National Preparedness Month
National Preparedness month begins this week with a focus on making sure you are prepared for an emergency at home, work or places you visit. The ADHS “Wise and Ready” webpage offers practical resources to help prepare for and withstand incidents that may impact the health of the public. Join us in sharing resources such as Ready.gov with your partners [...]
Blood Banks are a Public Health Service
This week Governor Doug Ducey issued a proclamation for Arizona Blood Donation Week highlighting the importance of donating blood to save people’s lives. Back in 1969, an article titled "The Blood Bank as a Public Health Service" described blood donation as an altruistic service: one human helping another. The article suggested that benefits might extend to the donor too, depending on [...]
Vaccination Coverage rates for teens are improving across the country and in Arizona
Last week CDC released 2015 vaccination coverage data for teens collected through the National Immunization Surveys (NIS). These surveys are sponsored annually through the CDC, and for teens, they attempt to estimate the level of coverage for three important adolescent vaccines: Tdap, Meningococcal, and HPV vaccine. There is good news for Arizona in this year's report. Our Tdap coverage rates [...]
We’re Celebrating Falls Prevention Awareness Month
September is National Falls Prevention Month and in Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has issued a proclamation calling for community partnerships to promote a falls free Arizona. Our most recent data from 2015 shows more than half of falls-related hospitalizations end up in skilled nursing facilities. People 85 and older have the highest rates of fatal and nonfatal fall injuries. Falls [...]
PANS/PANDAS: Now there’s a Treatment Center of Excellence
In the 1980s, a subset of children were noted to have an abrupt onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder, along with neuropsychiatric symptoms triggered by an infection of some kind. This lead to the development of diagnoses of PANS (Pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome) and PANDAS (Pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections). For decades, understanding how to diagnose and treat PANS/PANDAS [...]