On a steamy July afternoon, West Garfield Park residents lined up at the Above & Beyond Free Food Pantry on South Pulaski Road. Moms with kids, seniors and young men brought bags to fill. Inside, volunteers handed out packages of Danish pastry and cookies “rescued” from local supermarkets, along with frozen chicken and cans of tuna and beans. [Crains Forum]

Since opening during the pandemic in 2021, the pantry’s customer traffic has increased by more than 25% a year, and that’s before changes to the federal food stamp program take effect as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Donald Trump signed into law in July. Executive Director Ken Cozzi is bracing for a surge in demand as the pantry prepares to move to a bigger space a few blocks away. “We’re a big pantry, but we only have so many refrigerators and freezers,” he says.

The Illinois Department of Human Services estimates that 360,000 people are at risk of losing eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which Illinois recipients access via electronic benefit transfer cards called Link. That’s largely due to stricter work requirements that will soon be imposed. The result, food experts say, will be greater food insecurity and stress on the distribution system. SNAP, once known as food stamps, is the nation’s most effective anti-poverty program for younger people, reducing extreme poverty by more than 50%, advocates say. It’s also a powerful economic multiplier.

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Human–computer interactions have been occurring for decades, but recent technological developments in medical artificial intelligence (AI) have resulted in more effective and potentially more dangerous interactions. Although the hype around AI resonates with previous technological revolutions, such as the development of the Internet and the electronic health record,1 the appearance of large language models (LLMs) seems different. LLMs can simulate knowledge generation and clinical reasoning with humanlike fluency, which gives them the appearance of agency and independent information processing.2 Therefore, AI has the capacity to fundamentally alter medical learning and practice.3,4 As in other professions,5 the use of AI in medical training could result in professionals who are highly efficient yet less capable of independent problem solving and critical evaluation than their pre-AI counterparts. [New England Journal of Medicine]

Such a challenge presents educational opportunities and risks. AI can enhance simulation-based learning,6 knowledge recall, and just-in-time feedback7 and can be used for cognitive off-loading of rote tasks. With cognitive off-loading, learners rely on AI to reduce the load on their working memory, a strategy that facilitates mental engagement with more-demanding tasks.8 However, off-loading of complex tasks, such as clinical reasoning and decision making, can potentially lead to automation bias (overreliance on automated systems and risk of error), “deskilling” (loss of previously acquired skills), “never-skilling” (failure to develop essential competencies), and “mis-skilling” (reinforcement of incorrect behavior due to AI errors or bias).9 These risks are especially troubling because LLMs operate as unpredictable black boxes10; they generate probabilistic responses with low reasoning transparency, which limits assessment of their reliability. For example, in one study, more than a third of advanced medical students missed erroneous LLM answers to clinical scenarios.11

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The Chicago Department of Public Health will collaborate with the University of Illinois Chicago on a new network to monitor the city’s air quality. [Health News Illinois]

The network will place sensors that measure levels of particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide around the city, with a focus on areas historically vulnerable to environmental impacts.

“Installing air sensors across our city is imperative in assessing what risks there are and protecting our community members, especially those who are most vulnerable, such as children, older folks and people with respiratory illnesses,” said health Commissioner Dr. Olusimbo “Simbo” Ige. “CDPH continues to gather the best available data for all Chicagoans to guide the development of interventions to improve the health of Chicagoans.”

Chicago air quality data is currently available and tracked by eight federal-grade monitoring systems that are run by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, in partnership with Cook County.

CDPH said the new network will supplement the existing work and will provide neighborhood-level air quality data to the public.

The network will set 280 sensors around the city by the end of summer, which officials said will give Chicago the “largest community air monitoring network in the world.”

The release of a dashboard with publicly available data is expected in early 2026.

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The American Fluoridation Society opposed recent actions taken by federal officials to move away from community water fluoridation in the U.S. [Becker's Dental & DSO Review]

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency said it will “expeditiously review” new information on the potential health risks of fluoride. The move came as HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he would advise the CDC to stop recommending the addition of fluoride to public water supplies. Additionally, the FDA said it would begin removing ingestible fluoride prescription drug products for children. 

The American Fluoridation Society questioned EPA’s ability to conduct an impartial review due to RFK Jr.’s viewpoints, and said Aug. 12 that the attacks on fluoride are based on a “misrepresentation of the evidence.”

The organization pointed to a recent Make America Healthy Again report that cited “74 high-quality studies” reviewed by the National Toxicology Program as a basis for its concerns about fluoride. However, the AFS highlighted that 70% of the studies reviewed by the NTP were rated as low quality. The NTP report also found no link between low IQ scores and the level of fluoride in U.S. water supplies.

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In a deep red state, a public program focused on maternal and infant health has thrived for decades, and continues to win public support and federal dollars.

Project WATCH -- which stands for Working in Appalachia To Capture High-risk infants -- collects data on nearly 100% of live births in West Virginia, and has contributed to a decline in infant mortality in the state. It has also been adapted over the years to help researchers better understand evolving problems like neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS).

And it has managed to retain most of its federal funding, which grants $4 for every $3 invested by the state, sources told MedPage Today.

One of the reasons Project WATCH remains trusted in West Virginia is simply that it's been around for so long, said its medical director Collin John, MD, MPH, of West Virginia University in Morgantown.

Residents of the state know what the program is, even if they don't know that it receives federal funding, so it doesn't "get that government feel in it," John told MedPage Today.

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New CDC resource released today highlight effective strategies to prevent substance use among U.S. teens. ENGAGE: Evidence-Based Strategies to Prevent Youth Substance Use represents the best available information on what works to prevent youth substance use and showcases how to implement and evaluate programs.

Youth substance use is preventable. The substance use landscape is continually evolving, and prevention efforts need to keep up with these changing circumstances. ENGAGE offers state and local organizations an easily accessible resource to plan for and implement a wide range of evidence-based strategies to prevent substance use before youth reach college age. It includes six strategies - each with several different approaches, along with evidence to support each approach. [CDC]

Youth substance use is a significant public health problem. 

• Early exposure to substances during critical points in development may disrupt healthy brain development.

• In 2024, approximately 26% of 12th graders in the U.S. used illegal substances in the past year, such as cannabis, LSD and other hallucinogens, cocaine or heroin, other narcotics, amphetamines, sedatives, or tranquilizers not under a doctor’s orders. 

• Early exposure to substance use increases risk for being diagnosed with a substance use disorder (SUD); SUDs are linked to developing chronic illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, or other mental health conditions like depression.

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As clinicians, we all want the best for our patients. But when our evidence-based recommendations are thwarted by things out of our control, it can be frustrating. [MedPage Today]

In the clinic, my patients routinely ask me about ads they have seen. As an ob/gyn, this becomes particularly relevant when we discuss prenatal vitamins, because I recommend that all my pregnant patients take multivitamins with folic acid. However, what happens when a patient follows my recommendations but inadvertently buys a supplement that has ingredients that can cause harm? A bill in my home state of California, SB 646, aims to stop this from happening.

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Introduction

Child health sets the foundation of the overall health and prosperity of the nation. Healthy children are more likely to become healthy adults who lead meaningful and productive lives.¹ Recent scientific and policy statements have raised concerns that child health in the US may be declining. A 2024 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine stated that “the United States faces a major crisis with the poor and worsening health and wellbeing of children and youth.”² The Presidential Commission to Make America Healthy Again issued a May 2025 report that called out the need to better understand the root causes of the declining health of US children.^3 [JAMA]

^{Objective  To determine how US children’s health has been changing from 2007 to 2023 using multiple data collection methods and a comprehensive set of health indicators.}

^Conclusion 

^{Conclusions and Relevance  The health of US children has worsened across a wide range of health indicator domains over the past 17 years. The broad scope of this deterioration highlights the need to identify and address the root causes of this fundamental decline in the nation’s health.}

^{Full article on the study here>} 

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The common cold may help protect against COVID-19, which may partially explain why children, who are especially vulnerable to most viral respiratory infections, generally have milder SARS-CoV-2 infections than adults, National Jewish Health–led researchers write today in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Prostock-Studio / iStock

The investigators tested 10,493 repeat nasal swabs from 1,156 US children and adults in the Human Epidemiology and Response to SARS-CoV-2 (HEROS) cohort for 21 respiratory pathogens. They also performed RNA sequencing on 147 swabs from 144 participants taken before COVID-19 infection and 391 swabs from 165 participants before and during rhinovirus infection, which frequently causes the common cold.

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Amid a slow but steady rise in COVID activity, SARS-CoV-2 wastewater detections last week rose from the low to the moderate level, with the highest levels in the West, followed by the South, where detections in Louisiana are at the very high level, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its latest weekly data updates.  [KFF health News & CIDRAP]

The CDC said wastewater trends and model-based epidemic trends suggest that COVID infections are growing or likely growing in most states.

Other indicators also rose, including test positivity, which rose from 6.5% to 8.6% over the past week, with levels higher in the West and Southwest compared to the rest of the country. Meanwhile, emergency department visits for COVID are rising for all ages, with the overall level up 19% compared the previous week, with moderate and substantial increases reported for many states. Deaths declined a bit in the CDC’s most recent reporting week.

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