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MONDAY, March 21, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Harassment of U.S. public health officials and departments was rampant during the COVID-19 pandemic and led some officials to quit, researchers say.Their analysis of survey responses from 583 local health departments nationwide found 57% of them reported nearly 1,500 incidents of harassment that targeted leadership or staff during the pandemic's first 11 months, March 2020 to January 2021."This is a wakeup call for the field about the need to prioritize the long-term protection of our public health workforce," said study author Beth Resnick, an assistant dean at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. "Taking care of the workforce needs to be a fundamental component of the public health infrastructure that doesn't end...

MONDAY, March 21, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. wildfires have become larger, more frequent and more widespread in the past two decades, and the situation will become even worse in the future, a new study warns.“Projected changes in climate, fuel and ignitions suggest that we’ll see more and larger fires in the future,” said lead author Virginia Iglesias, a research scientist at Earth Lab, at the University of Colorado Boulder. "Our analyses show that those changes are already happening."For the study, researchers analyzed data on more than 28,000 wildfires that occurred in the United States between 1984 and 2018 and found more fires in all regions of the 48 lower states between 2005 and 2018 than in the previous two decades.Wildfire frequency quadrupled in the Great Plains and...

MONDAY, March 21 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Problem drinking led to more than 232 million missed work days a year in the United States before the pandemic, and the situation likely became worse with more people working at home, a new study suggests.“Alcohol use disorder is a major problem in the United States and a big problem in many workplaces, where it contributes to a significant number of workdays missed,” said senior investigator Dr. Laura Bierut, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis.“The problem likely has worsened during the pandemic, and we need to try to do more to ensure that people can get the help they need to deal with alcohol use disorder," she said. Bierut said employers and policymakers have an economic incentive to address the issue.For...

SUNDAY, March 20, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Chronic pelvic pain -- typically during menstruation -- is the most common indication of endometriosis, an incurable inflammatory condition that can cause infertility, an expert says.About 10% of women have the disorder in which tissue that normally lines the uterus grows outside of it and can spread to areas such as the fallopian tubes, ovaries and pelvis."The most common symptom of endometriosis is painful periods," said Dr. Kristin Riley, interim chief of the Division of Minimally Invasive Gynecologic Surgery at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa."We're talking about the kind of pain that doesn't go away with a simple treatment, like over-the-counter medications," she said in a center news release. "Pain that...