Health & Fitness

Several key public health occupations are lacking a Standard Occupational Classification code (SOC), including disease intervention specialist, public health nurse, policy analyst, and program manager, and without valid SOC matches and detailed data on local and state government health departments, the U.S. Department of Labor’s data cannot be used to count the number of public health workers serving as our nation’s frontline biodefense.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released new data on state Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) enrollment changes among children and youth since full eligibility renewals for these programs restarted earlier this year.

When a toilet is flushed in California, the water can end up in a lot of places: An ice skating rink near Disneyland, ski slopes around Lake Tahoe, farmland in the Central Valley. And — coming soon — kitchen faucets.

A woman whose fetus was unlikely to survive called more than a dozen abortion clinics before finding one that would take her, only to be put on weekslong waiting lists. A teen waited seven weeks for an abortion because it took her mother that long to get her an appointment. Others seeking the procedure faced waits because they struggled to travel hundreds of miles for care.

Physicians have long emphasized individual actions to prevent chronic disease such as eating well, exercising, and avoiding smoking. But even as global smoking rates have dropped, the amount of chronic disease at the population level hasn’t fallen as much as public health researchers had hoped it would.