EHN Originals

Want to hear more from our “Agents of Change?” Here’s your chance. On July 30, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE) will host a Q&A discussion featuring four environmental health leaders who participated in Agents of Change, an ongoing series featuring the stories, analyses and perspectives of next generation environmental health leaders who…

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“In 2014, my world changed forever when I learned my family was exposed to contaminated drinking water containing high levels of PFAS. Since then, I haven’t stopped worrying about my family’s health,” says Andrea Amico, a New Hampshire resident and PFAS community advocate turned national activist. “Impacted communities didn’t get a choice in their exposure.…

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Historians generally place the invention of fracking in a gas field in southwestern Kansas in 1947. It remained largely a novelty until the late 1980’s, when a petroleum geologist named George Mitchell found a cost-efficient way to shatter shale rock with a high-pressure mix of water, sand, and chemicals, collecting the oil or gas released…

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Exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in medicine and medical devices is grossly underestimated, and physicians have an ethical obligation to talk about these exposures with their patients, according to a new study. Authored by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the paper synthesizes scientific literature on the presence and potential health impacts of endocrine…

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It’s that time of year again—summer is in full swing as we head into the Fourth of July weekend. Of course, the world looks much different since our last summer reading list—but the power of the book remains. We spend a lot of time writing, reading, and sifting through environmental news, so our book choices…

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As the nation remains in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, a more insidious crisis is taking root as households are unable to pay their energy bills, risking serious health consequences and increasing debt, while federal and state governments fail to adequately protect vulnerable families. Before COVID-19, one in three American households were struggling to…

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Peter Dykstra joins Host Steve Curwood to look at how microplastic particles are raining down from the sky, even in National Parks. They also cover the Canadian oil sands industry’s cutting of green initiatives, and good news that wolverines may be expanding through the Cascade Range. Finally, they look back in the history calendar to…

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My home state has an epic environmental history. And, believe it or not, it’s not all bad. Let’s start more than a hundred years back. Something happened on the Jersey Shore in 1916 that inspired a movie mega-hit 60 years later. On July 1, Charles Vansant was swimming 50 yards in front of his beachfront…

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Education and equity are central to good public health. The failure of higher education in the United States was made clear by the COVID-19 virus pandemic. From the president down, too many elected officials with college degrees have been ignorant of or defiant toward the lessons of the biological and social sciences. Ill-advised reassurances in…

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When it comes to our bodies, we are what we eat—or so the adage goes. “Conventionally, obesity research focuses more on diets, physical activity, and a sedentary lifestyle,” Xiaozhong Wen, associate professor at the University of Buffalo, told EHN. But to explain the childhood obesity epidemic, researchers are increasingly looking beyond the usual culprits, like…

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