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University of Iowa Physician Wins Lasker Award!

How about some good news? This just in, University of Iowa Physician-Scientist, Dr. Michael Welsh, wins the 2025 Lasker Award for his research on cystic fibrosis.

His work and the work of two other researchers with whom he’ll share the award set the stage for the development of new drugs which saves the lives of those who suffer from cystic fibrosis.

I learned from the article that the cystic fibrosis gene was discovered in 1989; I was a second-year medical student then. Since then, the development of new treatments has meant that many people who died in early adulthood now can live into their 80s.

Congratulations to Dr. Welsh and colleagues!

24th Anniversary of 9/11 Attack on America: A Reminder of Our Connection to Each Other

I’m thinking about the upcoming commemoration of the 24^th Anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attack on America. There will be the annual event in New York City.

In Muscatine, Iowa, there will be the annual Patriot Day ceremonies sponsored by the City of Muscatine and the Muscatine Fire Department. After the morning ceremony, the Memorial Stair Climb will begin at 8:52 a.m. at the Muscatine High School football stadium bleachers.

The KCRG news reported on August 7, 2025 that 3 more World Trade Center victims were identified last month by DNA testing. The New York medical examiner’s office continues testing the remains recovered from the wreckage.

Like many people, I remember where I was and what I was doing when the attack happened in 2001. I was the general hospital psychiatric consultant on duty at the hospital at the time. I was hustling up the stairs back to my office after responding to a consultation request.

I happened to glance at the big television screen on the wall of the main floor lobby in the south part of the hospital. I watched in horror as a newscast showed the fire and smoke coming from one of the towers, which I later learned came from the plane crashing into the building. The rest of the day was full of reports of the attack.

When we visited New York City in 2017, we saw the Memorial & Museum Plaza as well as the Survivor Tree, the Callery Pear. It was discovered at Ground Zero, scarred and scorched but alive and replanted at the Memorial in 2010 after being nursed back to health at the city nursery. It is still alive and well today. It remains a symbol of strength, hope, and a reminder of our connection to each other.

The Butterfly House or The Bigfoot Monarch Roundup

Sena went over to ForeverGreen, a popular landscaping and garden center locally, to see the butterfly house. She got pictures and video clips which showed the monarch butterfly management operation they have. They have quite a conservation program, including a large monarch butterfly house enclosure along with demos of life cycle stages. The butterfly house is just part of the deal and it’s open to the public. It opened in June of this year and runs until September 14^th. The schedule shows there’ll be a big release then and possibly even tagging prior to that. You might want to call ahead and check to see if they’re still going to tag the monarchs.

I think this is also a good way to rehabilitate Bigfoot’s image because they could be sort of like ranch hands tending to the monarch as they go through their life cycle. The monarchs migrate to Mexico every fall. You can learn more about the monarch watch program and why many people believe the monarchs are at risk of extinction.

Upcoming CDC Advisory Committee Meeting in September 2025-Or Not?

I’ve been checking the Centers for Advisory Committee schedule on their website for weeks and the only way I found out there is an upcoming meeting is on the Federal Register schedule. Sena found it in a news outlet story. As of this morning around 9 a.m., there was no announcement on the CDC website yet. That may change later today.

According to the Federal Register, the CDC ACIP will hold a meeting on September 18, 2025, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., EDT, and September 19, 2025, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., EDT.

Under Supplementary Information:

“The agenda will include discussions on COVID-19 vaccines; Hepatitis B vaccine; measles, mumps, rubella, varicella (MMRV) vaccine; and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV). The agenda will include updates on ACIP Workgroups. Recommendation votes may be scheduled for COVID-19 vaccines, Hepatitis B vaccine, MMRV vaccine, and RSV. Vaccines for Children (VFC) may be scheduled for COVID-19 vaccines, Hepatitis B vaccine, MMRV vaccine, and RSV. Agenda items are subject to change as priorities dictate. For more information on the meeting agenda, visit https://www.cdc.gov/acip/meetings/index.html.”

However, I also noticed a news article posted by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) indicating that the meeting might be postponed because of the recent upheaval around vaccine policy and personnel.

This meeting’s actual timing and schedule items could be moving targets.

Iowa State Fair Cribbage Tournament and More!

I just have a few remarks about the Iowa State Fair Cribbage Tournament which took place today. I don’t have the results and it could be a week before anything is announced about the winner. Here are the rules:

Note the $1 entry fee and you have to bring your own cribbage board, cards, and pen. In the past there have been as many as 200 entrants (that was in 2015). We’ve never entered.

I also wanted to let you know that Sena has started a new cribbage tradition. Whenever she wants to play cribbage, she just puts the deck of cards in our automatic shuffler and makes a racket.

In Memory of Leonard Tow, Founder of the Tow Foundation and Humanism in Medicine

I just found out that Leonard Tow died on August 10, 2025. In humility, I express my gratitude and respect for his creation of the Tow Foundation, a big part of that being the Humanism in Medicine Award, of which I am one of the many recipients over the years. I hope this great tradition goes on forever, a reminder to doctors, patients, and families of the great rewards and greater responsibilities in medicine.

I thank Dr. Jeanne M. Lackamp, now Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, Psychiatrist in Chief for University Hospitals and Director of the University Hospital Behavioral Health Institute for nominating me and Dr. Jerold Woodhead, Professor Emeritus in Pediatrics at University of Iowa Health Care for placing the pin in my lapel. That was in 2007.

Leonard Tow established the Humanism in Medicine award to foster the development of humanistic doctors. They exemplify compassion and respect for others, humility and empathy.

That is how I will remember Leonard Tow.

Pride or Rhetoric? What Would Dr. Melvin P. Sikes Say?

I noticed the headlines about the DEI flap at The University of Iowa, the one with the official apparently spilling the beans about University of Iowa’s DEI program not going away despite being illegal while maybe being unaware of being filmed. I’m not going to retell the story.

However, it does remind me of a time back in the 1970s in the days of affirmative action when I was a freshman student at Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University) in Austin, Texas.

I learned about tenacity to principle and practice from a visiting African American professor in educational psychology from the University of Texas. It was 1975. Dr. Melvin P. Sikes paced back and forth across the Agard-Lovinggood auditorium stage in a lemon-yellow leisure suit as he talked about the importance of bringing about change in society.

He was a scholar yet decried the pursuit of the mere trappings of scholarship, exhorting us to work directly for change where it was needed most. He didn’t assign term papers, but sent me and another freshman to the Austin Police Department. The goal evidently was to make them nervous by our requests for the Uniform Crime Report, which Dr. Sikes suspected might reveal a tendency to arrest blacks more frequently than whites. He wasn’t satisfied with merely studying society’s institutions; he worked to change them for the better. Although we were probably just as nervous as the police were, this real-life lesson about the importance of applying principles of change directly to society was awkward.

Nothing like confronting social issues head on, right?

We would have preferred a term paper. We sat in the police station looking at the Uniform Crime Report, which was the only resource we could get. I think we were there a couple of hours; it felt a lot longer than that. The officer who got us the paperwork was polite, but a little stiff and wasn’t really open to anything like an interview or anything close to that. I can’t remember what we came up with as a write-up for what felt like a fiasco. I’m pretty sure we didn’t bring about anything even close to change. It was a humbling experience. Maybe that was the point but I’ll never know.

Dr. Melvin P. Sikes was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen although he didn’t see combat. He was the dean of two historically black colleges, a clinical psychologist, and a University of Texas professor. He died in 2012 after a long and successful career as a psychologist, teacher, and author.

I found a podcast about him which was sponsored by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health and which aired February 15, 2024. It’s an hour long, but there are segments of interviews of him in 1972 that I consider fascinating. A couple of times he says something which I wish the interviewer had allowed him to expand on. The gist of it is that we need to have a system of education which allows people to speak from the standpoint of pride rather than rhetoric. I think what he might have meant is that it would be wonderful if we felt secure and confident in ourselves to express our minds sincerely. The word “rhetoric” makes me think of talk that is persuasive, even impressive, but maybe insincere. I think it still fits today.

Success of Johnson County Civil Mental Health Court in its First Year

I’ve been looking for other ways that Iowa addresses mental illness and its impact on homelessness and other adverse outcomes since my last post on the issue.

It turns out that, despite Iowa ranking 51^st out of all U.S. states for the low number of psychiatric beds according to the Treatment Advocacy Center statistics (in 2023, it had just two beds per 100,000 patients in need), a new mental health court established in in May of 2023 has made substantial progress in reducing the number of crisis contacts, psychiatric hospitalizations, and days in the hospital. Arrests, jailings, and days in jail were also reduced.

Participants in the new program include the University of Iowa Health Care, Iowa City VA Hospital, the Abbe Center, Guidelink Center, National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), Shelter House, and several other mental health service agencies in Johnson County.

The Johnson Mental Health Court continues to operate since June of this year when the pilot program’s funding from the East Central Iowa Mental Health Region was supposed to have ended on June 30, 2025, due to the change in mental health regions. This is a program for patients under involuntary mental health commitment that avoids incarceration and placement in a state psychiatric hospital.

This civil mental health program didn’t exist until well after I retired and I hope for its continued success.

Luett, T. (2024, April 24). Civil Mental Health Court in Johnson County finds success in first year. The Daily Iowan. https://dailyiowan.com/2024/04/24/civil-mental-health-court-in-johnson-county-finds-success-in-first-year/ Accessed July 30, 2025

Mehaffey, T. (2024, April 14). News Track: ‘Challenging, rewarding’ first year of Johnson County mental health court. The Gazette – Local Iowa News, Sports, Obituaries, and Headlines – Cedar Rapids, Iowa City. https://www.thegazette.com/crime-courts/news-track-challenging-rewarding-first-year-of-johnson-county-mental-health-court/ Accessed July 30, 2025.

Svengoolie Interviewed at the Comic-Con!

Hey, I thought it would be fun to share an interview that somebody did of Svengoolie at the Comic-Con in San Diego yesterday. Svengoolie is played by Rich Koz and he’s been around a long time. He’s definitely not thinkinig of retiring. The only way we would have recognized him is by his voice!

It Takes a Village to Tackle Homelessness: What’s Iowa Doing?

After I read Dr. Dawson’s post today “More on homelessness and violence as a public health problem,” it got me thinking about what the situation on homelessness of people with mental illness and substance use disorder is here in Iowa.

First, I looked at the 2024 Iowa Homelessness Needs Assessment, which is a thorough report you can download if you need it. It’s a 23-page pdf document which doesn’t mention the intersection with the homeless mentally ill until almost the very last page. It gets mentioned in the section subtitled “Improve Coordination With Adjacent Systems”:

To end or substantially reduce homelessness, a coordinated response is needed that aligns the resources in adjacent systems with CoC resources and housing. Homelessness is often caused by and/or exacerbated by the inability of public support systems to address the complex needs of people in extreme poverty experiencing housing crises. These systems include education, hospitals, behavioral health, criminal justice, and child welfare. Engagement and service delivery approaches need to be responsive to the particular needs of people at imminent risk or experiencing literal homelessness. More responsive adjacent systems will provide specialized engagement, enrollment supports, discharge planning, and coordination with CoCs in each region.

Typically, this kind of document makes me thirsty for a more granular, human connected account of what kind of person actually becomes homeless. Are they always dangerous? The answer is “no.”

Actually, there’s this human-interest Iowa’s News Now story published December 27, 2024, “A Closer Look: U.S. and Iowa homelessness reach record highs” (accessed July 28, 2025). It’s about a real person who became homeless despite being a University of Iowa graduate.

People become homeless for many reasons. I just want to mention resources that are available in Iowa that could be helpful. The website Homeless or At-Risk of Homelessness presents the idea that “Sometimes, life takes an unexpected turn. People face hardships and turn toward their communities for support.”

There are some people who struggle with mental illness and substance abuse and as a consequence of those challenges become homeless, as the Iowa Homelessness Needs Assessment above points out.

One resource I think is important is The University of Iowa’s Integrated Multidisciplinary Program of Assertive Community Treatment or PACT program. It’s an evidence-based treatment model that’s been around for decades in many locations in the U.S.

There’s also an Iowa Health and Human Services program called PATH (Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness) to help homeless adults with mental illness, substance abuse and trauma.

This was just a quick and admittedly superficial summary of what Iowans have been doing about the homelessness crisis. It really takes a village.