Blogs - Page 28 of 81 - This Week In Public Health

Environment

The Emotional and Physical Toll of COVID-19 Burial Teams in Ghana

The COVID-19 pandemic left no corner of the globe untouched, creating a wave of fear, loss, and disruption that continues to ripple through societies. Among those on the frontlines were Ghana’s Environmental Health Officers (EHOs), an often-overlooked group tasked with the heart-wrenching and hazardous responsibility of burying the pandemic’s victims. These workers faced unimaginable challenges, […]

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Analytics

Agent-Based Modeling for Public Health Initiatives

Agent-based modeling (ABM) has emerged as a transformative tool for understanding complex systems in public health. Imagine a virtual world where individual “agents” (such as people, households, or organizations) interact based on set rules. These interactions simulate real-life dynamics, shedding light on patterns that drive health outcomes. But ABM isn’t just for researchers; it has […]

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AI

The Economic Case for AI-Driven Diagnoses of Rare Diseases

Imagine facing a health issue so elusive that it takes years—even decades—to diagnose. Meanwhile, your work performance suffers, your income dwindles, and your quality of life declines. For millions of people with rare diseases, this isn’t just a nightmare scenario; it’s their daily reality. Rare diseases, affecting fewer than 5 in 10,000 people in Europe […]

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Health equity

COVID-19 Models Missed the Social Determinants of Health

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, infectious disease models played a crucial role in guiding public health responses. But new research reveals a critical gap in these early models—most failed to incorporate social determinants of health (SDH), such as race, income, and geographic location, despite their impact on how the virus affected different […]

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Policy

The Fragile Balance of Trust

Imagine scrolling through your newsfeed and encountering a headline about a miraculous new COVID-19 cure. The article looks legitimate, but how do you decide whether to believe it? This decision hinges on an intricate psychological mechanism called epistemic trust—our ability to assess the credibility of knowledge and determine if it’s relevant, accurate, and worth adopting. […]

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Health equity

How Socioeconomic Factors Shape Lifetime Healthcare Costs

Healthcare policy debates often focus on costs, accessibility, and fairness. A new study, leveraging comprehensive data from Denmark, flips the script on a common assumption: that lower-income individuals consistently use more healthcare resources over their lifetime than wealthier individuals. This research reveals a surprising equality in lifetime healthcare expenditures across socioeconomic groups, even in a […]

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Commentary

A Clinical Trial is the Definition of Vaccine Skepticsm.

Next Week in Public Health, December 6, 2024 After a month of discouragement and avoiding the news, I’ve been back at monitoring what’s going on from a policy perspective in the US. Obviously, the big change is the incoming administration and what several, eh, sketchy picks for different agency heads might have for public health. […]

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Wellbeing

How Fulfilling Employee Values Boosts Wellbeing and Productivity

In today’s work environments, where burnout and job dissatisfaction are on the rise, a study offers a simple insight: supporting employees to fulfill what they value at work leads to long-term benefits like job satisfaction, productivity, and reduced burnout. This isn’t just about the work they do—it’s about enabling people to thrive by aligning work […]

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Workforce

What do you get for an MPH?

Imagine you’ve invested years in earning a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree, hoping to climb the career ladder and make a meaningful impact in your field. But what if the reality of the job market doesn’t align with these aspirations? This question drove a recent study from the University of Haifa in Israel, which […]

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