health – Jessica S. McKenzie

Bulletin: Wildfires push air quality in East Coast cities almost off the charts

The East Coast was blanketed in smoke from wildfires in Canada this week. I can feel the burn and sting from the toxic smog in the back of my throat even now, after the air quality in Brooklyn has somewhat improved. My eyes became swollen, puffy, and irritated the morning after a masked walk.

In New York City, the Air Quality Index (AQI), a measure of air pollution and health safety risk, peaked at 484 on Wednesday evening, the highest ever recorded in the city. (The index only goes up to 500.) Philadelphia also surpassed 400.

New Food Economy: The misbegotten promise of anaerobic digesters

Federal agencies and state governments are spending millions on anaerobic digesters to wring renewable energy from animal poop. But critics say “cow power” from factory farms is neither clean nor green.

New Food Economy: Are plant-based milks causing harmful nutritional deficiencies in children?

While researching the debate over labeling plant-based milks “milk” I came across an interesting tidbit: a letter to the FDA from the American Academy of Pediatrics claiming that children were suffering from “harmful nutritional deficiencies” because their parents were giving them plant-based milk thinking it was nutritionally equivalent to cow. So I looked into those claims for The New Food Economy.

New Food Economy: Scientists say many UTIs are caused by E. coli in food—when will the government believe them?

The women may have lived more than 2,500 miles apart, but somehow they had a unique strain of multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli bacteria in common.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found the E. coli bacteria in 48 urine samples from college students who visited health centers at UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Minnesota with urinary tract infections (UTIs). Between 38 and 51 percent of the Berkeley, Minnesota, and Michigan students with UTIs resistant to the first-line antibiotic trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, often marketed as Bactrim, were infected with the same strain.