Impact of various media on health

The Federal Communications Commission announced the launch of a major update to the Mapping Broadband Health in America platform, expanding its capacity to analyze the intersection of broadband connectivity and a range of critical health outcomes, including new variables to better examine maternal health.

In 2022, President Joe Biden (D-DE) signed the Data Mapping to Save Moms' Lives Act, which directs the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to “incorporate publicly available data on maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity into the agency’s Mapping Broadband Health in America platform, in consultation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” The bipartisan bill was introduced in 2021 by Sens.

The Data Mapping to Save Moms’ Lives Act directed the Federal Communications Commission to incorporate maternal health data into its Mapping Broadband Health in America platform. The agency took this task seriously and on June 20, 2023, first introduced this information on the platform, including public data about maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity, as well as facts about race and ethnicity, maternal age, rurality, areas with maternity care deserts, and areas with shortages of mental health care providers.

The United States has the highest level of maternal mortality of any industrialized country.  And deaths from pregnancy-related causes strike women of color and those who live in rural communities especially hard.  This is a crisis.  It requires everyone to identify how they can help because so many studies show that most pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.... We used authority under the Data Mapping to Save Moms’ Lives Act to update the agency’s Mapping Broadband Health in America platform to include maternal health data.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and Congressman Tony Cárdenas (D-CA) visited Sycamores Pacoima Community Based Services  to learn about the Centers’ collaboration with the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and highlighted how georouting can improve the ability for people in crisis to receive the local care they need.

The Indian telecommunication market witnessed a distortion in 2016 due to a late-entrant firm's disruptive market entry with deep-discounted pricing; however, Internet penetration marked a considerable increase. Using nationally representative cross-sectional data from the post-market disruption period and an instrumental variable strategy for identification, we estimate the impact of the Internet on the uptake of maternal and child healthcare services. We find that the Internet improves the uptake of antenatal care, institutional delivery, postnatal care, and modern contraceptive use.

An idea percolating all summer in the big national argument about social media—warning labels to help reduce the harms of online platforms to kids—has suddenly landed in Congress. Sens. Katie Britt (R-AL) and John Fetterman (D-PA) introduced a bill requiring platforms to add those labels.

Sens Katie Britt (R-AL) and John Fetterman (D-PA) introduced the Stop the Scroll Act, which would create a mental health warning label requirement for social media platforms. This bipartisan legislation would ensure all users, especially adolescents, are aware of the potential mental health risks posed by social media usage and are provided access to mental health resources. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy recently recommended a warning label be placed on social media platforms.

In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) that touched on a series of controversies, Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said it was improper for the Biden administration to have pressured Facebook to censor content in 2021 related to the coronavirus pandemic, vowing that the social-media company would reject any such future efforts. Zuckerberg wrote that senior Biden administration officials, including from the White House, had “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a reorganization that will streamline and bolster technology, cybersecurity, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) strategy and policy functions. This reorganization will clarify and consolidate these critical functions, as follows: