Like many people, you may be making your health a priority in the new year. Did you know that being physically active can help you increase your chances to live longer, feel better about yourself, decrease your chances of becoming depressed, sleep well at night, and stay at or get to a healthy [...]
The core of our decision-making as an agency relies on evidence. Evidence can be scientific like surveillance or research or it can be administrative or financial. Whichever way you slice it- the key is to get good reliable information so that our teams can make effective decisions as we execute our mission. One of the [...]
This week is Men’s Health Week - the worldwide event happens every year before Father’s Day calling attention to the issues that affect men’s health. Many groups take the opportunity to talk about men’s health – we should be thinking about our health every week. The top health issues that impact men’s health are also [...]
Today our preparedness team will participate in a drill (graded by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) to test our response to a simulated radiation release from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. The exercise simulates an event where people, food or drinking water could become contaminated in the very unlikely event that there were to be a release of [...]
Lots of people tell me it is easy to drop pounds quickly when starting a diet. Keeping that weight off long-term seems harder. Particularly for older women, natural declines in energy needs after menopause make long-term weight loss even more challenging. Traditional behavioral treatments for obesity have focused on calorie intake and have poor long-term [...]
I'm excited to announce that we have 32 teams signed up for the ADHS Worksite Wellness Stair Climb Challenge. Stair climbing and other physical activities have so many health benefits including decreasing your risk of developing a chronic disease, improving your mental health and mood, and it increases your chances of living longer. So, Get Your Climb On!
Making good decisions about prioritizing which public health issues to tackle and how to target our interventions rests on our ability to collect and analyze public health data. For infectious disease surveillance that means have a base of solid reporting and surveillance so we can analyze infectious disease trends. For chronic diseases, we need to [...]
When we implemented our Salt Initiative earlier this year we asked people to know their blood pressure and consider reducing their sodium intake by shopping more carefully and preparing recipes that are lower in sodium. One of the main messages was to encourage people to know their own blood pressure. Then it occurred to me- [...]
The Trust for America’s Health released their annual obesity report. Overall, the national trend toward increasing obesity rates continued it’s march forward. Arizona ranked in the middle of the pack, but the pack itself in increasingly unhealthy. More than two-thirds of states have adult obesity rates above 25 percent. In 1991, no state had an [...]
Our preparedness team organized and executed a Functional Exercise on Tuesday last week to test Arizona’s hospital system for Interoperable Communications, Tracking of Bed Availability, Deploying Volunteer Health Professionals, Fatality Management, and Medical Evacuation/Shelter-In-Place capabilities. The exercise focused on hospital, local health, and state health Emergency Operations Center coordination. The exercise scenario was called Sink [...]
