Teacher Patty Yeung kneels down with a container of ladybugs, and six tiny children encircle her like a hug. She gently lifts the lid, releasing a cloud of ladybugs into the spring garden at the Early Childhood Lab School.

“Open your palm and let them come to you,” Yeung says as the ladybugs flit amid the lavender and fava beans and the toddlers’ outstretched arms.

Testing employees with and without COVID-19 symptoms is an important part of California’s pandemic control strategy, even as more people become vaccinated. To make testing easier, employers, schools and community groups can team up with the California Department of Public Health to provide fast, on-site testing with little or no cost to local groups.

An estimated 334,000 COVID-19 cases are attributable to meatpacking plants, resulting in $11.2 billion in economic damage, according to a new study led by a researcher at the University of California, Davis. The study was published in the journal Food Policy.

By UC Davis News and Media Relations

Young women today may face increased health risks linked to breast cancer due to effects from a banned toxic pesticide lasting over three generations, according to a new study from the Public Health Institute’s Child Health and Development Studies, or CHDS, and the University of California, Davis.

Waiting for your turn can be frustrating, especially when it comes to COVID-19 vaccinations. But prioritizing who receives the limited supply of vaccines available saves lives and reduces spread of infection, according to a study published today in the journal PNAS from the University of California, Davis. 

Probiotics — those bacteria that are good for your digestive tract — are short-lived, rarely taking residence or colonizing the gut. But a new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, finds that in breast milk-fed babies given the probiotic B. infantis, the probiotic will persist in the baby’s gut for up to one year and play a valuable role in a healthy digestive system.

While COVID-19-related lockdowns may have decreased the spread of a deadly virus, they appear to have created an ideal environment for increased domestic violence. Extra stress in the COVID-19 pandemic caused by income loss, and lack of ability to pay for housing and food has exacerbated the often silent epidemic of intimate partner violence, suggests a new University of California, Davis, study.

Acres of asphalt parking lots, unshaded roads, dense apartment complexes and neighborhoods with few parks have taken their toll on the poor. As climate change accelerates, low-income districts in the Southwestern United States are 4 to 7 degrees hotter in Fahrenheit — on average — than wealthy neighborhoods in the same metro regions, University of California, Davis, researchers have found in a new analysis. 

Leigh Ann Simmons, a professor and chair in the Department of Human Ecology and co-director of the Perinatal Origins of Disparities (POD) Center, has received a $3 million award to build and strengthen community-based health and social supports systems in Yolo County toaddress Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress.

California’s 800,000 farmworkers have been hit hard by COVID-19, the disease that has infected more than 25 million people and killed more than 420,000 in the United States. Farmworkers are especially vulnerable to the airborne virus that causes COVID-19 because they often live, work and carpool in close quarters with other people. As essential employees, farmworkers have stayed on the job during the pandemic to plant, process and harvest the nation’s food.