A couple weeks ago I wrote about our new Community Profiles Dashboards. They’re a huge leap forward for public health professionals, city planners, non-profit organizations, medical providers and anyone interested in health data. The data are arranged on the Dashboards - in state, county, and Primary Care Areas - to provide several options to compare and explore [...]
Child-serving organizations and community leaders will be meeting at the 2014 National Latino Children’s Summit on October 3rd in Phoenix. It’s called The State of Latino Children: Our Future – and it’ll focus on health, child safety, education and more. At the summit, Dyanne Herrera from our Office of Women and Children’s Health will provide [...]
Our most recent AzHIP broadcast is posted to the Arizona State Health Assessment section (look under the Resources heading). A big thank you to everyone involved for their hard work. The next set of heavy lifting is putting together the working groups that will assemble gap analysis and the intervention ideas that will flesh out [...]
After more than 30 years of litigation, the Maricopa County Superior Court last week dismissed the Arnold v. Sarn lawsuit, retaining jurisdiction to enforce the on-going agreement that lead to this historic resolution. The dismissal is the result of a comprehensive joint stipulation – filed by the parties and approved by the court earlier this year [...]
Abuse of prescription drugs is a public health epidemic, but you can do your part in helping to curb access to prescription drugs with one simple step: get rid of your old and unused medications. This weekend is the National Prescription Drug Take Back Day held by the DEA and state and local partners. Removing [...]
Eating foods with trans-fat (or trans fatty acids) raises low-density lipoprotein (“bad” cholesterol), lowers your high-density lipoprotein (“good” cholesterol), and is linked to heart disease. Trans fat provides no health benefit and there’s no safe level of eating trans-fat. The FDA, American Heart Association, and the Institute of Medicine all agree that trans fatty acids [...]
This is national suicide prevention month. What can you do to prevent suicide? Look for the warning signs: Those talking about wanting to die Those giving away their possessions Those feeling hopeless, or intensely lonely Those experiencing mental or physical pain Those increasing their use of substances Those discussing revenge Those demonstrating extreme mood swings [...]
The pace of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has quickened over the last few weeks. There have now been over 4,900 cases and 2,400 deaths (half in the last month). The WHO has warned that by October, we may see the number of Ebola cases doubling every three weeks. For several months now, the [...]
It’s coming up on the harvest season for infectious diseases, and many of our ADHS teams are gearing up. We’re monitoring the number of flu cases reported across the state (we’ve only had 1 in the last couple weeks), supporting distribution of flu vaccines, encouraging healthcare workers and the public to get vaccinated, and testing influenza [...]
We’re showing success in reducing our teen age pregnancies. It’s one of our winnable battles because babies born to teen moms are more likely to have bad birth outcomes; teen moms are likely to drop out of school and live in poverty. Since 2002, our teen pregnancy rate has declined almost 40%. We continue to [...]
