Lectures, Symposium Answer Pressing Questions

Taking place in person for the first time since 2019, the Annual Saxon Graham Lecture featured noted UB epidemiology alumnus Zuo-Feng Zhang, MD, PhD ‘91, distinguished professor and chair of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology.

Zhang’s talk, “Challenges and Opportunity of COVID-19 Pandemic on Non-communicable Disease Epidemiology,” began with a review of COVID-19 pandemic statistics—infection rates and in the context of herd immunity—and compared the United States to other countries.

• Of 458.9 million cases worldwide resulting in 6 million deaths, the U.S. counted 81 million infections and 993,000 deaths as of the date of Zhang’s lecture.
  
• Zhang estimates that 90% of the U.S. population has antibodies from either vaccines or infection.
  
• Case fatality in the U.S. is currently the highest worldwide at 2.3%.
  
• COVID-19 can be considered endemic when daily mortality drops to 0.3 per million (99 deaths per day). Annualized at 36,135 deaths, this would be similar to the number of influenza’s annual deaths—34,157 in the 2018-19 flu season.
  

“As higher proportions of people gain immunity protection from vaccines and natural infection, we will see less transmission, much less hospitalization and death, even as the virus continues to circulate at a stable level of infection,” he said.

Stay-at-home policies and masking continue to be protective, Zhang said, citing his research on risk factors and his paper correlating smoking and air pollutant impacts on the SARS infection. The risks apply to COVID-19 as well, with non-communicable diseases (NCD) such as cancer, cardiovascular and chronic lung conditions, and diabetes presenting significant severity and mortality rates in those infected with COVID-19.

Zhang emphasized that while 80% of those who recover from COVID-19 will develop one or more long-term symptom, 10 to 15 years of observation would be required to better understand the more than 60 potential “long COVID” symptoms, including the most common: fatigue, headache, “brain fog,” hair loss and shortness of breath.

The Saxon Graham Lectureship honors the life and legacy of a man known as one of the fathers of U.S. chronic disease epidemiology, L. Saxon Graham, PhD, a longtime SPHHP professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health from 1981 to 1991. Zhang completed his PhD on cancer epidemiology and experimental pathology under Graham’s mentorship.

When matching a person with disabilities with the correct technology to improve their learning, working and daily living, getting to know the user is the key to achieving success.

Marcia J. Scherer, PhD, MPH, is a rehabilitation psychologist and founding president of the Institute for Matching Person & Technology. She is also professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Rochester Medical Center and has received numerous awards for her groundbreaking work in assistive technology (AT).

In her Glen E. Gresham Visiting Professorship in Rehabilitation Science lecture, “Technology is the Answer, But That’s Not the Question,” Scherer focused on ways to achieve user buy-in to, as well as benefit from, AT use. The answer, she believes, lies in working as a provider-user team centered on the user and provider goal achievement, user well-being and provider satisfaction.

“The number one fundamental is to involve the consumer from the get-go,” Scherer said. “Address functional needs but also personal factors and environmental factors, going beyond the built physical architectural space to the social space that person is living within.”

Scherer stressed that use-worthiness is vitally important for users to value AT and not abandon it. While clinic directors, PTs, OTs, engineers and others all emphasize giving users the means to accomplish, and perform, activities, “The user wants to be comfortable and gain function,” Scherer said. “AT needs to result in functional gain and use-worthiness … as well as realizing benefit from use-enhanced well-being and quality of life,” she said.

Assistive technology is now on the world stage for funding, impact and consideration of people with disabilities, Scherer said, thanks to the World Health Organization adopting a resolution to make assistive technology a priority. Current estimates are that globally more than one billion people need one or more assistive product.

The Glen E. Gresham Visiting Professorship in Rehabilitation Science lecture is held annually to honor the former UB faculty member. It is supported by an endowment made by the late Albert Rekate and his wife, Linda, to benefit students, faculty and the wider community.

As year three of the COVID- 19 pandemic begins, global health experts have obtained increasingly more data and are digging into it to better understand how the virus will continue to impact populations around the world. UB’s 11th Annual Global Health Day Symposium, held virtually this year, recently brought together experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Institutes of Health, academia, medicine, public health and the Western New York community to share insights about the next stages of response to the pandemic.

Keynoter Janet Diaz, clinical head of the WHO program responsible for readiness and response to emerging infectious diseases, highlighted post-COVID conditions and patient advocacy. Even patients not hospitalized with COVID-19 have persistent, burdensome symptoms months following infection, she said.

“Post COVID-19 conditions remain under-recognized, and though awareness is increasing, it is not increasing fast enough,” Diaz said. The good news is that governments are beginning to commit funds to ongoing studies, she said.

• Thomas Russo, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases in UB’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, spoke optimistically about how vaccinations are decoupling cases with hospitalization and severe disease. He encouraged booster shots while cautioning that a significant minority of the unvaccinated exists.
• Avindra Nath, clinical director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorder of New York and National Institute of Health, discussed the long COVID symptom of “brain fog” (encompassing cognition and executive function), a complaint of nearly all patients with lingering symptoms. His findings, concluded from autopsies of brains from COVID patients, are that these long-term neurological complications will be akin to dementia.
• Lina Mu, associate professor, SPHHP’s Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health, reported a 25% increase in anxiety and depression worldwide since the start of the pandemic, with younger adults, women and underrepresented people identified as the most vulnerable groups.
• Yinyin Ye, assistant professor, UB Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, discussed using wastewater-based epidemiology to provide estimates of cases, and prevailing COVID variants, in a population.
• Meng Wang, assistant professor, SPHHP Department of Epidemiology in Environmental Health, examined the correlations between air pollution and COVID risk groups, and how lockdowns reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

The Global Health Day Symposium is sponsored and produced annually by UB’s Office of Global Health Initiatives.