News Digest

 The US is in the midst of a significant Covid-19 wave, with viral activity levels in wastewater the highest they’ve been for a summer surge since July 2022, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s wastewater dashboard. The CDC’s measure of national Covid viral activity in wastewater rose to 8.82 on August 10 – falling shy of a peak of 9.56 in July 2022. The CDC says the most recent data is incomplete and may change. Before it started rising again in May, it was at 1.36. “Currently, the COVID-19 wastewater viral activity level is very high nationally, with the highest levels in the Western US region,” Dr. Jonathan Yoder, deputy director of the CDC’s Wastewater Surveillance Program, said in an email. “This year’s COVID-19 wave is coming earlier than last year, which occurred in late August/early September.” Emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths are also ticking up, although not to the same extent as infections, according to the CDC’s Covid dashb...

 More than two years ago, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden reignited the Cancer Moonshot with the goals of reducing the cancer death rate in the United States by at least half—preventing more than 4 million cancer deaths—by 2047, and improving the experience of people who are touched by cancer. As part of this effort, President Biden and Vice President Harris secured bipartisan Congressional support to establish the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to generate breakthroughs in ways to prevent, detect, and treat cancer and other diseases. In its first two years, ARPA-H has invested more than $400 million to fast-track progress on how we prevent, detect, and treat cancer. Today in New Orleans, the President and First Lady will announce up to $150 million in ARPA-H awards to develop technologies that will allow surgeons to provide more successful tumor-removal surgeries for people facing cancer. These awards will support researchers from eight teams a...

Since launching its all-of-government Housing Supply Action Plan, the Biden-Harris Administration has been committed to using every available tool to build more housing and lower costs. President Biden and Vice President Harris have put building more homes at the center of their economic agenda because rents are lower and homes are more affordable when we build more housing. After decades of under-investment in housing, we are finally seeing progress under President Biden and Vice President Harris: more units are under construction than at any time in over 50 years, and the rate of new housing starts is up 17 percent compared to the last Administration. The Biden-Harris Housing Plan would build over 2 million new homes to further increase supply and lower housing costs for Americans. Building rental units and homes faster means lower costs for consumers: not only will more units get to the market faster, but increasing the speed of construction lowers building costs. The President and ...

  The Inflation Reduction Act is tackling the climate crisis by advancing clean power, cutting pollution from buildings, transportation, and industry and supporting climate-smart agriculture and forestry. The law is accelerating our progress toward President Biden and Vice President Harris’ goal of cutting U.S. climate pollution by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels in 2030. Two years after the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden-Harris Administration has made tremendous progress implementing the climate and clean energy provisions of this law quickly and effectively. Treasury guidance is now available for nearly all of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax provisions. On the grant, loan, and rebate side of the law, nearly two thirds of Inflation Reduction Act funding has been awarded. As an example of the Administration’s rapid progress on implementation, today the Environmental Protection Agency announced that all $27 billion in awards through their Greenho...

 Over the past three decades, routine immunizations have prevented 1.1 million deaths and saved the United States $540 billion, the C.D.C. estimated. There’s no way to put a price on the pain and suffering prevented by childhood vaccines. But as it turns out, you can pinpoint the savings to the country. For nearly three decades, childhood vaccines — including those that target measles, tetanus and diphtheria — have saved the United States $540 billion in health care costs, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Routine childhood vaccinations have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations and 1,129,000 deaths, the agency estimated on Thursday. “These vaccine programs, when you create the right infrastructure to implement them, they pay for themselves right away,” said William Padula, a health economist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the new research. The savings estimate...

 In 2021, a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on teen mental health focused on a stark crisis: Nearly three in five teenage girls reported feeling persistent sadness, the highest rate in a decade. But the newest iteration of the survey, distributed in 2023 to more than 20,000 high school students across the country, suggests that some of the despair seen at the height of the pandemic may be lessening. Fifty-three percent of girls reported extreme depressive symptoms in 2023, down from 57 percent in 2021. For comparison, just 28 percent of teenage boys felt persistent sadness, about the same as in 2021. Suicide risk among girls stayed roughly the same as the last survey. But Black students, who reported troubling increases in suicide attempts in 2021, reported significantly fewer attempts in 2023. Still, the number of teens reporting persistent sadness in 2023 remained higher than at any point in the last decade aside from 2021. And around 65 percent of lesbia...

 A third person has died from consuming products tainted with listeria, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday, the latest death connected to a nationwide outbreak that began in May and has been linked to meats sliced at deli counters. Officials also said that the number of people sickened by food contaminated by the bacteria had risen to 43 since they last released numbers in late July. The outbreak has been linked by federal food safety officials to Boar’s Head deli meats, and the company recently recalled millions of pounds of meat. Boar’s Head, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the third death, which occurred in Virginia, began recalling sliceable deli meats in late July, after federal food safety officials announced that a sample of Boar’s Head liverwurst for sale at a Maryland store had tested positive for the same strain of the bacteria causing the outbreak of listeriosis. On July 30, Boar’s Head recalled seven million pou...

  Cellphones have become a school scourge. More than 70 percent of high school teachers say student phone distraction is a “major problem,” according to a survey this year by   Pew Research . That’s why states are mounting a bipartisan effort to crack down on rampant student cellphone use. So far this year, at least eight states have passed laws, issued orders or adopted rules to curb phone use among students during school hours. The issue isn’t simply that some children and teenagers compulsively use apps like Snap, TikTok and Instagram during lessons, distracting themselves and their classmates. In many schools, students have also used their phones to bully,  sexually exploit  and share videos of physical  attacks  on their peers. But cellphone restrictions can be difficult for teachers to enforce without schoolwide rules requiring students to place their phones in lockers or other locations. Now state lawmakers, along with some prominent governors, are p...

  Thanks to the PACT Act the Biden-Harris Administration has helped veterans in   every state and territory   receive the services and care they deserve by: Delivering benefits to veterans and their survivors : Since enactment of the PACT Act, VA has delivered new PACT Act related disability benefits to more than 1 million veterans and over 10,000 survivors of veterans who died of a toxic related illness. This amounts to more than $6.8 billion in earned PACT Act related benefits over the past two years. In total, VA has processed over 1.5 million PACT Act claims since August 10, 2022. Thanks in part to the PACT Act, VA is delivering benefits to veterans and their survivors at the fastest rate in history, processing more than 2 million total claims (both PACT and non-PACT Act combined) thus far in 2024 – an all-time record. Delivering health care to veterans:   Since Aug. 10, 2022, 739,421 veterans have enrolled in VA health care — a 33% increase over the previous two...

  In a move not seen for almost 40 years, the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday   issued an emergency order   suspending all uses of a weedkiller linked to serious health risks for unborn babies. The pesticide dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, also known as DCPA or Dacthal, is used on crops such as broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage and onions. Babies whose pregnant mothers are exposed to it could suffer from low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased I.Q., and impaired motor skills later in life, the E.P.A. said. “DCPA is so dangerous that it needs to be removed from the market immediately,” Michal Freedhoff, the E.P.A. assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety, said in statement. “In this case, pregnant women who may never even know they were exposed could give birth to babies that experience irreversible lifelong health problems.” California-based AMVAC Chemical Corporation, the sole manufacturer of the pesticide, didn’t immediat...

  The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet. The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity’s actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years. The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions, and  GPS  navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping. The length of the Earth’s day has been steadily increasing over geological time due to the gravitational drag of the moon on the planet’s oceans and land. However, the melting of the  Greenland  and Antarctic ice sheets due to human-caused global heating has been redistributing water stored at high latitudes into the world’s oceans, leading to more water in the seas nearer the equator. This makes the Earth more oblate — or fatter — s...

  Devastating wildfires are breaking out across North America on a daily basis, with smoke and ash spreading over large swaths of the continent from Reno to Toronto and New York. Fast-moving blazes have   destroyed homes   and charred through thousands of acres of farms and forests. Some have become deadly. So far this year, over 28,000 wildfires have burned more than 4.5 million acres in the United States, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. U.S. fire activity for 2024 is above the average for the last decade, agency data shows, and the resulting destruction has already amounted to more than what burned in all of 2023. And with the expected peak of this year’s fire season still at least a month or more away, experts say that fires are burning with a level of intensity rarely seen at this point in the summer. “Every dimension of this fire season looks increasingly problematic from here on out,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of Cal...

  Today, the White House hosted a   convening on transforming child welfare   to announce new policies that focus on preventing family separation and supporting and creating opportunities for families and youth. The convening brought together policymakers across federal, state, local, and tribal governments, philanthropy, child welfare and family support organizations, and young people and families who have personal experiences, to encourage further innovation, build new partnerships, and exchange best practices. The new announcements focus on four key areas: Separating Poverty and Neglect Children should not be separated from their families due to financial hardship alone. Several states, like Kentucky, Indiana, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Kansas have already clarified that poverty alone should not cause child removal. And there is emerging evidence connecting these actions to improvements in family outcomes. The Biden-Harris Administration i...