Kira Hinslea wanted to play outside, but she knew she couldn’t until her mom checked an air-quality app on her phone. “Is it OK?” the 6-year-old eagerly asked her mother, Shirley Hinslea, one day late last month. Hinslea gave Kira the green light, and the child beamed with excitement. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” she yelled, sprinting [...]
Firefighters’ strikingly high cancer rates may be partly due to exposures to contaminants in firehouses, says Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researcher Emily Sparer. In a September 13, 2018 commentary for WBUR’s “Cognoscenti,” Sparer, a research associate in the Healthy Buildings program in the Department of Environmental Health, wrote that firefighters can be exposed to contaminants from the truck [...]
Governor Cuomo today announced a groundbreaking partnership between ILÚM Health Solutions, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Merck & Co, OpGen, and the New York State Department of Health to develop a state-of-the-art research program to detect, track and manage antimicrobial-resistant infections at healthcare institutions statewide. ILÚM will partner with the Wadsworth Center and DOH to develop an Infectious Disease Digital [...]
ABSTRACT Background: Telemonitoring of symptoms and physiological signs has been suggested as a means of early detection of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbations, with a view to instituting timely treatment. However, algorithms to identify exacerbations result in frequent false-positive results and increased workload. Machine learning, when applied to predictive modelling, can determine patterns of risk [...]
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard University will be honoring the centennial of the 1918 influenza pandemic with a series of events on disease outbreak. The school’s Global Health Institute is hosting ‘‘Outbreak Week’’ starting Monday, featuring public lectures and discussions with prominent scholars and scientists. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious [...]
A new study led by UNC School of Medicine researchers indicates that ozone has a greater impact on asthma patients than previously thought. The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, recruited 23 African American youth ages 12-17 with persistent asthma from the Allergy/Immunology and Pediatric Pulmonary clinics in Raleigh, NC. African American [...]
BEIJING (Reuters) – China said on Monday it has confirmed a new outbreak of African swine fever in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of northern China, as authorities struggle to contain the highly contagious disease. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said a slaughterhouse in the city of Hohhot reported the outbreak, adding that [...]
Managing life with a food allergy means reading packaged food labels—every time you purchase that food. The only way to prevent a food-allergy reaction is to avoid the problem food. But you can’t know whether a food contains an allergen simply by looking at it. Laws and regulations like the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer [...]
The infant gut microbiota has a high abundance of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) compared to adults, even in the absence of antibiotic exposure. Here we study potential sources of infant gut ARGs by performing metagenomic sequencing of breast milk, as well as infant and maternal gut microbiomes. We find that fecal ARG and mobile genetic element (MGE) profiles of infants [...]
Factory farming risks pushing us into a post-antibiotic world, but consumers are demanding change. Kate Morgan had not intended to get involved in her family’s pig farm in Yorkshire in the northeast of England. But, returning home after growing bored of her office job, the 34-year-old became determined to help seek new opportunities for the [...]