Media Coverage

he sooner you start ART, the better. That’s true even if you feel good. “There’s no upside to waiting,” says Shannon Galvin, MD, associate professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Northwestern Medicine. “Everyone who has HIV will benefit from being on treatment, no matter what their T-cell count is.”

Before stay-in-place orders were announced, investigators called nearly 700 people in the Chicago area who were part of five U.S. National Institutes of Health studies. Most were 60 and older. The calls were made March 13-20. “They didn’t think they would get the virus and weren’t changing their daily routine or plans,” said lead investigator Michael Wolf, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

Saliva-based testing limits the exposure of health care workers performing the test and also tends to be easier on the patient, said Dr. Elizabeth McNally, director of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Center for Genetic Medicine. Saliva-based testing limits the exposure of health care workers performing the test and also tends to be easier on the patient, said Dr. Elizabeth McNally, director of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Center for Genetic Medicine.

That said, it’s unlikely that you’ll get sick from not changing your shirt after returning home from the grocery store, says Dr. Irfan Hafiz, an infectious disease specialist at Northwestern Medicine. You’re more likely to get it through respiratory droplets from another person than contracting it from a surface.

Chronic stress can also cause fatigue, problems concentrating, irritability and changes in sleep and appetite, said Inger Burnett-Zeigler, an associate professor of psychiatry at Northwestern University. For women, who even before this crisis reported stress and anxiety at twice the rate of men, the effects can be even more pronounced, Burnett-Zeigler added.

In the case of the new coronavirus entering through a cut, “the receptors aren’t there,” Ison said. The most common way the virus spreads is through the respiratory route — when an infected person coughs or sneezes on someone nearby, or when people touch a contaminated surface and then touch mucous membranes on their face.

“It puts something in our hands that we can investigate in a rigorous fashion in the quest for therapies that may be effective and widely adopted to treat the pandemic,” said Babafemi Taiwo, chief of infectious diseases at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“There is much work on tracking mutations in the virus but no work to my knowledge of the implications of these differences on diseases,” added Karla Satchell, a professor in the Department of Microbiology-Immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “All conclusions to that end are solely speculative.”

“You can’t assume it’s safe and effective,” said Dr. Babafemi Taiwo, chief of infectious diseases at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago. This week, Northwestern was among the latest U.S. medical centers to join a large-scale research effort sponsored by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). It is putting remdesivir to the “gold standard” test in medicine: a controlled clinical trial.

There is also evidence that men in China are doing worse than women, and smoking – men smoke at much higher rates than women do – is proposed as the main reason for this discrepancy, says Dr. Jeffrey A. Linder, chief of the division of general internal medicine and geriatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “Having damaged lungs and getting a lung infection is a double whammy,” he says.