In Arizona, outbreaks are reported and managed by local public health departments using a module in our electronic disease surveillance system, MEDSIS. Outbreak Module’s integration into MEDSIS allows users to easily link existing infectious disease cases to an outbreak and retrieve outbreak data for analysis. The data collected in this module has replaced our paper-based outbreak [...]
As we continue our recognition of August as National Immunization Awareness Month, we want to take this week to remind pregnant women about the importance of immunizations to protect themselves and their babies. During pregnancy, you are often thinking about baby names, nursery colors, and prenatal vitamins, but you should also be thinking about vaccines. Vaccines [...]
The Arizona Tribal Cancer Collaborative Conference will celebrate its tenth year in November of 2016! The conference has been held annually for ten years, but the active collaborations and learning about one another truly began two years prior to the first conference. CDC provided Arizona Department of Health Services and the Arizona tribes receiving Cancer [...]
Public health efforts continue to move the needle on reducing smoking rates among youth. And that’s important since 90 percent of adult tobacco users report using tobacco in their teen years. Tobacco use among Arizona youth is at an all-time low of 10 percent , which is a decrease of over 40 percent in the [...]
For the past three months, state and local public health disease detectives have been working tirelessly to bring an end to the measles outbreak originating from a private detention facility in Eloy, Arizona. This week, the outbreak is officially closed. A total of 22 cases have been reported during this three month outbreak, all of [...]
Our SunWise Skin Cancer Prevention Program has been working all summer spreading the sun safety message throughout the community. In June and July we worked with the Parks and Recreation Departments with City of Phoenix and City of Glendale for their summer camps series. The SunWise Program visited several sites teaching day campers from ages [...]
The 2016 Summer Olympics will soon take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a Zika-affected country. This has created a lot of discussion about the risk for travelers and their families. CDC and the WHO have both affirmed that travel to the Olympics is not any riskier than non-Olympic-related travel to Zika affected areas. The [...]
Every year, tens of thousands of adults in the United States suffer serious health problems, are hospitalized, or even die from diseases that could have been prevented by vaccination. Arizona has had 22 cases of measles in adults this year, making it the biggest measles outbreak of 2016 in the US. To celebrate the importance [...]
Last week, we hosted our seventh annual Arizona Infectious Disease Training and Exercise, where nearly 400 partners from a wide variety of organizations joined together to learn and share about current infectious disease trends in Arizona and surrounding states. We hosted speakers from local Arizona jurisdictions, other states, CDC, and even from Sonora, Mexico. Our [...]
Last week, more than 150 local, state, tribal, and federal partners working throughout Arizona participated in a tabletop exercise as part of the seventh annual Arizona Infectious Disease Training and Exercise. Participants were from diverse professional arenas including public health, environmental health, public health preparedness, infection prevention, nursing, veterinary services, and academia. The exercise was based on an animal-borne [...]
