Impact of various media on health

Fallout continues from the Wall Street Journal’s investigative journalism exposé that showed telecommunications companies in the US have left behind a massive network of copper cables covered in toxic lead. AT&T CEO John Stankey said “there is no public health crisis” to worry about, citing the release of lead test results by AT&T, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the state of New York.

Large language model (LLM)–-based artificial intelligence chatbots direct the power of large training data sets toward successive, related tasks as opposed to single-ask tasks, for which artificial intelligence already achieves impressive performance. The capacity of LLMs to assist in the full scope of iterative clinical reasoning via successive prompting, in effect acting as artificial physicians, has not yet been evaluated. The objective of the study was to evaluate ChatGPT’s capacity for ongoing clinical decision support via its performance on standardized clinical vignettes.

The Good Things Foundation is the UK’s largest digital inclusion charity, seeking to help a million people to get across a tech divide that has deepened during the cost of living crisis.

For decades, AT&T, Verizon, and other firms dating back to the old Bell System have known that the lead in their networks was a possible health risk to their workers and had the potential to leach into the nearby environment. They knew their employees working with lead regularly had high amounts of the metal in their blood, studies from the 1970s and ’80s show.

The Federal Communications Commission announced an important update to its Mapping Broadband Health in America platform to incorporate maternal health data, enabling policymakers, public health experts, clinicians, researchers, innovators, and other public and private stakeholders to better explore the intersection of broadband and maternal health.

Digital equity is a core social driver of health. Digital equity refers to the condition in which all individuals and communities have the information technology capacity needed for full participation in our society, democracy and economy.

Phones at school are "a disaster," said Jonathan Haidt, the prominent social psychologist, making the case for phone-free schools. "Smartphones impede learning, stunt relationships, and lessen belonging," says Haidt. Teachers and administrators see "clear links between rising phone addiction and declining mental health, to say nothing of declining academic performance. Back in 2019, Haidt asked school leaders why they couldn't just ban phones during school hours. "They said too many parents would be upset if they could not reach their children during the school day," he said.

This advisory describes the current evidence on the impacts of social media on the mental health of children and adolescents. It states that we cannot conclude social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents and outlines immediate steps we can take to mitigate the risk of harm to children and adolescents. Key takeaways:

On December 20, 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the Data Mapping to Save Moms’ Lives Act. This Act directs the Federal Communications Commission to incorporate, in consultation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), publicly available data on maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity into its Mapping Broadband Health in America platform by June 18, 2023.

Broadband is no longer a luxury that only a few people need; it is a critical service that supports Americans’ economic opportunity, health, education, recreation, and well-being.