College of Pharmacy hosting safe medication disposal event Oct. 5
The College of Pharmacy will host a Safe Medication Disposal Event from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Oct. 5. During the event, members of the university community will be able to drop off unused and expired medications for environmentally safe disposal. The collection site is at Ingalls Mall on North University Avenue, across from the Rackham Building. Accepted items include prescription and over-the-counter medications, medication samples, vitamins, ointments and lotions, inhalers, antibiotics, steroids, veterinary medicine, controlled medications, sharps and sharps containers. Unaccepted items include sunscreen, insect repellent, cosmetics, hair care or personal hygiene products, hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol, aerosol cans, blood or infectious waste and tobacco. More information is available at pharmacy.umich.edu/events/safemed.
Campus bus system to restore pre-pandemic routes Oct. 24
Logistics, Transportation & Parking will make major changes to campus bus service starting Oct. 24, restoring pre-pandemic bus routes and discontinuing a half-dozen routes currently operating. The changes come as LTP continues to address feedback and challenges currently being faced due to driver shortages. With the service changes, the following routes will be discontinued: Campus Connector, Green Road – NW5 Loop, Oxford-Markley Loop, Stadium-Diag Loop, Crisler Express (AM service only), North-East On-Demand Patient Shuttle. See a full list of Ann Arbor campus and Michigan Medicine routes, along with times and other information.
Partnership launches new Medicare Advantage plans in area
Michigan Medicine and Saint Joseph Mercy Health System have announced a partnership with Physicians Health Plan to bring a new choice in Medicare Advantage plans to Livingston and Washtenaw counties this fall. The plans will be marketed under the name U-M Health + St. Joe’s Advantage and are administered by PHP. U-M Health + St. Joe’s Advantage will be available to Medicare-eligible residents of those counties during the Medicare Annual Enrollment Period beginning Oct. 15 for the 2022 calendar year. Members in the U-M Health + St. Joe’s Advantage plans will have access to a wide network of hospitals and providers, which includes all Michigan Medicine providers, hospitals and ambulatory facilities as well as IHA and HVPA primary and specialty care providers within Saint Joseph Mercy Health System. For Michigan Medicine, the U-M Health + St. Joe’s Advantage represents the next step in the strategic partnership with PHP. In 2019, Michigan Medicine became a minority owner of PHP, and joined Lansing-based Sparrow Health System as the second health system owner. In 2020, Michigan Care, a PHP commercial health plan, was offered to University and Health System employees.
$1.8M NSF grant to develop room temperature, controllable quantum nanomaterials
An effort to create quantum semiconductors that operate at room temperature has been awarded $1.8 million by the National Science Foundation. The success of the U-M team could lead to the integration of quantum information and communications technologies with conventional computers — as well as advances in high-precision sensing and more sustainable UV lamps for sterilization and air purification. Gallium nitride has been widely hailed as the future’s silicon, and its properties can be tuned by replacing some of that gallium with boron, aluminum and indium — cousins of gallium in the same column of the periodic table. These materials are widely used in LEDs and in power electronics. But they can also support what are known as extreme quantum-dot arrays. Quantum dots are groups of atoms that behave like a single atom, absorbing and emitting light at single wavelength or a few distinct wavelengths. Read more about this research.
Graphic cigarette warning labels could have prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths
A child with an oxygen mask. A diseased lung. A woman with a huge bump on her neck. Adding warning labels like these with graphic depictions of the negative health consequences of cigarette smoking could have averted thousands of smoking-related deaths if approved as originally planned in 2012, according to a new analysis by U-M researchers and colleagues from the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling network Lung Group. If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does require tobacco companies to include the graphic warning labels on cigarette packages in October 2022, as it’s expected to do, between 275,000 and 794,000 smoking-attributable deaths could be averted by 2100, and between 4 million to 11.6 million life-years could be gained during that period. While the FDA had planned to implement the graphic warning labels nine years ago, it has been entangled in litigation with the tobacco industry over the issue. The rules to add the labels include textual warnings and color graphics with photorealistic images depicting the negative health consequences of cigarette smoking, such as warnings that smoking can cause erectile dysfunction or head and neck cancer, and can lead to COPD. Read more about this research.
— Compiled by James Iseler, The University Record
