About 3 in 10 health care workers say they have considered leaving the profession and about 6 in 10 say the pandemic has harmed their mental health, according to a poll by the Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation. Most health care workers surveyed said they felt respected by patients and the public, but most also said Americans were not taking sufficient precautions against COVID-19.

Of the about 278 million COVID-19 vaccine doses distributed as of Wednesday, more than 215.9 million have been administered in the US, the CDC reported. The number of fully vaccinated Americans has now reached nearly 87.6 million people, with 134.4 million people given at least one dose.

Visit the COVID Vaccine Facts for Nurses website for relevant, accurate and up-to-date information as well as expert perspectives about the safety, efficacy and importance of COVID-19 vaccines.

A study in The Journal of Pediatrics found that 124 of 4,401 children with Down syndrome were diagnosed with leukemia, compared with 1,941 of over 3.9 million children without Down syndrome. The findings also showed that the cumulative incidence of acute myeloid leukemia was 1,405 per 100,000 at age 4 and unchanged at age 14 among those with Down syndrome, while the cumulative incidence of acute lymphoid leukemia in children with Down syndrome was 1,059 per 100,000 at age 4 and 1,714 per 100,000 at age 14.

Data suggested the gastrointestinal pathogen Campylobacter may be transmitted by sex, with a 14-times higher risk among men who have sex with men, compared with a control group, according to a retrospective study by Katrin Gaardbo Kuhn of the University of Oklahoma, and colleagues, and published in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

A study in Pediatrics found that total and measles-containing vaccine uptake dropped markedly among all children but recovered in those ages 0 to 23 months during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, compared with the 2019 period. The findings also showed the uptake of measles-containing vaccines recovered after an initial decline among children ages 2 to 18 years, but the total vaccine uptake stayed lower.

Long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on health care likely will include having a mix of in-person and virtual care, more home care and monitoring, and increased reliance on cloud-based platforms, experts told the virtual CHIME21 Spring Forum. Cook Children's Health Care System CIO Teresa Meadows said the pandemic will lead to greater consumerization of health care, with a focus on health literacy and care provided outside hospital and office settings.

Adults who slept six hours or fewer per weeknight at age 50 or 60 were more prone to developing dementia than those who slept seven hours a night, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications. Researchers followed almost 8,000 people for 25 years, and they found a link between persistent short sleep duration and 30% higher dementia risk among adults age 50, 60 and 70, independent of behavioral, cardiometabolic, sociodemographic and mental health factors.

A clinical trial of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine involving 43,783 enrollees from three continents found no COVID-19 hospitalizations or deaths in the treatment group 28 days after vaccination, and the vaccine also offered protection against emerging variants. The findings, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, showed the vaccine was 66% effective against moderate to severe-critical COVID-19 and 85% effective against severe-critical illness 28 days after administration.

A deep learning algorithm used to detect the presence of metastatic lung nodules on chest imaging scans gathered from 226 patients with breast cancer was able to predict the mortality risk among those with lung metastases, according to a study presented at the American Roentgen Ray Society annual meeting. Researchers also found that the artificial intelligence-based classification and regression tree models created for risk assessment yielded a 0.857 area under the curve for mortality prediction when using clinical-, image- and pathological-based characteristics, and a 0.826 AUC when using maximal nodule size on AI and the total number of nodules.

Researchers analyzed answers to radiology report questions posted on online discussion forums and found that 32% of patients were having difficulty understanding their MRI reports. "From our data, patients want to improve their understanding of the report by enhancing image visualization, report representation, resources, and preference," study authors wrote in Insights into Imaging.

The Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, which seeks to prevent workplace violence in health care environments, including against nurses, physicians and emergency responders, was approved by the House of Representatives on April 16. The American Nurses Association is one of the supporters of this legislation.

As a nurse, having access to trustworthy, accurate information is vital. Project ECHO is one part of Project Firstline, a collaborative partnership offered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to provide infection prevention and control (IPC) education for healthcare professionals. Project ECHO aims to improve the dissemination of best practices by providing free, virtual forums to nurses in all practice settings and locations, including rural and underserved areas. Register for Spring/Summer 2021 ANA IPC Fundamentals ECHO.