As droughts become more frequent and intense, the fragmentation of water service in the U.S. among tens of thousands of community systems, most of which are small and rely on local funding, leaves many households vulnerable to water contamination or loss of service, a new Duke University analysis finds. These vulnerabilities aren’t distributed equally, the...
Public health scientists predict that school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate the epidemic of childhood obesity in the United States. Andrew Rundle, DrPH, associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and colleagues expect that COVID-19-related school closures will double out-of-school time this year for many children in...
Surgical masks may help prevent infected people from making others sick with seasonal viruses, including coronaviruses, according to new research that could help settle a fierce debate spanning clinical and cultural norms. In laboratory experiments, the masks significantly reduced the amounts of various airborne viruses coming from infected patients, measured using the breath-capturing “Gesundheit II...
The pandemic began in the East, sweeping through cities and towns, disrupting daily life and sowing fear and uncertainty throughout much of the known world. It was the second century CE. And the Antonine Plague, as it came to be called, weighed heavily on the mind of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Today, Marcus is...
Few novel or emerging infectious diseases have posed such vital ethical challenges so quickly and dramatically as the novel coronavirus. An early-view essay in the March-April 2020 Hastings Center Report offers guidance at a time when health care institutions and governments are desperately confronting these challenges. The authors are Prof. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of the O’Neill...
Pauline Lawrence is 63, an age that puts her at increased risk if she contracts COVID-19. Yet, three days a week, she spends 16 hours with someone at even greater risk: a 97-year-old man who depends on her and two other home health aides to survive. “Somebody has to take care of him,” said Lawrence,...
By March 5, Andrew Cencini, a computer science professor at Vermont’s Bennington College, had been having bouts of fever, malaise and a bit of difficulty breathing for a couple of weeks. Just before falling ill, he had traveled to New York City, helped with computers at a local prison and gone out on multiple calls...
As city leaders across the country scramble to find space for the expected surge of COVID-19 patients, some are looking at a seemingly obvious choice: former hospital buildings, sitting empty, right downtown. In Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, where hospitalizations from COVID-19 increase each day, shuttered hospitals that once served the city’s poor and...
Historic research based on group movements of humans and animals suggest three simple rules: move away from those that are too close. move toward those that are far away. match the direction of the movement of their neighbors. This research is especially used for air travel where there is an increased risk for contagious infection...
Female eggs exposed to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, have an impaired ability to produce viable embryos, and are significantly less likely to result in a viable pregnancy, according to an animal study accepted for presentation at ENDO 2020, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting. The abstract will be published in the Journal of the...
