Health Wanted: Gun Violence

May 2, 2025
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HEALTH WANTED, a weekly radio show and podcast produced in partnership with WABE, brings need-to-know public health headlines and breaks down the science behind trending topics.

The Episode

The topic: Gun violence is a major public health crisis in the U.S. and the number one cause of death for children aged 1-19. This week on Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow and guest Nandita Somayaji explore how gun violence affects health and why research and prevention efforts are more critical than ever.

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The takeaway: Gun violence presents a serious threat to public health in the U.S. and funding cuts to suppress federal research have seriously affected efforts to understand and prevent it. Despite more recent progress in funding and public awareness, current policy rollbacks and staffing cuts threaten to stall vital change.

  • Previous U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy officially recognized gun violence as a major public health issue in 2024. Gun violence is a leading cause of death for Americans ages 1-44 and is the number one cause of death for children under 20. Even beyond fatalities, the prevalence of guns in the U.S. contributes to countless injuries, psychological trauma, and lower community well-being.
  • Many gun owners believe guns provide physical protection, but evidence shows that living in a home with firearms significantly increases the risk of homicide and suicide, especially for women and youth. Living in a home with access to a firearm increases the risk of suicide by three times and multiplies the risk of being shot by a spouse or partner by seven.
  • The National Rifle Association worked to pass the Dickey Amendment in 1996, which severely limited funding and discouraged federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from researching gun control. For over two decades, federal gun violence research was practically nonexistent, severely limiting evidence-based policy development despite rising death tolls.
  • In 2019, the U.S. Congress allocated $25 million for gun research to fund the exploration of prevention strategies like safe storage, community-based programs, and Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs). However, recent federal layoffs and rollbacks to gun control policies threaten to undo that progress.

The Interview

The guest: Nandita Somayaji

The key takeaways:

  • The Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health applies a public health and epidemiological approach to studying gun violence. Their work focuses on identifying causes, understanding impacts, advancing evidence-based solutions, and advocating for policies that reduce firearm-related harm.
  • Extreme Risk Protection Orders are legal tools that temporarily restrict access to firearms for individuals who pose a threat to themselves or others. These orders can be requested by family members, law enforcement, or community members. This type of intervention is designed to prevent violence before it happens.
  • Programs like community violence intervention target areas with high rates of gun violence. Strategies include violence interrupters, trained community members who mediate conflicts, and local committees that engage stakeholders to implement violence reduction plans. These efforts aim to prevent everyday gun violence, including shootings tied to disputes or retaliation.
  • Funding ongoing gun violence research is critical to better understand its full impact on public health. Studied impacts include mental health challenges, chronic stress, and long-term physical effects, but there are likely more. Additional data is needed to guide effective prevention strategies and public policy.

 

The Listener Questions 

Why does measles cause immune amnesia? Do any other viruses do this?

There are cells in your lungs called macrophages (they are in other parts of your body, but measles infects the lungs, so we’re focusing there). The job of macrophages is to eat foreign particles like dust and bacteria to keep your lungs healthy.


But these macrophages have a receptor on their surface that measles likes to bind to. Measles can bind to this receptor and brought into the macrophage cell, and once that happens, it can enter the lymph nodes.

This is a problem because your lymph nodes are where a lot of your immune cells hang out when they are not in use. Now measles can pop out in the lymph node and infect your memory immune cells that were made for other things like chicken pox.

To clear measles out of the body, your immune system has to destroy these infected memory cells, and when they do that, they destroy the memory of how to respond to the pathogen those cells were originally made to fight. So, suddenly a kid who has already had chickenpox or been vaccinated for chicken pox could get it again.

Some studies have estimated that measles can destroy between 11% and 73% of these antibodies to things you’re already immune to. Some other pathogens like the flu can suppress your immune system while you are acutely ill, which is why people run the risk of getting a secondary bacterial infection of the lungs. It can take 2-3 years for someone’s immune system to recover from measles.

Studies have even found that, after the measles vaccine was introduced, pediatric deaths due to other infectious diseases were reduced, likely because you had fewer kids who lost their susceptibility to pathogens.



Health officials found three cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in a neighboring county. Should I avoid going there?

Prion diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are very scary, but you do not need to avoid the area.

The reason prion diseases are scary is because you could have one right now and not even know it.

They are mutations that cause the proteins of the brain to misfold over and over again and result in dementia-like symptoms that typically end in death within a year of symptoms starting, but the incubation period for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is decades long.

It’s not spread through the air or casual contact, and most of the 350 or so cases a year are sporadic, meaning that a fluke error in gene copying sets it off. The other percent is familial, or genetically inherited. 

An incredibly small fraction of cases over the last several years have been as a result of either contaminated medical equipment or from eating infected meat (this was the mad cow scare in the UK in the ‘80s and ‘90s). So you’re not at risk of getting CJD from any sort of casual contact.

It will be interesting to see what the investigation of these cases brings up. Are they related? Did they all have surgery at the same hospital years ago and are tied to a prior case? Is it just coincidental? We will just have to see.


Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:

 

 

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