Pien Huang
speaker
78 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Pien Huang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah. Okay. This sounds like a very serious disease. And it's one of the reasons you two went to report this story in Arizona. Before we get into how the tribe turned the disease around, why has the infection rate been so high?
I am from Connecticut, where there's lots of ticks. So I know a vector is just like... Fancy science word for a creature that carries a disease. It can be a mosquito. It can be a flea. In this case, it's a tick.
And it's upon these dogs that this new tick vector is being carried, spreading Rocky Mountain spotted fever to children. And it all just sounds like a bad combination of things.
OK, so given this perfect storm. Who then has been turning this disease around and how?
This is why we love public health, though. They're all about prevention. They're all about partnerships. Okay, so how is the tribe and the CDC doing this?
This reminds me of, what was it during the pandemic we all did? Contact tracing? Contact tracing, yeah. Exactly, yeah.
That's pretty cool.
And it's so, this One Health approach is so multi-pronged. It is making a difference, but it does sound really labor intensive. How does the tribe keep all this going?
I've heard... In other public health interventions, individuals like that are called like super communicators or nerd nodes of trust. They're just like people who are really good at spreading awareness because people already trust them.
Well, we will take and celebrate any win we have right now. Five years, no deaths from Rocky Mountain spotted fever in this community. Ping, Megan, thank you so much for bringing us this story. You're welcome. Thanks for having us. If you liked this episode, make sure you never miss a new one by following us on whichever podcasting platform you're listening to.
And hey, if you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave at NPR.org. This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Kweisi Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. I'm Ping Kwong.
And I'm Megan Lim. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Hello, hello.
Yep, we're talking fluoride, which is a topic that NPR has covered in drinking water around the U.S. for literally decades. Hmm. Fluoride is a very common mineral that occurs naturally in almost all soil, in water, even in many rocks.
And most people in the U.S. get fluoridated drinking water. It's added to the water to prevent tooth decay and cavities. The current U.S. Public Health Service recommendation is 0.7 parts per million optimally, which is three drops in a 55-gallon barrel.
Right, Emily. And it used to be a range, but in 2015, it was revised down to the standard minimum, 0.7 parts per million, because there were concerns that at levels higher than that, it could be causing dental fluorosis, which is, you know, streaking or mottling on kids' teeth.
And it still is, Emily, but a debate is evolving over whether the risks and the benefits of fluoride have changed. So back in August 2024, part of the National Institutes of Health called the National Toxicology Program released a big report. It was over 300 pages long, and it linked high levels of fluoride exposure with a slight decline in children's IQ.
At the time, I spoke with Ashley Mullen, who's an outside researcher...
And there were experts, especially within the dental community, that raised concerns about the report immediately. I mean, they were worried that people would misconstrue it to mean that any fluoridation in drinking water is a problem. when the amount of fluoride being discussed was twice what's added to the public drinking water.
Yeah, yeah. So it gave us some more details about how they'd done their research for this analysis. They had looked at dozens of studies, mostly from China and India. And they use this to conclude that some babies and kids exposed to high levels of fluoride may experience some amount of neurodevelopmental harm.
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