Public Health On Call

Roughly 10 percent of long-term care workers have left their careers since the start of COVID-19. The shortage in staffing has led to nursing homes turning patients away, left caregivers at home struggling for help, and ultimately put patients at risk in the hands of workers who have been stretched thin. Tradeoffs host Dan Gorenstein talks about a San Fransisco non-profit home health agency looking to make changes in this sector and how providing long-term care workers with new career pathways could be part of the solution. If you like this episode, check out the Tradeoffs podcast at www.tradeoffs.org.

Howard Sklamberg, a former deputy commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, talks to Dr. Sharfstein about legislation passed at the end of 2022 to improve the safety of cosmetics. On the agenda for discussion: inspections, manufacturing standards, recalls, and the answer to the trivia question of whether a combination of antiperspirant and deodorant is considered a cosmetic or a drug.

Guest host Shelley Hearne, director of the Lerner Center for Public Health Advocacy, brings us eight miles above the Arctic Circle to talk with Bernadette Demientieff, council member for the Arctic Refuge Defense Council and member of the Gwichyaa Zhee Gwich'in Tribe. They discuss the very real impacts of climate change on her community in their day-to-day lives and our global interconnectedness, including why it matters to all of us what's happening in a remote corner of the world.

Years of masking and distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic protected many of us from the common cold and flu, and isolation protected children from respiratory illnesses like RSV. So, why are so many kids getting sick this winter? In this episode, Stephanie Desmon talks to Dr. Mike Rose, a pediatric resident at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine about a concept called 'immunity debt' and why it could explain the recent increase in pediatric illness and hospitalizations.

After years of using a ZERO COVID strategy in China, which led to many lockdowns and economic questions, the country has dropped all COVID restrictions in recent weeks. Dr. Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security joins Stephanie Desmon to discuss what has happened in China, what the consequences are now and what they will be in the future. Adalja says both policies were destined to fail and we could see China in 2023 look a lot like the United States in 2020.

Environmental health wasn't always part of the public health portfolio but in recent years "science caught up to the obvious." Dr. Howard Frumkin, former head of Environmental Health Operations at the CDC and currently senior vice president at Trust for Public Land, talks with Shelley Hearne about the evidence base behind environmental impacts on our health, the political and cultural changes required for the CDC to adopt programs around climate and environment, and why hope for tackling climate change is not only a worthy strategy, there's empirical evidence behind it.

Dr. Roger Mitchell, the former chief medical examiner of the District of Columbia, and current chief of pathology at Howard University speaks with Dr. Sharfstein about how deaths in custody are classified. Dr. Mitchell has observed that when it comes to understanding the reasons for these deaths, the usual rules of autopsies and death investigations don't always seem to apply. He's leading the charge to understand more about what's happening.

As we enter the fourth year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Mike Osterholm, a leading expert from the University of Minnesota, talks to Stephanie Desmon about why hundreds of people in the U.S. continue to die each day from COVID and tens of thousands are newly hospitalized. They discuss the question he gets asked most often, "Is this pandemic ever going to end?", as well as coming variants, the massive outbreaks in China, and the lack of demand for vaccines and treatments that are effective in preventing death and severe disease.

Our guest is Judge David Tatel, who recently took senior status on the U.S. court of appeals for the DC circuit after joining the court in 1994. He was appointed to fill the seat created by the appointment of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. Judge Tatel speaks with Dr. Sharfstein about West Virginia v. EPA, in which the Supreme Court announced a major new doctrine for judging actions by health agencies to protect the public.

In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau, director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, speaks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about sexual abuse prevention means for youth serving organizations, and for children themselves. More about the Moore Center is here.