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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.
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Researchers Launch Global Dashboard to Track Invasive Mosquitoes Carrying Deadly Diseases
To combat the ongoing threat of mosquito-borne diseases worldwide, researchers have launched a mosquito-tracking dashboard driven by citizen science – a scalable solution proven effective in a recent study.
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Flood Maps Show U.S. Vastly Underestimates Contamination Risk at Old Industrial Sites
Floodwaters are a growing risk for many American cities, threatening to displace not only people and housing but also the land-based pollution left behind by earlier industrial activities. For communities near these sites, the flooding of contaminated land is worrisome because it threatens to compromise common pollution containment methods, such as capping contaminated land with clean soil. It can also transport legacy contaminants into surrounding soils and waterways, putting the health and safety of urban ecosystems and residents at risk.
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Regenerate: Biotechnology and U.S. Industrial Policy
A revolution in biotechnology is dawning at the precise moment the world needs it most. Amid an ongoing climate crisis, fast-paced technological maturation, and a global pandemic, humans must find new ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve food security, develop new vaccines and therapeutics, recycle waste, synthesize new materials, and adapt to a changing world. The United States needs some form of industrial policy to promote its bioeconomy—one that is enshrined in democratic values and focused on improving access to four key drivers of bioeconomic growth: equipment, personnel, information, and capital.
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COVID-19 Origins Linked to Wildlife Sales at Chinese Market; Other Scenarios Extremely Unlikely: Studies
Analyses based on locations and viral sequencing of early cases indicate the COVID-19 pandemic started in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, with two separate jumps from animals to humans.
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U.S. Launches Heat.gov with Tools for Communities Facing Extreme Heat
The administration launched Heat.gov, a new website to provide the public and decision-makers with clear, timely and science-based information to understand and reduce the health risks of extreme heat. Heat.gov will provide a one-stop hub on heat and health for the nation and is a priority of President Biden’s National Climate Task Force and its Interagency Working Group on Extreme Heat.
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NIST Updates Guidance for Health Care Cybersecurity
In an effort to help health care organizations protect patients’ personal health information, NIST has updated its cybersecurity guidance for the health care industry. The revised draft publication aims to help organizations comply with HIPAA Security Rule.
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Amid Climate Change and Conflict, More Resilient Food Systems a Must: Report
Increased demand for water will be the No. 1 threat to food security in the next 20 years, followed closely by heat waves, droughts, income inequality and political instability.
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During Pandemic: More News, More Worry
Anxiety and fear went hand in hand with trying to learn more about COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic in the United States — and the most distressed people were turning on the television and scrolling through social media.
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Google/Apple's Contact-Tracing Apps Susceptible to Digital Attacks
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and health authorities have relied on contact-tracing technologies to help manage the spread of the virus. Yet there’s a major flaw in a framework that many of these mobile apps utilize – one that attackers could exploit to ramp up false positive notifications.
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Local Focus Can Prevent Failures in Large Networks
We live in an increasingly connected world, a fact underscored by the swift spread of the coronavirus around the globe. Underlying this connectivity are complex networks — global air transportation, the internet, power grids, financial systems and ecological networks, to name just a few. The need to ensure the proper functioning of these systems also is increasing, but control is difficult.
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Strengthening U.S. Government’s Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogen Framework, Dual Use Research
Group of scientists, public health experts, policy researchers propose strengthening of U.S. government’s policies regarding enhanced potential pandemic pathogen framework and dual use research of concern.
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Review: IT in Health Care Has Produced Modest Changes — So Far
Large study of existing research shows incremental improvement in patient outcomes and productivity, without big employment changes.
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Research Collaboration Informs International Classification of Firefighting as Carcinogenic
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) recently classified occupational exposure as a firefighter as carcinogenic, changing the previous classification of possibly carcinogenic.
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Europe Heat Wave: U.K. Records Hottest-Ever Temperature
Western Europe continues to bake in extreme heat, with the UK recording a temperature over 40 degrees Celsius for the first time, and wildfires burning through French forests. Relief is expected later in the week.
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The long view
Vaccine Myths That Won't Die and How to Counter Them—Part 1
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has spent decades promoting vaccine skepticism. He has replaced scientists at different HHS such as CDC and NIH with vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine activists. They have polluted the information environment with, and base their policy changes on, myths about the supposed risks of vaccines. Each of these myths has been studied extensively. Each has been refuted. And yet each persists, because misinformation travels faster than correction and because these myths tap into fears that are genuinely human.
Vaccine Myths That Won’t Die and How to Counter Them—Part 2
This article and its Part 1 catalogue the debunked myths driving the vaccine skeptics who now run HHS. These myths share four fundamental errors: First, the conflation of temporal association with causation. Second, the confusion of regulatory paperwork with the totality of scientific evidence. Third, the demand for impossible standards. Fourth, the selective citation of evidence. The current political moment has given unprecedented platforms to vaccine skepticism. But politics cannot change biology.