"From space, NASA collects data that’s crucial for public health. Potential cuts could threaten that work."
"Daniel P. Johnson, a geographer at Indiana University at Indianapolis, works with a team of researchers who spend a lot of time catching blowflies, dissecting their iridescent blue-green abdomens, and analyzing the contents of their guts.
Johnson and his colleagues are tracking the spread of Lyme disease on a warming planet. But they need a lot of additional data. They get it from NASA.
The world’s foremost driver of space science is not a public health agency. But NASA’s vast data collection has quietly become important for health research, helping scientists track disease outbreaks and monitor air pollution amid climate change.
Now, as President Donald Trump’s administration proposes sweeping cuts to the agency’s budget, including its Earth Sciences Division, experts are worried that many of these data sources could be lost, and research collaborations halted, with serious consequences for public health.
NASA “really enabled a whole new world of health research that the public health community hadn’t been doing yet,” said Susan Anenberg, who directs the George Washington University Climate and Health Institute, and whose own work has been funded by NASA for nearly a decade."
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