Media Coverage

In the past two decades, life-threatening childhood food allergies have risen steadily, growing by about 4 percent per year to afflict 32 million Americans, according to research by Northwestern University, McKinsey & Company, and Food Allergy Research and Education, a nonprofit. Studies estimate that the costs borne by American families — for medical bills, buying special foods or forgoing full-time employment to care for a child with a food allergy — total $24.8 billion annually.

Dr. Rakhi Shah, an OB-GYN at Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital, said she doesn’t see a way the COVID-19 vaccines could affect menstruation. “I think that there’s really no biological mechanism that is plausible in terms of how that could be possible,” Shah said. “I think that potentially people are having normal menstrual pain plus the aches and pains that are associated post-vaccine, and maybe combining all of that together and associating it.” Dr. Julie Levitt, an OB-GYN at Northwestern Medicine said two patients have come to her with concerns specifically related to their periods after getting vaccinated.

The release of the body camera video of the fatal shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo by Chicago police has left many people feeling traumatized. This is the latest in a series of graphic videos displaying people of color dying at the hands of the police.

“Our data are suggesting that the path to herd immunity really is through vaccination,” professor Thomas McDade, who was one of the individuals who helped put the study together, said. The study found that one dose “does not provide adequate protection for most people who had mild or asymptomatic cases of COVID-19,” and that those individuals should still get both doses of the treatment.

“Because lactose intolerance is so common, people don’t think of milk allergy as something that can be significant or severe,” said Ruchi Gupta, MD, director of the Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

The sudden resurgence of mass workplace shootings is not simply the result of more people returning to work, said Lori Ann Post, director of the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “It’s because the pandemic and politics sucked up all the attention last year,” Post said. “The objective of mass shooters is to kill as many people as possible and get as much attention as possible. Now that Covid is starting to decline, and we have a president who is not involved in scandal after scandal, there is more room in the media for something else.”

It’s also important to remember that the immune response to covid-19 varies from person to person, said Rob Murphy, executive director of the Institute for Global Health and a professor of medicine and biomedical engineering at Northwestern University.

However, “we’re seeing so many mental health impacts from Covid-19 on our kids — like anxiety and depression and isolation and loneliness,” said Dr. Nia Heard-Garris, a pediatrician at Northwestern Medicine. So it’s important for families to find ways to safely balance the two.

More than a year after a “mysterious pneumonia” sickened workers at a seafood market in China, scientists are still gathering clues about where SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — emerged from. “It’s critical to understand where this virus came from, so that we can understand how to stop future outbreaks going forward,” said Anne Rimoin, an infectious disease epidemiologist at UCLA.

“People have predicted for a long time that there was going to be more of a boom in egg freezing and utilization of genetic testing. This is probably the beginning of a scale up,” says Dr. Eve Feinberg, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at Northwestern Medicine. “The transition to a work-from-home environment has opened up more time and space for people to focus on some of their life goals and priorities.”