Articles Tagged with ''public health''

Food allergies are a growing public health issue. About 15 million Americans have food allergies; one in 13 children and one in 25 adults. In some cases, symptoms from ingesting allergens can be severe enough to require medical treatment. Food allergic reactions are responsible for about 30,000 emergency room visits and 150-200 deaths a year.

From respiratory illnesses to lower birthweight to deaths caused by the “urban heat island effect,” a special supplement recently published by the American Journal of Public Health explores the many ways in which climate change is impacting public health.

New Englanders can get a heads’ up on smoggy conditions that may affect their health with some free resources being offered by the EPA and their states. The warm weather up ahead brings with it an increased risk of ground-level ozone and fine particle air pollution (when combined, often referred to as smog).

Nearly a hundred people in 22 states have now been made sick from eating E. coli-contaminated romaine lettuce in the worst such outbreak since 2006, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More than half of the 98 people affected have had symptoms so severe they required hospitalization.

Dicamba, an herbicide sold by agribusiness giants Monsanto, BASF and DowDupont, doesn’t just kill weeds. Last year, according to a University of Missouri survey, dicamba damaged an estimated 3.6 million acres of soybeans across 25 states when it drifted from farms planted with seeds genetically engineered to resist the chemical onto regular soybean fields.

Short sleep, obesity, and physical inactivity occur frequently among workers, affecting more than one in five, according to a recent National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. These modifiable risk factors can lead to serious illnesses, such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

They look like flash drives (and can be charged on the USB port of a computer), come in sweet flavors like mango and fruit medley, and oh, yes – they deliver a strong dose of nicotine. Their popularity among American middle and high schoolers is raising alarm among public health and medical organizations, six of whom sent a letter to the FDA yesterday calling for strong and immediate action on the teen use of Juul e-cigarettes.

A new report from the American Lung Association (ALA) finds 133.9 million Americans at risk from air pollution – much of it ozone pollution that is worsening significantly due to warmer temperatures. The ALA’s 2018 "State of the Air" report found that the four in ten Americans (41.4 percent) who live in counties with unhealthful levels of either ozone or particle pollution are at greater risk for premature death and other serious health effects such as lung cancer, asthma attacks, cardiovascular damage, and developmental and reproductive harm.

With wildfire seasons in North America increasing in intensity and duration, researchers are focusing their attention on the health impacts from smoke exposure. A new study in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the Open Access Journal of the American Heart Association (AHA)/American Stroke Association, finds that smoke from wildfires may send people – particularly seniors – to hospital emergency rooms (ERs) with heart and stroke-related complaints.

A new paper is calling for an end to the term ‘healthy obesity’ – a phrase used to denote individuals who are apparently healthy despite being obese. The term originated in the 1980s and was used to describe overweight people who did not suffer from metabolic complications like hypertension or diabetes.