CIDRAP: CDC revamps wastewater COVID data reporting. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently unveiled new wastewater data tracking dashboard to make it easier to track local and national trends, even by variant. Wastewater tracking is one of the early indicators health officials use to gauge the activity of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses.”
Union College: Stigmatizing content on social media affects perceptions of mental health care, new study reveals. “Research has shown that social media can negatively impact people’s mental health. But can it affect people’s beliefs about mental health treatment? Yes, according to researchers at Union. In one of the first studies to examine the impact of social media on people’s perceptions of mental health care, researchers discovered that viewing just a few social media posts that mock mental health treatment can have a profound impact on some people’s attitudes toward treatment.”
CBS News: 2 N.J. emergency rooms diverting patients after Hackensack Meridian Health hit with potential cyber attack. “A ransomware attack on a health system in New Jersey is forcing two hospitals in the state to divert patients coming to their emergency rooms to other facilities. One of the hospitals is Hackensack Meridian Pascack Valley Medical Center in Westwood and the other is in Montclair.”
University of Waterloo: Revolutionizing the way air quality data is shared. “Shahan Salim, a PhD candidate in the School of Public Health Sciences and a member of the Waterloo Climate Institute’s COP 28 delegation, has designed, in partnership with UNICEF in Mongolia, a platform to use data from low-cost air quality sensors to monitor and predict adverse outcomes related to air pollution exposure in underserved communities.”
Harvard Gazette: Smart trackers may predict health risks in older adults. “Wearable devices that measure daily patterns of circadian rest-activity rhythms may be able to predict frailty-related health risks more than six years before an incidence occurs, according to a new study out of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.”
University of Florida: Study reveals bias in AI tools when diagnosing women’s health issue. “Machine learning algorithms designed to diagnose a common infection that affects women showed a diagnostic bias among ethnic groups, University of Florida researchers found.”
University of Nebraska Medical Center: Online resource offers child-friendly lesson on COVID-19. “Parents and guardians looking to find a child-friendly yet scientifically accurate way of speaking to kids about COVID-19 and other communicable diseases can turn to a new resource from UNMC, in partnership with the ‘Youth in Agriculture’ education program. A user-friendly online COVID-19 Training mini-course for kids now is available via phone, tablet or desktop computer.”
European Food Information Council: New Food Facts community to empower media and scientists to fight food misinformation together. “In a bid to enhance the quality of food-related reporting and counter misinformation on food EUFIC is launching its online community Food Facts during the Global Media and Information Literacy Week. The initiative aims to provide a platform for the exchange of information between media and experts with insights in the realm of healthy and sustainable nutrition, including topics that frequently appear in the news such as sugar, fats, food additives (such as sweeteners), processed food, obesity or diabetes.”
PetaPixel: Selfie-Related Deaths are ‘Public Health Risk’ in Age of Social Media. “In a paper published in September, researchers found that selfie-related injury and deaths have become a public health concern amid the near ubiquitous use of smartphones and social media apps. The paper scraped news reports of selfie-related deaths as well as a cross-sectional study by the iO Foundation that found 379 people were killed while taking selfies around the world between January 2008 and July 2021.”
New York Times: V.A. Recruits Millionth Veteran for Its Genetic Research Database. This is a gift article and you should be able to read it without paywall. “On Saturday, after a 12-year effort, the Department of Veterans Affairs reached a long-term goal — it enrolled the millionth veteran in a genetic database, the Million Veteran Program. According to the V.A., the Million Veteran Program is the largest such database in the world.”
WIRED: Underage Workers Are Training AI. “Driven by a global rush into AI, the global data labeling and collection industry is expected to grow to over $17.1 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research, a market research and consulting company. Crowdsourcing platforms such as Toloka, Appen, Clickworker, Teemwork.AI, and OneForma connect millions of remote gig workers in the global south to tech companies located in Silicon Valley. Platforms post micro-tasks from their tech clients, which have included Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, Google, Nvidia, Boeing, and Adobe. Many platforms also partner with Microsoft’s own data services platform, the Universal Human Relevance System (UHRS).”
MedPage Today: ChatGPT Quickly Authored 100 Blogs Full of Healthcare Disinformation. “In just 65 minutes and with basic prompting, ChatGPT produced 102 blog articles containing more than 17,000 words of disinformation on those two topics, Ashley Hopkins, PhD, of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and colleagues reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.”
University of Colorado: New Interactive Evidence-Based Mapping Tool Gives Policymakers More Insight into Highly Concentrated Cannabis Products. “After conducting the first scoping review of its kind, researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have developed an evidence based interactive mapping tool to assist policymakers as they consider regulating the concentration of THC in cannabis products and as more potent products move into the marketplace…. The map includes 452 studies that meets three criteria: studies involving humans; highly concentrated cannabis exposure; and any health outcomes regardless of whether they were classified as beneficial or adverse.”
National Library of Medicine: Digitized Document Collection from USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee Now Publicly Available Through NLM. “A collection of reproduced documents from the 1932 study by the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) on the effects of untreated syphilis in Black men at Tuskegee Institute is now available as a digitized collection through the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee was conducted without informed consent and led to major reforms to protect participants in biomedical research.”
Penn Live: How many deaths occurred in your county’s jail? See our database. “The lack of proper reporting by Pa. jails is widespread, resulting in severe undercounting of in-custody deaths in the Commonwealth. PennLive and the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism spent 6-months investigating in-custody deaths to create the first comprehensive database in Pa. Toggle over any county on this interactive map to see the number of deaths and details about those deaths.”
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