The fact that China's green economy has outpaced our fossil fuel one was totally predictable 10 years ago. And US companies and economic policies continue to put their head in the sand. Even as we wrangle against facism, the physical effects of our CO2 emissions continue inexorably. Science.

I lived with my dad when I was very young and he didn’t apply for food stamps or free school lunches, though we qualified. So, I went hungry. It was awful. I begged neighbors for saltine crackers. I can say it was the worst time of my life. Children shouldn’t go hungry. Restore SNAP benefits.

Rita Hamad, professor of social epidemiology and public policy, explains why losing the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System puts the health of mothers and infants at risk, and how she hopes to help keep its data accessible. “Without data, we can’t fix problems,” says @ritahamad.bsky.social

If the ostriches are not culled, Canada will violate its trade agreements for managing avian flu outbreaks. This could cause our trading partners to ban Canadian poultry imports and cut off the entire $2B poultry export market. Three countries have already restricted Canadian imports on this basis.

Recently published work from colleagues Morgan Wack (postdoc at University of Zurich) & Joey Schafer (UW PhD candidate) showing how state election policies that delayed vote counting fueled rumoring and conspiracy theorizing around the 2020 election: blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/20...

With deportation continuing apace amid the federal government shutdown, advocates speculated that the latest scheme to pay off immigrant children was deliberately timed by ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, to minimize public attention.

In my latest for @nytopinion.nytimes.com, I break down the health care provisions Democrats are fighting for in this government shutdown. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/o...

A drug that provides near-perfect protection against HIV with shots just twice a year will be made available at $40 per patient annually in low- and middle-income countries, offering new hope for ending the HIV epidemic. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/h...

There is only one major company in the world that makes monovalent measles vaccine: Serum Institute of India. The only reason it continues to do so is that, until recently, 19 countries in the world had not yet introduced rubella vaccination to their national schedules 1/

To be clear, there are no data that provide a link between short-term use of Tylenol during pregnancy and autism. In fact, one of the best prospective studies w/ sibling controls, if anything, pointed to a protective effect for use less than 7 days acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

When the vaccine first came out, the US actually only vaccinated “high-risk” individuals and children born to Hepatitis-B-positive parents. And it didn’t work out well. Disease rates only declined - by ~99% - after making the vaccine a universal recommendation on Day1 www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcn...

Hyperlocal forecasting that provides real time, practical information for people to use when navigating extreme weather events is perhaps one of the first steps in climate adaptation today. An institute in Mumbai, in partnership with the local met department, is on it www.science.org/content/arti...

it’s hard to overstate: -how beneficial vaccines are -how massively overwhelming the evidence is showing no link between vaccines and autism -how impossible it is that RFK will somehow “find the cause” (at all, let alone in his first year) -how much RFKjr want to get rid of childhood vaccines

Must read for all teams consulting infectious diseases #idsky #idmeded #meded #stewardship #voicesofID @cidjournal.bsky.social academic.oup.com/cid/advance-...

The Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, or CBER, was one of the hardest hit divisions. It ensures the safety and quality of biological products for human use, like red blood cells, immunotherapy, and vaccines. Since January, the center has lost about 500 people, or 26% of its workforce.

A natural experiment provides evidence for promoting moderate-vigorous physical activity: the importance of walkable cities www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Concern for airborne H5N1 on US dairy farm…(🎁 article) #IDSky Not yet peer reviewed 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/h...

A fascinating new paper in @nature.com found that infection w/ influenza or SARS-CoV-2 caused dormant breast cancer cells in the lungs to “awaken” & grow...*IN MICE*. The data for people was *suggestive* but not super compelling IMO. #episky #medsky #idsky jenndowd.substack.com/p/can-covid-...

Advice for academics on finding their public voice: www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Unsettling case: A UK baby develops #botulism after eating peanut butter. Father is peanut allergic; parents were trying to lower baby's risk of peanut allergy by gradually introducing peanut to its diet, per medical guidance. Baby was very ill but recovered. www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2...

Thanks for this useful thread. What about changing of the focus from immunity, the outcome of NPIs or other changes to pathogen circulation, to *infection*, the actual thing that is causing an impact. So... "Infection pause" works best here I think. 1/2

📃Follow-up of UCSF's DoxyPEP trial published. TL;DR ✅std care STI ↘️when started PEP -of course!🤷‍♂ ✅no difference between arms for doxy R in N. gono 🥳 ✅no change in S. aureus/MRSA carriage😅 ❌doxy R in S. aureus ↗️ in doxy arm 😬 #AMR #AntimicrobialResistance #IDSky www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

“Their small bodies are shutting down — they can’t breathe, their immune systems are collapsing.” Children are dying from starvation. Nearly 1 in 3 people are going days without food. This is preventable. They need food, water, care — urgently. #BlueSky #MedSku #NewsSky #PedsSky #NurseSky

Interesting randomised controlled trial that found use of AI tools (i.e. Cursor) made developers about 20% slower on time-to-completion. Included a nice accompanying visualisation of possible reasons for discrepancies between RCT and other findings... metr.org/blog/2025-07...

Neat to see this idea for how AI can be used to help with package learning!

105 years ago today, the Women's Bureau—a DOL office dedicated to promoting American women in the workforce—was born. Today, Trump is calling for its elimination for the first time ever. Spoke to 9 current & former staffers about its work for @motherjones.com: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Worth noting: we previously projected that if pregnant individuals been vaccinated at the same rate as age- and state-matched women, we would have averted 20% of maternal COVID-19 deaths (i.e., 8% of ALL maternal deaths) from March-November 2021. doi.org/10.7326/ANNA...

The Department of Health and Human Services has a process for making and updating recommendations like this, using expert scientists and clinicians. RFK is deliberately putting Americans' health at risk and sidestepping good science for political reasons.

Weekly COVID-19 hospital visits surge 88 percent Among 330 severe COVID-19 cases reported this year "74.2 percent were people aged 65 or older, 84 percent had underlying health conditions and 90 percent did not get the JN.1-adapted vaccine" www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/...

⛔️ Big NIH update: We just learned of 726 more NIH grants that were terminated sometime over the past 2 months. A huge number of diversity supps, diversity F31s, and diversity training grants. See below ⤵️ View them here: grant-watch.us/nih-data.html h/t to @noamross.net for processing them.

I had the exact same reaction...

Update: 800 documented measles cases in the US & CDC continues to have a plane travel image on the outbreak page. It used to be right, when measles was eliminated in the US. But this year 94% of cases are outbreak associated. It's here, it's spreading here. www.cdc.gov/measles/data...

I'm funded by one of the COVID-19 era grants used for pandemic preparedness they are working to pull back. Part of what I do is develop methods to continue to track COVID-19, These methods are leveraged for other diseases and will be invaluable to have ready for next pandemic. calcat.covid19.ca.gov

“I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president” www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

This is one of the biggest threats to Americans' personal data in decades. If you're a 23andMe customer, I strongly urge you to delete your data to protect it from whoever the new buyer might be. Here’s how:

A bit of delightful biology: my coauthor Jay Falk hypothesizes that the chicks of one species of hummingbird protect themselves by mimicking toxic caterpillars. www.colorado.edu/today/2025/0...

Yes, the US #flu season was historically huge. Yes, it has peaked, but as with climbing any mountain, one eventually has to go down the other side, and there are still many flu cases in the US community. www.cdc.gov/fluview/surv...

French researcher, going to a conference in Houston, was forbidden entry to US; his work and personal electronics were both confiscated. Why? Because a “random search” of his cell phone revealed a negative personal opinion on Trump and the Trump administration. www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

0.234... is the asymptotic optimal acceptance proportion for Random Walk Metropolis Hastings Markov Chain Monte Carlo. I conjecture this also suggests to us we can be working at about the right level of ambition if most things we try don't work out.

Nothing will kill more children than the ongoing decimation of CDC, NIH, and USAID work to lift vaccine uptake in the US and world. Child survival rose 75% in the last 50 years. Vaccines account for 40% of that. Measles vax alone was 60% of the benefit. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Wait, what the fuck? These orgs applied for and received grants from the government, and now, because this administration chooses to pretend climate change doesn’t exist, they’re going to be accused of FRAUD? For work already done and paid for as the government directed?

Eeeepa www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/c...

My latest post is now out. I show how Trump's attacks on science and universities are neither random nor new - they fit very precisely into the authoritarian playbook. This means we can guess what might come next and prepare - and we must! christinapagel.substack.com/p/censor-pur...

Check this out-terminated employee. “Without my position filled, these species will be neglected for years to come,” Gladstone said. He said his firing left these species, among the most at risk under the Endangered Species Act, in particular danger…as their habitats face threats from development.

WHO has an update (via DON) on the cluster of deaths in #DRC. Summary: 53 deaths, 1198 cases* Lead hypotheses: 🟢 chemical poisoning (accidental or deliberate) 🟢 bacterial meningitis (deadly, rapid onset) compounded by other infectious diseases, inc. endemic malaria (*broad case definition) 1/5

You want to know what has kept girls/women's sports from being extinct? DEI. Title IX mandated that schools give equal resources to girls (vs boys) sports. The right spent years raging against Title IX claiming it took opportunities from boys/men, and now they pretend to be "saving" women's sports?

NEWS: The USAID official put on leave for disseminating two memos about Rubio's failure to push through life-saving foreign aid was in the process of writing a THIRD memo when fired. We obtained it. It's far more alarming than the first two. www.thebulwark.com/p/what-a-wee...

Proposed budget cuts focused on medicaid cuts would directly impact the 37 million children covered by Medicaid (almost half of US kids)