Do you like a good mystery or are you a budding public health geek looking for some summer reading? Look no further than Medical Detectives by Berton Roueche. It’s a book with dozens of real-life public health short stories and mysteries (they all get solved). The stories include fascinating cases of cyanosis traced to a [...]
Our Tobacco and Chronic Disease program will win 4 of the coveted International Association of Business Communicators Phoenix Copper Quill Awards this week. The awards are given annually to outstanding marketing and communications efforts, as judged by communications professionals around the US and Internationally. This year we’ll be getting awards for: Our Venomocity website and social media [...]
He’s a guy that may have saved more lives than any other single person in history. In the 1790's, he noticed that “milkmaids” seldom came down with smallpox. He developed a theory that the blisters which “milkmaids” commonly had as part of their work (from a disease called cowpox) somehow protected them from smallpox. In [...]
Last year we received funding from CDC to implement the Communities Putting Prevention to Work, which aims to achieve broad reaching, highly impactful, and sustainable change to reduce chronic disease burden associated with obesity and tobacco. This week CDC notified us that Arizona is a “high performing” state. What does this mean? CDC will soon be [...]
The Sonoran Desert will be among the hottest places on the globe for the next 4 months. The heat on the desert floor isn’t just a nuisance, it’s expensive & lethal. Do you know what to do to protect yourself and your family? Do you follow through? Year in and year out, nearly 1,400 Arizonans [...]
Did you know that Special Olympics’ Healthy Athletes Program is the largest health care provider for people with intellectual disabilities in the world? Although “health” and “athletics” tend to be two topics that are believed to go hand in hand—that is not always the case, as Special Olympics leaders became aware of over the years. [...]
Guest blog by: Karen Lewis, M.D., Medical Director of the Immunization Program Office of the Arizona Department of Health Services. Tobacco use is the world's leading single preventable cause of death. Every year, tobacco-related illnesses cause about 500,000 deaths in the United States. Children start smoking early. Every year, there are about 400,000 new daily [...]
The American Academy of Pediatrics updated their car safety recommendations in the April issue of Pediatrics advising parents to keep their toddlers in rear-facing car seats until 2 (or until they reach the maximum height and weight for their seat for big kids). They also recommend that most children should be in a belt-positioning booster [...]
Life expectancy improved by more than 30 years in the US during the 20th Century. Advances in diagnosis and treatment of disease have played a role, but the real reason we’re living longer today has a lot more to do with public health interventions than advances in health care. Interventions like vaccines, motor vehicle safety, [...]
The Legislature completed the Regular Session a couple of weeks ago, and Monday marked the deadline for the Governor to make her decision about each bill that came to her desk: sign the bill into law, veto the bill, or do nothing and let the bill become law. Last week I summarized the new laws [...]
