It’s National Rural Health Day! Cornell’s Health Impacts Core (CHIC) and Cornell Public Health faculty are doing a lot to support public health and wellbeing in rural communities across the U.S. Dr. Sabine Jamal, CHIC manager of public health workforce development shares more.
Just-in-time training for how to handle a food poisoning outbreak; a decision guide for air quality risk; a course for recognizing and responding to mental health issues. These are just a sampling of the resources provided by the Cornell Health Impacts Core (CHIC), which just celebrated the one-year anniversary of its launch. In this short amount of time, CHIC, which is administered by Cornell Public Health, has seen success despite significant national challenges pitted against public health. In recognition of these impacts and the years of groundwork to prepare for them, CHIC’s team has been awarded the Cornell President’s Award for Employee Excellence…
Aquaculture – the farming of fish and other aquatic organisms – is the world’s fastest-growing food production system. The sharpest growth in aquaculture is happening in Africa. Average annual growth rates have exceeded 10% in recent years measured by production value. Over the past 10 years in Lake Victoria, shared between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, aquaculture has transformed from a small-scale enterprise into a vast and diverse commercial industry. Lake Victoria is the world’s second-largest freshwater lake. Cage aquaculture, the farming of fish within cages, has expanded rapidly in the…
“Rats are adapted to human environments, they’re all around us,” Plowright says. “As we degrade habitats, we bring rats with us, and we’re potentially bringing a bridging host with us to help us be exposed to the next pandemic pathogen…
In the aftermath of COVID-19, the question of where the next pandemic might come from looms large. Increasingly, eyes turn to bats. The diversity of deadly viruses these much-maligned mammals carry is astonishing – as is their ability to host at least some of them without falling ill. “Bats also suffer certain diseases, but overall, they don’t suffer disease like we do,” says Prof Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. “They carry all these nasty viruses that are highly lethal when they jump – not only to humans, but to pigs, horses, cats, everything. But in bats, they don’t even induce a fever.” Bats have been blamed for some of the deadliest viruses to cross into humans – from SARS, Marburg and Nipah to…
The latest installment of the Cornell Veterinary Podcast features Dr. Amandine Gamble, assistant professor in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health, who joins show host Michelle Moyal, D.V.M.’ 07, to talk about her work as a wildlife disease ecologist. Learn how her career journey has taken her to far-flung places like the Falkland Islands, where the Wi-Fi is bad but the mutton is tasty — and how seabirds make the perfect study models…
New York City’s mostly indoor cats easily caught SARS-CoV-2 during the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic – and most were asymptomatic and were likely infected by their owners, according to a new study from a sample of cats that visited an Upper East Side veterinary clinic. The study, published Oct. 7 in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases One Health, confirms that cats can efficiently catch SARS-CoV-2 from humans, though very few cases of humans catching it from cats have been reported. Their results point to the importance of including pets in public health surveillance – as well as the low public health risk infected cats pose…
In the past 20 years, extreme wildfires have more than doubled, causing destruction to those directly impacted and spreading air pollution across borders and even continents. Outdoor air pollution, and the disease it engenders, is estimated to cause roughly 8 million deaths globally each year. A team of scientists from Cornell and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) are working to understand how air pollutants from dust and wildfires have changed over time, from 1850 to today, to improve predictions of future air pollution. They’ll also calculate respiratory disease, mortality risk and economic impact for a range of air quality scenarios, with a special focus on Latin America…
Cornell students received international recognition and a cash prize from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology during its One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition 2025. The competition brought international teams to devise and present practical solutions for a sustainable future, pitching their innovations to an international panel of investors, clinicians and tech experts. “Representing the United States and Cornell University on such a stage was an incredible honor,” says Gauri Vanjari, M.P.H. Class of 2026, whose team, MaternaSense, took home the Gold-level (first runner-up) honor. Their award-winning innovation is a non-invasive sweat patch that utilizes a telehealth monitoring app…
Since highly pathogenic avian influenza, or H5N1 – better known as bird flu – was first detected in the U.S. in 2022, it has wreaked havoc on the natural world, tearing through delicate populations of wild birds and spreading to mammals, killing some species in devastating numbers. Meanwhile, the disease is also acutely felt by poultry farmers, who see avian influenza as a terrifying new threat to their livelihoods. At the same time, the soaring costs are ultimately passed on to consumers as egg prices have been destabilized. This year, cases are reportedly spiking earlier than experts predicted, sparking major industry concerns over the scale of culls of infected poultry and how this will affect egg production and prices…
From the bench to the clinic and to the field, our faculty are making discoveries that help create a healthier world for animals and people. Check out some of their recently published research below…
A higher than normal tide first floods the two blocks adjacent to Roger Gendron’s street in Hamilton Beach, Queens. Then it crests the curbs and sidewalks, flows through yards and fills his road, Davenport Court, and stays there. A berm at the end of the street, between the road and Jamaica Bay, traps the water, sometimes through another two or three tide cycles. “These are the nuances someone like myself and others – we know because it’s our neighborhood,” said Gendron, 63, a lifelong resident of Hamilton Beach, president of the New Hamilton Beach Civic Association and self-taught flood monitor and forecaster for the 450 households in his community. “Nobody knows the neighborhood better…