Which social media platforms facilitate monitoring the opioid crisis?

Social media can provide real-time insight into trends in substance use, addiction, and recovery. Prior studies have used platforms such as Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), but evolving policies around data access have threatened these platforms' usability in research. We evaluate the potential of a broad set of platforms to detect emerging trends in the opioid epidemic.

Disparities in air pollution attributable mortality in the US population by race/ethnicity and sociodemographic factors.

There are large differences in premature mortality in the USA by race/ethnicity, education, rurality and social vulnerability index groups. Using existing concentration-response functions, published particulate matter (PM) air pollution estimates, population estimates at the census tract level and county-level mortality data from the US National Vital Statistics System, we estimated the degree to which these mortality discrepancies can be attributed to differences in exposure and susceptibility to PM. We show that differences in PM-attributable mortality were consistently more pronounced by race/ethnicity than by education, rurality or social vulnerability index, with the Black American population having the highest proportion of deaths attributable to PM in all years from 1990 to 2016.

Invited commentary: Motivating better methods-and better data collection-for measuring prevalence of drug misuse.

The United States continues to suffer a drug overdose crisis that has resulted in over 100,000 deaths annually since 2021. Despite decades of attention, estimates of the prevalence of drug use at the spatiotemporal resolutions necessary for resource allocation and intervention evaluation are lacking. Current approaches to measure prevalence of drug use, such as population surveys, capture-recapture, and multiplier methods, have significant limitations.

Excess Fatal Overdoses in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic by Geography and Substance Type: March 2020-August 2021.

To assess heterogeneity in pandemic-period excess fatal overdoses in the United States, by location (state, county) and substance type. We used seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) models to estimate counterfactual death counts in the scenario that no pandemic had occurred. Such estimates were subtracted from actual death counts to assess the magnitude of pandemic-period excess mortality between March 2020 and August 2021.

Youth Experiencing Parental Death Due to Drug Poisoning and Firearm Violence in the US, 1999-2020.

Importance: Youth (those aged <18 years) parental death has been associated with negative health outcomes. Understanding the burden of parental death due to drug poisoning (herein, drugs) and firearms is essential for informing interventions.

Objective: To estimate the incidence of youth parental death due to drugs, firearms, and all other causes.

Sociodemographic and geographic variation in mortality attributable to air pollution in the United States.

There are large differences in premature mortality in the USA by racial/ethnic, education, rurality, and social vulnerability index groups. Using existing concentration-response functions, particulate matter (PM) air pollution, population estimates at the tract level, and county-level mortality data, we estimated the degree to which these mortality discrepancies can be attributed to differences in exposure and susceptibility to PM. We show that differences in mortality attributable to PM were consistently more pronounced between racial/ethnic groups than by education, rurality, or social vulnerability index, with the Black American population having by far the highest proportion of deaths attributable to PM in all years from 1990 to 2016.

Estimated Childhood Lead Exposure From Drinking Water in Chicago.

Importance: There is no level of lead in drinking water considered to be safe, yet lead service lines are still commonly used in water systems across the US.

Objective: To identify the extent of lead-contaminated drinking water in Chicago, Illinois, and model its impact on children younger than 6 years.

Design, Setting, And Participants: For this cross-sectional study, a retrospective assessment was performed of lead exposure based on household tests collected from January 2016 to September 2023.

Associations between county-level public health expenditures and community health planning activities with COVID-19 incidence and mortality.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed consequences of past defunding of the U.S. public health system, but the extent to which public health infrastructure is associated with COVID-19 burden is unknown.

Emergency department visits respond nonlinearly to wildfire smoke.

Air pollution negatively affects a range of health outcomes. Wildfire smoke is an increasingly important contributor to air pollution, yet wildfire smoke events are highly salient and could induce behavioral responses that alter health impacts. We combine geolocated data covering all emergency department (ED) visits to nonfederal hospitals in California from 2006 to 2017 with spatially resolved estimates of daily wildfire smoke PM[Formula: see text] concentrations and quantify how smoke events affect ED visits.

Shortage of thoracic surgeons in the United States: Implications for treatment and survival for stage I lung cancer patients.

Objectives: To evaluate whether there is a shortage of thoracic surgeons in the United States and whether any potential shortage is impacting lung cancer treatment and outcomes.

Design: Using the US Area Health Resources File and Surveillance Epidemiology End Results database, we assessed the number of cardiothoracic surgeons per 100,000 people and the number of stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) diagnoses in the US in 2010 versus 2018. Changes in the percentage of patients diagnosed with stage I NSCLC who underwent surgery and stereotactic body radiotherapy and changes in overall survival of patients with stage I NSCLC from 2010 to 2018 in the National Cancer Database were evaluated using multivariable logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards modeling.

Deaths Due to COVID-19 in Patients With Cancer During Different Waves of the Pandemic in the US.

Importance: With the ongoing relaxation of guidelines to prevent COVID-19 transmission, particularly in hospital settings, medically vulnerable groups, such as patients with cancer, may experience a disparate burden of COVID-19 mortality compared with the general population.

Objective: To evaluate COVID-19 mortality among US patients with cancer compared with the general US population during different waves of the pandemic.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cross-sectional study used data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research database to examine COVID-19 mortality among US patients with cancer and the general population from March 1, 2020, to May 31, 2022.

Excess Mortality With Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias as an Underlying or Contributing Cause During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US.

Importance: Adults with Alzheimer disease and related dementias (ADRD) are particularly vulnerable to the direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaths associated with ADRD increased substantially in pandemic year 1. It is unclear whether mortality associated with ADRD declined when better prevention strategies, testing, and vaccines became widely available in year 2.

Evaluation of the New England Office Based Addiction Treatment ECHO: A Tool for Strengthening the Addiction Workforce.

Introduction: Reducing substance-related morbidity requires an educated and well-supported workforce. The New England Office Based Addiction Treatment Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (NE OBAT ECHO) began in 2019 to support community-based addiction care teams through virtual mentoring and case-based learning. We sought to characterize the program's impact on the knowledge and attitudes of NE OBAT ECHO participants.

COVID-19 Mortality by Race and Ethnicity in US Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Areas, March 2020 to February 2022.

Importance: Prior research has established that Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black residents in the US experienced substantially higher COVID-19 mortality rates in 2020 than non-Hispanic White residents owing to structural racism. In 2021, these disparities decreased.

Objective: To assess to what extent national decreases in racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality between the initial pandemic wave and subsequent Omicron wave reflect reductions in mortality vs other factors, such as the pandemic's changing geography.

Spatiotemporal distribution of power outages with climate events and social vulnerability in the USA.

Power outages threaten public health. While outages will likely increase with climate change, an aging electrical grid, and increased energy demand, little is known about their frequency and distribution within states. Here, we characterize 2018-2020 outages, finding an average of 520 million customer-hours total without power annually across 2447 US counties (73.

All-cause excess mortality across 90 municipalities in Gujarat, India, during the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020-April 2021).

Official COVID-19 mortality statistics are strongly influenced by local diagnostic capacity, strength of the healthcare and vital registration systems, and death certification criteria and capacity, often resulting in significant undercounting of COVID-19 attributable deaths. Excess mortality, which is defined as the increase in observed death counts compared to a baseline expectation, provides an alternate measure of the mortality shock-both direct and indirect-of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we use data from civil death registers from a convenience sample of 90 (of 162) municipalities across the state of Gujarat, India, to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on all-cause mortality.

Counterpoint: Preprints and the Future of Scientific Publishing-In Favor of Relevance.

Peer-reviewed journals provide an invaluable but inadequate vehicle for scientific communication. Preprints are now an essential complement to peer-reviewed publications. Eschewing preprints will slow scientific progress and reduce the public health impact of epidemiologic research.

Solidarity and strife after the Atlanta spa shootings: A mixed methods study characterizing Twitter discussions by qualitative analysis and machine learning.

Background: On March 16, 2021, a white man shot and killed eight victims, six of whom were Asian women at Atlanta-area spa and massage parlors. The aims of the study were to: (1) qualitatively summarize themes of tweets related to race, ethnicity, and racism immediately following the Atlanta spa shootings, and (2) examine temporal trends in expressions hate speech and solidarity before and after the Atlanta spa shootings using a new methodology for hate speech analysis.

Methods: A random 1% sample of publicly available tweets was collected from January to April 2021.

State Cannabis Legalization and Psychosis-Related Health Care Utilization.

Importance: Psychosis is a hypothesized consequence of cannabis use. Legalization of cannabis could therefore be associated with an increase in rates of health care utilization for psychosis.

Objective: To evaluate the association of state medical and recreational cannabis laws and commercialization with rates of psychosis-related health care utilization.

Wildfire smoke exposure and emergency department visits for headache: A case-crossover analysis in California, 2006-2020.

Objective: To evaluate the association of short-term exposure to overall fine particulate matter of <2.5 μm (PM ) and wildfire-specific PM with emergency department (ED) visits for headache.

Background: Studies have reported associations between PM exposure and headache risk.

Dynamics of racial disparities in all-cause mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As research documenting disparate impacts of COVID-19 by race and ethnicity grows, little attention has been given to dynamics in mortality disparities during the pandemic and whether changes in disparities persist. We estimate age-standardized monthly all-cause mortality in the United States from January 2018 through February 2022 for seven racial/ethnic populations. Using joinpoint regression, we quantify trends in race-specific rate ratios relative to non-Hispanic White mortality to examine the magnitude of pandemic-related shifts in mortality disparities.

COVID-19 mortality and excess mortality among working-age residents in California, USA, by occupational sector: a longitudinal cohort analysis of mortality surveillance data.

Background: During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers in essential sectors had higher rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 mortality than those in non-essential sectors. It is unknown whether disparities in pandemic-related mortality across occupational sectors have continued to occur during the periods of SARS-CoV-2 variants and vaccine availability.

Methods: In this longitudinal cohort study, we obtained data from the California Department of Public Health on all deaths occurring in the state of California, USA, from Jan 1, 2016, to Dec 31, 2021.