The case studies in Medicine for a Changing Planet, collated from clinical encounters around the world, support health professionals in recognizing and treating a variety of health-related conditions that can be traced to environmental stressors.
Tag: School of Public Health
Taken together, the two papers’ findings suggest that wildfire smoke poses a risk to people of all ages, not just young children and older adults.
Two years after the Pacific Northwest heat dome — the deadliest weather-related disaster in state history — a collaborative effort has drawn up recommendations for how people and groups across the state could prevent future heat-related illness and save lives. The effort involves a report led by the UW Climate Impacts Group and an interactive risk-mapping tool led by the UW Center for Health and the Global Environment,
The University of Washington’s graduate and professional degree programs were widely recognized as among the best in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2024 Best Graduate Schools rankings released late Monday.
A record-breaking heat wave that baked Washington state in 2021 contributed to 159 excess injury deaths, according to research led by a UW professor.
Four new faculty books from the University of Washington cover topics ranging from inequality’s effects on health to fad diets to former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s legacy on gender equality.
New research led by the University of Washington finds that the number of U.S. adult handgun owners carrying a loaded handgun on their person doubled from 2015 to 2019, and that a larger proportion of handgun owners carried handguns in states with less restrictive carrying regulations.
The University of Washington is proud to announce that more than 44 faculty and researchers who completed their work while at UW have been named on the annual Highly Cited Researchers 2022 list from Clarivate.
Connect with the UW community every week through public events and exhibitions, summarized in this ArtSci Roundup.
Connect with the UW community every week through public events and exhibitions, summarized in this ArtSci Roundup.
Heat-related deaths occur across Washington state, even in regions with typically milder climates. This is the most extensive study yet of heat-related mortality in Washington state, and the first to look beyond the major population to and include rural areas. Researchers used statistical methods to uncover “hidden” deaths that may have listed something else, like illness or a chronic disease, as the primary cause.
When schools closed during the first year of the pandemic, an immediate and potentially devastating problem surfaced: How would millions of children in struggling families get the school meals many of them depended on? The U.S. Congress responded by authorizing the Department of Agriculture to roll out two major programs. It launched the “grab and go school meals,” which helped schools provide prepared meals for off-site consumption and distributed funding for the state-operated Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) program, which gave…
For birds that inhabit developed areas of the Pacific Northwest, the reduction in noise and commotion from COVID-19 lockdowns may have allowed them to use a wider range of habitats in cities, a new University of Washington study has found.
Since it first launched in 2019, Washington state’s Environmental Health Disparities Map has been used to help decisionmakers and government agencies engage with overburdened communities to clean up contamination, improve buildings and electric grids, plant trees and many other projects. Using a complex matrix of data, this open-access, interactive map ranks Washington’s nearly 1,500 U.S. census tracts by health risks due to environmental degradation and economic and health disparities. It acts as a guide for state agencies and the legislature…
Eight University of Washington subjects ranked in the top 10 and Atmospheric Sciences moved to its position as No. 1 in the world on the Global Ranking of Academic Subjects list for 2022. The ranking, released Tuesday, was conducted by researchers at the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, a fully independent organization dedicating to research on higher education intelligence and consultation.
After Washington became the first state to require suicide prevention training for health care providers, the University of Washington worked with experts and organizations to develop the All Patients Safe program. A new study shows how All Patients Safe helped providers of all specialties learn how to identify and respond to patients at risk of suicide.
Air pollution is not just a problem for lungs. Increasingly, research suggests air pollution can influence childhood behavioral problems and even IQ. A new study led by the University of Washington has added evidence showing that both prenatal and postnatal exposure to air pollution can harm kids. The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, found that children whose mothers experienced higher nitrogen dioxide (NO2) exposure during pregnancy, particularly in the first and second trimester, were more likely to have behavioral problems….
New research led by University of Washington professors James Krieger and Melissa Knox found that sweetened beverage taxes redistributed dollars from higher- to lower-income households.
Opioid use disorder is an addiction crisis in the United States that has become increasingly lethal during the COVID-19 pandemic. To preserve access to life-saving treatment during the pandemic, federal drug agencies loosened requirements on physicians for treating these patients, including moving patient evaluations away from in-person exams to telemedicine. This federal policy change focused primarily on buprenorphine, a highly effective treatment for opioid use disorder and one that is much less onerous and stigmatizing than methadone, the other most…
All forest fire smoke is bad for people, but not all fires in forests are bad. This is the conundrum faced by experts in forest management and public health: Climate change and decades of fire suppression that have increased fuels are contributing to larger and more intense wildfires and, in order to improve forest health and reduce these explosive fires, prescribed and managed fire is necessary. Video: Experts collaborate to troubleshoot necessary fires and harmful smoke Journalists: Download soundbites…
As the most serious type of skin cancer, a melanoma diagnosis carries emotional, financial and medical consequences. That’s why recent studies finding that there is an overdiagnosis of melanoma are a significant cause for concern. “Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of disease that will not harm a person in their lifetime. If melanoma is being overdiagnosed, it means that too many people are getting the scary news that they have cancer, and receiving and paying for unnecessary treatment,” said Kathleen Kerr,…
The University of Washington’s graduate and professional degree programs were widely recognized as among the best in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2023 Best Graduate School rankings released Tuesday.
Two University of Washington experts in climate change and health are lead authors of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The new report titled Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptations and Vulnerability, published Monday morning, details in over three thousand pages a “dire warning” about the consequences of inaction on reducing the emissions that are causing our planet to warm and on implementing interventions to prepare for and effectively manage the dangerous impacts of climate change…
Across the globe, endangered species are at risk for illegal poaching. African elephants are sought out for their ivory, rhinoceros for their singular horns, and armadillo-like pangolins for their protective, brittle scales. Add to that list valuable and environmentally sensitive trees illegally harvested throughout the world where entire ecosystems are being deforested and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing that is devastating oceans. These illicit markets, estimated at $1 trillion annually, cause enormous environmental impacts and have the potential to unleash new, deadly pathogens.
What started as a University of Washington-led project to measure air pollution near Sea-Tac International Airport has led to schools in the area installing portable air filters to improve indoor air quality. First, UW researchers found they were able to parse aircraft pollution from roadway pollution in the communities under Sea-Tac International Airport flight paths and map the air quality impacts of the ultrafine particles associated with planes. Then they discovered that the mix of ultrafine particle pollution, black carbon…
New research from an interdisciplinary team at the University of Washington, Duke University and The Nature Conservancy shows how local temperature increases in the tropics – compounded by accelerating deforestation – may already be jeopardizing the well-being and productivity of outdoor workers.
Outdoor workers in the world’s lower-latitude tropical forests may face a greater risk of heat-related deaths and unsafe working conditions because of deforestation and climate warming, according to a study led by The Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington and Indonesia’s Mulawarman University. In the study, researchers found that increased temperatures of 0.95 C (1.7 F) in the deforested areas of Berau Regency, Indonesia, between 2002 and 2018 were linked to roughly 118 additional deaths in 2018, and 20 additional…
Public health messages such as in the image below — designed to reduce parents’ purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages marketed as fruit drinks for children — convinced a significant percentage of parents to avoid those drinks, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Pennsylvania. The UW-led study set out to assess the effect of culturally tailored countermarketing messages on drink choices, similar to stark anti-smoking campaigns, and involved more than 1,600 Latinx parents…
When you get into the car of the app-based driver you just tapped up on your phone, you expect and hope the driver and the car are safe and capable of getting you where you need to go. Apps rate drivers, which you can see. But what if the driver is sick? What if the car has a mechanical problem? What if the driver has simply had a bad day? What you may not have realized is that the driver…
New research by the University of Washington shows that states eased pandemic restrictions, such as gathering limits and business closures, based on politics as much as COVID-19 death rates or case counts.
For researchers around the world working to understand and treat Alzheimer’s and eventually find a cure, data from clinical exams of patients suffering from this complex neurodegenerative disease needs to be standardized and accessible. Since 1999, that’s what the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center (NACC), housed in the UW School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology, has been doing. With funding from the NIH’s National Institute on Aging, the UW center began collecting data from another set of centers housed in…
University of Washington Associate Professor Wendy Barrington will be the featured speaker at the university’s 38th annual New Student Convocation. Barrington has joint appointments in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing in the School of Nursing and the departments of Epidemiology and of Health Systems and Population Health in the School of Public Health.
The new Cascadia Coastlines and Peoples Hazards Research Hub, led by Oregon State University and the University of Washington, will study coastal hazards and community resilience. The National Science Foundation awarded $18.9 million for the hub over five years.
In a new series on increasingly common extreme heat waves and their impact on human health published Thursday in the British medical journal The Lancet, a University of Washington climate change and health expert joined more than a dozen international experts to warn that we better prepare. “The preventable heat stress and deaths during this summer’s heat waves highlight the importance of developing a regional heat action plan. A heat wave early warning and response plan that includes all relevant services,…
With wildfire smoke forecast for next week in Seattle and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in Oregon posting rules for keeping workers safe during increasingly smoky conditions and heat in that state, we caught up with a University of Washington expert on worker safety for advice. Check out Professor Baker’s advice on worker safety in this video. Journalists can download the video here. Marissa Baker, an industrial hygiene program director and assistant professor in the UW Department of…
Using data from two large, long-running study projects in the Puget Sound region — one that began in the late 1970s measuring air pollution and another on risk factors for dementia that began in 1994 — University of Washington researchers identified a link between air pollution and dementia. In the UW-led study, a small increase in the levels of fine particle pollution (PM2.5 or particulate matter 2.5 micrometers or smaller) averaged over a decade at specific addresses in the Seattle…
Washington residents continue to experience a dramatically higher level of food insecurity — from 10% before the COVID-19 pandemic to 27%, according to the latest University of Washington and Washington State University research on food insecurity and food assistance in the state. The study team also found that need for food assistance has continued to rise. Before COVID-19, about 29% of respondents reported using food assistance. In wave 1 of the survey, food assistance use increased to 33% of respondents;…
Public health researchers have learned a lot about how the pandemic affected workers and exacerbated existing health disparities that exist in many communities. However, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the experience of workers deemed essential in the food industry and who were at higher risk of contracting COVID-19, such those working in grocery stores, restaurants, delivery and factories. To find out how food workers were or were not protected and how they can be better protected going…
Twenty scientists and engineers at the University of Washington are among the 38 new members elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences for 2021, according to a July 15 announcement. New members were chosen for “their outstanding record of scientific and technical achievement, and their willingness to work on behalf of the Academy to bring the best available science to bear on issues within the state of Washington.”
People don’t gain or lose weight because they live near a fast-food restaurant or supermarket, according to a new study led by the University of Washington. And, living in a more “walkable,” dense neighborhood likely only has a small impact on weight. These “built-environment” amenities have been seen in past research as essential contributors to losing weight or tending toward obesity. The idea appears obvious: If you live next to a fast-food restaurant, you’ll eat there more and thus gain…