The article in The Magazine section of the Greek news website quoted a 2018 study by Dr. Jeff Temple, director of Center for Violence Prevention at UTMB: “As with sex, in sexting if there is no consent or something is done compulsorily, there are negative issues in mental health.”

The fact that it’s easy to get to and not embarrassing to expose is a small part of it, but there are important technical reasons, write Drs. Norbert Herzog and David Niesel in the latest Medical Discovery News column.

Dr. Colleen Silva, director of Breast Health and professor of surgery at UTMB, commented on the importance of survivor support groups. “I think sharing your own experiences, asking questions about what to expect, expressing your fears or concerns with women who have been through it is very important and plays a vital role in developing personal resiliency and making it successfully through the entire treatment. Some patients have told me that being a part of this support group saved their lives,” Silva said.

Omicron harbors more than 30 mutations in its spike protein, the primary target of most of the world’s COVID-19 shots. And it’s certainly dodging some of the antibodies that vaccines goad our bodies into producing—more so, it appears, than the variants that have come before it.

It will also be important to see further studies confirming the latest results, because variables such as the type of cell used can affect their conclusions, says Pei-Yong Shi, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “In the next week or 10 days, there will be a lot of confirmatory results coming out,” he said.

In South Africa researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute took blood from about a dozen people who had been vaccinated with two shots of the Pfizer vaccine and looked to see how well their antibodies kill the virus. In the experiment, everyone's antibodies were able to neutralize an earlier version of the virus quite well. And that's a lot. "It's astonishing ... in terms of the reduction," said Pei-Yong Shi, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who has been doing similar experiments to determine the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against the coronavirus. This story was picked up by NPR affiliates across the country.

Microbiologist Pei-Yong Shi runs a high-containment laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Over Thanksgiving, his team began engineering a replica of the new variant to test against the antibodies generated by vaccines. But it doesn’t happen overnight: It will take about two weeks to build the omicron replica, another few days to confirm that it’s an accurate facsimile, and one more week to pit the virus against blood samples from vaccinated people. “I think there is a lot of overreaction, and we just have to sit tight,” Shi said. “There are no results yet, these are just the mutations. What does that mean? We have to see.”

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch began engineering their own copy of the new COVID variant in local labs with genome data shared online. At the same time, researchers were working to get their hands on an isolate of the virus from a person confirmed to have been infected with it. The expert advice is to stay calm about omicron. “I think we have some concern, but it’s too early to worry a lot about this,” said Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections & Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “The bad news is that this is a variant with a lot of mutations.”