A new study published in the journal Preventive Medicine explores food insufficiency and financial challenges among families after multiple states stopped providing emergency allotments of SNAP benefits provided during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. SNAP benefit reductions were associated with increased difficulty affording both food and household expenses among SNAP-participant families, particularly among those with children. The risk of food insufficiency—a narrow measure that indicates that a household has not had enough food to eat within the past seven days—increased by five percentage points after several states ended their emergency allotments in 2021, compared to states that ended this assistance later. Similarly, the risk of difficulty affording household expenses increased by eight percentage points after the emergency allotments ended.

The year 2024 broke several temperature records: it was the hottest ever recorded, and its summer was also the warmest to date. A study published in Nature Medicine has estimated that 62,775 heat-related deaths occurred in Europe between 1 June and 30 September of that year. These mortality figures are 23.6% higher than the approximately 50,800 estimated for the summer of 2023, and 8.1% lower than the nearly 67,900 estimated for the summer of 2022. 

Three education experts at the University of Kansas have written a new article that outlines a host of issues that have plagued education research and limited how effective it can be. Things such as peer review fatigue, overgeneralization and conflicting results have kept researchers from leading to positive change in education. However, the age of AI presents an opportunity to rethink how education is done for new generations of scholars and educators, they write.

Despite the expansion of virtual care in Ontario prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, specialist physicians did not expand reach to patients living at great distances from where they provided care, found new research published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.250166