Public Health On Call

Recent research led by Craig Pollack of Johns Hopkins and Kathryn Leifheit of UCLA suggests that more than 433,000 excess cases and 10,700 excess deaths from COVID-19 in 2020 were associated with the lifting of eviction moratoriums in various states. They talk to Stephanie Desmon about the impact of a recently reinstated eviction moratorium, the staggering amount of back rent owed in the United States, and how much the pandemic has exposed larger problems in the housing market.

With a string of massive climate crises seemingly ever-present in the news, Dr. John Groopman, an environmental epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, talks to Public Health on Call Producer Lindsay Smith Rogers about their link to climate change and aging infrastructure, the history of how we got here and why there are reasons for optimism.

In the early days of the pandemic, Australia kept COVID cases low by closing its borders and instituting rigorous public health measures like contact tracing. Now, however, low vaccination rates and the delta variant have forced communities back into lockdown. Dr. Patricia Davidson, vice chancellor of the University of Wollongong—and former dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing—talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the COVID-19 experience of Australia, how it is similar in some respects and different in others from that of the US.

With so much news about the Delta variant and calls for many vaccinated people to mask up again, Gigi Gronvall of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security talks with Stephanie Desmon about what we know right now about breakthrough COVID-19 infections and how worried the vaccinated should be about getting sick from COVID-19. "The more people who get vaccinated, the fewer chances the virus that causes COVID-19 has to mutate into an even deadlier virus," Gronvall says.

Until recently, Dr. Michelle Fiscus served as the Medical Director for Immunization Programs at the Tennessee Department of Health. But after sending out a factual memo explaining the law about vaccinating teenagers caused a backlash among conservative lawmakers, Fiscus was fired. Dr. Fiscus talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about her background in public health, her recent painful experiences, and her next chapter. This interview was recorded on July 21, 2021.

After a drop in COVID hospitalizations and deaths over the spring and early summer, hospitals in southwest Missouri are at capacity again. Steve Edwards, president and CEO of Cox Health which has six hospitals in the region, talks with Stephanie Desmon about why things are so much more extreme now than they were last winter, how the politicization of public health has choked efforts to make vaccines more accessible, and why this fight is so personal for him.

In this episode, Dr. Josh Sharfstein talks with researchers who break down three papers about the delta variant. Carli Jones, a PhD student at Hopkins School of Medicine talks about a preprint study on the emergence and spread of the delta variant in India. Wendy Grant-McAuley, also a PhD student, talks about an Oxford University paper on how the delta variant responds to various antibodies in a lab setting. Shirlee Wohl, a post-doctoral fellow at the Bloomberg School talks about a preprint looking at an outbreak of the delta variant among vaccinated people at a Texas wedding. These researchers are part of the Hopkins novel coronavirus research consortium, with many summaries of new studies available at http://ncrc.jhsph.edu.

Dr. Stephen Thomas, the director of the University of Maryland Center for Health Equity, works with barber shops in the African-American community to offer health services. Mike Brown, a barber and a certified community health care worker, works with Dr. Thomas to provide vaccines in his barber shop. They talk with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the community role of barber shops, the importance of community trust, and lessons for other public health efforts.

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein speaks to Jason Dearen, author of the book Kill Shot: A Shadow Industry, A Deadly Disease. The book covers the nationwide meningitis outbreak caused by the New England Compounding Center, which sold medications contaminated with mold and fungi for injection into joints, the spine, and other sterile spaces. They discussed what led to this catastrophe, the legislation that passed in its aftermath, and the future of oversight in this area.

Fungal diseases are rare but, once diagnosed, incredibly hard to treat and often fatal. The overwhelming surge of COVID-19 cases in India has given rise to mucormycosis, also called "black fungus" for the appearance of the lesions caused by the infection. Dr. Arturo Casadevall talks with Stephanie Desmon about this and other fungal diseases, why COVID patients in India are particularly vulnerable, why treatments are slow and often ineffective, and why the pharmaceutical industry hasn't invested more in treating these often deadly infections.