• Performing Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery

    Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery: Treating Oral, Head and Neck Cancers

    The physicians in UTMB Health’s Division of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery provide expertise that extends beyond impacted wisdom teeth and dental implants—they treat patients with head, neck and mouth cancers, injuries due to facial trauma and a wide array of other surgical needs related to the face and mouth.

  • Researchers are racing to figure out if Omicron can beat our vaccines

    To really understand how effective vaccines remain, we need to see who becomes sick with the variant, and how severe that disease becomes. That takes time. “It’s been about two, three weeks since South Africa started reporting these cases. What I’ll be looking for is: Is there a corresponding increase in hospitalizations, and a week later, an increase in deaths?” said Dr. Vineet Menachery, an immunologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch who studies the interaction between the immune system and coronaviruses.

  • Why COVID-19 Tests Don't Tell You Which Variant You May Have

    Dr. Pei-Yong Shi, chair in innovations in molecular biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told Verywell that sequencing data is meaningless if it cannot be paired with information on the variant’s severity and its impact on the population. “(Variants) need to be very carefully studied, because otherwise it’s just a mutation, it’s just a code,” Shi said. “You can speculate a little bit based on the knowledge of the closer-related (mutations), but you really have to do experiments to find out what is the impact.”

  • UTMB team working to determine how dangerous the omicron variant really is

    Scientists at UTMB are reverse engineering this version of the coronavirus to figure out exactly what they are dealing with. “The data we've presented has been presented to the FDA, CDC, and government agencies and of course our long-term collaborators of Pfizer BioNTech,” Dr. Pei-Yong Shi said.

  • Social media threats targeting Henrico schools prompt extra security measures

    Several non-credible social media threats targeting Virginia schools appeared following the Nov. 30 shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan that left four dead. “There’s a contagion effect that we know about in terms of suicides, shootings, bad things happening, and people copycat what they see,” said Dr. Jeff Temple, a professor and psychologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch who studies adolescent violence. “Coupled with the real adolescent mental health crisis caused by COVID and everything else, we’re seeing more and more of this.”

  • Pandemic isolation, fentanyl cause spike in opioid-related deaths, experts say

    When the COVID-19 pandemic hit two years ago, the country already was facing a different crisis—an opioid epidemic. And as shutdowns and working from home spread, the opioid epidemic worsened as many who struggled with opioid use found themselves isolated from support and spiraling in their addictions, experts say. “All of this physical distancing and this social distancing has impacted the ability to get treatment, remain in treatment and have their support systems in place,” said Dr. Kathryn Cunningham, director of the University of Texas Medical Branch Center for Addiction Research.

  • Cyberbullying: The glossary of the new scourge

    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.”

  • Why is it nearly always the upper arm with shots?

    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.

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