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Health tips

Hey Doctors: Wash your hands!

It’s the sound you hear a thousand times in a hospital—the squirt of sanitizer from a dispenser, the rush of water at a sink. These small acts seem routine, even forgettable. But in reality, hand hygiene is one of the most powerful weapons we have against hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). And yet, compliance has long been […]

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News

Next Week in Public Health, September 12, 2025

It’s been a little too quiet this week on the policy front, but I suppose we should be grateful for that. Here’s what’s in the research. We are working on a project involving Lil Sis to help understand the special interests driving these policy changes, so we can hopefully have that done soonish. And we we can […]

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Society

America’s Public Health System Isn’t Ready for the Next Disaster

“Are we ready for the next big one?” That question has haunted U.S. public health for two decades. After 9/11, billions of dollars flowed into strengthening emergency response, building laboratories, and stockpiling medicines. And yet, when COVID-19 hit in 2020, the cracks showed: overwhelmed hospitals, broken supply chains, and communities left behind. The irony is […]

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Global

Prevention Pays Off – In Dollars and Lives

The bottom line: Investing in public health prevention pays for itself. This is a message we NEED to hit over and over as the current public health infrastructure is systematically dismantled. A large body of U.S. research shows that every dollar spent on effective prevention programs yields many times more in savings on healthcare costs […]

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Epi

What Rift Valley Fever Teaches Us About Hidden Epidemics

In 2007, Kenya faced a Rift Valley fever (RVF) epidemic so severe it drained $32 million from its economy. Four years later, South Africa’s sheep industry lost nearly $14 million to the same disease. For decades, scientists explained these outbreaks through a neat, if chilling, story: infected mosquito eggs lie dormant during dry spells, then […]

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Health equity

How Narrative Power Can Boost Health Equity

More than 260 governments have formally declared racism a public health crisis. That is not just a headline. It is a signal that stories shape policy, budgets, and who receives care. If that sounds wild, welcome to narrative power 101. Why Stories Act Like Gravity Narrative power is the ability to make certain stories feel […]

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Policy

Yes, Politics Shapes Cancer Outcomes

A few months ago, before things took a nosedive, we spoke to Nancy Kriegar about her work looking at the intersection of health and political belief systems. You can revisit below. Now, Dr. Kriegar has a new article looking at how politics shape cancer outcomes. Let’s start with a basic principle. Many cancer deaths are […]

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News

Next Week in Public Health, September 5, 2025

Yesterday was gruesome, no doubt about it. This particular White House statement on RFK grew my particular ire (and relevant to this site) The phrase, “Gold Standard Science,” is doing some heavy lifting there. What defines the gold standard? I assume there aren’t many methodologists in the White House, so is he saying we should […]

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Environment

Unsafe Tap Water is not-so-Quietly Harming America’s Health

If you turned on your kitchen tap right now, would you be sure the water is safe? For millions of Americans, the answer is more uncertain than you’d think. A new study published in Frontiers in Public Health shows that even a single Safe Drinking Water Act violation in a county can ripple through communities’ […]

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News

Next Week in Public Health, August 29, 2025

What a shitty, shitty week. Mandy had a couple of blogs about it here: And also, if we try to forecast out what the next few years might be like, we have some thoughts. If you can still stomach the news, here’s what’s been in it. Determinants of vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers in an […]

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Nutrition

55% Higher Liver Disease Risk from Fast Food Diets

For millions of people, the answer to “What’s for dinner?” comes in a paper bag, passed through a drive-thru window. It’s quick, cheap, and tasty. But according to new research, that convenience may come with a serious cost to your liver. A sweeping meta-analysis, pooling data from over 169,000 people across nine studies, found that […]

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Uncategorized

Why a 3x Smoking Risk Still Looks Like a Decline

Picture a chart: vaping among teens climbing sharply, while smoking drops. To the casual observer—or even to a policymaker under pressure—it might look like good news. Maybe vaping is helping young people quit cigarettes, or keeping them from starting at all. That’s the “displacement effect” story, and it’s a tempting one. But according to new […]

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