] biases are.” There is “no concrete evidence” on why these corrections for race — which typically act to reduce the probability of success for a procedure or favorability of an outcome — exist. Dr. Mungo would urge providers “not to stop at, ‘well, African Americans have an increased risk of diabetes.’ Ask why. Have them explain food deserts… and structural and environmental racism.”

Dr. Huchko stated that giving aspirin throughout pregnancy reduces preeclampsia, and is thus traditionally offered based on risk factors for preeclampsia, like low socioeconomic status and African American race. Sometimes, healthcare providers may not be able to address these risks without the acknowledgement of race as a risk factor. Dr. Huchko is right, African American women are at a higher risk for preeclampsia, and ignoring this correlation would probably do more harm than good.

But per Dr. Mungo’s appeal, providers must interrogate these associations more deeply — and be ever anti-racist in their efforts — if they are to create the safe spaces and trusting relationships that Mahendru, Dr. Huchko, and Dr. Mungo each hope to see.

By Zella Hanson

Wednesdays, My New Favorite Day

By Cydney Livingston

On October 16, 2020

In Animals, Biology, Global Health, Students

After my freshman fall, I swore I’d never take another 8AM class. Yet, when a microbiology lab was the only opportunity I had for an in-person course in Duke’s disrupted Fall 2020 semester, I jumped at the chance to take it. Wednesdays have become my on-campus days, and though they start at 7AM and are often jam-packed until 7PM, they are my favorite days of the week.

I’m usually the first to arrive in sub-basement of the Biological Sciences building on Wednesdays. As my six lab-mates join me, we stand in line on top of stickers spaced according to 6-foot social-distancing guidelines and talk about questions from class or the lab we’re going to perform that day. Sometimes it’s difficult to hear one another through our masks. When our TA is ready for us to enter the classroom, we do so one at a time, only after she’s verified our Symptom Monitoring status and taken our temperature.

Stickers marking 6-ft distances for safety. The lab layout with seating arrangements according to Covid guidelines.

Our lab stations are spaced so that we are appropriately distanced from one another, but able to work and collaborate as a team as best we can. We have a no-contact drop-zone for placing and picking up shared lab items, though each students’ space is equipped with most everything we need for our lab on most occasions. The stations are close enough so that we can chat, compare results, and ask each other for assistance as we work. Everyone wears a face shield over a face mask. Each lab session we exchange our “home” face mask for a disposable “lab” face mask. Since we work with potentially pathogenic microbes, this step is for our safety to make sure we don’t carry harmful bacteria out of our lab space. Unlike previous years, gloves are worn at all times, but the lab coats we wear have always been a standard part of the microbiology lab attire.

The infamous “no contact drop zone” for use of shared materials during lab.

What used to be two, two-hour lab sessions twice a week has been condensed into a single four-hour lab-session to minimize exposure to one another. At the beginning of the semester it felt strange and uncomfortable to wear a mask for the whole lab period and for the rest of the day on campus. But like many changes due to Covid-19, I’ve simply gotten used to it. It’s worth it to have face-to-face interactions with fellow students and to have hands-on experience in the lab. In many ways, these experiences feel much more real and meaningful than my fully online classes, in which I interact exclusively virtually with peers and instructors.

This semester we’ve also been doing science at home, having been tasked with an independent research project to be performed outside of lab. The kitchen in my apartment has become a makeshift space for inoculating TSA plates and perplexing my roommate with my experiment.

At home experimental set-up and data collection in my apartment.

After microbiology, I grab a quick lunch at West Union…which I’m still figuring out how to navigate. There’s more online ordering and different routes for lines I haven’t gotten used to. Though it’s significantly less crowded than it used to be – which has its advantages – the energy and fervor that made up Duke is certainly missing. Though I feel it in spurts when I run into the rare upperclassman on the Plaza or in the Bryan Center while trying to find a spot to study, campus is unequivocally not the same.

I leave the central part of campus and return to the basement of BioSci to work in my research lab, the Steve Nowicki Lab. According to our Covid plan, a grad student must be present to supervise me at all times and each of us works on opposite sides of the lab space. It’s really not all that different than it used to be.

In the Nowicki Lab, I test the categorical color perception of Zebra finches. After being trained for the trials, the birds are tested to see if they can detect color differences between a background color and two “odd color out” chips. Colors one and eight are most starkly different, but when comparing colors seven and eight, for example, I sometimes struggle to tell the two colors apart.

Background color 8 versus odd-color-out 7. Can you tell the difference? (Color 7 is in wells 1 and 7)

Following a five-month hiatus from running trials, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in the rhythm of things with only a few marginal mishaps. Within a half-hour of being back in the lab, I was running experiments at full speed again. For a moment it felt like I’d never left, and like it could have been the Wednesday before spring break, before the pandemic took full effect. Sometimes still when I’m running trials, I imagine I could walk out of BioSci’s basement and find that everything would be just as it had been when I left in March.

I spend three hours with the birds, running a refresher round followed by five experimental trials. And usually, I listen to podcasts while I work. The time passes quickly, sometimes more quickly than I’d hope.

Since I’m already on campus, most Wednesdays I stick around and attend my online history seminar from a spot around campus. Though I can’t perch myself on the third floor of Perkins Library these days, I’ve found a new spot I like on the second level of the Bryan Center and I’ve made it work for me.

On Wednesdays, I am reminded of the reasons I fell in love with Duke and of all the things I miss about it in these strange and uncertain times. I wonder if the Duke I knew will ever be the same. Or if something has fundamentally shifted in our institution, and more largely in each of us individually, that only leaves us with a path forward to a new Duke, rather than a return to the old.

I am team Crystal Violet #2 and this is my bag for placing my “home mask” in when gearing up for lab.

As I return to my car in Blue Zone, I take a longing look at the Chapel. Then I make my way to my car, turn on some tunes for the drive home, and patiently wait for my alarm to wake me at 7AM the next Wednesday morning.

Most of the time I’m left thinking about the Duke that used to be, despite the fact that I certainly admire the socially-responsible and safe Duke that is. We’re doing well, all things considered. But still, it’s not the same. The Duke that the first years know is not the Duke I remember.

Post by Cydney Livingston, Trinity 2022

Following the people and events that make up the research community at Duke

Category: Global Health Page 1 of 10

Black Americans’ Vaccine Hesitancy is Grounded in More Than Mistrust

Duke Researcher Busts Metabolism Myths in New Book

Centering Patients and Expanding Access in the Opioid Epidemic

Bass Connections Teams Tackling COVID-19 Problems, from Food Security to Voting-by-Mail

Increasing Access to Care with the Help of Big Data

Invisible No More, the Cervix

Widespread Vaccination Will Depend on Faith in Science

Phase 3 Trials: What We Know About a Covid Vaccine

Trust in Gynecology: The Impact of Race & Socioeconomic Status in Women’s Health

Wednesdays, My New Favorite Day