#public-health-data

#public-health-data

New research has uncovered how Londoners reacted in real time to the Great Plague of 1665, revealing that people reshaped their daily lives around published death figures - using them to decide where to go, who to meet, and whether to remain in the city or flee. The study, from the University of Portsmouth, shows that weekly death reports, known as the Bills of Mortality, served as a practical guide to survival.

The action prompted a lawsuit from nine medical groups who alleged the administration's actions were arbitrary, illegal and threatened public health. Driving the news: Under the agreement, the Health and Human Services Department will reinstate the webpages in question to reflect how they appeared online as of January 29, 2025. Once that happens, the case will then dismissed, according to AcademyHealth, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

A federal website that informs the public about what information agencies are collecting and allows for public comment went down last weekend, and it has only been partially restored. The outage has raised concerns among advocates who already were troubled by the disappearance of data sets from government websites after President Donald Trump began his second term. As of Thursday, the website's landing page said, it was "currently undergoing revisions."

More than 2.8 million people now identify as transgender in the US, including an estimated 724,000 youth, according to a new data analysis that is the largest of its kind to date. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Williams Institute used federal surveys and data from state health agencies to identify the size and demographics of the trans population in each state. The analysis, shared with the Guardian and released on Wednesday, documented thousands of trans youth living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The findings counter Donald Trump's aggressive efforts to deny the existence of trans minors, as his administration removes references to trans people across federal agencies and widely erodes protections and programs for LGBTQ+ communities.

An army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely, ensuring their future availability.