STAYING SANE AT HOME • IBUPROFEN & CORONAVIRUS • TELEMEDICINE • MALE INFERTILITY • HEALTH EQUITY
STAYING SANE AT HOME
With many families being forced to stay home during the pandemic, tensions can start to rise and mental health might become a struggle. To help, Kehan “Anna” Bao, a student in the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, put together a list of tips for managing relationships at home during this time. Bao recommends giving everyone personal space to be alone and explore hobbies, scheduling intentional time together, maintaining household norms and personal schedules, dividing labor equitably, being open about feelings, showing appreciation, sharing memories and stories and including children in decision-making. (Additional information for news editors)
IBUPROFEN & CORONAVIRUS
Ever since French health minister Olivier Véran tweeted that taking anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen “could be a factor in worsening” COVID-19, popular social media platforms have been circulating the claim. However, FactCheck.org, run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, reports there is no solid evidence that ibuprofen exacerbates the disease and, instead, that that idea remains an untested hypothesis. (Additional information for news editors)
TELEMEDICINE
To keep minor or chronic health concerns from escalating, health care staff in the University of Pennsylvania Health System are utilizing telemedicine tactics such as pre-screening calls and virtual visits to care for patients. “Tools that were being adopted much more slowly six months ago are now progressing much more rapidly,” William Hanson, chief medical information officer, said. Everything from checking on postpartum women to monitoring the glucose levels of patients with diabetes is being done through telemedicine. (Additional information for news editors)
MALE INFERTILITY
he recent identification of an enzyme that plays an important role in maintaining chromosomal pairing in sperm could be key in overcoming challenges related to male infertility. “Reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization have made a huge difference for infertile patients, but the male needs to have at least some sperm,” biologist P. Jeremy Wang of the University of Pennsylvania said. “But if you can find these spermatogonia, the pre-meiotic germ cells, they could be induced to go through meiosis and make sperm.” (Additional information for news editors)
HEALTH EQUITY
The coronavirus pandemic has brought to the table the topic of health equity and the individual responses of nations around the world. In the case of the U.S., the emphasis on individual rights and fragmented local, state, and federal approaches has created a system of uncertainty, according to a University of Pennsylvania scholar. “The solution is to have a much better system to understand and control emerging zoonotic diseases and how to respond to them from the earliest stages of transmission, from animals to humans, all the way through to the various stages of disease spread through human populations,” Jennifer Prah Ruger of Penn’s School of Social Policy and Practice said. (Additional information for news editors)
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