#public-health

#public-health

Children in Florida will no longer be required to receive vaccines against preventable diseases including measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio and hepatitis said Joseph Ladapo, the state's surgeon general, on Wednesday in a speech during which he likened vaccine mandates to slavery. Ladapo, hand-picked for the role by Ron DeSantis, Florida's Republican governor, is a long-time skeptic of the benefit of vaccines, and has previously been accused of peddling scientific nonsense by public health advocates.

There were 1,017 drug misuse deaths in 2024, down 155 from the previous year. National Records of Scotland said the latest figure was the lowest annual number since 2017. It brings the total in a decade to 10,884. After adjusting for age, there were 191 drug misuse deaths per million people in Scotland in 2024. According to the most recent European data, the next highest rate was Estonia with 135 deaths per million in 2023.

Nowhere in the north-east of England and Cumbria has the childhood measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination rate of 95% needed to achieve the "herd immunity" at which point disease does not spread, latest figures show.

Iman Salim is used to seeing flood waters in the field of lush lilypads next to her home in the village of Kamanwala. But nothing prepared her for this week, when torrential monsoon rains that broke a 49-year record lashed the area, flooding her house with water that rose above her chest. The whole house has drowned. The water left nothing, the 24-year-old said.

Your morning hair routine might be exposing you to as much pollution as standing in dense traffic, research has suggested. A study found heat-based hair styling, such as straightening, curling or blow drying, emits chemicals when used with hair creams, lotions and serums. Researchers found that a 10- to 20-minute heat-based hair care routine exposes a person to upward of 10 billion nanoparticles that are directly deposited into the lungs - that's the equivalent pollution of standing in motorway traffic.

Former Trump Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Dr. Demetre Daskalakis hit back at White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on CNN, and proudly defended his use of the term pregnant people and preferred pronouns. Dr. Daskalakis is among a raft of senior officials who resigned in the wake of President Donald Trump's attempted firing of CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, and was criticized by Leavitt at Thursday's White House briefing over his use of inclusive language.

A pillar in Toronto's tattoo scene is saying goodbye to his iconic shop with a few parting words on the standards in his industry. Joey Nixon, a founding partner at Adrenaline, says he's shutting down the Toronto location of his tattoo and piercing shop after nearly 20 years on Queen Street W., citing financial difficulties. Adrenaline's Montreal and Vancouver locations will remain open.

As the river flows through Baja California, it takes in untreated sewage and industrial waste from Tijuana, then crosses the U.S.-Mexico border into San Diego County, where beaches are regularly closed because the surf is filled with bacteria from the river. Researchers have now gained new insights into how that water pollution is creating air pollution that besets nearby communities.

Researchers at the California-based non-profit science institute PSE Healthy Energy created a first-of-its-kind interactive map using data from more than 1,300 major methane leaks across the country to model the spread of dangerous air pollutants released during each event. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a potent greenhouse gas. When it leaks from oil and gas infrastructure due to equipment failure, malfunctions, or ruptures, the plume acts as a carrier for a wide array of hazardous co-pollutants,

I somehow came down with a severe case of malaria, Roberts, 68, announced via X on Tuesday. I can honestly say that I am the only person in the hospital with malaria. In fact, one of my doctors said I'm the first case he has ever seen. Thank you to Trace for jumping into the chair today!I somehow came down with a severe case of Malaria.I can honestly say that I am the only person in the hospital with Malaria. In fact, one of my doctors said I'm the first case he has ever seen. Thanks to the folks at https://t.co/6ZHiB5Dv8v John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) August 26, 2025

Air pollution from oil and gas activities is responsible for an estimated 91,000 deaths and over 10,000 preterm births in the US each year, according to a new study that examined the impacts of the industry through its lifecycle from extraction to refining to burning fuel in power plants. The study, published August 22 in the journal Science Advances, also attributes an estimated 216,000 annual incidences of US childhood asthma to air pollutants from fossil fuels, as well as over 1,600 lifetime cancers.

"For me to get a cancer diagnosis was a big shock. And then to have a lung cancer diagnosis was very puzzling for me," Katie Hulan, a 37-year-old tech worker told the news agency.

Have you gone outside recently and smelled an acrid odor, perhaps accompanied by a hellish orange sky? Check the news, and you were likely downwind of massive wildfires like those in the Canadian province of Manitoba or the Florida Everglades- an increasingly regular event as millions of people find themselves in the path of noxious smoke, sometimes from a country away.

The Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the Supreme Court decided Thursday. The high court majority lifted a judge's order blocking $783 million worth of cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Republican President Donald Trump's priorities. The high court did keep Trump administration guidance on future funding blocked, however.

The list of summertime scourges grows longer each year: wildfires, heat waves, floods. And we can now add to that a veritable infestation of biting, Lyme-disease-carrying ticks. Emergency room visits for tick bites in the Northeast are at their highest levels in at least five years. This June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 229 tick bites per every 100,000 visits to ERs around the Northeast, up from 167 bites per 100,000 visits a year earlier.

Daniel P. Johnson, a geographer at Indiana University at Indianapolis, works with a team of researchers who spend a lot of time catching blowflies, dissecting their iridescent blue-green abdomens, and analyzing the contents of their guts. Johnson and his colleagues are tracking the spread of Lyme disease on a warming planet. But they need a lot of additional data. They get it from NASA.

North Bay Interior Valleys and San Francisco Bay Shoreline are included in an updated heat advisory released by the National Weather Service on Thursday at 1:44 a.m. The advisory is valid between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. The NWS San Francisco CA said, Temperatures in the 80s to the middle 90s expected near the Bay and 90s to near 100 degrees interior North Bay.

The National Weather Service has issued a swath of heat advisories, watches and warnings, along with red-flag alerts, warning the public to prepare. This dangerous level of heat will pose a threat to anyone without effective cooling and adequate hydration, NWS forecasters said in an outlook issued on Wednesday, outlining temperature highs that could climb past 110F (43C) in the desert south-west and above 100F across southern California.

Plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is typically spread by fleas that have fed on infected wild rodents such as squirrels and chipmunks, health officials said. Pets, particularly cats and dogs, can also carry plague-infected fleas into the home. Symptoms of plague generally appear within two weeks of exposure and may include fever, nausea, weakness, and swollen lymph nodes. If detected early, the illness is treatable with antibiotics.

Put down the book, pick up the phone.