• Countering the threats of fake or substandard medications

    No country acting alone can protect its citizens against the health risks posed by illegitimate medications, and reducing this problem requires international cooperation. A new study calls for global agreement on an international code of practice on drug quality. It also recommends establishing a mandatory drug tracking system and tightening the licensing requirements on medication wholesalers in the United States.

  • Keeping an eye on the world’s dangerous chemicals

    In the chemistry labs of the developing world, it is not uncommon to find containers, forgotten on shelves, with only vague clues to their origins. The label, if there is one, is rubbed away. Left alone for years, some chemicals can quietly break down into explosive elixirs, and what was once an innocent experiment by a well-meaning scientist becomes a very real, unsecured threat. Should such chemicals fall into malicious hands, the consequences could be widespread and deadly.

  • Toxic legacy of lead pollution persists despite regulatory efforts, modest gains

    Efforts to reduce lead pollution have paid off in many ways, yet the problem persists and will probably continue to affect the health of people and animals well into the future. The good news, he said, is that atmospheric lead concentrations in the United States have fallen by 89 percent in the past three decades.The bad news is that blood lead levels are still about 100 times higher than the natural background level, and there is no known threshold for lead toxicity. In other words, even tiny amounts of lead in the body can be harmful.

  • Sewage lagoons remove most pharmaceuticals from wastewater

    Despite these advances made under the Clean Water Act, sewage remains a major source of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) and naturally occurring hormones found in the environment. New research shows the effectiveness of rural lagoon systems at removing these compounds from wastewater.

  • Surveillance system identifies, tracks emerging infectious diseases

    Researchers have developed a method to identify the cause of infectious disease outbreaks based on online reports about the symptoms, the season, and the ratio of cases to fatalities. Using data from the Internet outbreak reporting system ProMED-mail, the researchers applied this method to more than 100 outbreaks of encephalitis in South Asia, recently identified as an emerging infectious disease “hotspot.”

  • DNA sequencing a serious risk to privacy

    The growing ease of DNA sequencing has led to enormous advancements in the scientific field. Through extensive networked databases, researchers can access genetic information to gain valuable knowledge about causative and preventative factors for disease, and identify new targets for future treatments. The wider availability of such information, however, also has a significant downside — the risk of revealing personal information. New study finds that new policies are needed to safeguard participants’ identity in genetic studies.

  • Massachusetts moves against unscrupulous compounding pharmas

    State regulators in Massachusetts have shut down or cited thirty-two of the state’s forty compounding pharmacies as a result of a nationwide fungal meningitis outbreak. The outbreak killed forty-five people and sickened 696, who required hospitalization.

  • Climate change threatens public health, safety, economy along U.S. coasts

    A new technical study from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reports that the effects of climate change will continue to threaten the health and vitality of U.S. coastal communities’ social, economic, and natural systems. All U.S. coasts are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change such as sea-level rise, erosion, storms, and flooding, especially in the more populated low-lying parts of the U.S. coast along the Gulf of Mexico, Mid-Atlantic, northern Alaska, Hawaii, and island territories. The report says that the financial risks associated with both private and public hazard insurance are expected to increase dramatically.

  • Arizona may require hospitals to report undocumented immigrants seeking care

    A bill before the Arizona legislature aims to track how many undocumented immigrants are receiving free medical care at hospitals in Arizona. The bill would require hospitals to confirm a person’s legal presence in the country if the individual seeking care does not have insurance. If the staff thinks the patient is here illegally, they must notify authorities.

  • Americans’ health worst among high-income countries

    On average, Americans die sooner and experience higher rates of disease and injury than people in other high-income countries. This health disadvantage exists even though the United States spends more per capita on health care than any other nation. A new study offers a comprehensive comparison of the United States with sixteen peer nations — affluent democracies that include Australia, Canada, Japan, and many Western European countries.  Among these countries, the United States is at or near the bottom in the nine key areas of health to study examined.

  • Improving cities by using the notion of “urban metabolism”

    As is the case with organisms, cities need energy, water, and nutrients, and they need to dispose of wastes and byproducts in ways which are viable and sustainable over the long run. This concept of “urban metabolism” is a model for looking systematically at the resources that flow into cities and the wastes and emissions that flow out from them in order better to understand the environmental impacts of cities and to highlight opportunities for efficiencies, improvements, and transformation.

  • Personal genetic information vulnerable to hacking

    Using only a computer, an Internet connection, and publicly accessible online resources, a team of researchers has been able to identify nearly fifty individuals who had submitted personal genetic material as participants in genomic studies.

  • Flu virus can tell time

    The flu knows how much time it has to multiply, infect other cells, and spread to another human being before the immune system kills it. The discovery of the flu virus’s timing mechanism gives scientists the ability to reset the virus’s clock and combat it in more effective ways.

  • Tires shipped from Arizona to a U.K. contained black widow spiders

    Two shipments of tires from an Arizona company to a U.K.-based client contained dozens of deadly Black Widow spiders; it appears that the spiders nested in the tires in Arizona, and hatched a brood of young spiders while the shipment was on its 5,000-mile journey to England.

  • Helicopter monitors radiation levels in Washington, D.C.

    For the last week, a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) helicopter has been flying over Washington, D.C., measuring naturally occurring radiation levels; the purpose is to establish a baseline of radiation levels so that abnormal spikes – occurring, for example, as a result of exploding a dirty bomb — may be readily detected