Housing policies established more than eight decades ago that effectively trapped people of color in low income and segregated neighborhoods continue to impact the health of residents to this day, specifically resulting in poor obstetric outcomes such as pre-term birth.  That is the conclusion of a new study in the journal JAMA Network Open, by Medical Center researchers.

Beginning in the 1930s and 40s, the federal government created thousands of area descriptions for cities across the U.S.  First created by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), the housing policies were adopted by the Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs and delineated areas where mortgages could be insured. The term redlining comes from the color that was used on HOLC maps to identify neighborhoods composed predominately of people of color and labeled “hazardous.”

The researchers focused on the region surrounding Rochester. Of the 199,088 births during 2015-2018, pre-term births occurred at a rate of 12.38% in HOLC “hazardous” zip codes compared to 7.55% in areas that were labeled “best” or “still desirable.”

“These findings suggest the potential influences of a system of profound structural inequity that ripple forward in time, with impacts that extend beyond measurable socioeconomic inequality,” says Elaine Hill, an economist in the Department of Public Health Sciences and co-author of the study. “In our study population of a single mid-sized U.S. city, historic redlining was associated with worse outcomes in pregnancy and childbirth experienced by Black women in the modern day.”

The redlining policies, which remained in effect until the 1960s, led to decades of community disinvestment, concentrated poverty in inner city neighborhoods, and denied residents the ability to build intergenerational wealth through home ownership. The health impacts of redlining have long been hinted at, but it was not until the recent digitization of the original HOLC maps by the University of Richmond Mapping Inequality project that researchers have been able to more precisely examine these questions. Read more.

Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience are working to better understand how COVID-19 impacts students and staff in schools that serve students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The $4 million project, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics-Underserved Populations (RADx-UP), will allow researchers to work with students and staff at the Mary Cariola Center School in Rochester, to study how COVID-19 spreads in the vulnerable population the agency serves.

“Understanding how to best test this population and how COVID spreads in group settings is imperative to keeping those with an IDD safe,” says John Foxe, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, and co-principal investigator of the study. “Ultimately, this study will have major implications for schools across the United States and specifically for schools that serve vulnerable students. This funding continues a well-established collaboration with Mary Cariola Center and will help keep their population, many of which are too young to be vaccinated, safe from COVID.”

Martin Zand, co-director of the Clinical & Translational Science Institute and senior associate dean for Clinical Research at the Medical Center, and Stephen Dewhurst, vice dean for research at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, are also principal investigators.

According to the NIH, a non-vaccinated person with intellectual and developmental disabilities is four-times more likely to contract COVID-19 and eight-times more likely to die from the virus than someone without an IDD. Persons with IDD are difficult to test with effective procedures. This study will allow researchers to rapidly identify initial infections, antigen levels, and through isolating and contact-tracing, stop the spread of infection in school settings.

“This partnership will provide crucial insight into this deadly virus and will allow us to update, revise, and create best practices beyond what we are currently doing,” says Karen Zandi, president/CEO of Mary Cariola Center. “Ultimately, it means we will be able to keep our students and staff healthy and provide peace-of-mind to their families, while providing important research data to help schools in general and other schools like ours.” Read more.

Jonathan W. Mink, the Frederick A. Horner M.D. Distinguished Professor in Pediatric Neurology and chief of Child Neurology at the Medical Center, who has been awarded the Child Neurology Society’s (CNS) 2021 Hower Award. The award is the organization’s highest honor and is given annually to a child neurologist recognized as an outstanding teacher, scholar, and for making high levels of contributions to the field and the CNS. Mink served as president of the CNS from 2017-2019. Since moving to the University 2001, he has focused on clinical research in movement disorders, including Tourette syndrome, and Batten disease. Mink is a dedicated teacher and mentor and many of his students have gone on to become child neurologists and physician-scientists. He is currently the director of the University’s Batten Center, co-director of the Tourette Center of Excellence, and co-director of the Intellectual and Developmental Diseases Research Center. Read more.

For chemists and chemical engineers who are ready to share their research openly, one no-cost, quick-submission option is to post to ChemRxiv, says Susan Cardinal, science and engineering librarian at the Carlson Library.

The preprint server, sponsored by the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Chinese Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Chemical Society of Japan and the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, has been quickly embraced by the community since its launch in 2017.

Spurred on by COVID-19, posts to preprint servers escalated last year, with 3,847 articles deposited on ChemRxiv just in 2020. All preprints posted to the server are checked for plagiarism, offensive, dangerous, and/or non-scientific content. However, only unpublished, not peer-reviewed manuscripts can be deposited.

Once posted, an article can easily be submitted to a society journal of choice using Direct Journal Transfer. Most ACS journals, even JACS, permit preprint posting; check the ACS Prior Publication Policies page for more information on journal policies.

Researchers can share the DOIs of their recent preprints with colleagues, potential employers and the research community in general through social media and on job applications. Although not formally peer reviewed or expertly formatted, preprints can establish priority for credit on scientific discoveries and increase the speed of scientific advancement.

In addition, community discussions addressing specific preprints can help authors improve their papers; ChemRxiv tracks public interest (news, blogs, social media) on its preprints through Altmetric.

Here are two hot papers:

• Smith, Micholas; Smith, Jeremy C. (2020): Repurposing Therapeutics for COVID-19: Supercomputer-Based Docking to the SARS-CoV-2 Viral Spike Protein and Viral Spike Protein-Human ACE2 Interface. ChemRxiv. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11871402.v4
• Arya, Rimanshee; Das, Amit; Prashar, Vishal; Kumar, Mukesh (2020): Potential inhibitors against papain-like protease of novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) from FDA approved drugs. ChemRxiv. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11860011.v2

To locate more chemistry preprints, go directly to ChemRxiv or search in databases that index ChemRxiv preprints, such as SciFinder-n, Scopus, Google Scholar or Dimensions. Questions? Contact Sue Cardinal (STEM Librarian – River Campus Libraries).

The University’s Environmental Health Sciences Center (EHSC) supports pilot projects to advance new translational environmental health sciences research.

These pilot projects help investigators:

• obtain preliminary data for extramural grant applications,
• develop new innovative research initiatives,
• access novel technologies and
• build new opportunities to address community needs and inform public health protection efforts.

Submit initial applications by Monday, November 1. Learn more.