Community

Oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is a highly effective method of reducing the risk for HIV, yet use of PrEP is uniformly low, especially among women. As a result, researchers have developed long-acting injectable (LAI) versions of PrEP, one version of which was recently shown to be superior to oral PrEP in Phase 3 trials.

One silver lining of the pandemic is that children and young people have been largely spared from COVID-19’s more serious outcomes. But just as we see in older adults, children and young people from minority groups are most at risk. Of 121 Americans under age 21 who died from COVID-19 between February and July of this year, a staggering 78% were people of color, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows.

Front-line care workers have been called heroes throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Many of them don’t feel like it. Instead, they feel besieged and traumatized not only by the suffering and death they’ve witnessed, but by a health care system they believe is showing it doesn’t value them, a disjointed and ineffective governmental response, and members of the public who deny the reality of all that suffering and death.

Columbia is ramping up a program to test wastewater in residence halls to identify signs of the novel coronavirus before a widespread outbreak of COVID-19 can occur.

School closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted access to low or no-cost school breakfast and lunch programs for millions of low-income children. States and school districts developed innovative solutions to meet the nutritional needs of children and respond to the rapidly growing food insecurity crisis, yet the number of replacement meals is likely far short of what they provided prior to the pandemic, according to a study led by a researcher at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.