A Look Back on 2024 Through U.S. Census Bureau Data | Census Bureau data document how we're changing as a country, from how and where we live to economic shifts, increased diversity, and how disasters affect communities. A Look Back on 2024 Through U.S. Census Bureau Data. 

Continue reading to learn more about:

-The rising cost of child care services
-The nation's fastest-growing metro areas
-The largest annual spike in public school spending in over 20 years
-Broadband access in tribal areas
-How to measure disasters' impact on supply chains
-The effect of power outages on households

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A growing number of emergency room visits are related to mental health emergencies, and hospitals are adapting to keep up. [Becker's Behavioral Health] 

One adaptation aims to carve out a therapeutic space amid a crowded and chaotic emergency department for patients experiencing a mental health crisis. 

EmPATH — emergency psychiatric assessment, treatment, and healing — units, look more like a living room than an ER. Though they run differently from hospital to hospital, the units feature reclining chairs, rather than beds, in a shared space, or milieu. Nursing stations are open, rather than shrouded in plexiglass. 

Inova Fairfax (Va.) Hospital is home to one of the newest EmPath units, which opened in November. Sonja Flood, director of Inova Behavioral Health, told Becker's the unit features 14 recliners, dim lighting, televisions and quiet spaces for patients who need to decompress away from others on the unit. 

The environment is key to the EmPATH unit, she said, and the hospital put a lot of thought into designing the space. 

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WASHINGTON — A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides a comprehensive assessment of the literature on science misinformation, its origins and impact, and strategies for mitigating its spread and potential harms. [National Academies]

While misinformation about science can originate from wide-ranging sources — such as corporations, governments and politicians, alternative health and science industries, entertainment media, news media, nongovernmental organizations, science organizations, individual scientists and medical professionals, and ordinary citizens — its influence varies, says the report. For example, science misinformation is more influential when it reaches large audiences, such as on search engines and social media. The report says search engines and social media platforms should foreground evidence-based science information that is clear and easy to understand for different audiences, working closely with nonprofit, nonpartisan professional science societies and organizations to identify such information.

To provide clarity and to focus its analysis, the committee that wrote the report defined misinformation about science as “information that asserts or implies claims that are inconsistent with the weight of accepted scientific evidence at the time (reflecting both quality and quantity of evidence).” Claims that are determined to be misinformation about science can evolve over time as new evidence accumulates and scientific knowledge advances. Moreover, the committee considered disinformation about science to be a subcategory of misinformation that is spread by agents who are aware they are circulating false information.

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The healthcare profession has done an admirable job controlling infectious epidemics and pandemics, such as AIDS and COVID-19 (special shout-out to Operation Warp Speed for the creation of COVID vaccines in record time). Now, we need to move on to social media epidemics. [MedPage Today]

I believe the epidemic of social media has the potential to be as dangerous as infectious epidemics. Mental health should be treated with the same urgency as physical health. The time has arrived for physicians to take an active role in recognizing the dangers of social media, especially for youth, and to have discussions with young patients and their parents about the impact of social media on the growth and development of children.

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Black men born from 1951 through 1970 have the greatest risk of dying of overdoses and always have, even in their 20s,30s, and 40s. That's true in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington and some other cities, an investigation by the Sun-Times, The New York Times, The Baltimore Banner, Big Local News at Stanford University and other organizations found.  [Chicago Sun-Times]

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The life expectancy for Chicagoans has risen to a level higher than was seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, but disparities remain, according to a report released this week by the city’s Department of Public Health. [Health News Illinois]

Life expectancy in Chicago rose to 77.2 years in 2022, just 1.6 years below the 2019 level.

However, the life expectancy for Black Chicagoans was 69.8 years, about 11.4 years less than non-Black city residents. Chronic diseases, such as heart disease, as well as homicide and opioid overdoses remain the primary factors driving the gap.

Life expectancy is lower in several south and west sides communities. For residents of the West Garfield Park neighborhood, it's 62 years.

"The recent data has prompted us to reflect on how to best direct our resources and tailor our efforts to make progress toward closing this gap,” CDPH Commissioner Dr. Olusimbo ‘Simbo’ Ige said in a statement. “We will align CDPH’s priorities and programs to address the primary factors driving the widening racial life expectancy gap in the most impacted communities."

The life expectancy among the Latinx population was 81.4 years in 2022, while ​​Asian and Pacific Islander Chicagoans lived on average 85.5 years. The life expectancy for white city residents was 80.3 years. 

The strategic plan lays out seven action steps to address the contributing factors to the life expectancy gap for Black Chicagoans, with a specific focus on addressing outcomes in five Chicago neighborhoods on the south and west sides where lower life expectancy is concentrated. That includes supporting programs that address social determinants that lead to chronic conditions.

The report calls for shifting focus away from white health outcomes as the standard or goal and instead focusing on “reaching health equity for all people”

"Our focus is on improving the health and well-being of all Chicagoans, through effective collaboration and data-driven strategies,” Ige said. “CDPH is committed to prioritizing the health of communities most affected by declining life expectancy."

The agency will allow public review and input on the plan into early next year.

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The modified vaccinia Ankara-Bavarian Nordic (MVA-BN) vaccine is approved in several countries for use in the prevention of mpox and smallpox in adults. New research suggests it’s also safe and produces an immune response in adolescents, a population affected by the current clade I mpox outbreak. [JAMA Network]

In an interim analysis presented at the IDWeek2024 conference, researchers evaluated the immune response generated by 2 doses of MVA-BN in participants aged 12 to 17 years. Midstage results from the National Institutes of Health–funded trial showed that antibody levels in adolescents 2 weeks after the second dose were comparable with those observed in adults. Additionally, the vaccine was well-tolerated for the following 6 months. Although reports of dizziness were more common in adolescents than adults, the frequency was on par with the dizzying effects of other vaccines in this age group.

These results could support a broader application of the MVA-BN vaccine, but the authors stressed the need to review the vaccine’s effectiveness in children younger than 12 years, who are also affected by the current global outbreak.

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Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has joined the U.S. Department of Justice and the federal and state Environmental Protection Agencies to sue two Metro East communities over failures to address their sewer systems. [Health News Illinois]

Lawsuits filed against Cahokia Heights and East St. Louis allege the two cities violated federal and state environmental protection laws by failing to address sanitary sewer overflows, threatening the health of those who live in the surrounding communities, Raoul said.

“For too long, the neglected and aging sewer systems in Cahokia Heights and East St. Louis have forced local residents to deal with raw sewage in their basements, in their streets and in local waterways,” he said in a statement.

Cahokia Heights has entered into a consent decree to resolve the allegations, requiring the city to pay a $30,000 civil penalty and invest $30 million in sewer improvement projects. An ongoing health study has found Cahokia Height residents have been exposed to bacteria and parasites from sewage backups and flooding. 

Mayor Curtis McCall Sr. said the consent decree represents the city’s “continued commitment to invest in our infrastructure and improve the lives of residents throughout Cahokia Heights for many years to come.”

The complaint against East St. Louis alleges the city discharged untreated sewage to the Mississippi River 140 times since 2020, and an unknown number of times into Whispering Willow Lake.

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In the past few years, state and local governments across the U.S. have begun spending billions in opioid settlements paid by companies accused of fueling the overdose crisis. But where is that money going, who is getting it, and is it doing any good? [KFF Health News}

KFF Health News, partnering with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Shatterproof, a national nonprofit focused on addiction, undertook a yearlong investigation to find out.

Dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of documents, an array of public records requests, and outreach to all 50 states resulted in a first-of-its kind database that catalogs more than 7,000 ways opioid settlement cash was used in 2022 and 2023. It’s the most comprehensive resource to date tracking some of the largest public health settlements in American history.

Among the findings:

• States and localities received more than $6 billion in opioid settlement funds in 2022 and 2023. According to public records, they spent or committed about a third of that amount and set aside about another third for future use. The final third was untrackable, as many jurisdictions did not produce public reports on the funds.
• Reports of spending tracked the minuscule to the monumental, from $11.74 to buy postage in Yavapai County, Arizona, to more than $51 million to increase the addiction treatment workforce in California.

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— The benefits outweigh the risks | Despite water fluoridation being widely regarded as one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for HHS secretary, is pushing to remove fluoride from drinking water. [MedPage Today]

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, MD (R), is now echoing RFK Jr.'s concerns and advising Florida communities against adding fluoride to public water systems. He is calling it "public health malpractice." Meanwhile, other states and communities have initiated conversations about whether they should still mandate the practice.

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