Public Health Data Applications Using the CDC Tracking Network: Augmenting Environmental Hazard Information With Lower-Latency NASA Data.

Exposure to environmental hazards is an important determinant of health, and the frequency and severity of exposures is expected to be impacted by climate change. Through a partnership with the U.S.

Aligning staff schedules, testing, and isolation reduces the risk of COVID-19 outbreaks in carceral and other congregate settings: A simulation study.

COVID-19 outbreaks in congregate settings remain a serious threat to the health of disproportionately affected populations such as people experiencing incarceration or homelessness, the elderly, and essential workers. An individual-based model accounting for individual infectiousness over time, staff work schedules, and testing and isolation schedules was developed to simulate community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to staff in a congregate facility and subsequent transmission within the facility that could cause an outbreak. Systematic testing strategies in which staff are tested on the first day of their workweek were found to prevent up to 16% more infections than testing strategies unrelated to staff schedules.

Outdoor Residential Water Use Restrictions during Recent Drought Suppressed Disease Vector Abundance in Southern California.

The California state government put restrictions on outdoor residential water use, including landscape irrigation, during the 2012-2016 drought. The public health implications of these actions are largely unknown, particularly with respect to mosquito-borne disease transmission. While residential irrigation facilitates persistence of mosquitoes by increasing the availability of standing water, few studies have investigated its effects on vector abundance.

Prenatal and early-life exposure to the Great Chinese Famine increased the risk of tuberculosis in adulthood across two generations.

Global food security is a major driver of population health, and food system collapse may have complex and long-lasting effects on health outcomes. We examined the effect of prenatal exposure to the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1962)-the largest famine in human history-on pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) across consecutive generations in a major center of ongoing transmission in China. We analyzed >1 million PTB cases diagnosed between 2005 and 2018 in Sichuan Province using age-period-cohort analysis and mixed-effects metaregression to estimate the effect of the famine on PTB risk in the directly affected birth cohort (F1) and their likely offspring (F2).

Thermal thresholds heighten sensitivity of West Nile virus transmission to changing temperatures in coastal California.

Temperature is widely known to influence the spatio-temporal dynamics of vector-borne disease transmission, particularly as temperatures vary across critical thermal thresholds. When temperature conditions exhibit such 'transcritical variation', abrupt spatial or temporal discontinuities may result, generating sharp geographical or seasonal boundaries in transmission. Here, we develop a spatio-temporal machine learning algorithm to examine the implications of transcritical variation for West Nile virus (WNV) transmission in the Los Angeles metropolitan area (LA).