News & Updates

Some states are allowing restaurants to move back to indoor dining. But is it a safe idea to dine in right now?

Patrick Perry is research coordinator for the University of Kentucky’s Tobacco Research and Development Center, which operates Spindletop — a sprawling 2,200 acre farm on the city’s outskirts. Using Artemisia annua plants, also known as sweet wormwood, that Perry and his team harvested last year, UK is awaiting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials to see if purified plant compounds and its leaves — dried and steeped in either tea or coffee — can treat someone with underlying health issues who contracts the virus.

Stocked & Reddie, the food pantry at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), has been helping university students and employees gain access to healthy food for about a year. But its membership—and operating practices—went through some big changes when the coronavirus crisis hit this spring.

When stay-at-home orders to reduce the spread of COVID-19 are eventually lifted, most restaurants can reopen their doors. Yet when it's back to business as usual, chances are that some of that food will be thrown out. A partnership among University of Kansas researchers, students, local restaurants and community agencies is still working to reduce food waste and food insecurity and will be ready once restaurant business returns.

“Chicago will be ours!” This is the last line of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which captured the horrific working conditions immigrants working in meat factories experienced. The descriptions of how adulterated and unsafe our food was so disgusting that the book was a catalyst for President Theodore Roosevelt’s call to investigate meat processing plants. These investigations led to the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair later lamented that the public latched onto the unsafe handling of food and overlooked the labor exploitation. But the safe handling of food and labor exploitation are inextricably linked.

Kansas State University has signed a new preclinical research and option agreement with Tonix Pharmaceuticals, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, to develop a vaccine candidate for the prevention of COVID-19. The inventor of the technology, Waithaka Mwangi, professor of diagnostic pathobiology in the K-State College of Veterinary Medicine, will direct the research, which is based on a new vaccine platform that his research team developed for bovine parainfluenza 3 virus, known as BPI3V, which is closely related to human parainfluenza 3 virus.

By Becky Vuksta’s calculations, the new socially distanced dining-hall setup at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., will serve 12 students a minute, or 720 students per hour. Not bad, but still not fast enough to feed the school’s 2,700 students in the rush between classes.

The University of Montana’s Family Medicine Residency of Western Montana just received a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration. UM’s program is now one of 20 throughout the country to receive an award for residency training in primary care. The grant will enhance training for resident physicians in rural or underserved areas, while encouraging graduates to pursue careers in rural and underserved primary care after completion of training.

Assistant mechanical engineering professor Saikat Basu was the first SDSU researcher to have a proposal for COVID-19 research receive NSF funding . He is working with researchers at Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to design a reusable mask with a respirator that will capture and kill the novel coronavirus.

ACE2 to Predict Outcomes in Infection with SARS-CoV-2 - John Arthur, M.D., Ph.D. Laura James, M.D. COVID-19 severity ranges from asymptomatic to deadly, but currently there is no way to predict which patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 will develop severe symptoms. Arthur and his team are investigating approaches to accurately make this prediction on the basis of specific features of proteins and DNA in the blood of individual patients. Identifying patients at highest risk of severe disease could save lives by designating the appropriate treatment at an early stage.