News & Insights

Public health law and policy stories that made headlines recently include expanding Medicaid access post-postpartum to improve maternal mortality rates; how changes in naloxone access laws could save thousands of lives; Juul’s suspension of flavored e-cigarette product sales amid growing scrutiny of its advertising practices; how proposed food-stamp cutbacks could worsen obesity and food insecurity in the U.S.; and a landmark ruling on supervised injection sites.

Syringe service programs (SSP) are places where people who inject drugs (PWID) can receive new syringes and other injection equipment and drop off used supplies. They typically also provide other harm reduction and health promotion services including referrals to treatment, hepatitis C and HIV testing, the overdose reversal medication naloxone, and other related services. Nevertheless, SSPs are controversial due to stigma around PWID and many states prohibit the use of state funds for the operation of SSPs.

Title X is the only federally funded program for low-income patients exclusively dedicated to providing family planning and preventative services, including contraception and screenings for breast cancer, cervical cancer and STDs. Title X serves some four million people a year, most of them women. However, recent rule changes threaten to severely limit women’s access to these essential services.

Approximately 37 million Americans lack dependable access to enough food to live healthy lives. The health effects of food insecurity are particularly pronounced for children, putting them at increased risk for mental health disorders, chronic disease and impaired cognitive development. Current proposed changes to the Federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides qualifying households with funds to purchase food, would put millions of children at risk of experiencing ongoing food insecurity.

Human exposure to waterborne illnesses will increase as climate change creates more extreme precipitation events that drive harmful pollutants that into fresh waters used for drinking, bathing, swimming, and boating. Rising global temperature is also predicted to promote the growth of pathogens and toxic algae blooms in freshwater. Communities recognizing these threats are establishing adaptation plans and policies to prevent increased risks to human health as the climate changes.

Naloxone is a prescription drug that reverses respiratory depression and other effects caused by opioids. In an effort to reduce opioid-related morbid and mortality, states have attempted to make naloxone more available. A public health professional from Arizona contacted the Network to ask for examples of what other jurisdictions have done to expand access to naloxone.

There are approximately two million farms in the U.S. and 893,000 young people living on them. Just more than half of these young people work on the farm where they live. According to research studies, about every three days a child dies from an agriculture-related incident, and about 33 children are injured in agriculture-related incidents each day. While child labor laws protect young people working in other industries, these laws do not extend to the many working in agriculture.

Supervised consumption spaces (SCS) allow people who use drugs to consume those drugs in a controlled setting, under supervision. SCS provide safe injecting equipment and other health supplies and, in most cases, also provide services including medical care, counseling, and referrals to drug treatment. While many states have taken steps towards authorizing or implementing SCS, the federal government has taken a strong stance against them.

The Network recently held a two-day Summit focused on strategies to collect, use, share and protect multi-sector data to improve the health of communities. In this Q & A, Sallie Milam, J.D. and Jennifer Bernstein, J.D. deputy directors at the Network’s Mid-States Region Office, which organized the Summit, discuss why the Summit was so important to those working with health data and public health.

The Network is one of 12 organizations to receive a grant from the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments (GLISA) to address the risks of climate variability and change in the Great Lakes region.

The Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) enables health information to be shared nationwide by public health, government agencies, individuals, providers, payers and technology developers. TEFCA promises to position public health to work faster and more efficiently towards health equity by enabling better reporting, cross-jurisdictional information exchange, surveillance, tracking and outbreak investigation.

There is an established link between mental illness and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated brain trauma, including sports related concussions. CTE has been recognized as a contributing factor in the deaths of an alarming number of NFL players, but as the NFL classifies mental illness as an injury, it may inadvertently be discouraging and disincentivizing players from disclosing a debilitating mental disability.