Continuing with the success of last year’s landmark national tobacco education campaign- the CDC is launching “Tips from Former Smokers” which will run in Arizona through the end of June. The media campaign showcases the real and devastating effects of smoking & secondhand smoke. The ads feature people with smoking-related health conditions and candidly describe the [...]
Whooping cough (pertussis) is a growing problem in the US and Arizona. There were 41,880 cases and 14 infant deaths from pertussis in the US last year… which is the largest number of cases since the vaccine became available in the 50s. In Arizona there were 988 cases in 2012 and there’s a pretty substantial outbreak going on right [...]
Valley Fever has been making news across the country today. A new report in this week’s CDC’s weekly epidemiology report shows that Valley Fever numbers have gone up substantially in AZ over the last 10 years. Part of the increase is probably due to the fact that Valley Fever became reportable a few years ago- [...]
The number of prescriptions filled for opioid pain relievers has increased dramatically along with deaths from overdoses from painkillers (more than 1000 in AZ last year), leading the CDC to identify prescription drug abuse a problem of "epidemic" proportions. To better equip physicians against this crisis, the National Institute on Drug Abuse offers two free online [...]
There’s never a dull day in public health! Things are changing all the time– from new interventions to help folks stay or be more healthy to the discovery of a new virus. Recently, folks on the other side of the world documented a new Coronavirus that can be transmitted person to person. It was first [...]
No doubt the word “ Sequestration” is front and center in your vocabulary these days. This is just a quick note to forecast how it might impact our mission. For starters… the main impacts from federal sequestration (i.e. the federal budget reduction for some programs) will be related to the services that we provide and [...]
Check out CDC’s new iPad App, Solve the Outbreak, which lets you pretend you’re a disease outbreak investigator in the world-class Epidemic Intelligence Service by solving outbreaks based on real-life. When new outbreaks happen, disease detectives are sent in to figure out how they started, before they can spread. You get to investigate the outbreak and [...]
The CDC's “Strategic National Stockpile” is a large quantity of medicine and medical supplies that are available to states in case there’s a public health emergency (flu outbreak, asteroid, etc.) severe enough to cause local health supplies to run out. Once federal and local authorities agree that the stockpile is needed, meds and supplies are [...]
According to the CDC about 15% of school age kids have some hearing loss. Children who are hard of hearing will find it harder to learn vocabulary, grammar, word order, and other parts of verbal communication. Newborn hearing loss occurs in about 1 in 5,000 births- which is why it’s so important that AZ kids [...]
A new CDC report released this week gave a status update on the national Winnable Battle to reduce hospital associated infections. Not all medical procedures carry the same risk of infection, so the report uses something called a standardized infection ratio to compare infection rates among hospitals. It’s a complicated statistic, but basically, it divides [...]
