Kim Krisberg
Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade. You can reach her at kkrisberg@yahoo.com.
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Posts by this author
June 6, 2017
When you ask public health advocates about President Trump’s recent budget proposal, you typically get a bewildered pause. Public health people don’t like to exaggerate — they follow the science, they stay calm, they face off against dangerous threats on a regular basis. Exaggerating doesn’t help…
May 30, 2017
At Eater, Elizabeth Grossman reports that Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation that would protect undocumented agricultural workers from deportation and provide them and their families with a path to long-term residence and citizenship.
The bill proposes that farmworkers who can prove…
May 26, 2017
To the surprise of literally no one, President Trump’s 2018 budget proposed stripping all federal funds, including Medicaid dollars, from Planned Parenthood. Proponents of this argue that if Planned Parenthood clinics end up shuttered, women can simply access care elsewhere. But growing research…
May 23, 2017
Last week, researchers officially opened enrollment in the nation’s first decades-long study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer health — an effort they hope will transform our understanding of the health challenges LGBTQ people face and begin narrowing a giant data gap on their…
May 18, 2017
A Zika attack rate of just 1 percent across the six states most at risk for the mosquito-borne disease could result in $1.2 billion in medical costs and lost productivity, a new study finds. That’s more than the $1.1 billion in emergency Zika funding that Congress approved last year after months of…
May 16, 2017
At BuzzFeed, Kate Moore tells the story of the “radium girls,” the hundreds of women during WWI who worked painting watch dials with luminous radium paint — a substance that would eventually poison and kill them even though they were told it was perfectly safe. What followed was years of employers…
May 5, 2017
Right now, according to public health officials, about half a million U.S. kids have blood lead levels that could harm their health. However, new research finds many more children — hundreds of thousands more — are likely going unidentified.
In a study published last week in Pediatrics, researchers…
May 2, 2017
At ProPublica, Michael Grabell investigates how U.S. companies take advantage of immigrant workers, focusing on Case Farms poultry plants, which former OSHA chief David Michaels once described as “an outrageously dangerous place to work.” He reports that Case Farms built its business by recruiting…
May 1, 2017
Protecting babies and children against dangerous — sometimes fatal — diseases is a core mission of public health. Everyday, in health departments across the nation, someone is working on maintaining and improving childhood vaccination rates and keeping diseases like measles and mumps from regaining…
April 25, 2017
More than 8 million U.S. children depend on the Children’s Health Insurance Program for access to timely medical care. The program is authorized through 2019, but its federal funding expires in September and it’s unclear what Congress will do.
That uncertainty stresses all the systems and families…
April 21, 2017
There was always an assumption that the Affordable Care Act would need time to find its sea legs. That’s why it included measures to shield insurers from the potential profit losses that inherently come with offering millions more people better health coverage at more reasonable prices. Insurers…
April 18, 2017
At Bloomberg BNA, Stephen Lee reports that with fears of deportation looming, undocumented immigrants are becoming afraid to access legal remedies when they’re injured on the job. The article notes that such immigrants are disproportionately employed in hazardous jobs and while they account for…
April 14, 2017
Public health is in trouble.
Last month, President Trump released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2018. It was more of an outline, really, and didn’t provide many details, but it did call for a nearly 18 percent cut to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and for block granting the…
April 12, 2017
To get a clearer sense of just how bad our drug overdose problem has gotten, look no further than this year’s County Health Rankings. The annual report found that after years of declining premature deaths, that rate is on the rise and due primarily to overdose deaths. It means we could be seeing…
April 8, 2017
At the Center for Public Integrity, Talia Buford and Maryam Jameel investigate federal contractors that receive billions in public funds despite committing wage violations against their workers. In analyzing Department of Labor data on more than 1,100 egregious violators, the reporters found that…
March 31, 2017
As a PhD student, Laura Syron was helping her advisor with workplace safety research focused on the Pacific Northwest commercial fishing industry. The project got her thinking about worker safety throughout the seafood supply chain, from the boat to the processing plant. So she decided to do a…
March 28, 2017
Before Patrick Morrison worked for the International Association of Fire Fighters, he was a firefighter himself. He’s experienced the horrifying and profoundly saddening events that first responders see every day. And like many other firefighters, he turned to alcohol to deal with the accumulating…
March 25, 2017
Yesterday, House Republicans failed to find enough votes to pass their Affordable Care Act replacement. It was a very good day for the millions of Americans projected to lose their coverage under the GOP plan. But let’s be clear: Obamacare is not safe.
In a last-ditch effort to round up more votes…
March 21, 2017
At the Sacramento Bee, Ryan Lillis and Jose Luis Villegas report on the effects that Trump’s immigration crackdown is having on California farms, writing that fear of deportation is spreading throughout the state’s farming communities. While many farmworkers believe immigration raids are inevitable…
March 17, 2017
There’s a lot at stake for women’s health in the Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, which eliminated out-of-pocket costs for birth control and has been highly successful in breaking down barriers to affordable family planning. The cost-sharing changes alone are saving individual…
March 15, 2017
As the Republicans push forward their abysmal Affordable Care Act replacement, much of the talk surrounding its impact focuses on insurance numbers and premium hikes. Those things are certainly important. But this is more important: The Republican plan will cause unnecessary suffering and…
March 10, 2017
Another day, another study that shows soda taxes work to reduce the consumption of beverages associated with costly chronic diseases in children and adults.
This time it’s a study on Mexico’s sugar-sweetened beverage tax, which went into effect at the start of 2014 and tacked on 1 peso per liter of…
March 8, 2017
At the Atlantic Monthly, Alana Semuels interviews David Weil, who served as administrator of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division under President Obama, on his time at DOL and the future of labor under Trump.
On Obama’s effect, Weil told Semuels:
Semuels: What specifically changed in…
March 3, 2017
Most news on the dangers of antibiotic-resistant infections focus on adults. But children are very much at risk too. In fact, a recent study found that U.S. children have experienced a 700 percent surge in infections caused by particular bacteria that’s both resistant to multiple antibiotics and…
March 1, 2017
In 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a report finding 457 fracking-related spills in eight states between 2006 and 2012. Last month, a new study tallied more than 6,600 fracking spills in just four states between 2005 and 2014. But, as usual, the numbers only tell part of the…
February 24, 2017
Earlier this month, news broke of a study that found potentially health-harming chemicals in a variety of fast food packaging. Upon hearing such news, the natural inclination is to worry that you’re ingesting those chemicals along with your burger and fries. Study researcher Graham Peaslee says…
February 21, 2017
At Reveal, Jennifer Gollan reports on how the Navy and other federal agencies give lucrative contracts to shipbuilders with troublesome worker safety records. In fact, Gollan reports that since 2008, the Navy and Coast Guard’s seven major shipbuilders have received more than $100 billion in public…
February 17, 2017
The anti-vaxxers were out again this week, spreading misinformation and debunked science about an intervention that’s saved millions of lives and prevented immeasurable human suffering. It’s unconscionable.
That person is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who — to repeat — is not a doctor, not a scientist,…
February 14, 2017
Fewer economic opportunities may be exposing black and Hispanic workers to an increased risk of workplace injury, according to a new study.
Published this month in Health Affairs, the study set out to document differences in the risk of occupational injury and in the prevalence of work-related…
February 7, 2017
At the American Prospect, Justin Miller interviews Obama-era Labor Department officials on the future of worker protections under President Trump. Miller takes a behind-the-scenes peek at what it took to pass some of the Obama administration’s key labor rules, discusses the nomination of Andy…