The promise of public health surveillance based on near real-time health data is based on the notion that there will be uniform participation among providers, the systems will be easy to utilize, the data will be timely and standardized and the information gained for the systems will be useful.
The alarm is sounding. Today, more Americans are dying from viral hepatitis than HIV/AIDS! May 2012 is National Viral Hepatitis Awareness Month, a time for all Americans to hear the alarm and learn more about this silent epidemic.
With the rapidly changing economic trends within the United States, participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has ballooned recently. As of April 2, 2012, the total number of individuals participating in SNAP in the United States was 46,449,850. SNAP is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s largest food and nutrition assistance program and the cornerstone of the nation’s programs for reducing food insecurity and hunger.
Your health shouldn’t be determined by where you live, but two new reports show that where you live, learn, work and play have a major impact on how healthy you are and how long you live. Disease rates and factors that influence health vary dramatically from neighborhood to neighborhood and region to region—and funding for public health and disease prevention programs also vary significantly from community to community and state to state.
The City of Niagara Falls was “spending a lot of money to maintain marginal courts where people didn’t want them anyway, and we were getting complaints from neighbors who lived nearby.” “We wanted to use all of that money to create one large-scale park with actual programming. It led to a much more elegant solution that let us do more things than anybody thought we’d get. – Thomas Desantis, Playing Smart, Maximizing the Potential of School and Community Property Through Joint Use Agreements
The International AIDS Conference is coming to the United States this July 22-27 for the first time in over 20 years. This is the 19th time the global HIV/AIDS community will be convened for this event. It is the world’s largest—and most important—conference for bringing together service providers, advocates, policymakers and scientific and social science researchers to learn about and share advances in prevention, treatment, care and policy for an epidemic that counts 34 million living with HIV/AIDS worldwide.
It is often difficult to discern what is happening on the fringe of things and then decide whether any of it matters. In the last year, the center of health care has bulged with inevitably growing and demoralizing statistics of illness and costs, predictably warmed by the heat of presidential campaign rhetoric. But at its edge, centrifugal forces have been at work, tilting some usually obscure elements into the light.
Due to the rapid increase in prescription drug abuse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared prescription drug abuse an epidemic. The latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health indicates that over 70 percent of people who abused prescription pain medications obtained them from friends or relatives, while approximately 5 percent got them from a drug dealer or over the Internet.
Just as Walmart and other retailers shook up the prescription drug business by offering $4 generic drugs, the industry now aims to apply its negotiating and marketing clout to tackle problems that vex consumers and the health sector: unpredictable costs, a lack of primary care doctors and inefficient management of chronic illnesses, whose costs drive the majority of health care spending.
It seems that a number of programs that help detect and respond to bioterrorism and other health emergencies are at risk for major cuts or elimination.
