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Public Health News

Sustainability. Equity. Engagement.

Faculty Spotlights

December 16, 2024

Despite the danger and death toll of heat-related disasters in the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has never declared a heat wave an emergency. The reason is twofold: a lack of real-time data on the impacts of extreme heat, and a lack of clarity on how to mitigate those impacts.

December 9, 2024

Bird flu has crept uncomfortably close to home in recent months. Public health experts have detected nearly five dozen known infections of the H5N1 avian influenza virus in people in the U.S. Dairy farmers are approaching a full year of exposure to the virus in their herds. And more than 100 million birds in U.S. poultry farms have been lost to the pathogen or killed in attempts to stop its spread since February 2022. Meanwhile the type of H5N1 virus that has been spreading, known as clade 2.3.4.4b, has also infiltrated ecosystems around the world, wreaking devastation that has mostly gone overlooked.

December 4, 2024

Research from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and universities across the state have found manmade chemicals known as PFAS are being found in our ecosystem and hurt public health. “PFAS are a whole category of thousands of different types of chemicals and they’re known as forever chemicals because they are really hard to break down,” said Professor of Public Health at Cornell University Alistair Hayden. “We use them in many different processes, a lot of plastics manufacturing.”

December 3, 2024

Faculty from the Department of Public & Ecosystem Health in the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, in partnership with the University of Pretoria in South Africa, have received an NIH P20 grant to establish the Center for Transformative Infectious...

December 2, 2024

Our Master’s Program publishes an annual magazine to provide students, alumni, prospective students, donors, advisors, and friends with a beautiful annual summary of our work In this year’s magazine we focus on engagement To have the greatest impacts, we must...

November 26, 2024

Scammers, beware! Cornell researchers created a multi-step protocol to detect and remove fake data created by bots and humans attempting to enroll in online research studies, thus preventing biased results and unwarranted monetary compensation to bad actors The...

November 25, 2024

The first thing farmer Erica Sawatzke does every morning is check on her turkeys For generations, Sawatzke and her family have run Oakdale Farm in Minnesota They usually have tens of thousands of turkeys on their farm at a time But last year, the day before...

November 20, 2024

Rocky and Ren Hazelman run a chicken farm in West Milford, NJ, about 10 miles south from the Jennings Creek wildfire along the state’s border with New York Their 2,000 chickens require about 150 gallons of water daily, and the couple usually has no trouble...

November 7, 2024

For decades, public health systems in many parts of the world have been under-equipped In response, government and partner organizations are working to ensure integrated and adaptive systems, and to expand the skilled workforce to meet growing demands Universities have...

October 28, 2024

For the first time, scientists have tracked the dispersion of the Oropouche virus in the Brazilian Amazon region, an important first step to control future outbreaks of a disease with more than 100,000 reported cases since the 1960s The researchers followed a new...

October 10, 2024

Residents of Southside, a historically Black community that lies along Six Mile Creek in Ithaca, now live in an area recently recategorized as a “special hazard flood zone” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency “When we get weeks of rain, people’s...

September 30, 2024

Medicaid and health systems are playing a growing role in providing housing and other services to people experiencing homelessness, investments that could bolster – or eventually overtake – existing governance structures, new Cornell research finds As of August...