Prevention – Page 40 – AZ Dept. of Health Services News

Topics here will include issues that fall into the Prevention Division of the agency, which include – as the name implies – programs that help prevent disease in our state. You will find information about chronic diseases (cancer, heart health, breathing disorders) as well as tobacco use prevention. This area also includes education about Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Women, Infant and Children programs; both USDA programs that help provide nutrition to lower income residents.

2013 March of Dimes Report Card Released

By Will Humble|2017-02-10T09:49:26-07:00November 6th, 2014|Prevention|

Every year the March of Dimes reviews where we are as a nation in reducing premature birth. Being born too early can impact a child’s ability to live a healthy life. It is one of the leading causes of infant death. Arizona has been improving the preterm birth rate for the past 7 years. In [...]

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Community Profiles Dashboards (Part III of IV)

By Will Humble|2017-02-10T09:49:26-07:00November 4th, 2014|Prevention|

Our Community Profiles Dashboard is a powerful new tool public health professionals, city planners, non-profit organizations, medical providers and anyone interested in health data. In Part I of the series we covered the Dashboards and the Primary Care Areas. The second blog and video demo explored suicide data and how you can compare rural and [...]

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Post-Arrival Monitoring Underway

By Will Humble|2017-02-10T09:49:27-07:00October 31st, 2014|Prevention|

This week the CDC began providing us with a daily listing of people arriving in Arizona from Ebola affected countries. This is valuable information because it allows us to more quickly and easily identify suspect cases of Ebola right away-before community exposures occur. This week we received information about a handful of low-risk people that are [...]

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Halloween Safety

By Will Humble|2017-02-10T09:49:27-07:00October 30th, 2014|Prevention|

As we make our way home from work and school tomorrow, neighborhoods will be filled with goblins, ghosts and superheroes. It’s a night kids look forward to all year, so we need to do our part to make sure Arizona kids have a safe Halloween. The most important thing you can do to keep kids [...]

Melanoma Reporting

By Will Humble|2017-02-10T09:49:27-07:00October 28th, 2014|Prevention|

Melanoma skin cancer is the deadliest form of skin cancer. Many believe that Arizona has similar age adjusted incidence rates to Australia, the world’s highest rate. But during the middle of the last decade, the Arizona Cancer Registry data showed a puzzling decline in cancer rates. The AZ Melanoma Task Force to look at the [...]

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How infectious is Ebola?

By Will Humble|2017-02-10T09:49:28-07:00October 21st, 2014|Prevention|

Epidemiologists (aka disease investigators) use a number of tools to estimate the contagiousness and spread of a disease. One such tool is the R0 (R nought), which represents the average number of people one sick person will infect. It's calculated by estimating the chances of exposure, number of susceptible persons, length of contagious period, how the disease [...]

Enterovirus D68 Update from CO

By Will Humble|2017-02-10T09:49:29-07:00October 3rd, 2014|Prevention|

This week there’s been some news about kids in Colorado hospitalized with neurologic illness. At this time, 10 of the kids have been hospitalized with weakness in their limbs, but no cause has been identified. The neurologic illness could be caused by enteroviorus D68 (4 of the kids have tested positive), but we don’t yet know for [...]

What Zero Grams (0g) of Trans Fat Really Means

By Will Humble|2017-02-10T09:49:29-07:00September 25th, 2014|Prevention|

Eating foods with trans-fat (or trans fatty acids) raises low-density lipoprotein (“bad” cholesterol), lowers your high-density lipoprotein (“good” cholesterol), and is linked to heart disease. Trans fat provides no health benefit and there’s no safe level of eating trans-fat. The FDA, American Heart Association, and the Institute of Medicine all agree that trans fatty acids [...]

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We Can Prevent Suicide

By Will Humble|2017-02-10T09:49:29-07:00September 24th, 2014|Prevention|

This is national suicide prevention month. What can you do to prevent suicide? Look for the warning signs: Those talking about wanting to die Those giving away their possessions Those feeling hopeless, or intensely lonely Those experiencing mental or physical pain Those increasing their use of substances Those discussing revenge Those demonstrating extreme mood swings [...]

Bringing Down AZ’s Teen Pregnancy Rate

By Will Humble|2017-02-10T09:49:29-07:00September 19th, 2014|Prevention|

We’re showing success in reducing our teen age pregnancies. It’s one of our winnable battles because babies born to teen moms are more likely to have bad birth outcomes; teen moms are likely to drop out of school and live in poverty. Since 2002, our teen pregnancy rate has declined almost 40%. We continue to [...]

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