Making good decisions about prioritizing which public health issues to tackle and how to target our interventions rests on our ability to collect and analyze public health data. For infectious disease surveillance that means have a base of solid reporting and surveillance so we can analyze infectious disease trends. For chronic diseases, we need to [...]
For the past 16 months, our folks in the Division of Behavioral health and our Bureau of Tobacco and Chronic Disease and ASHline have been working to train clinical behavioral health staff in Maricopa and Pima Counties on how to get folks into smoking cessation (quit) services. The overall goal of this collaboration was to establish [...]
Everybody knows that people in different parts of the country behave differently when it comes to smoking and physical activity, but does it impact how long they live? The answer is yes. According to fascinating study, Americans are living longer, but not in every part of the country. In fact, in some areas, life expectancy [...]
Today the FDA released the new, graphic warning labels that will be on cigarette packs. The labels educate smokers and others, including kids, about the dangers of tobacco use and encourage smokers to quit. Using this proven techique, the U.S. joins 43 other countries that already require pictures or images on cigarette packs. The warning [...]
This month AHCCCS told us that they’ve picked our Bureau of Tobacco & Chronic Disease as the state applicant for HHS’ Medicaid Incentives for Prevention of Chronic Diseases Grant. The grant proposal (which will be developed with AHCCCS) must be turned in to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services early next month. The grant [...]
For the past 18 months our tobacco cessation and behavioral health teams have been working together in a way that is positioning Arizona as a national leader in closing the gap in life expectancy for people with a mental illness! Consider these startling facts which confront Arizonans with a mental illness: Life expectancy is 30 [...]
Our Tobacco Prevention Program will be hitting targeted audiences (lower income Arizonans) a few days before New Years and during January with smoking cessation messages. There’s no better time to motivate folks to quit smoking than January because that’s the time of year when people generally set health goals for themselves. The ads (funded by [...]
The name of the game for Public Health Prevention in 2011 is integration and leverage. Our Public Health Prevention Team will be focusing on the social determinants of health and working to implement policies, systems and environmental changes that make the healthy choices easy. Here are some examples of our public health prevention priorities for the [...]
A new report from the CDC this week showed that the smoking rate across the US has stayed flat at about 20% over the last 5 years. Not so in Arizona, where we’ve decreased from 20% in 2005 to 16% in 2009, according to our latest BRFS report. As is the case across the country, [...]
Our new advertising campaign that encourages people to call our Arizona Smokers’ Helpline is going great. The ads continue to bring in unprecedented call volumes to the ASHLine. Since the commercials began airing less than a month ago, we’ve gotten more than 8,100 calls- which is more than the ASHLine receives typically in a five-month [...]
