public health

More Than 80 Million U.S. Adults Consume Fast Food on Any Given Day

More Than 80 Million U.S. Adults Consume Fast Food on Any Given Day

More than a third of Americans eat fast food on any given day. That’s the key finding of a report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention‘s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) that tracked the fast food consumption of Americans between 2013 and 2016. “On any given day in the […]

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    Google Street View to Expand Mapping of Air Pollution

    Google Street View to Expand Mapping of Air Pollution

    Google announced Wednesday it would expand its innovative, street-by-street air pollution mapping program to an international fleet of 50 Google Street View cars, Business Wire reported. The program is a partnership with Aclima, a San Francisco company that maps air quality on a block-by-block scale. The announcement comes a day after a report from the […]

    Official Hurricane Maria Death Toll Raised to Nearly 3,000

    Official Hurricane Maria Death Toll Raised to Nearly 3,000

    Puerto Rico will revise the official Hurricane Maria death toll from 64 to nearly 3,000 following the release of a report by the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health (GW SPH) commissioned by the Puerto Rican government, CNN reported Tuesday. The study used data from 2010 to 2017 to predict mortality on […]

    Fight Against Glyphosate Could Reignite Push for Agent Orange Justice

    Fight Against Glyphosate Could Reignite Push for Agent Orange Justice

    A jury’s verdict in California that a groundskeeper got cancer from repeated exposure to Monsanto‘s Roundup weedkiller is offering new hope for justice for millions of plaintiffs an ocean away. During the Vietnam War, Monsanto was one of the primary companies that supplied Agent Orange to the U.S military, which sprayed 44 million liters (approximately […]

    Air Pollution Shortens Human Life by One Year, on Average

    Air Pollution Shortens Human Life by One Year, on Average

    In a summer marked by air quality alerts as wildfires rage in the western U.S., a study has been published finding that air pollution lowers the average lifespan by one year worldwide. The study, published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters Aug. 22, was the first to assess the impact of particulate matter pollution smaller […]

    Fire Chief: Verizon Throttled Data Speed, Endangering Firefighting Efforts

    Fire Chief: Verizon Throttled Data Speed, Endangering Firefighting Efforts

    A Northern California fire chief said in a court filing (pdf) Monday that during its efforts in battling the Mendocino Complex Fire—the largest in state history—that one of the department’s trucks, equipped with Verizon wireless service, had its connection speeds significantly slowed and made communication effectively impossible. “This throttling has had a significant impact on […]

    Why Asbestos Is Still a Major Public Health Threat in the U.S.

    Why Asbestos Is Still a Major Public Health Threat in the U.S.

    Reports surfaced this month that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had proposed a significant new use rule (SNUR) for asbestos in June, requiring anyone who wanted to start or resume importing or manufacturing the carcinogenic mineral to first receive EPA approval. Advocates and some EPA employees raised concerns that the SNUR could pave the […]

    Baby Food Tests Find 68 Percent Contain ‘Worrisome’ Levels of Heavy Metals

    Baby Food Tests Find 68 Percent Contain ‘Worrisome’ Levels of Heavy Metals

    Testing published by Consumer Reports (CR) Thursday found “concerning levels” of toxic metals in popular U.S. baby and toddler food. The consumer advocacy group tested 50 nationally-distributed, packaged foods designed for toddlers and babies for mercury, cadmium, arsenic and lead. They found that every product they tested had measurable amounts of cadmium, inorganic arsenic or […]