Newborn Screening Rulemaking
Our Newborn Screening Program ensures that each newborn is tested for 28 inherited disorders and hearing problems. The goal is to help kids avoid illness, developmental delays and even death by quickly identifying problems and swiftly letting their doctors know so they can implement interventions. On any given day our newborn screening team tests from 600 to 1,500 bloodspot samples [...]
Collaborating Across the Pacific
You may have noticed some new faces around the ADHS the past few months as we have been hosting visiting Professors from Korea, Japan, and this coming year from Singapore. The two Professors who are currently working with us are Dr. Sungwoo Moon from Korea University and Dr. Taro Irisawa from Osaka University in Japan. They’re Emergency Physicians who have funding from their [...]
AZ Food Safety Report
Our core environmental health responsibilities include administering the statewide public health sanitation program for food safety, bottled water, hotels and motels, children’s camps, public schools, and public and semi-public swimming pools. We delegate most of the actual inspection work to the county health departments. We finished our 2012 statewide Annual Report last week. Last fiscal year the AZ system did 108,315 food [...]
New Foster Care Toolkit
The ADES & Magellan of Arizona have developed a new Foster Care Toolkit to help foster families navigate the support system that’s available for foster families. It’s a one-stop guide connecting them to resources to make their job a little easier. The Toolkit includes information to help current and prospective foster parents connect with community resources like child care, health services, [...]
Reviewing Child Fatalities Provides Critical Information
One of the ways we create good public health interventions is by studying outcomes. This week, the 20th Annual Child Fatality Review report came out- which examines all 854 deaths of children under the age of 18 in 2012. The Report reviews the circumstances of each child’s death, determines preventability and makes recommendations to save children’s lives moving forward. Although the number of deaths this year is [...]
Valley Fever Awareness
Guest blog by Jessica Rigler, Bureau of Epidemiology and Disease Control 11th Annual Valley Fever Awareness Week Valley Fever is a lung infection caused a fungus in the soil here in Arizona. People get it by breathing in Valley Fever spores in the air. Most people will have no symptoms or recover after a few weeks of flu-like symptoms – [...]