Bookmarks (74)

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, nearly 30 percent of Covid-19 infections reported for the week ending on Sept. 9 were in children. Though kids are now being admitted to hospitals in large numbers, most are protected from developed severe disease. Scientists want to understand why.

Ongoing study — which has yet to be peer reviewed — suggests that masks work well to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission in adults, for whom the virus can lead to serious disease. But for young children, the tradeoffs are less clear, and even major public health agencies have issued conflicting guidelines.

The United States’ Covid-19 vaccination campaign has slowed, and new vaccine mandates are now inspiring extensive backlash. In the process, the politicization of mass vaccination and other public health interventions has raised concerns about broader attacks on U.S. public health practice.

ER doctor Robert Meyer and journalist Dan Koeppel’s “Every Minute is a Day” documents the gruesome early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City. In a diary of sorts, the story is told through the lens of Koeppel and Meyer’s frequent text messages as Meyer witnessed the breakdown of the medical system.

For the millions of high school students who take Advanced Placement exams each year, a good score can boost their chances of winning scholarships and earning valuable college credit. But inconsistent scoring practices are causing some students to lose points unfairly, writes a former exam grader.

Decades of efforts to increase diversity at medical schools have made progress with other demographics, but barely any with Black men. This absence ripples across the health system and may contribute to health disparities. Now, a new strategy of wooing athletes is slowly gaining traction.

Medicaid traditionally doesn’t fund clinics to supply legal assistance, but Colorado and other states have been given permission to use some of the money to help pay for such programs. The goal: Reduce toxic stress and keep families intact, on the premise that it will serve their health for years to come.

The World Trade Center dust plume consisted of a dangerous mixture of cement dust, asbestos, and other pollutants. Two decades later, those who were exposed to these toxins are facing respiratory diseases and cancer. Despite the clear consequences, recent disasters show we haven’t learned the lesson.

As schools reopen across the United States for in-person instruction, cases of Covid-19 are rising among kids — a surge that may intensify long-running debates over pandemic safety protocols in schools, and over how, exactly, to assess the risk the coronavirus poses to children.

Whether we’re biking to work or reducing our meat intake, skipping flights or buying green power, our efforts to curtail our personal carbon footprints are best viewed not merely as individual lifestyle choices but as acts of strategic mass mobilization.

Despite the limited evidence, myofunctional therapy and tongue-tie surgeries are increasingly promoted as a treatment for the many ailments attributed to poor tongue posture in adults. Especially concerning, some experts say, is the claim that the therapy is an alternative treatment for sleep apnea.

Lawsuits against Purdue Pharma have produced millions of internal company documents that shed light on the origins of the opioid crisis. Now that the lawsuits have been settled, those documents will soon be released, exposing Purdue’s inner workings like only a few U.S. corporations before.

Texas’ latest bill restricting abortion, referred to as a “heartbeat bill,” references the point in time when the embryo’s cardiac activity can first be detected by an ultrasound. The moniker has helped rally supporters around the law nationwide, but health care experts say the term is not medically accurate.

New abortion restrictions began in Texas on Wednesday, banning the procedure as early as week six of pregnancy. The law, which was originally signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in May, sharply curtails access to abortion in the country’s second-most populous state.

Maia Szalavitz’s “Undoing Drugs” explores the evolution of the movement to prioritize people in the war on drugs — a philosophy known as harm reduction. In this in-depth history, Szalavitz covers many angles of drug policy, including prescription drug use, supervised consumption, and racial inequities.

When a Los Angeles wastewater treatment facility spilled 17 million gallons of raw sewage into Santa Monica Bay this summer, it underscored the growing social and environmental risks posed by centralized wastewater treatment. Fortunately, there’s a sustainable solution: Sewage should go local.

In the world’s second-most populous country, policymakers have historically paid too little attention to tracking people’s deaths — with serious implications for public health. During India’s devastating second wave of Covid, many deaths in rural areas went uncounted. Will the pandemic prompt a new approach?

Despite a fourth, delta-fueled surge, states are going dark on Covid data. In several states, data on cases in prisons has been removed or reduced. Florida has halted daily data in favor of weekly reporting. And in Georgia, a state website removed a link to Covid cases and deaths in long-term care facilities.

There’s a dearth of knowledge when it comes to how exactly water moves through the Shasta Valley’s arid, volcanic earth. The movement of that water is the economic linchpin of the Northern California valley –– cattle ranchers, alfalfa farmers, cannabis growers, and more all depend on it.

A new policy decision this week may increase the pressure on adults who have so far avoided the Covid-19 vaccine. On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it had granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for people 16 and older.

In “Wild Souls,” Emma Marris uses philosophy and science to explore the worth of wild animals and the species they belong to, and the responsibility we have toward them. Ultimately, Marris writes, it’s time to renegotiate our approach to conservation to better match the realities of our human-dominated world.

You can draw a straight line from the 1919 death of Eugene Williams, a Black teenager who fell off a raft and drowned while attempting to enjoy the outdoors, to the underrepresentation of Black Americans in outdoor spaces today. Now is an opportunity for people of color to reengage with these natural spaces.

From Afghanistan to Myanmar, Nigeria to Azerbaijan, people caught in the midst of violence and instability will need to be vaccinated in order to fully end the pandemic. But hammering out the necessary interludes of peace isn’t easy — in all of world history, a global ceasefire has never taken place.

Nearly every child around the world was at risk from at least one impact of climate change today, including heatwaves, floods, cyclones, disease, drought, and air pollution, a new UNICEF report states. But 1 billion children currently live in 33 countries facing three or four impacts simultaneously.

Scientists are investigating whether increased protein intake could be an important and overlooked component in helping ICU patients avoid long-term disability — which many say is caused by severely reduced muscle mass. But some question whether simply adding more protein to patients’ diets will be enough.

Amid growing concern over new Covid-19 outbreaks in nursing homes, the federal government plans to require vaccination for nursing home staff. While more than 82 percent of nursing home residents are currently vaccinated against the coronavirus, among staff that figure is just 60 percent.

The long journey of the coronavirus pandemic took students through dimensions of online learning, social isolation, economic anguish, personal loss, and mass grief. It resulted in psychological distress for many, sometimes in the form of burnout. Here’s how higher education is preparing for the fall.

Magical thinkers — people who accept the existence of a problem yet believe as a matter of course that everything will work out fine — are just as dangerous to the common good as science deniers. By leaving others to do the worry and the work, they hold society back and waste precious time.

Iran is the only country in the Muslim world with a milk bank network. In general, Islam makes the practice tricky. The opposition centers on a tenet called milk kinship, which states that a parent-child bond is formed when a woman gives milk to a baby who isn’t biologically related to her.

In June, Apple said that patients who use the company’s health app, which tracks over 100 types of data, will be able to send their doctors metrics like heart rate, sleep hours, and exercise minutes. But outside of a few reports of success, it’s unclear if an abundance of data will improve health.

Recently, research on health and environmental disparities has focused on the specific legacy of redlining, and the way racist policy continues to shape the landscapes of U.S. cities. In communities like Richmond, California, residents are living with the long-term impacts — and making moves to reverse them.

The latest major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is forceful in its insistence that humans have warmed the planet, that major environmental changes are now inevitable, and that some of the severe effects of climate change are not just distant projections, but unfolding right now.

In “Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World,” Lisa Wells explores the lives of “relatively ordinary people” who have chosen to live off the grid to reconnect and restore nature. Wells argues that alongside a crisis of engineering and politics, climate change has also ushered in a crisis of narrative.

Wikipedia’s crowdsourced approach to quality control has a fundamental weakness: It works only if the crowd is large, diverse, and independent enough to reliably weed out misinformation. That’s left less-trafficked, non-English versions of the encyclopedia especially vulnerable to manipulation and abuse.

Residents of the West are no strangers to wildfire, but recent years have seen some of the most extreme fire activity on record. The cause? Climate change and a century of fighting nearly every fire. But the severity of future wildfires can still be mitigated by managing forests to foster resilience.

In the 1960s, fungi were given their own kingdom after decades of being classified as plants. But this recognition has been slow to seep into policy. The vast majority of environmental laws still default to the outdated phrase “flora and fauna.” But there’s a growing movement to save the mushrooms.

As new variants of the coronavirus emerge across the world and breakthrough Covid-19 cases continue to appear, tensions over global vaccine equity grew this week as Germany and other wealthy countries announced plans to offer already-vaccinated adults additional Covid-19 booster shots.

Aerosol expert Donald Milton has been on the front lines of the struggle to understand and communicate how Covid-19 is transmitted. In this Q&A, Milton discusses his early campaign to warn health authorities about the vital role of microscopic airborne droplets in the spread of the virus.

The pharmaceutical industry and its allies would have the public believe that patent protections and exorbitant drug prices are necessary for developing and deploying technologies such as Covid-19 vaccines. But examine their logic closely, and it quickly begins to fall apart.

In Bangladesh’s coastal districts — including Khulna, Satkhira, and Bagerhat — the effects of climate change have made the water so salty that it can no longer be used for drinking or for other domestic purposes. According to one study, some 70 percent of local residents now depend on water in distant ponds.

In the wake of the 2020 wildfire season, the California Energy Commission proposed state building standards that require “electric ready” equipment and encourage electric heating rather than the use of natural gas. If regulators approve the new code, it will be another first-in-the-nation state standard.

In recent years, as a contentious debate over electronic cigarettes has fractured the community of tobacco researchers, many of Stanton Glantz’s former allies have turned on the 75-year-old scientist. His critics accuse him of exaggerating the dangers of e-cigarettes and downplaying their benefits.

In an announcement this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections are more likely to pass Covid-19 on than had been previously thought. Given this, the agency recommends that even vaccinated individuals return to wearing masks indoors.

In the summer’s ultimate beach read, journalist Sarah Everts delivers a chatty, informative romp through the science and history of perspiration. From the literal smell of fear to the chemical fingerprints in our sweat, Everts covers the latest science while calling for a celebration of our miraculous stink.

The transrectal biopsy has been considered the gold standard for diagnosing prostate cancer. But it’s also risky, and can sometimes cause life-threatening infections. Some urologists are already abandoning the procedure in favor of a safer technique. Others should follow suit.

Amid rising violence, many hospitals and health care clinics in Afghanistan have been forced to shut down. Those that continue to operate are often difficult to access and overwhelmed with war injuries. All of this is happening as the Delta variant fuels the country’s third wave of coronavirus cases.

As the number of coronavirus infections rises around the country, lawmakers have adopted responses that trouble many health officials. In Missouri, where the dangerous delta variant is taking hold, these attitudes are accelerating anti-vaccine sentiment that has run strong in the state legislature for years.

Long marginalized in the Hindu caste system, Dalits are systematically underrepresented in India’s elite science institutes. And while some upper-caste researchers say caste discrimination is a thing of the past, government records and Dalit scientists tell a very different story.

The opening ceremony for the 2020 Olympics, delayed by a year due to Covid-19, kicked off Friday in a restrained performance in Tokyo. Around 15,000 athletes from more than 200 countries are expected to compete but already, 106 people associated with the Games have tested positive for the virus.

From ice-pick lobotomies to gruesome pirate raids, in “The Icepick Surgeon,” Sam Kean catalogues the long trail of amoral scientists, and their justifications. Through his comprehensive and complex portraits of these scientists, Kean excels at conveying their deceptively slow slide into corruption.