A weekly roundup of public health news
Poll: New US health leadership reduces trust for some
More than 4 in 10 Americans say they will lose trust in public health recommendations because of new leaders appointed by the Trump administration.
The findings, released April 29, come from a national poll conducted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and de Beaumont Foundation in March. Although 44% of U.S. adults overall said they will have less trust in federal public health agencies, the results were split starkly along party lines. While 76% of Democrats said they will lose trust, 57% of Republicans said they would gain it.
The partisan disparity extended to opinions on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with 83% of Democrats saying the agency will function more poorly under the Trump administration, and 80% of Republicans saying it will function better. Trump officials have cut thousands of jobs, gutted funding and ended programs at the agency.
People who think CDC will function worse over the next four years said they were worried that health recommendations will be influenced by politics, public access to health information on issues such as vaccines will be reduced and health threats such as infectious disease outbreaks would be downplayed.
Despite the political division, poll respondents agreed on a number of issues they believe should be top priorities for CDC and their state and local health departments. Both Democrats and Republicans said those should include preventing chronic diseases, reducing maternal and infant mortality, and ensuring the safety of tap water.
The results follow the appointment of leaders with questionable qualifications to key federal health agency posts in recent months. One of those is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a science skeptic now serving as head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who this week implied vaccines were unsafe and misstated how new drugs are approved by the federal government. Another is Trump administration appointee Mehmet Oz, a former TV personality sued for promoting fake weight-loss supplements, who is now leading the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Low water pressure can you make you sick
When water pressure falls, gastrointestinal illnesses may rise, new research says.
Published April 23 in Environmental Health Perspectives, the study found households that consume water while pressure is low are 20% more likely to experience gastrointestinal illness. The more water people in exposed households drank, the greater their risk of getting sick with symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting and abdominal pain, the study found.
When water systems experience low pressure, such as during maintenance or emergencies, they can become contaminated through backflow or environmental sources — which is why communities often issue boil water alerts when pressure is low.
About 240,000 water main breaks occur annually in the U.S., regularly putting Americans at risk from contaminated water. Scheduled work on water systems, such as pipe installations, cleaning and repairs can lower water pressure as well. Flooding, which is becoming more common with human-caused climate change, can cause pipes to crack or leak and also reduce pressure.
While chemical disinfectants and water system flushing are commonly used after low-pressure events, the study findings show there is room for improvement. Researchers found E. coli, enterococci and P. aeruginosa — bacteria found in feces and soil — in samples taken from water systems that had experienced low pressure.
Study researchers, who were affiliated with CDC, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other institutions, called for reducing the number of low-pressure events when able, increasing adherence to disinfection practices and more monitoring for contamination after system repairs.
Lack of monitoring leaves millions without air quality information
When it comes to local air quality, 50 million people in the U.S. may be in the dark, a new study finds.
More than half of counties in U.S. have no active air-quality monitoring sites, according to the April 21 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Air quality data is gathered mainly by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or by communities working in tandem with EPA.
Communities in rural areas and in the South and Midwest are most likely to lack air quality monitoring sites, which are used to collect data on air pollution and advise residents on air safety. Counties without monitoring were also more likely to have higher levels of poverty, lower education levels and higher proportions of Hispanic and Black residents, the study found.
Researchers identified more than 4,800 active air quality monitors in the nation’s 3,200 counties as of September 2024. While numerous, the monitors were not equally distributed. States such as Massachusetts, Washington and California had monitoring sites in every or near-every county, but in many states, the sites were few and far between.
When people in Stratford, a small city in the Texas Panhandle, search for their air quality in AirNow.gov, for example, they receive a message that “there are no current and forecast air quality data found near your location.” The same holds true for Sullivan City, a small community in the Rio Grande Valley that is near numerous oil fields. Though Texas boasts of having “one of the most robust air quality networks” in the U.S., many of its counties lack monitoring sites.
As people in rural areas are more likely to be exposed to pollutants such as wildfire smoke or agricultural emissions, a lack of local monitoring could leave them vulnerable to health risks, study researchers said.
Other recent public health news of note includes:
• Chemicals in plastic used for food containers, medical equipment and other common products could be linked to more than 365,000 heart disease deaths around the world each year, an April 29 study in eBioMedicine finds. The use of di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate, also known as DEHP, in plastic contributed to 13% of all global health disease deaths in 2018, researchers estimated.
• High concentrations of wildfire smoke increase hospitalizations for respiratory problems among older adults, says a new study in JAMA Network Open that looked at data from 11 states in the western U.S.
• Hotter temperatures can trigger wetlands to emit more methane, new research in Science Advances says. In coastal wetlands dominated by thick sedges, methane emission levels rose to nearly four times higher than usual with high heat. Wetlands are the world’s largest natural source of methane, which is a contributor to global warming.
• Improvements in U.S. life expectancy have stalled in the South, new findings in JAMA Network Open report. Researchers looked at changes in life expectancy from 1900 to 2000, finding significant increases in the West and Northeast U.S., such as New York’s jump from about 60 years for men born in 1900 to nearly 88 in 2000. Improvements were much less significant in the South, with West Virginia’s life expectancy of about 74 for women born in 1900 creeping up to only 75 in 2000.
The Watch is written by Michele Late, who has more than two decades of experience as a public health journalist.