Facts first> Amid widespread vaccine misinformation and confusion, the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy’s Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH (left), is calling on science to set the record straight. He’s spearheading the philanthropy-funded Vaccine Integrity Project, a volunteer-driven effort to analyze 17,500 publications on influenza, COVID, and RSV vaccines and provide information to the medical organizations that make immunization recommendations, the Guardian reported in July. “We need to have the kind of scientific expertise … to ensure the vaccine enterprise is healthy and exists,” Osterholm said.

What’s that tickle?> As winds carried smoke from Canadian wildfires into Minnesota this summer, M Health Fairview pediatric pulmonologist Dorothy Curran, MD, told USA Today that she fielded more calls from parents seeking medication for their children with asthma or other underlying health conditions. “Things that I’ve been hearing about are shortness of breath with activity, cough, especially a dry cough,” she said in August. “Very rarely, we’ve been seeing that trigger more airway reactivity or narrow airways, leading to wheezing and presenting to the emergency department.”

Slowing the clock> Live better for longer? That’s the goal of the University of Minnesota’s new philanthropy-backed Institute for Healthy Aging. It includes a research arm on the Twin Cities campus and will open a clinic next year in St. Louis Park, which also will be a training site for the next generation of geriatricians. “We want to step in at an earlier age with interventions that will allow people to age in a healthy way,” the Medical School’s Tim Schacker, MD, told the Minnesota Star Tribune in August.