Each of us is a living ecosystem with trillions of microorganisms living on and in us, our microbiome. Each of us has her own collection of such microbes, inhabiting skin, mouth, gut, lungs. Yes, it’s surprising that identical twins are barely more similar to one another in microbial composition than are non-identical twins; that our personal menagerie changes over time; that a sufficiently extreme short-term dietary change can cause the gastrointestinal flora of different people to resemble one another within days. Yes, the microbiome may well turn out to play a critical role in an individual’s health, a very intriguing prospect. But when nearly two dozen federal agencies—NIH, FDA, EPA, NSF—join together to release a five-year strategic plan to bolster the study of microbiomes, we wonder why these same agencies can’t get together on another day to make a second strategic plan. This one a plan for public health, not private health, one that could save lives and reduce morbidities next year by focusing on what we know matters to our health: the policies that drive behavior.

President Trump has a history of statements that suggests he harbors racist sentiments and of actions that would back up these same sentiments. He seemed to lay to rest any doubt about his inclinations in reported statements in the Oval Office that the United States should not be granting admission to residents from “shithole” countries. 

The world is aging rapidly. There are now more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 5 worldwide. And we all want to age healthy.
 
Yet how do we do that? We propose one simple potential way to facilitate healthy aging: volunteering. We like to think of volunteering as a public health intervention, as a social model for health promotion.

Every health care provider—from pediatrician to geriatrician—has seen how hunger and homelessness affect health. The disordered lives of patients disrupt appointment-keeping and medication adherence but also create problems themselves. For example, they drive depressive symptoms, high blood pressure, and hospitalizations for asthma.
 
Recognizing this, some health systems are paying attention. Our health system in Boston recently announced plans to subsidize housing to improve housing options for patients for whom it is accountable. 

According to a new study, there was little discussion by candidates Trump and Clinton of “public health issues” during the 2016 Presidential campaign. 
 
Combing the texts of major campaign speeches, interviews, and advertisements made by candidates Trump and Clinton for keywords, the authors of this study conclude, “the two candidates did not communicate the major concerns of the public health field.” They bemoan that general references to “health” accounted for less than 1% of the words used by these candidates.

Pre-tax incomes for the poorest 50 percent of Americans have stayed mostly unchanged for the past 40 years. As our economy has grown, the pre-tax share of national income among the poor has dropped significantly, widening income gaps in the country. We leave the question of why inequality matters for the economy to others. What is of concern to us is whether income inequality matters to our health and to the extent that it does, how we in the health profession should respond. 

Quietly, slowly, there has been a notable change in how young Americans relate sexually with each other. Between 1995 and 2015, the proportion of high school students who report ever having sexual intercourse has fallen from 53.1% to 41.2%, the lowest rate since the 1970s. If these percentages were moving in the opposite direction, the headlines would announce how “discouraged” we were by this next generation putting themselves at risk for pregnancy, infection. Good news does not travel as fast as bad news does. So if you were looking for positive public health reports, this is one.