Pima County will receive a $16 million grant as part of the national Communities Putting Prevention to Work efforts funded through the federal Stimulus program. They’ll be creating a community-wide set of strategies and interventions to reduce obesity by ensuring safe, attractive accessible places for physical activity and making healthy foods available, accessible, and affordable. [...]
Thursday afternoon the Governor signed the budget bills that the Legislature passed that prescribed budgets for the remaining part of FY 2010 and FY 2011. The deal is complicated and contains lots of details. Most of the provisions for our agency pertain to reductions in services that will begin next fiscal year (which starts July 1)- including orders to [...]
Post-surgery infections cost a fortune. Health care–associated infections cause 1.7 million extended hospitalizations each year. A study published last week in the Archives of Internal Medicine looked at the clinical and economic costs from these infections which are poorly understood. The researchers looked at national hospital discharge records to find sepsis (blood borne infections) and [...]
High blood pressure is at the source of roughly one in six deaths among adults annually. About one in three adult Arizonans have blood pressure that’s too high, putting huge economic demands on Medicaid, Medicare (AHCCCS) and our private health insurers (plus, of course, the loss of life). The Institute of Medicine put out a [...]
The Mexican Federal Government announced a new policy this week to promote medical tourism in Mexico. Medical tourism is when you go abroad for medical care. Their goal is to encourage U.S. residents (with an initial focus on the uninsured) to travel to Mexico for their medical needs, generating jobs and investment. Another objective is [...]
We launched our salt reduction initiative this week http://www.azdhs.gov/salt/. The overall goal is to get Arizonans to reduce their salt intake by paying more attention to the Sodium line in the nutrition facts and being a better- by selecting foods for the family that are lower in sodium. Sodium can increase your blood pressure and [...]
Please take a couple of minutes to sign up for our new ADHS electronic updates feature. When you sign up to receive electronic updates from the Department, you can click on the kinds of things that you want to receive, like our new “healthy and in-season recipe of the week”, media releases, immunizations newsletters and [...]
The US obesity epidemic is costing Americans more and more each year. It’s not just the decreased quality of life that it causes, but it causes a whole host of downstream problems like diabetes and circulatory problems. Type 2 diabetes had been a disease of folks over 40 that became seriously overweight over time- but [...]
Throughout history, mankind’s future was largely determined by fate. Infectious diseases like Diphtheria and Smallpox could wipe out an entire family in just a few days. People were vulnerable to outside threats ranging from a lack of clean drinking water to poor sanitation to gaps in environmental infrastructure that led to a host of infectious [...]
When’s the last time you heard anything about the pandemic? It’s been awhile, huh? Well, it’s still around. The number of cases is back down to where it was this summer, with cases here and there. Nothing like it was last October- but the flu is still out there. We’re still encouraging the stragglers to [...]
