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UNC Launches Largest COVID-19 Observational Study of its Kind in North Carolina

November 8, 2022
This study led by the UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases, will enroll 7,500 COVID-positive individuals to answer some of the biggest questions about COVID-19. Investigators explain the study in this video. Over two years into the COVID-19 pandemic and researchers still are looking to answer some of...

Report from Malawi: Weathering a second wave—or tsunami—of COVID-19

February 10, 2021
  By Mina Hosseinipour, MD, MPH Officials announced the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Malawi on April 2, 2020. At UNC Project Malawi, we’d been working for a month to carefully review and prepare for the virus. We established COVID preventive procedures and clinical management guidelines and planning for...

Office of Global Health Education funds COVID-19 research, service learning projects

February 2, 2021
Projects include vaccinating farmworkers arriving in North Carolina, managing data from Nicaragua, and testing blood samples from Africa   UNC’s Office of Global Health Education (OGHE) is awarding $23,000 to teams of global health faculty and medical students to pursue COVID-19 related research and service learning in the spring or...

UNC investigators help prove a monoclonal antibody prevents, treats COVID-19 in nursing homes

January 21, 2021
  Eli Lilly today released results of a clinical trial that found bamlanivimab, a monoclonal antibody, significantly reduced the risk of contracting COVID-19 among residents and staff of long-term care facilities. The Phase 3 trial was conducted in partnership with the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and...

A Safe Space

December 17, 2020
A collaborative team, drawing in part on experience working with disease outbreaks in Africa, has remarkably transformed UNC’s Medical Intensive Care Unit to treat COVID-19 patients. They’ve demonstrated that it’s possible to provide critical care for patients while keeping providers safe. Like most of us during the pandemic, Billy Fischer,...

NIH funds study aimed at improving access to COVID-19 testing for underserved North Carolina communities

November 30, 2020
  A team of investigators from UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases has been awarded $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a two-year implementation science study to scale up COVID-19 testing in North Carolina. The researchers will examine the impact of a COVID screening...

Promising COVID-19 drug is part of global study being led by UNC researchers

November 16, 2020
  Last week’s authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use of bamlanivimab feels like a shot in the arm, so to speak, for David Wohl, MD, a UNC infectious diseases physician and researcher. A monoclonal antibody developed by Eli Lilly to treat mild to moderate COVID-19,...

Taking the long view: Cohen delivers Richardson Lecture

October 13, 2020
Human beings will continue to suffer from infectious diseases, some of them contagious. To fight a new disease, infectious disease physicians first work to determine the rules that govern the disease, its spread, and the gravity of the infection. Those rules then determine our prevention and treatment strategies, Institute Director...

‘Someone who looks like you’

October 7, 2020
Ernest Grant, RN, PhD, FAAN, president of American Nurses Association and an African American, shares why he is participating in COVID-19 vaccine trial   Spending a few hours at a University of North Carolina Health clinic, giving his health history and receiving an injection, might not be Ernest Grant’s favorite...

Global survey aims to measure pandemic’s effects on sexual and reproductive health

October 6, 2020
  The expanding COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the social lives of people across the world. A collaboration between researchers at the UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Disease, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the Academic Network for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Policy is...

Convalescent plasma clinical trial ramps up

September 7, 2020
On the heels of FDA authorization of convalescent plasma as a treatment for COVID-19, UNC researchers are conducting a clinical trial to determine the safety and efficacy of plasma that includes a higher amount of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. The new Coronavirus-inactivating Plasma (CoVIP) research clinical trial is designed to...

Wohl launches clinical trial, one of 25 sites nationally testing COVID-19 treatments

September 1, 2020
  UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases researchers have begun phase 2 and phase 3 evaluations of promising treatments for COVID-19. The UNC School of Medicine joins more than 25 initial sites participating in the clinical trials through ACTIV-2, a public-private partnership sponsored by the NIH’s National Institute...

ID faculty organize, conduct COVID-19 testing in hard-hit Lee County, NC

July 29, 2020
  It’s hot (especially wearing full PPE), it’s tedious, and it’s critical. A volunteer team of UNC infectious diseases faculty members along with UNC hospitalists has been conducting drive-up testing for COVID-19 in Sanford, NC, about 35 miles south of Chapel Hill, twice a month since June, seeing roughly 1,000...

Gay leading phase 3 trial of COVID-19 vaccine

July 28, 2020
In February 2020, as bits of data about the SARS-CoV-2 virus started to emerge, Cindy Gay, MD, MPH, and UNC infectious diseases colleagues began meeting to formulate a local response to the virus. They’ve met weekly ever since, resorting to Zoom calls once the university sent employees home in March....

NIH awards Cohen, FHI $9.2 million for development of COVID prevention studies

July 21, 2020
The National Institutes of Health has awarded Myron Cohen, MD, director of UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, and FHI 360 $9.2 million to support research through the new COVID Prevention Network (CoVPN). The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health has...

Cohen, Fischer, and Pettifor update Board of Trustees on COVID-19 efforts

June 7, 2020
  Three Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases representatives joined the May 21 UNC Board of Trustees meeting to talk about COVID-19 and the university’s response to the pandemic. Institute Director Myron Cohen, MD, talked about how so many of our researchers have pivoted their work to COVID, working...

Parr, medical students conduct first study of tocilizumab in treating COVID-19

May 19, 2020
  In the first COVID-19 case series of tocilizumab in the United States, UNC-Chapel Hill researchers report sobering results. They say the drug should be used judiciously until randomized clinical trials determine tocilizumab’s true efficacy. Meanwhile, medical students sidelined from clinical rotations by the virus conducted the research with lightning...

Boyce, Aiello team with state, local agencies to study COVID-19 cases with mild or no symptoms

May 6, 2020
Ross Boyce, MD, MSc, assistant professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division, and, Allison Aiello, PhD, MS, professor of epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, are leading a study along with Aaron Fleischauer, PhD, MSPH, at NC Department of Health and Human Services and other...

Study addresses COVID-19 infection rates for household members

April 24, 2020
By Alyssa LaFaro As seven states now require masks and face coverings for visiting essential businesses or using public transportation, it seems like those spaces are where we are most at risk for COVID-19 infection. But, in truth, the riskiest place could be our homes — at least, if you live with someone...

She’s raising funds to feed coworkers on frontlines of Covid-19

April 17, 2020
Kathy James was watching the evening news a week or so ago when she saw a story about people in Winston-Salem who were organizing to bring food to local hospital staff fighting Covid-19. We need to do something like that for our people, she thought. James is an administrative coordinator...