Public Health On Call

Caring for Kids with COVID-19 in Florida. There are more children sick with COVID-19 in Florida today than ever before. Joseph Perno is an emergency department physician and the chief medical officer of Johns Hopkins All-Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg. He speaks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein about why the rising number of sick children has yet to change many minds about measures to combat the pand...

Public Health On Call producer Lindsay Smith Rogers speaks with Elinor Cleghorn , author of the book Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World. The book covers how misogyny and mythology were baked into western medicine and has attributed to gender bias on women's health, how some of these biases remain today and what needs to be done to create a more equitable health system for all...

It's back-to-school time and the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging in many places. Stephanie Desmon talks to Keri Althoff and Elizabeth Stuart of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about how important it is for K-12 students to get back into the classroom, how safe it is to do so right now, how to navigate masking for kids too young to be vaccinated and how to talk to your kids ab...

2020 marked a historically high number of overdoses with more than 93,000 deaths in the United States. A particular risk for overdose is recent incarceration, yet few people who are incarcerated have access to effective, life-saving treatment. Dr. Brendan Saloner, talks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein on the urgency of jails and prisons providing needed care.

Overdose death rates in the U.S. reached record highs during the pandemic. Stephanie Desmon talks to Sika Yeboah Sampong about a recent report from the Legal Action Center about the role of emergency departments in saving lives from overdose. Clinicians can screen for and diagnose addiction, provide life-saving therapy, and refer to ongoing care. Many emergency departments, Yeboah Sampong argues,...

Recent research led by Craig Pollack of Johns Hopkins and Kathryn Leifheit of UCLA suggests that more than 433,000 excess cases and 10,700 excess deaths from COVID-19 in 2020 were associated with the lifting of eviction moratoriums in various states. They talk to Stephanie Desmon about the impact of a recently reinstated eviction moratorium, the staggering amount of back rent owed in the United St...

With a string of massive climate crises seemingly ever-present in the news, Dr. John Groopman , an environmental epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, talks to Public Health on Call Producer Lindsay Smith Rogers about their link to climate change and aging infrastructure, the history of how we got here and why there are reasons for optimism.

With so much news about the Delta variant and calls for many vaccinated people to mask up again, Gigi Gronvall of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security talks with Stephanie Desmon about what we know right now about breakthrough COVID-19 infections and how worried the vaccinated should be about getting sick from COVID-19. "The more people who get vaccinated, the fewer chances the virus that...

In the early days of the pandemic, Australia kept COVID cases low by closing its borders and instituting rigorous public health measures like contact tracing. Now, however, low vaccination rates and the delta variant have forced communities back into lockdown. Dr. Patricia Davidson , vice chancellor of the University of Wollongong—and former dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing—talks with D...

Until recently, Dr. Michelle Fiscus served as the Medical Director for Immunization Programs at the Tennessee Department of Health. But after sending out a factual memo explaining the law about vaccinating teenagers caused a backlash among conservative lawmakers, Fiscus was fired. Dr. Fiscus talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about her background in public health, her recent painful experiences, and h...

After a drop in COVID hospitalizations and deaths over the spring and early summer, hospitals in southwest Missouri are at capacity again. Steve Edwards , president and CEO of Cox Health which has six hospitals in the region, talks with Stephanie Desmon about why things are so much more extreme now than they were last winter, how the politicization of public health has choked efforts to make vacci...

In this episode, Dr. Josh Sharfstein talks with researchers who break down three papers about the delta variant. Carli Jones , a PhD student at Hopkins School of Medicine talks about a preprint study on the emergence and spread of the delta variant in India. Wendy Grant-McAuley , also a PhD student, talks about an Oxford University paper on how the delta variant responds to various antibodies in a...

Dr. Stephen Thomas , the director of the University of Maryland Center for Health Equity, works with barber shops in the African-American community to offer health services. Mike Brown , a barber and a certified community health care worker, works with Dr. Thomas to provide vaccines in his barber shop. They talk with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the community role of barber shops, the importance of c...

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein speaks to Jason Dearen , author of the book Kill Shot: A Shadow Industry, A Deadly Disease. The book covers the nationwide meningitis outbreak caused by the New England Compounding Center, which sold medications contaminated with mold and fungi for injection into joints, the spine, and other sterile spaces. They discussed what led to this catastrophe, the legislation that pas...

Fungal diseases are rare but, once diagnosed, incredibly hard to treat and often fatal. The overwhelming surge of COVID-19 cases in India has given rise to mucormycosis, also called "black fungus" for the appearance of the lesions caused by the infection. Dr. Arturo Casadevall talks with Stephanie Desmon about this and other fungal diseases, why COVID patients in India are particularly vulnerable,...

The pandemic has caused trauma, grief, and stress leading to depression, anxiety, and worsening of other mental health conditions. Dr. Adam Karpati , former executive deputy commissioner for mental hygiene at the New York City Health Department and currently the Senior Vice President of Public Health Programs at Vital Strategies, talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the profound mental health impa...

Will we need COVID-19 booster shots and, if so, when? Where is the FDA in its approval process of the vaccines currently under emergency use authorization? What goes into this process? Why, if the current vaccines are so good, are companies still trying to make new ones? Dr. Anna Durbin returns to the podcast to talk with Stephanie Desmon about all things COVID-19 vaccines.

Vermont has had far fewer COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths than many other states, and health commissioner Dr. Mark Levine credits a number of reasons why. Dr. Levine talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about Vermont's response to the pandemic, how the state is now addressing gaps in vaccination, and why it's so important for all decisions to be driven by data and science, not politics.

The COVID-19 pandemic will change our culture in all kinds of ways, both concrete and conceptual. Coming to work if you're sick, for example, may hopefully be a thing of the past while normalizing mask use during COVID surges may become part of our new future. Conceptually, our culture is changing as more people become aware of how social determinants of health like housing, employment, and educat...

On June 5, 1981, the CDC identified a cluster of five cases of a rare pneumonia occurring in previously healthy young, homosexual men in the US. Forty years later, despite great advances in therapies for prevention, and extending life expectancy and quality of life, the pandemic is still growing in some places and killing millions around the world. Epidemiologist Dr. Chris Beyrer , associate direc...

The US is not the only country facing COVID-19 vaccine hesitation. Around the world, public health officials are grappling with this issue that has the potential to slow or even derail efforts to end the pandemic. Dr. Saad Omer , director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, talks with Stephanie Desmon about the spectrum of vaccine hesitancy, the promise of continuing medical education for doc...

Youths 12 and older have been eligible for COVID-19 vaccines since March, but clinical trials are still ongoing for kids under 12. Dr. Kawsar Talaat , who led one of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine trials in adults, and Dr. Odis Johnson , executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, return to the podcast to talk with Stephanie Desmon about whether schools may require vacc...

In this episode, Dr. Josh Sharfstein talks with researchers who break down three papers looking at what happens to patients with COVID over the longer term. Dr. Lauren Peetluck , an epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University, talks about the risks of long-term complications of COVID. Dr. Heather McKay , an epidemiologist at Hopkins, talks the risks of negative neurological and psychiatric outcomes of...

On a special episode, Tradeoffs host Dan Gorenstein talks with a host of experts about screening for lung cancer, America's number one cancer killer. While CT scans have provided early insights into a cancer that previously wasn't caught until far too late, this tool has also led to unnecessary procedures, costs, and even disability and death for patients that may not have even been sick. You'll h...

There are a lot of worrying headlines about the delta variant and outbreaks of COVID-19 around the world. Lindsay Smith Rogers talks to Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo from the Center for Health Security about the variant, how much more transmissible it is, whether it causes more serious disease, what the variant means for vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, and what people should be most concerned about.