This week has been an eventful one for America's public health agency. Two former leaders of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explained why they suddenly departed in a Senate hearing. They also described how CDC employees are being instructed to turn their backs on scientific evidence. They painted a picture of a health agency in turmoil--and at risk of harming the people it is meant to serve. And, just hours afterwards, a panel of CDC advisers voted to stop recommending the MMRV vaccine for children under four. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter.

The pandemic has put a spotlight on how big data and analytics technologies are being used in the public health sector. Contact tracing, where phone numbers and location data from mobile devices were combined with lab results in public health systems to issue alerts when an individual came in contact with a confirmed COVID patient. This information empowered people to preemptively self-isolate and/or head for rapid testing. Google and Apple, meanwhile, developed some groundbreaking application programming applications (APIs) for contact tracing that protected anonymity, while allowing their devices to receive updates from state disease surveillance systems and send out alerts. The use of big data during the pandemic is certainly a harbinger of things to come, and public health agencies must understand how such data is being used.

GENEVA - The World Health Organization expressed alarm Thursday at the lack of progress on curbing sexually transmitted diseases, while one of its experts warned of complacency as dating apps are spurring sexual activity. The U.N. health agency said in a fresh report that every day globally there were more than 1 million new cases of treatable sexually transmitted diseases (STD) or infections (STI). WHO found that there were more than 376 million new cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, trichomoniasis and syphilis registered around the world in 2016 -- the latest year for which data is available. That is basically the same number as WHO reported in its previous study, based on data from 2012. A WHO expert on sexually transmitted infections, Teodora Wi, separately told journalists there were concerns that condom use may be declining as people have lost their fear of contracting HIV in step with the emergence of available and effective antiviral treatments.