Resources & Information

KFF Health News
October 15, 2024
Sociologist Elena Portacolone was taken aback. Many of the older adults in San Francisco she visited at home for a research project were confused when she came to the door. They’d forgotten the appointment or couldn’t remember speaking to her. It seemed clear they had some type of cognitive impairment. Yet they were living alone. Portacolone, an associate professor at the University of California-San Francisco, wondered how common this was. Had anyone examined this group? How were they managing? When she reviewed the research literature more than a decade ago, there was little there. “I realized this is a largely invisible population,” she said.

NPR
September 21, 2024
“It’s [from] your soda can, your plastic cooking utensils, your nonstick frying pan, the cardboard box that your fries come in,” says Jane Muncke, a toxicologist based in Zurich. “It’s retail food packaging, but also the processing equipment, and your [kitchenware] and tableware at home.” Recent use of hair and skin care products have been linked to higher levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in kids. More than 3,600 chemicals found in food packaging are also found in human bodies, according to a paper published Tuesday in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology. The research was led by Muncke and her colleagues at the Food Packaging Forum Foundation, a nonprofit research group focused on hazardous chemicals in food packaging.

NBC News
September 19, 2024
Jennifer White, a New York state epidemiologist, has a reminder as summer’s end approaches: “It may be pumpkin spice season, but it’s not the end of mosquito season.”

August and September are the peak months for mosquito-borne illnesses in the U.S. That’s because populations of the insects — which prefer warm temperatures and high humidity — have had time to grow and transmit more virus by the end of the summer.

Indeed, new cases of the three most common diseases spread locally by mosquitoes within the U.S. — dengue fever, eastern equine encephalitis and West Nile virus — are still being reported in many states. This week, California health officials issued a warning about three locally acquired dengue cases in Los Angeles County, two of which were announced Wednesday.

NPR
September 15, 2024
About three years ago, Soumya Rangarajan struggled day after day with exhaustion, headaches, and heart palpitations. As a front-line hospital doctor during the COVID-19 pandemic, she first attributed her symptoms to the demands of an unprecedented health care crisis.

But a social media post got Rangarajan thinking about the possibility that she might actually be the victim of something more mundane: an iron deficiency. She requested a blood test from her doctor, and the results determined she had anemia, a condition caused by lower-than-normal levels of iron in the blood.

It was the first step toward relief, recalled Rangarajan, who is a geriatrician at the University of Michigan. Her symptoms, she added, had made it so she “had difficulty getting through a full week at work.”

MedPageToday
September 7, 2024
The goal of the COVID vaccine is to keep people out of the hospital and out of the intensive care unit. So the critical question then is: who’s getting hospitalized? Who’s getting hospitalized with COVID? And the answer is, it generally falls into four high-risk groups. One are people who are elderly, which is to say those over 75. Two are people who are immune compromised either because they were born with certain immune deficiencies or they’re taking drugs that suppress their immune system because of cancers or rheumatologic disease. Three are people who are pregnant. And four are people who have high-risk medical conditions like obesity, diabetes, chronic lung disease, chronic heart disease. So that’s who you’re trying to keep out of the hospital.

Time
September 4, 2024
Mosquito-borne diseases seem to be everywhere this year. Towns in Massachusetts are shutting down public parks and other outdoor areas after officials learned that mosquitoes in the region are carrying eastern equine encephalitis, a rare but deadly virus. And Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top infectious-disease expert in the U.S., recently was hospitalized with West Nile virus that he allegedly acquired from a mosquito buzzing through his backyard. Is this a particularly bad year for disease-spreading mosquitoes in the U.S.? And what can we expect in the future?