Today the Arizona Academy of Pediatrics recognized our Nutrition and Physical Activity Team as a co-recipient of the 2011 Partnership Award at its annual luncheon and chapter meeting. Our team was recognized for increasing outreach efforts to pediatricians and actively fostering collaboration among staff and the Academy membership. Karen Sell and the team helped the Academy indentify [...]
The major public health achievements of the first 10 years of the 21st century included improvements in vaccine preventable and infectious diseases, reductions in deaths from certain chronic diseases, declines in deaths and injuries from motor vehicle crashes, and more, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 10 domestic [...]
Arizona has been able to decrease the rate of deaths from car, truck and motorcycle crashes by 43% in the last 4 years, from about 19 deaths per 100,000 in 2005 to 11 per 100,000 Arizonans in 2009. While this is good progress, we still have a long way to go. Crashes are still the [...]
Early in my career, I learned the importance of have a few random minutes with someone that I had little access to… someone you bump into in an elevator, sidewalk, or whatever. Someone that can help you with your mission. It could be someone in a key position from a Stakeholder group, your boss's boss's [...]
He’s a guy that may have saved more lives than any other single person in history. In the 1790's, he noticed that “milkmaids” seldom came down with smallpox. He developed a theory that the blisters which “milkmaids” commonly had as part of their work (from a disease called cowpox) somehow protected them from smallpox. In [...]
Life expectancy improved by more than 30 years in the US during the 20th Century. Advances in diagnosis and treatment of disease have played a role, but the real reason we’re living longer today has a lot more to do with public health interventions than advances in health care. Interventions like vaccines, motor vehicle safety, [...]
Title V of the Social Security Act is the longest-standing public health legislation in America. Over the past 75 years, the Title V Maternal & Child Health Block Grant has supported a number of efforts in Arizona which have contributed to improved immunization rates, declining infant mortality and more comprehensive services for children with special health care [...]
Healthcare-associated infections are a critical challenge to public health in Arizona. Healthcare associated infections are acquired during healthcare treatment and can be devastating and even deadly- importantly, they’re preventable. At any given time, about 1 in 20 patients have an infection while receiving healthcare treatment in U.S. hospitals, causing up to $33B in excess medical [...]
This month AHCCCS told us that they’ve picked our Bureau of Tobacco & Chronic Disease as the state applicant for HHS’ Medicaid Incentives for Prevention of Chronic Diseases Grant. The grant proposal (which will be developed with AHCCCS) must be turned in to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services early next month. The grant [...]
Last week I wrote about how Arizona Radiation Regulatory Agency (ARRA) instruments detected trace levels of Iodine-131 in AZ air from the troubled nuclear power plant in Japan. This week testing by ARRA and the AZ Dept. of Agriculture found trace levels of I-131 in the milk samples that they routinely monitor. The levels are of no [...]
