Media Coverage

The work done by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine faculty members (and even some students) is regularly highlighted in newspapers, online media outlets and more. Below you’ll find links to articles and videos of Feinberg in the news.

If you’ve been exposed but don’t have symptoms, you’ll need to quarantine for 10 days, per the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention option. People who test negative for Covid can stop the quarantine after seven days past the exposure. A 14-day quarantine remains safest to reduce risk, the CDC says. “There is a false sense of security that if you aren’t symptomatic that you are not putting others at risk,” says Khalilah Gates, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.

One of the patients was a woman who explained that she was having “syntax errors and no articles.” They began collecting other patients with unusual language problems, or aphasia, with no evidence of stroke. Their first six patients were described in a paper published in 1982. That puzzle was the beginning for Mesulam, now at Northwestern University in Chicago and the director of the Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease.

In addition to wearing masks, we must restrict our activities and reduce capacity at certain types of businesses. A modeling study, by researchers at Stanford and Northwestern universities, shows that a small minority of places people visit account for a large majority of coronavirus infections in big cities. And it suggests that reducing the maximum occupancy in such places — including restaurants, gyms, cafes, hotels and religious establishments — can slow the spread of illness substantially.

Last week, almost 1,000 people died of COVID-19 in Illinois alone. Dr. Michelle Prickett has been working at an ICU in Chicago and describes the scene from inside the hospital: “The COVID ICU is one of the quietest ICUs because all the doors are closed, there’s no family, there’s no conversations, and the vast majority of patients are ventilated.” She adds that she and her colleagues “know the look in people’s eyes when they can’t breathe. As a pulmonary doctor, it’s a look I’ve seen too many times in my career.”

Dr. Martha Twaddle, medical director for palliative medicine and supportive care at Northwestern Medicine-Lake Forest Hospital, tells Yahoo Life that the pandemic has completely changed the practice of palliative care. “Palliative care focuses on the seriously ill and their families, looking at patients and family as a unit of care,” she says. “Before the pandemic, families were very much an integrated part of the team. On rounds they would be bedside. That doesn’t happen now.”

“Basically the whole idea for this is like an early warning system. What we would hope to do with this is to … be able to see when things are starting to stoke and an outbreak is occurring,” said Lori Post, co-lead investigator and director of the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “However, it’s really a difficult time just because all U.S. states are just like out of control right now in America,” said Post, a professor of emergency medicine and medical social sciences.

Pregnant women are commonly excluded from research, something that has frustrated Dr. Emily Miller for years. Miller is the assistant professor in the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at Northwestern Medicine’s Feinberg School of Medicine, where she has been closely following the lack of data on pregnant women and new vaccines.

According to study senior author Dr. Scott Budinger, professor and chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Northwestern, lungs attacked by COVID-19 “also showed striking similarities to the lungs of patients with a condition called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.” In that condition, lung tissue gets “thick and stiff, making it difficult for the body to take in oxygen,” Budinger said in the news release.

“The C.D.C. will have to be rebuilt, and its guidelines and the F.D.A.’s have to be promptly re-evaluated,” said Dr. Robert L. Murphy, director of the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University’s medical school. “The Biden team will move quickly. It’s not like they don’t know what to do.”

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