News from the School of Public Health

Doctoral students John P. Salerno (behavioral and community health) and Natasha D. Williams (family science) highlight the structural, social and individual-level challenges faced by LGBTQ persons in the context of COVID-19 and propose strategies to mitigate their psychological trauma in a commentary published in the Journal of the American Psychological Association. Both Salerno and Williams are research staff in the UMD Prevention Research Center. 

Marie Thoma, an assistant professor of family science in the School of Public Health received an honorable mention in the 2019 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Global Health NOW Annual Untold Stories of Global Health Contest for her submission putting forth the untold st

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bill using racialized arguments based on retracted studies on the impact of vaccination on African American boys and historical references to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a decades-long study in which government researchers withheld treatment from Black men with syphilis, to stir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.”