Dear Reader,

Happy Saturday, and a happy “getting kicked off my parents’ health insurance had they lived in the United States” day (aka my 26th birthday) to yours truly!

If you’re so inclined, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our small team in doing this work. Here’s your weekend digest of the most pressing health and environmental disparities:

Best regards,
Alex Ip
Publisher and Editor

🍑 A SOUTHERN FLAIR

• Louisiana takes steps to bring its HIV exposure law in line with modern science (Halle Parker, Verite News)

  “ We’ve definitely got many, many more steps to take before we get to the finish line that we’re envisioning. But this feels like a strong stride forward,” Dietz[, the Louisiana Coalition on Criminalization and Health’s coordinator,] said. “This is a victory, especially for folks who have been charged for ways that cannot transmit HIV.”

• BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK, Texas — ‘I’ve never worked with so many conservatives’: the Texans fighting the Big Bend border wall (Diana Spechler, The Guardian)

  “We live in a desert and they’re building a wall that cuts us off from our river. It makes no sense,” says Clara Bensen, one of the five respondents to Walker’s Instagram story, who says that she and her collaborators have cycled through something akin to the stages of grief. “First it was shock,” she says. “Then anger. Now I think we’ve internalized the reality of a long-term fight.”

• BESSEMER, Ala. — Alabama Data Center Non-Disclosure Agreement Required City Officials to Destroy Records, Document Shows (Lee Hedgepeth, Inside Climate News)

  Cleo King, a Bessemer city council member who has voted against rezoning measures for Project Marvel, told Inside Climate News he was “totally shocked” that city officials signed such an agreement with the data center developer.

  “I can’t say who all signed—all I know is it wasn’t Cleo King,” he said.

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🗺️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING

• FARMINGTON, N.M — The Chinese immigrants trafficked on New Mexico’s weed farms (Wufei Yu, High Country News and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project)

  The workers opened the doors. “At first, I felt like I was finally rescued,” Mary said. But that quickly changed: The officers escorted the 16 workers out of the rooms, instructed and gestured for them to sit or kneel on the ground, according to police dashcam video included in court filings against Mary. Some held their hands behind their heads, and as they waited over two hours to be transferred to the San Juan County Adult Detention Center, a policeman who spoke some Mandarin Chinese arrived and asked if the group knew what they were cutting. Everyone shook their heads.

• TORONTO — Shrouded in wildfire smoke, my first summer as a mother is not what I imagined (Amara Possian, The Narwhal)

  A friend told me that her kids didn’t even question the N95 mask she wore to water the garden this week. They’ve grown up with summers like this, and to them it barely registers as strange. Yet when I called my dad to warn him about the air quality, he said, “Oh, that’s why it looks weird outside” — he had noticed the sky but hadn’t connected it to smoke.

• FDA approved Zyn nicotine pouches for sale without knowing what they were made of, says former agency scientist (Matthew Chapman and Kathryn Kranhold, The Examination and STAT)

  On Jan. 16, 2025, the FDA authorized Zyn for sale. An accompanying document stated that a “finding of no significant impact” determination had been signed by Leppanen on Jan. 2.
  
  In an email Leppanen later sent to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., she wrote that she didn’t sign that document and wouldn’t have if she had been asked. She was on leave, without access to a work computer, during that time, Leppanen wrote. When she left for her vacation, she told The Examination, the assessment was still in draft form.

• DENVER — My Search for a Psychiatric Bed in an Overburdened Health System (Helen Santoro, KFF Health News and The Denver Post)

  “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” said Leslie Carpenter, legislative advocacy manager at the Treatment Advocacy Center. “A lot of these bills, including the Community Mental Health Act, were really well intended and ended up with adverse consequences.”

• Trump is taking longer to approve disaster aid and denying Democratic states more frequently
  (David A. Lieb and M.K. Wildeman, Associated Press)

  During his second term, Trump has denied a greater percentage of disaster requests than any president dating to 1989. Those denials have not been evenly distributed among states.

  Trump has approved 80% of the disaster requests from Republican governors but only about 60% from Democratic governors, according to the AP’s analysis of FEMA data.

• PEMALUAN, Indonesia — Can you hear a forest disappearing? Scientists are trying to find out (Leah Varjacques, Scientific American, Mongabay, and Project Multatuli)

  “Our ancestors once predicted something. The prophecy was like this. They said, ‘It’s OK. Those who were once behind, one day will be ahead.’ It’s like the flow of a river. For so long, when the capital city was still in Jakarta, the flow from all of Indonesia converged there. This is the reversal. Our village, so to speak, has become bustling.”

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