• U.S. Gun Violence Soars in 2022

    Across America, gun violence surged in many communities in 2022 as overall death rates from firearms rose to the highest level in nearly three decades. The year saw a near-record number of mass casualty shooting incidents, including several motivated by hate.

  • Machine Learning Could Predict Rare Disastrous Events Like Earthquakes or Pandemics

    Researchers suggest how scientists can circumvent the need for massive data sets to forecast extreme events with the combination of an advanced machine learning system and sequential sampling techniques.

  • McDonald's Sets Targets for Reducing Antibiotics in Its Beef Supply

    Following criticism that it was backtracking on a commitment to reduce the use of medically important antibiotics in its beef supply chain, fast-food giant McDonald’s has set targets for responsible antibiotic use in the countries that supply most of its beef.

  • The Cold War Legacy Lurking in U.S. Groundwater

    In America’s rush to build the nuclear arsenal that won the Cold War, safety was sacrificed for speed. ProPublica has cataloged cleanup efforts at the 50-plus sites where uranium was processed to fuel the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Even after regulators say cleanup is complete, polluted water and sickness are often left behind.

  • What Plagues of the Past Have to Tell Us About Current Crises

    One expert says that event system theory (EST) helps us understand Albert Camus’s classic 1947 novel The Plague; the Black Death of the 14th century and the lethal waves that followed; and societal response to disruptions like COVID. EST reframes societal disruptions from isolated events to being the result of slowly unfolding chains of connected events.

  • Hurricane Ian Shows That Coastal Hospitals Aren’t Ready for Climate Change

    As rapidly intensifying storms and rising sea levels threaten coastal cities from Texas to the tip of Maine, Hurricane Ian has just demonstrated what researchers have warned: Hundreds of hospitals in the U.S. are not ready for climate change.

  • Extreme Heat Could Make Parts of Asia, Africa Uninhabitable

    Extreme heat events foreshadow a less habitable world. In the coming decades, heatwaves are predicted to meet and exceed human physiological and social limits in regions such as the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and South and South-West Asia.

  • Hundreds of Hospitals on Atlantic and Gulf Coasts at Risk of Flooding from Hurricanes

    Researchers identified 682 acute care hospitals in 78 metropolitan statistical areas located within 10 miles of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States, covering a population just under 85 million people, or about 1 in 4 Americans. They found that 25 of the 78 metro areas studied have half or more of their hospitals at risk of flooding from a Category 2 storm.

  • 9/11 Survivors’ Exposure to Toxic Dust and the Chronic Health Conditions That Followed Offer Lessons That Are Still Too Often Unheeded

    After the 9/11 attack, more than 100,000 responders and recovery workers from every U.S. state – along with some 400,000 residents and other workers around ground zero – were exposed to a toxic cloud of dust that fell as a ghostly, thick layer of ash and then hung in the air for more than three months. The World Trade Center dust plume consisted of a dangerous mixture of cement dust and particles, asbestos and a class of chemicals called persistent organic pollutants. The dust also contained heavy metals that are known to be poisonous to the human body and brain, such as lead and mercury, and PCB.

  • Summer 2022 Saw Thousands of Excess Deaths in England and Wales – Here’s Why That Might Be

    The difference between the actual and expected number of deaths recorded, from any cause, is known as the excess deaths. During the first eight weeks of 2022, despite there being 9,110 deaths documented with COVID mentioned on the death certificate in England and Wales, there were 8,001 fewer total deaths than anticipated. However, since April this has flipped. Between April 2 and August 19 (granted, a longer period) there were 12,321 deaths registered with COVID on the death certificate but notably, 21,475 excess deaths. So if COVID accounts for only a little over half of these excess deaths, what may be driving the rest?

  • Chronic Lack of Investment in Public Health Puts Americans’ Lives, Livelihoods at Risk

    COVID-19 emergency funding was critical to initial pandemic response but did not address nation’s long-standing underinvestment in public health; $4.5 billion in annual infrastructure funding is needed.

  • New Test May Predict Covid-19 Immunity

    The paper test measures the level of neutralizing antibodies in a blood sample and could help people decide what protections they should take against infection.

  • How Polio Crept Back into the U.S.

    U.S. public health agencies generally don’t test wastewater for signs of polio. That may have given the virus time to circulate silently before it paralyzed a New York man.

  • Origins of Unconventional War

    Flamethrowers, poison gases, incendiary bombs, the large-scale spreading of disease: are these terrifying agents of warfare modern inventions? Not by a long shot. Societies around the world have used biological and chemical weapons for thousands of years. “One sobering result of writing this book is the realization that there was no time or place when biological weapons were unthinkable,” says Adrienne Mayor, the author of a new book on the subject.

  • Study Highlights Community Spread of Superbugs

    New US surveillance data indicate that infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacterial pathogens are moving beyond the healthcare setting.