Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI has been granted a permit to run methane gas generators at its massive datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee. The county health department approved the permit for the 15 machines late on Wednesday, a move that has sparked outcry from the local community and environmental leaders, who say the generators pollute their neighborhoods. "Our local leaders are entrusted with protecting us from corporations violating on our right to clean air, but we are witnessing their failure to do so," said KeShaun Pearson, the director of the local environmental non-profit Memphis Community Against Pollution. To supplement the facility's heavy power usage, the company brought in dozens of portable methane gas generators. In January, xAI did apply for a permit for 15 generators – even though it had been running up to 35 generators on-site, according to photographs.

A dire threat to public health can emerge from a huge variety of sources--for example, infectious diseases, a spate of drug overdoses, or exposures to toxic chemicals. Federal, state, and local health departments must respond rapidly to disease outbreaks and other emerging bio-threats. While the current automated systems for "syndromic surveillance" can help by monitoring health data and detecting disease clusters, they are not able to detect clusters with rare or previously unseen symptomology. The method is incorporated in an automated system that can enable public health practitioners to respond more quickly and effectively in the future to fast-emerging threats, including those that are unusual or novel. "Existing systems are good at detecting outbreaks of diseases that we already know about and are actively looking for, like flu or COVID," comments NYU professor Daniel B. Neill, the senior author of the study and director of the ML4G Lab.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Researchers have created a new approach to detecting public health threats. A dire threat to public health can emerge from a huge variety of sources--for example, infectious diseases, a spate of drug overdoses, or exposures to toxic chemicals. Federal, state, and local health departments must respond rapidly to disease outbreaks and other emerging bio-threats. While the current automated systems for "syndromic surveillance" can help by monitoring health data and detecting disease clusters, they are not able to detect clusters with rare or previously unseen symptomology. The method is incorporated in an automated system that can enable public health practitioners to respond more quickly and effectively in the future to fast-emerging threats, including those that are unusual or novel.

The world has been caught grossly unprepared to meet the extraordinary challenges posed by the Covid-19 outbreak. The extreme ramifications of the global crisis have already begun to unfold. Businesses across the world are severely impacted and the global economy is heading towards what's said to be the worst global recession since World War II. Over the last few years, enterprises have been leveraging data science, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to draw meaningful insights and make informed decisions. In the light of the current pandemic, we are forced to wonder if things could have been any different.

Here's what you need to know as you start your day Fauci says'hopefully' making young kids wear masks won't have'lasting negative impact' White House Chief Health Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday that "hopefully" making young kids wear face masks won't have any "lasting negative impact" on them. During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Fauci said it's important to keep an "open mind" about masking after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that unvaccinated children ages 2 and older wear masks and that students wear masks in all K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status, in light of the rapid spread of the COVID-19 delta variant. "It's not comfortable, obviously, for children to wear masks, particularly the younger children," he said. "But you know, what we're starting to see, Hugh, and I think it's going to unfold even more as the weeks go by, that this virus not only is so extraordinarily transmissible, but we're starting to see pediatric hospitals get more and more younger people and kids not only numerically, but what seems to be more severe disease. "Now we're tracking that, the CDC is tracking that really very carefully, so it's going to be a balance that we would feel very badly if we all of a sudden said OK, kids, don't wear masks, then you find out retrospectively that this virus in a very, very strange and unusual way is really hitting kids really hard," he continued. "But hopefully, this will be a temporary thing, temporary enough that it doesn't have any lasting negative impact on them." Hewitt pushed back, citing an editorial Sunday by The Wall Street Journal, titled, "The Case Against Masks for Children," which argues that long-term masking can cause physical and developmental issues in children and that there's little evidence to back up a mandate. "Facial expressions are integral to human connection, particularly for younger children who are only learning how to signal fear, confusion and happiness," Hewitt said. "Covering a child's face mutes these nonverbal forms of communication, can result in robotic and emotionless interaction.

This story was published in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the Puffin Foundation. In California, non-English speakers handed COVID-19 vaccination cards without information on what they mean. In Pennsylvania, people who speak Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese unable to make vaccine appointments due to a lack of interpreters at hospital call centers. These are just a few of the examples captured in a new complaint filed on Friday to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights, Federal Emergency Management Agency's Office of Equal Rights, and Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The complaint, brought by the National Health Law Program, finds widespread problems across the country that inhibit access to COVID-19 resources for people with limited English proficiency (LEP).

Alison Stribling has learned a lot about infectious disease since she transferred onto Covid-19 response at the health department in Contra Costa County near San Francisco. One of her discoveries: How vital fax machines are to US pandemic response. Across the country, labs and health providers report new Covid-19 cases to local health departments. At Contra Costa Health Services, officials use the data to start contact tracing or send extra help in certain cases, such as at a care home or to an infected health care worker. On a typical day in Contra Costa, only around half of those reports arrive electronically; the rest, as many as hundreds, flow in via the fax line, creating a Sisyphean reading list.

Five months after the first Covid-19 case was reported from Gujarat, the government is largely relying on data collected via ITIHAS (IT-enabled lntegrated Hotspot Analysis System) developed by an IIT-Madras professor, for surveillance and containment strategies, apart from manual contact tracing. ITIHAS is a predictive, back-end tool to fine-tune Aarogya Setu data "strictly for surveillance purposes", according to Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) officials. In Gujarat, it was first used in Ahmedabad from May 23, and is now expanded to Surat, Vadodara, Rajkot and Navsari districts, while also being used for state-wide prediction of emerging hotspots. According to the Gujarat health department, as of August 19, there are 883 emerging hotspots across the state. This tool takes data via two channels once a patient tests positive -- one from ICMR, the nodal agency which is notified of positive cases tested in labs, or via Aarogya Setu application depending on the declaration and self assessment by the user.

Health departments around the U.S. that are using contact tracers to contain coronavirus outbreaks are scrambling to bolster their ranks amid a surge of cases and resistance to cooperation from those infected or exposed. With too few trained contact tracers to handle soaring caseloads, one hard-hit Arizona county is relying on National Guard members to pitch in. In Louisiana, people who have tested positive typically wait more than two days to respond to health officials -- giving the disease crucial time to spread. Many tracers are finding it hard to break through suspicion and apathy to convince people that compliance is crucial. Contact tracing -- tracking people who test positive and anyone they've come in contact with -- was challenging even when stay-at-home orders were in place.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - After a week or so sick in bed in their New York City apartment in March, members of the Johnson-Baruch family were convinced they had been stricken by the novel coronavirus. Subsequent test results left them with more questions than answers. Tests both for the virus itself and for the antibodies the immune system produces to fight the infection are becoming more widely available, but they are not perfect. For Maree Johnson-Baruch, her husband, Jason Baruch, and their two teenage daughters, their experience ran the gamut. They all became sick around the same time with the same symptoms.