Food for the Olympians
As the Olympics begin, Chef and Registered Dietitian Allen Tran’s words come to mind, “nutrition can make a good athlete great or a great athlete good”. I think his view holds some truth for all of us. Allen knows because he is the High-Performance Chef for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association. He is in Sochi preparing meals for our [...]
New Prevention Resources
CDC’s 2013 Prevention Status Reports have just been released publicly on CDC’s website. You’ll find reports specific to Arizona on topics like nutrition, physical activity, teen pregnancy, tobacco use, HIV, heart disease, motor vehicle crashes, and prescription drug abuse. Reports include a few data indicators of how we compare to the U.S., as well as implementation of key policies related [...]
New Medical Marijuana Rules Up for Public Comment
Last summer a Superior Court judge decided that a portion of our medical marijuana regulations are unreasonable because our regulations didn’t have a process for dispensary registration certificate holders to renew their dispensary registration certificate if they didn't earn their approval to operate within 1 year. This week we posted new draft rules (and an Online Survey to get public comment) to comply with [...]
Heroin: The Sleepy Killer
I’ve written several posts about how prescription painkillers kill more Arizonans than heroin and cocaine combined- but heroin is still the No. 1 killer among the illegal drugs. One hundred people died from a heroin overdose in AZ in 2013 (vs. about 1,000 from prescription drugs). Heroin is very addictive. According to NIDA, about 23% of people that try heroin will become addicts. Most addicts and new [...]
Encouraging WIC Outcome Measures
There’s increasing evidence that whether a person will have a healthy weight as an adult is influenced by nutrition and physical activity in the first 5 years of life. In fact, a new study this week in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that overweight 5-year-olds are 4 x more likely to become obese later in life. That makes [...]
AZ Aces Latest CDC Public Health Preparedness Report Card
Arizona continues to score high marks on preparedness according to a CDC report released this week. We got a perfect score this year for biological laboratory testing, and we’ve kept our excellent performance measures for incident management, public information, and medical countermeasures. Our response times for activating our emergency operation center have been well above the national target for the [...]