Health & Fitness

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), is awarding $20 million in American Rescue Plan (ARP) grant funding to State-based Marketplaces (SBMs) to increase consumer access to affordable, comprehensive health insurance coverage. The grants will be used by 21 SBMs to modernize IT systems and/or conduct targeted consumer outreach activities to help make health care coverage enrollment smoother. As a result, consumers will have access to increased financial assistance and eligibility determinations will be made faster.

The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered long-term underinvestment in the public health workforce, including staff losses and underfunding for public health education, according to a new paper in the American Journal of Public Health. For training of individuals in health departments to succeed, we must assess needs, increase access to education for future public health professionals, and invest in the existing public health workforce, according to Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health authors Heather Krasna and Dean Linda P. Fried.

Antibodies are like the protective force fields that surround the family in the movie “The Incredibles,” explains immunology professor Marion Pepper. Even if a threat breaks through that force field, they can still use their superhero powers to defend themselves.

Four traveling nurses quit their assignments at Providence St. Joseph Hospital just one day after starting because they were unfamiliar with the Eureka, Calif.-based hospital's EHR system, the Times Standard reported Sept. 4.

Racial disparities narrow on vaccines Since vaccines became available last winter, they’ve gone disproportionately to white people over Black and Hispanic people. But that may be starting to change, writes Nada Hassanein in USA Today. In recent weeks, as cases have soared, more people of color received a first shot, compared to their overall population share, than white people. “It shows a glint of promise,” experts told Hassanein. In Southern states where the delta variant is raging, Black and Hispanic vaccination rates are rising particularly fast, according to Bloomberg Equality’s COVID-19 tracker — but, “overall, states are still generally lagging in vaccinating Black and Hispanic people.” Those analyses are based on government data, which are incomplete, but an NBC News poll suggests a different picture: When asked, 76% of Black respondents said they’d been vaccinated, along with 71% of Latinos and just 66% of whites.