Here you will find topics ranging from current events that affect public health in Arizona to overall information about the Arizona Department of Health Services
When I started working at our agency in 1992 (doing risk assessments for state superfund sites) I never dreamed that one day I’d have the honor of serving as the agency director. Quite honestly, I never had a goal of being the director- but somehow it just happened. This has been an awesome job. [...]
One of the services we sometimes take for granted is mail service. At ADHS we have a small mailroom, staffed by Susan Barnes and Meredith Chernov, who processes mail sent through the US Postal Department and the inter-office mail between state offices. In 2014 our mailroom processed over 1,000,000 pieces of outgoing US mail for [...]
Tonight at 8 pm PBS American Experience will feature an episode called "The Forgotten Plague: Tuberculosis in America." Tuberculosis was the deadliest killer in human history prior to 1900. In fact, TB (then sometimes called Consumption) killed about 14% of all the people who ever lived prior to 1900. TB rifled through the US at the turn of the century, sometimes [...]
Leaders across Borders (LaB) is an advanced leadership development program funded by the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission. The idea is to build bi-national leadership capacity of public health, health care, and other community sectors to improve the health of communities in the U.S.- México border region. Right now (and through February 13) we’re looking for [...]
Over the last couple of years, we’ve been working with partners using data collected by the U of A to stem the tide of lower vaccination rates in Arizona schools. Last year’s initiatives included implementation of our Action Plan to Address Vaccine Exemptions which included updating the vaccine exemption form (which reinforces to parents know [...]
With all the news about Arizona’s measles outbreak, I’m sure you’ve heard just how important vaccination is for our community. Public health agencies study vaccine coverage data to understand how well communities are protected from preventable disease and to make targeted decisions about how to contain an outbreak. For example, if there’s a disease outbreak [...]
Last week Southwest Ambulance workers (Southwest is a subsidiary of Rural/Metro) voted to authorize their union management to call a strike in Pima, Pinal, and Maricopa Counties. The union’s management hasn't yet called for a strike and hopefully both parties will continue to negotiate and reach a deal. If they do decide to call a strike, [...]
Last fall I wrote about how contagious Ebola is compared to other diseases, using a mathematical calculation called R0 (R naught). R0 is a tool we use in epidemiology to estimate the average number of people one sick person will infect. The R0 for measles is off the charts. It has one of the highest R0 [...]
We published our end-of-year annual medical marijuana report this week. Dispensary marijuana sales were three times higher than in 2013. Dispensaries sold over 9 metric tons (about 10 US tons) of marijuana in 2014 for an estimated gross revenue of about $110M. There were 1,433,808 individual sales in ‘14 (among the 55,000 patients), with an [...]
A 2 year-old boy from Guinea appears to be what we call in our business the “Index Case” for the West African Ebola epidemic. In epidemiology, an Index Case is the first documented case of an illness that spreads to others. The 2 year-old appears to have been infected by playing in a hollow tree [...]
