What I'm reading (and doing) this week

(or planning to)

Are you nosy (affectionate)? I am.

I LOVE knowing what other people do with their time, especially now, given that our attention currency is spread very thin.

So here’s what I’m up to this week.

• Waiting to get approval for a policy presentation assignment for my Public Health Communication & Technology class. I really want to present a policy proposal on automobile idling near schools in NM—specifically Albuquerque, where I live. ABQ has some of the worst air quality in the nation (yay), so I was shocked to learn that there are no idling policies here. Fingies crossed that it gets approved.
  

• Flying to Chicago tomorrow to attend the Barrington Health & Wellness Summit. I delivered two presentations at this event last year, and they’re bringing me back to co-panel a Q&A session on environmental exposures with Robert Wright MD MPH, after his talk “Toxins, Technology, and Tomorrow: Applying Exposome Research for Real-World Health.” Dr. Wright is the co-director of the Institute for Exposomic Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. I find the field of exposomics soooo interesting. How do all of the thousands (millions? billions?) of exposures over our lifetime influence health outcomes? Which feeds into another topic I love wading around in: the nuance of what we know, what we don’t know, and where we should look next for exposure/health effect relationships. I’m very much looking forward to this!

• Doing research/demographics/data pull on the impact of loneliness & isolation on the general population health, and cancer specifically, as part of a United Way grant for a cancer non-profit. This is so fun and perfectly dovetails with my current MPH classwork.
  

• Reading the following articles:

  • West Virginia must close the cancer coverage gap for women firefighters

  • Forever stained - How a SC riverkeeper’s detective work reveals a deeper tale about the carpet industry’s PFAS legacy

  • Lower levels of PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ in North Atlantic whales show regulations work: Study
    

• Writing social media posts on environmental health topics for the monthly content subscription I offer. This month’s content will include posts on:

• The endangerment finding repeal: what it is, what just happened, and what it means for air quality and health

• The mercury emissions rollback: what mercury does in the body, and why this rule change is a big deal

• Can eating more fiber remove microplastics from our bodies?

• What are VOCs — and why does that “new” smell matter?

• The toxic exposure-cardiovascular disease connection that many women don’t know about (heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the US).

• PM2.5 and Alzheimer’s risk: the findings of a new large study

• What does “clean beauty” actually mean, and who decides what counts as clean?

• What your kidneys do, and why they’re particularly vulnerable to chemical exposure

• The bathroom swap guide: where to start if you want to lower exposures without overhauling everything you own

• + 6 more posts, a newsletter, Canva graphics, and more
  

• Spending the weekend with my brother and fam in freezing cold Chicago.

What are you nerds (affectionate) up to this week?

(Also, does anyone know how to move around these godforsaken subscribe sections?? finding the magically correct spot to click so I can drag it around, but also, dragging it further down the page is frustrating, and now I have two subscribe fields, and I cannot figure out how to delete one of them.)