Tag Archives: public-health

Dozens of public health groups call for urgent climate action

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Dozens of public health groups call for urgent climate action

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Congress Gutted Researchers’ Ability to Study Gun Violence. Now They’re Fighting Back.

Mother Jones

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On November 14, six days after Donald Trump won the presidential election, more than 80 researchers from 42 schools of public health gathered for a closed-door meeting at the Boston University School of Public Health. Their agenda: how to get around the federal government’s de facto ban on researching the health impact of gun violence and get it done anyway.

“The idea was to pull together a meeting to say, ‘We have had no change in the number of firearm deaths and firearm injuries since 2000. It’s become endemic,'” says Sandro Galea, a physician, epidemiologist, and the dean of the BU School of Public Health, who organized the hush-hush meeting. “There has been no action on this to speak of at the federal level, and there has been no clear statement from academic public health on this issue. We brought people together to ask, ‘What should academic public health be doing toward moving us collectively toward mitigating the consequences of gun violence?'”

Despite the more than 30,000 gun-related deaths that occur in America every year, firearms receive relatively little attention as a subject of public-health research. A recent research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that gun violence is the least-researched leading cause of death in the United States. This is largely because of a 1996 bill that prevented the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other agencies from using federal money to “advocate for or promote gun control.” The lack of funding combined with the toxic environment that surrounds the debate over gun rights has made most public-health researchers wary of touching the topic.

JAMA/Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

The group that met at BU in November hope to reverse that two-decade trend. They drafted a call to action, the final version of which was published yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health. It outlines a plan to beef up gun violence research and scholarship by seeking funding from the private sector, as well as seeking common ground between pro-gun advocates and gun safety advocates, and developing state-level initiatives.

“Federal funding is not going to happen with the National Rifle Association around,” says John Rosenthal, a Massachusetts-based businessman and gun owner who was a keynote speaker at the November meeting. In 1994, he started Stop Handgun Violence, which has advocated stricter gun laws in his home state. (Massachusetts has the third-lowest gun violence rate in the nation, and some of its toughest gun laws.) “In the absence of public funding, this call to action could lead to significant private funding,” he says. “If enough schools of public health really look at it—and this is a public health epidemic—then lives will be saved. I think there will be a critical mass with this group and more that will follow.”

Galea says gun researchers have a lot of catching up to do. “The fundamental, foundational work of documenting the full scale of the health consequences of firearms has not been done,” he says. “It’s the kind of project that we do all the time. It just hasn’t been done with firearms because there haven’t been resources.”

Even if the researchers overcome these financial obstacles, they must still contend with the political climate. “Trump was a clear supporter of gun rights throughout the campaign and has widely claimed support from the gun lobby as a core part of his appeal; the gun lobby spent more than $30 million on the campaign,” they write in their call to action. “This portends challenges to advancing gun policy at the federal level in the next four years, if not longer.”

The NRA has called out Galea for his “deeply flawed research,” likening his defense of a controversial recent study of gun laws to “the behavior of a mule.” “It is very charged when you have the NRA calling you out personally,” Galea says. “It has a chilling effect. It’s hard to encourage young people to make a career out of studying something which brings with it the threat of a public fight with a group as powerful as the NRA.” After 20 years of delay, Rosenthal says it’s time to stop ignoring one of the country’s leading causes of death. “We’ve reached a tipping point,” he says. “Enough is enough.”

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Congress Gutted Researchers’ Ability to Study Gun Violence. Now They’re Fighting Back.

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The Link Between Road Pollution and Dementia Just Got Stronger

Mother Jones

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Most of us associate car pollution with coughing and wheezing, but mounting evidence is linking air pollution to a less obvious health effect: Dementia.

People who live near a major road are up to 12 percent more likely to develop dementia—a group of memory-loss disorders including Alzheimer’s disease—than those who live further away, according to study published Wednesday in medical journal in The Lancet.

The study, led by scientists at Public Health Ontario, found that the risk of dementia increased the closer residents lived to a major road, and the longer they lived there. The authors tracked all the adults living in Ontario, Canada—about 6.6 million people—over the course of a decade from 2001 to 2012. Using postal codes and medical records, they determined how close a given resident lived to a major road—including freeways, highways, or congested roads with two or more lanes—and if they went on to develop dementia.

Residents living within 50 meters (55 yards) of a major road were between 7 and 12 percent more likely to develop dementia, depending on how long they had lived there and whether they lived in an urban or rural area. With distance from the road, the risk dissipated until, 200 meters away from a major road, residents were at no more risk than those who lived further away.

The numbers are particularly alarming considering how many people live close to traffic sources: Nearly half of adults in Ontario lived within 200 meters (219 yards) of a major roadway, and Copes estimates similar numbers for the United States.

This isn’t the first study to suggest that air pollution can change the brain. As journalist Aaron Reuben reported in a 2015 Mother Jones feature, several studies have found that people exposed to high pollution rates over time show more cognitive decline and pre-dementia symptoms than those who breathe cleaner air, even when controlling for things like income, ethnicity, and other environmental factors. Scientists are still pinpointing exactly how air pollution changes the brain, but as Reuben noted, fine particulate matter found in car exhaust is small enough to travel throughout our bodies—including to our brains. Once in the brain, pollution particles lead to inflammation that could contribute to cognitive decline over time.

Public health advocates have long recommended limiting exposure to major roads to the extent possible—whether that means living farther from major roads or choosing to exercise or commute on less congested streets. For now, this option isn’t available to all: Multiple studies have found that people of color and low-income populations are be exposed to air pollution at far higher rates than white people.

“The challenge is to look at different ways of laying out of communities so that we have a higher percentage of our population who are located or residing more than 200 meters away from major traffic arteries,” says Ray Copes, the director of environmental and occupational health at Public Health Ontario and a co-author on the Lancet study. That could mean building new homes, schools, and hospitals farther from major roads, or planning cities with more dispersed traffic.

The end goal, according to Copes: create “a greater degree of separation between traffic and noses.”

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The Link Between Road Pollution and Dementia Just Got Stronger

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Science Says: Drink Your Coffee

Mother Jones

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Coffee is one of the pleasures of existence. It’s also really good for us, an ever-expanding body of research suggests. The latest: an analysis of three large population studies by a team of researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They concluded that regular consumption of between one and five cups a day is associated with significantly lower risk of dying from from cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and brain disorders like Parkinson’s. (For those who drink more than five cups per day, the association unravels.)

Interestingly, the benefits are roughly the same for regular and decaf coffee—suggesting that something in the beloved beverage besides caffeine is the trigger. “Bioactive compounds in coffee reduce insulin resistance and systematic inflammation,” the study’s lead author, Ming Ding, said in a press release. The authors make clear that their results are consistent with “numerous” previous studies.

Now that coffee’s health-giving value is well-established, we should probably think harder about an alwaysvexing problem: how to ensure that the people who tend and harvest this tropical crop get their fair share of the profits generated from it.

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Science Says: Drink Your Coffee

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Mickey Mouse Exposed to Measles, Thanks to the Anti-Vaxxers

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, instead of cherishing freshly made memories of mouse ears or trying to get the song “A Pirate’s Life for Me” to stop looping in their heads, nine Disneyland visitors were left battling a potentially deadly disease. As The LA Times reports, the California Department of Public Health has confirmed and is investigating 12 likely Measles cases in California and Utah (nine are confirmed), after families visited the California theme park late in December.

The highly infectious disease, which is transmitted through the air, can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis, and sometimes death in children. In 2000, the US Centers for Disease Control declared it eliminated in the United States, thanks in large part to an effective vaccine. But because of anti-vaccination hysteria, fueled by discredited claims about links between vaccines and autism, many parents have opted out of vaccinating their kids, leaving them—and others, including children too young to be vaccinated—vulnerable. And while some children do react badly to vaccines, it’s important to remember that the diseases we vaccinate against are killers. The vaccines save countless lives.

Of the seven California cases, six hadn’t been vaccinated—two because they were underage. (Doctors administer the vaccine twice after the child is 12 months old.)

This outbreak is part of an ongoing trend. Measles rates have risen dramatically over the past few years. As my colleague Julia Lurie pointed out last May, the CDC reported record numbers in 2014, due in large part to gaps in vaccinations. According to a CDC press release, “90 percent of all measles cases in the United States were in people who were not vaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. Among the U.S. residents who were not vaccinated, 85 percent were religious, philosophical or personal reasons.”

In the following video, my colleague Kiera Butler interviews a Marin County pediatrician who caters to anti-vaxxer parents:

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Mickey Mouse Exposed to Measles, Thanks to the Anti-Vaxxers

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Study: Fad Diets Work (But Not Why You Think)

Mother Jones

What’s the best diet to follow to get healthy—should you go Paleo, low glycemic, low-carb, Mediterranean, or low-fat? For a paper released last month in the Annual Review of Public Health, Yale medical researchers David Katz and Samuel Meller surveyed the scientific evidence and decided … all of the above. Specifically, they found that all of these fad diets can be consistent with these basic principles:

The weight of evidence strongly supports a theme of healthful eating while allowing for variations on that theme. A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention and is consistent with the salient components of seemingly distinct dietary approaches. Emphasis added.

But what about the Paleo diet, which encourages meat eating? The authors conclude the “aggregation of evidence” supports meat eating, as long as the “animal foods are themselves the products, directly or ultimately, of pure plant foods—the composition of animal flesh and milk is as much influenced by diet as we are.” That’s entirely consistent with the Paleo push for meat from pasture-raised animals, and brought to mind a study I wrote about late last year finding that cows fed on grass deliver milk with healthier fat profile than their industrially raised peers.

The Yale paper essentially cuts through the hype of various fad diets and affirms the koan-like advice put forward by author Michael Pollan in his 2008 book In Defense of Food: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In fact, the authors reference Pollan directly in the chart that summarizes their findings:

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Study: Fad Diets Work (But Not Why You Think)

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Public surprisingly OK with government policies that push healthy eating

Public surprisingly OK with government policies that push healthy eating

USDA Eat this!

Subsidize green veggies, slaughter big sodas, and steal candy from babies? These kinds of government policies intended to promote healthy eating are A-OK with most of the American public, it turns out. A new poll from Harvard’s School of Public Health found that people “were surprisingly positive about these new public health laws,” as NPR reports, with big percentages in favor of encouraging exercise, making fruits and veg affordable, pushing for healthier restaurant choices, and banning use of food stamps to buy unhealthy foods.

From NPR’s The Salt blog:

“We clearly saw that the more coercion was involved, the more people you lost,” says Michelle Mello, a professor of law and public health at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was a co-author of the study. It was published in the March Health Affairs.

The researchers were surprised to find that people with health problems like obesity and diabetes didn’t object to new laws targeting them.

“We thought that people who felt like targets would be much less likely to support them,” says Stephanie Morain, a graduate student in ethics who co-authored the study. “That wasn’t true.” …

But though people are pretty supportive overall, the results make it clear that they’re more likely to buy in if they feel like public health officials understand their values, and they have a voice in the process. “If people feel like they’re engaged in the policy-making process, they’re more engaged across the board,” Mello says.

The poll found interesting racial differences: Blacks were two to four times more likely to support government intervention than whites, and Hispanics were more supportive than whites too.

Who was least happy about being told what to do by The Man? Older white men, of course! I mean, I coulda told you that.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Public surprisingly OK with government policies that push healthy eating

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