SPH in the News

With the approach of fall and cooler weather across the United States, officials say the risk posed by the H5N1 bird flu virus could rise — and they’re taking steps to prevent the creation of a hybrid flu virus that could more easily infect humans.

Massachusetts and Connecticut are now the first states to ban the use of PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” in protective gear worn by firefighters.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the new Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. It’s the third time the vaccines have been updated to match circulating strains since the original series. The shots should be available within days. The agency hasn't yet approved a third vaccine, from drugmaker Novavax.

laire Macon in Providence, Rhode Island, has one of the rarest job titles in the United States: overdose prevention center manager.

U.S. health officials now say COVID-19 is an endemic disease. That means it's here to stay – circulating regularly like the flu. Even though that changes how public health officials think about managing the virus, they say it doesn't mean being less cautious or vigilant during surges, like the current one this summer. COVID still poses significant risks for older individuals and those with underlying conditions — and anyone who gets COVID is at risk of developing long COVID.

If it seems like a lot of people are getting COVID right now, you’re not imagining it. We’re in the middle of a worldwide summer COVID-19 wave.

Four years after SARS-CoV2 sparked a devastating global pandemic, U.S. health officials now consider COVID-19 an endemic disease.

Over the past three decades, routine immunizations have prevented 1.1 million deaths and saved the United States $540 billion, the C.D.C. estimated.

BIRD FLU CHECK-IN — More cows and humans continue to test positive for avian influenza, but the CDC maintains that the risk to the public remains low. We checked in with several infectious disease experts to learn more about what the recent outbreak at poultry farms in Colorado means for the U.S. response to the virus.

Coronavirus activity in wastewater reached levels considered “high” or “very high” in 26 states, according to the most recent CDC data.

Even as the H5N1 virus evolves, gaps remain in the nation’s contingency plans for human testing, scientists say.

Farmworkers need paid sick leave and widespread testing to help prevent an H5N1 pandemic, experts say.

For years, the number of people dying of drug overdoses was on the rise nationwide and in Rhode Island. Then, there was a push to change that, specifically by introducing the life-saving drug Narcan. Last year, the number of people overdosing actually dropped. We look deeper into those figures.

Late last year, Scarlett Lanzas was chatting with neighbors — a group of fellow immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean — at the community pool in their housing development in Miami. That’s when Lanzas heard a neighbor say something in Spanish that was not true.

The dean of the Brown University School of Public Health shares what to know to stay safe amid a summer wave of COVID-19 cases and the new strain circulating.

How worried you should be about H5N1, the bird flu virus spreading on dairy farms in the United States, depends on who you are. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has described the current H5N1 risk to the general public as low. The risk that the virus poses is tempered by the fact that it doesn’t spread easily among people — yet.

While baseless attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci may be comforting to some, it doesn't get to the heart of the issues.

No one knows when the next pandemic will sweep across the United States. It could be bird flu, or an as-yet unknown infection. But after living through the Covid-19 pandemic, which claimed more than 1 million American lives, left more than 300,000 children orphaned, and shut down workplaces and schools, U.S. citizens should demand that the nation does better next time.

As much as we would all love to ignore COVID, a new set of variants that scientists call “FLiRT” is here to remind us that the virus is still with us.

When I began my Ph.D. in an interdisciplinary environmental studies program, students further along in the program warned it was going to be particularly hard for us to get academic jobs. They pointed out that among the brilliant and productive faculty who enthusiastically taught our program, none had in fact received training like ours— they all had Ph.D.s in clearly defined fields.

Outside a farm in Michigan in early May, an RV pulled up and parked. Registered nurse Aracely Nerio and others helped set up a canopy, where nearby farmworkers could find shade or bottles of water, and check their blood pressure and glucose levels. Health care is often out of reach for these laborers.

The number of U.S. fatal overdoses fell last year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data posted Wednesday.

Failure to shield these workers could allow the H5N1 virus to become a greater threat.

Batool Behnam, Graduate Assistant with Swearer Center’s community partnership team and current master's student at Brown’s School of Public Health, is concentrating on Global Health and graduating this Spring 2024. Through research, teaching and community services, Behnam’s dream is to reduce inequalities among communities.

The Information Futures Lab (IFL) at Brown University’s School of Public Health is pleased to introduce its 2024 Visiting Fellows cohort. Leaders in community-based journalism, equitable tech entrepreneurship, culturally competent communication and infodemics research have joined the Lab to drive a set of innovative projects and pilots that are responding to urgent information challenges in real time.

Officials are racing to conduct more testing to better understand the spread of the virus and its potential risk to humans.

Camping on city streets, open-air drug use, and crime are generating fierce pushback against harm reduction efforts like decriminalization. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Experts describe ways to turn down the volume, from earbuds to smartphone apps that detect harmful noise levels

American life expectancy started dropping even before the pandemic. It’s a critical barometer of our nation’s health and a sign that all is not well in the U.S.

Anaridis Rodriguez is joined by Pandemic Preparedness expert, Jennifer Nuzzo, from Brown University, to dig deeper into how we can best prepare ourselves for another pandemic.

Panel hosted by Information Futures Lab featured various media, communication experts

Here’s just the tip of the iceberg: $722.50 for a nurse to push a drug into an IV. $21,500 for ten stitches. The prices charged by hospitals are exorbitant and rising. Private health insurance premiums paid by working age adults are rising rapidly. Many Americans skip necessary medical care, while those who do get treated can end up bankrupt. With U.S. health care spending reaching $4.5 trillion in 2022, finding ways to cut costs has become increasingly urgent.

Homicides were down sharply in Boston during the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period in recent years, records show. The city saw just two confirmed homicides in the first quarter of the year, compared to 11 during the first quarter of 2023, according to Boston police statistics. There were five homicides in Boston in the first quarter of 2022, nine during the same period in 2021, and 10 in the first quarter of 2020.

A Texas dairy worker has tested positive for the avian flu, marking the first identified human case of an illness in the U.S. that has sickened cattle across several states over the past few weeks.

In four years of the Covid pandemic, we have seen lots and lots of guidance change over time. Most recently, the CDC has relaxed its recommendations about isolating after testing positive for Covid.

Americans who test positive for COVID-19 no longer need to stay in isolation for five days, U.S. health officials announced Friday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its longstanding guidance, saying that people can return to work or regular activities if their symptoms are mild and improving and it’s been a day since they’ve had a fever.

In mid-February, a measles outbreak started at the Manatee Bay Elementary School in Broward County in South Florida. There are now at least nine cases in the county and one additional one in Polk County in Central Florida.

New research points to October as the sweet spot, at least for kids. But it’s not too late to get one, even now.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may soon drop its isolation guidance for people with COVID-19. The planned change was reported in The Washington Post on Tuesday, attributed to several unnamed CDC officials.

Following a transformational tenure, Academic Director Dr. Anthony Napoli passes the torch to Dr. Scott Rivkees, ensuring a seamless transition for the program’s continued success.

Accomplished physician, scholar and public health expert Ateev Mehrotra M.D., MPH, will join Brown's School of Public Health on July 1, 2024.

The facility, also known as a safe injection center, will be the first in Rhode Island and the only one in the U.S. outside New York City to operate openly.

Every health care model involves people doing their best to balance competing priorities in the face of limited resources. In other words, every system involves tradeoffs.

Birth By Us, a maternal health app co-founded by Ijeoma Uche ’21, is one of three winners of the 2024 Westly Prize for Young Social Innovators, the Westly Foundation announced Jan. 23 on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Strokes are the leading cause of death and a major contributor to disability in the United States, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A new study published Wednesday in the journal “Neurology” found Black people in the United States experience strokes more frequently and at younger ages compared to White people.

The number of private equity firms has exploded in health care in recent years, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to buy physician practices, hospitals, laboratories and nursing homes. It’s a trend that should have everyone’s attention, from politicians to patients, because it can significantly increase costs, reduce access and even threaten patient safety.

Enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans has grown substantially in the past few decades, enticing more than half of eligible people, primarily those 65 or older, with low premium costs and perks like dental and vision insurance. And as the private plans' share of the Medicare patient pie has ballooned to 30.8 million people, so too have concerns about the insurers' aggressive sales tactics and misleading coverage claims.

Who owns your doctor’s office? More and more often nowadays, the answer is a private equity firm — a type of investment fund that buys, restructures, and resells companies.

With the expanded scope of biosecurity involving human, animal, and plant-based pathogens, there is a need for increased collaboration across sectors — human health, veterinary and agricultural authorities must work together to address potential biosecurity threats comprehensively.

With Intus Care, Robbie Felton, Evan Jackson and Alex Rothberg are building healthcare analytics software to help identify risks and optimize healthcare for low-income seniors. Health insurers use the Intus Care platform to help 1,500 providers treat 15,000 patients representing $1.5 billion in value-based care payments. The company expects more than $2.1 million in revenue in 2023.