👉 Applying our estimates to all insured LA residents, we estimated > 15,000 excess cardiovascular and respiratory-related virtual care visits and nearly 30,000 excess respiratory outpatient visits
💻 Virtual care likely to play a growing role as climate change intensifies 🥵

👉 All-cause virtual visits were also elevated in the moderately exposed group, potentially indicating displaced care

Two-stage interrupted time series analysis with machine learning: evaluating the health effects of the 2018 wildfire smoke event in San Francisco County as a case study - PubMed Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered a key identification strategy for establishing causal relationships between exposures and outcomes. When evaluating the health impacts of extreme weather events, however, RCTs are generally infeasible due to ethical issues, costs, and the lack of a …

👉 Studied 3.7 million Kaiser members using a two-stage interrupted time series design (read more: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40663094/)
👉 Cardiorespiratory virtual care and respiratory outpatient visits ⬆️ by >30% among those highly and moderately exposed

2025 Los Angeles Wildfires and Outpatient Acute Health Care This cohort study assesses the January 2025 LA fires’ impact on acute outpatient health care use at Kaiser Permanente Southern California.

🔥 Our new study, in collaboration with Kaiser Permanente, finds heightened outpatient 🩺 and virtual care 💻 utilization in the week following the 2025 LA fires ignition

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

California joins firefighting compact with a dozen Northwest states and Canadian provinces The Northwest Wildland Fire Fighting Compact facilitates sharing of firefighting resources and technology amongst U.S. and Canadian members — now including California — during emergencies.

California joins firefighting compact with a dozen Northwest states and Canadian provinces

Worth a read

🚨 OUT NOW! Our new @science.org study led by @kohrathefog.bsky.social is the first to comprehensively quantify the health impacts of and inequities in outdoor air pollution exposure across all stages of the US oil and gas lifecycle: extraction ➡️ transport/storage ➡️ refining/processing ➡️ end-use. 🧵

Just like most other universities in the US 👇

Preschooler describing to me how hot rain that is very strong can burn up and break the snow (through all the layers) and boy am I teaching her climate change right 🔥

💪💪💪❤️

Meditate they say
Just breath, stay calm
Problem is dealing with
These foreign countries like Guam

2025 is going great
There’s no system glitch
Yeah, let’s go ahead with
The “Theranos-like pitch”

F31 does not appear as an "Active Opportunity"

The NIH F31 (pre-doc training award) announcement expired yesterday, and nothing has replaced it.

Difficult to advise students to work on these grants for an August submission with this level of uncertainty. The system is truly gummed up.

a bar plot showing that a greater percentage of F31 awards have been cancelled as compared to R01 awards.

But there's a catch - if you normalize these data to the total number of R01s and F31s awarded in 2023, the story changes: a greater *percentage* of the trainee awards have been cancelled as compared to non-trainee awards.

THE SECRETARY OF EDUCATION WASHINGTON, DC 20202 May 5, 2025 Dr. Alan Garber Office of the President Harvard University Massachusetts Hall Cambridge, MA 02138 Dr. Garber, The Federal Government has a sacred responsibility to be a wise and important steward of American taxpayer dollars. Harvard University, despite amassing a largely tax-free $53.2 billion dollar endowment (larger than the GDP of 100 countries), receives billions of dollars of taxpayer largess each year. Receiving such taxpayer funds is a privilege, not a right. Yet instead of using these funds to advance the education of its students, Harvard is engaging in a systemic pattern of violating federal law. Where do many of these "students" come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country—and why is there so much HATE? These are questions that must be answered, among many more, but the biggest question of all is, why will Harvard not give straightforward answers to the American public? Harvard University has made a mockery of this country's higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus. In every way, Harvard has failed to abide by its legal obligations, its ethical and fiduciary duties, its transparency responsibilities, and any semblance of academic rigor. It had scrapped standardized testing requirements and a normalized grading system. This year Harvard was forced to adopt an embarrassing "remedial math" program for undergraduates. Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics, when it is supposedly so hard to get into this "acclaimed university"? Who is getting in under such a low standard when others, with fabulous grades and a great understanding of the highest levels of mathematics, are being rejected? Harvard has even been embroiled in humiliating plagiarism scandals, exposed clearly and plainly in the media, with respect to your then…

running the institution in a totally chaotic way. Harvard alumnus and highly successful hedge fund manager Bill Ackman noted that, under her leadership, Harvard has become "a political advocacy organization for one party." Ackman has called for the resignation of Pritzker, concluding that the "[t)he mismanagement here is Penny Pritzker" and noting that any serious corporation would have removed her after a litany of recent failings and the fact that, incredibly, "Harvard is not in a good financial position." According to Ackman, one of the world's foremost finance experts, Harvard's so-called S53 billion endowment is "massively overstated as far as what it's really worth," and Harvard has irresponsibly taken out $8 billion in debt. If this is true, it is concerning evidence of Harvard's disastrous mismanagement, indicating an urgent need for massive reform-not continued taxpayer investment. If Harvard prefers not to change, then Harvard should have no problem using its overflowing endowment to fund its bloated bureaucracy. At its best, a university should fulfill the highest ideals of our Nation, and enlighten the thousands of hopeful students who walk through its magnificent gates. But Harvard has betrayed this ideal. Perhaps most alarmingly, Harvard has failed to abide by the United States Supreme Court's ruling demanding that it end its racial preferencing, and continues to engage in ugly racism in its undergraduate and graduate schools, and even within the Harvard Law Review itself. Our universities should be bastions of merit that reward and celebrate excellence and achievement. They should not be incubators of discrimination that encourage resentment and instill grievance and racism into our wonderful young Americans. The above concerns are only a fraction of the long list of Harvard's consistent violations of its own legal duties. Given these and other concerning allegations, this letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the fede…

Federal Agencies. The Administration's priorities have not changed and today's letter marks the end of new grants for the University. These requests will advance the best interests of Harvard University, so it can reclaim its status as a respected educational institution for the future leaders of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! Sincerely, Linda E. McMahon Secretary of Education

🚨🚨 Deranged letter from Education Secretary Linda McMahon to Harvard’s president, cutting off federal funding for any new grants.

Worth reading in full. It is NUTS.

⚡️Younger children and non-Hispanic Black children had highest incidence of CO poisoning

publications.aap.org/pediatrics/a...

New paper on health risks related to power outages led by Alex Northrop @upenn.bsky.social

⚡️Risk of CO poisoning increased with power outage exposure: biggest impact on same-day and two days following the outage

⚡️2% of total CO poisoning cases in NY attributed to power outages between 2017–2020

I'm sad about a lot, but the chopping of MOSAIC, diversity F31s, and diversity supplements may top the list. 😔

I can do this all day: absolutely horrific health policy

Absolutely horrific health policy

Disproportionate exposure in communities with a higher proportion of American Indian and Alaska Native people

Communities most exposed to all three hazards simultaneously 🥵 + 🔥 💨 + 🔥 burn zones disproportionately consisted of people of older age, with disabilities, and living in poverty

Coexposure to extreme heat, wildfire burn zones, and wildfire smoke in the Western US from 2006 to 2020 Extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and their coexposure increased during 2006–2020 in the Western US.

Extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and wildfire burn zones in the Western US, 2006-2020

We see increases over the study period in:
Extreme heat 🥵
Wildfire smoke 🔥 💨
🥵 + 🔥 💨

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The biggest project I've worked on for the last chunk of years was just published. It asks, how big are US Black-white lifespan differences?

This might seem like a narrow question. I hope to convince you by the end that there are answers you didn't anticipate. And I hope some of them will move you.

RFK Jr. to End 'Godsend' Narcan Program That Helped Reduce Overdose Deaths Despite His Past Heroin Addiction Despite overcoming heroin addiction himself, RFK Jr. is backing plans to cut a critical Narcan program that helped reduce overdose deaths.

Absolutely horrific health policy www.latintimes.com/rfk-jr-end-g...

Thanks for your service. Just finished giving a climate change and health lecture here at UW and these reports are critical for teaching the next generation of scientists.

It’s almost like taxes make things nicer and more livable for everyone

NIH Funding Has Stagnated Since 2003 This Viewpoint explores how funding has changed at the National Institutes of Health over time and discusses how continued investment is necessary to maintain the current level of biomedical research.

Helpful context for NIH funding from @jama.com

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Yes, and...

This study does not yet incorporate specific health impacts of a warming global climate into the cost function.
-premature mortality
-increased emergency visits
-adverse birth outcomes, etc.

I think that makes total sense. I would include the reviews (for sure!) with your submission and let the journal know the circumstances. You may also wish to reach out to EHP directly for a supportive cover letter that you could include.

Continued routine childhood vaccination at high coverage is needed to prevent resurgence of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases and their infection-related complications in the US.

ja.ma/3YeEcVv #MedSky