Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode

Doctor, doctor: How the Trump administration is making America sicker

Episode Summary

This Earth Day, we're not celebrating progress, we're sounding the alarm. In today’s episode, Ken sits down with Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney, co-authors of a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine that breaks down how the Trump administration’s sweeping environmental rollbacks are threatening the health of every American. Dr. Landrigan is no stranger to these fights. As a young Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor in the 1970s, his groundbreaking research on lead poisoning in children helped drive lead out of gasoline and paint. This victory reduced childhood lead poisoning by 95% and raised the IQ of an entire generation. Dr. Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Harvard Medical School, has spent his career fighting to protect his patients’ lungs – and now the very protections that keep those lungs healthy are being dismantled one regulation at a time. <p/> Together, the doctors share with Ken all the vital rules that the administration is undoing, who will suffer most, and what it will cost the public in health harms and lives lost – from weakened air quality standards and gutted climate policy, to the quiet destruction of the scientific institutions that keep Americans safe.

Episode Notes

This Earth Day, we're not celebrating progress; we're sounding the alarm. In today’s episode, Ken sits down with Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney, co-authors of a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine that breaks down how the Trump administration’s sweeping environmental rollbacks are threatening the health of every American.

Dr. Landrigan is no stranger to these fights. As a young Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor in the 1970s, his groundbreaking research on lead poisoning in children helped drive lead out of gasoline and paint. This victory reduced childhood lead poisoning by 95% and raised the IQ of an entire generation.

Dr. Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Harvard Medical School, has spent his career fighting to protect his patients’ lungs – and now the very protections that keep those lungs healthy are being dismantled one regulation at a time.

Together, the doctors share with Ken all the vital rules that the administration is undoing, who will suffer most, and what it will cost the public in health harms and lives lost – from weakened air quality standards and gutted climate policy, to the quiet destruction of the scientific institutions that keep Americans safe.



For a deeper dive into today’s discussion:



New England Journal of Medicine: The Dismantling of Environmental Protections: A Grave Threat to America’s Health



Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode every other week.

@kencookspodcast

www.ewg.org

@environmentalworkinggroup