News from the School of Public Health

Authorities shrugging off risk—or ordering everyone to mask up. The virus surging in locales that dropped their guards too soon. Death rates that cut along racial lines, impacting African Americans with particular ferocity.

University of Maryland School of Public Health Professor, Amy R. Sapkota, will serve as an investigator on a five-year $10 million grant from the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The grant was awarded to a team of University of Maryland researchers to help farmers in the Corn Belt navigate efficient water and nutrient use in order to increase crop production. 

While Colorado lawmakers have passed a bill that would make it harder to get a vaccine exemption for school children (6/16/20), at a hearing in advance of the vote on the bill, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. the well-known anti-vaccine activist, testified against the bill using racialized arguments based on retracted studies on the impact of vaccination on African American boys and historical references to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a decades-long study in which government researchers withheld treatment from Black men with syphilis, to stir fears about distrust in the medical establishment.

Professor Don Milton's expertise related to the airborne transmission of viruses was again referenced by the New York Times in a story about the World Health Organization's June 8 statement that transmission of the coronavirus by people without symptoms is “very rare.”

Following concerted pushback from researchers, W.H.O. officials walked back the claim, saying it was a “misunderstanding.”

Professor Hongjie Liu, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, was appointed by Montgomery County, Maryland to serve on its advisory group of scientists and medical professionals to help with its recovery plans during the pandemic. County Health Officer Travis Gayles wrote that the COVID-19 Public Health Advisory Board would “provide guidance to the Health Officer and Public Health Services response team, particularly related to our reopening metrics.”

School of Public Health Professor Don Milton is leading a research study that brings both healthy people and people exposed to or diagnosed with COVID-19 into his research lab in the School of Public Health (SPH) building. The study is aimed at gathering new evidence related to how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, may spread by air. Dr. Milton’s team has carefully designed the study to limit risk to those in and around the SPH building.