As King County seeks to reach its goal of 鈥渮ero youth detention鈥� 鈥� ultimately eliminating the practice of juvenile detention in the county 鈥斕烀烙笆哟� researchers are working to help address major systemic challenges in how young people engage with health care. With a strategic plan to close the juvenile detention center by 2025, King County needs an increasingly robust system to ensure youth are getting consistent and accessible services, including health care. This is especially true upon…
When schools closed during the first year of the pandemic, an immediate and potentially devastating problem surfaced: How would millions of children in struggling families get the school meals many of them depended on? The U.S. Congress responded by authorizing the Department of Agriculture to roll out two major programs. It launched the 鈥済rab and go school meals,鈥� which helped schools provide prepared meals for off-site consumption and distributed funding for the state-operated Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) program, which gave…
Since it first launched in 2019, Washington state鈥檚 Environmental Health Disparities Map has been used to help decisionmakers and government agencies engage with overburdened communities to clean up contamination, improve buildings and electric grids, plant trees and many other projects. Using a complex matrix of data, this open-access, interactive map ranks Washington鈥檚 nearly 1,500 U.S. census tracts by health risks due to environmental degradation and economic and health disparities. It acts as a guide for state agencies and the legislature…
Air pollution is not just a problem for lungs. Increasingly, research suggests air pollution can influence childhood behavioral problems and even IQ. A new study led by the 天美影视传媒 has added evidence showing that both prenatal and postnatal exposure to air pollution can harm kids. The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, found that children whose mothers experienced higher nitrogen dioxide聽(NO2) exposure during pregnancy, particularly in the first and second trimester, were more likely to have behavioral problems….
Opioid use disorder is an addiction crisis in the United States that has become increasingly lethal during the COVID-19 pandemic. To preserve access to life-saving treatment during the pandemic, federal drug agencies loosened requirements on physicians for treating these patients, including moving patient evaluations away from in-person exams to telemedicine. This federal policy change focused primarily on buprenorphine, a highly effective treatment for opioid use disorder and one that is much less onerous and stigmatizing than methadone, the other most…
All forest fire smoke is bad for people, but not all fires in forests are bad. This is the conundrum faced by experts in forest management and public health: Climate change and decades of fire suppression that have increased fuels are contributing to larger and more intense wildfires and, in order to improve forest health and reduce these explosive fires, prescribed and managed fire is necessary. Video: Experts collaborate to troubleshoot necessary fires and harmful smoke Journalists: Download soundbites…
Your immune system鈥檚 ability to combat COVID-19, like any infection, largely depends on its ability to replicate the immune cells effective at destroying the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease. These cloned immune cells cannot be infinitely created, and a key hypothesis of a new 天美影视传媒 study is that the body鈥檚 ability to create these cloned cells falls off significantly in old age. According to a model created by UW research professor James Anderson, this genetically predetermined limit…
Two 天美影视传媒 nursing and midwife experts in maternal health have provided the following quotes on the issue of restricting abortion or making it illegal 鈥� seen as increasingly likely due to the Supreme Court draft opinion, leaked to Politico on Monday. Molly Altman is an assistant professor in the UW School of Nursing and nurse midwife, whose scientific research focuses on respectful and equitable care during pregnancy and childbirth. Meghan Eagen-Torkko is associate professor and Director of Nursing…
As the most serious type of skin cancer, a melanoma diagnosis carries emotional, financial and medical consequences. That鈥檚 why recent studies finding that there is an overdiagnosis of melanoma are a significant cause for concern. 鈥淥verdiagnosis is the diagnosis of disease that will not harm a person in their lifetime. If melanoma is being overdiagnosed, it means that too many people are getting the scary news that they have cancer, and receiving and paying for unnecessary treatment,鈥� said Kathleen Kerr,…
The first results of research led by the 天美影视传媒 into handgun carrying by young people growing up in rural areas has found six distinct patterns for when and how often these individuals carry a handgun. The patterns, or 鈥渓ongitudinal trajectories,鈥� suggest that youths in rural areas differ in some ways from their urban counterparts when it comes to handgun carrying and provide information for programs designed to help prevent firearm violence and injury. 鈥淏ecause firearms in many rural…