CDC
oracknows | March 21, 2013I don't always blog about stories or studies that interest me right away. Part of the reason is something I've learned over the last eight years of blogging, namely that, while it's great to be the firstest with the mostest, I'd rather be the blogger with the mostest than the firstest. I've learned this from occasionally painful experience, although I'd be lying if I didn't admit that in part this is a rationalization for the fact that I have a demanding day job that keeps me from jumping all over stories and studies of interest in the way that some bloggers can. There's also the simple fact…
catdynamics | September 14, 2012The OMB has reported on the effects of sequestration that will be triggered Jan 2013 unless Congress proactively changes the law before then.
Some time ago, Congress set itself a trap: in an attempt to look like they were dealing with government spending and the deficit, they passed a law that triggers automatic cuts to spending, unless Congress agrees and passes laws that make concomitant targeted cuts or revenue increases to decrease the deficit.
The nominal cuts are about $1.2 trillion, over a decade, cut from the projected budget in the out years, and are, by design flat across-the-board…
lborkowski | September 14, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Funny cats and disaster preparedness. It's a marriage made in Internet heaven.
"Cats are all over the Internet," says Michele Late, coordinator of the American Public Health Association's (APHA) Cat Preparedness Photo Contest. "And if cats are what people want, then marrying them with emergency preparedness seems like a smart fit."
Launched just after Labor Day weekend, APHA's cat photo contest takes its inspiration from the enormous popularity of an Internet meme known as LOLcats, in which — yep, you guessed it — people take funny photos of cats and photoshop them with funny…
lborkowski | August 3, 2012by Kim Krisberg
To the long list of hard-to-pronounce bacteria and viruses that threaten people's health can now be added one more threat: sequestration. Except sequestration isn't a disease — well, unless you'd call Congress' chronic inability to deal with the national debt in a fair and balanced way a disease.
Of course, if sequestration were a real disease, the public health system might actually be immune to such budget-slashing illnesses by now, considering its near-constant exposure rate. But come this January, if Congress doesn't act, the public health system will absorb another round…
lborkowski | June 4, 2012by Kim Krisberg
A recent report again confirms what comes as no surprise to public health practitioners: that income and education are inextricably tied to the opportunities for better health and longevity.
In mid-May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its yearly report on Americans' health, "Health, United States, 2011." This year's report included a special section examining the links between socioeconomic status and health. It's another reminder that good health is as much — or even more — tied to what goes on outside a doctor's office rather than what goes on inside…
sastyk | May 30, 2012I try to post this once a year or so, because most of the people who read my blog also play in the dirt, and with playing in the dirt comes minor injuries that you really don't want to turn into anything nasty. So, if you haven't had a tetanus booster in the last decade, or don't remember having one, now is the time to get updated. Tetanus is not avoidable by good health practices, boosting your immune system, etc... - it is caused by a bacteria in the soil entering into your body through a wound - often wounds so small it would never occur to you that it could threaten your life. You…
oracknows | May 29, 2012When I saw the latest screed from that very living embodiment of crank magnetism, Mike Adams, I chuckled. I sent it around to some fellow skeptics, including, for instance, the crew at The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, as well as acquaintances and friends of mine because I couldn't believe it. Adams, as loony as he is, had topped himself. In the meantime, I couldn't decide whether or not to write about it, particularly after Steve Novella took a swipe at it. After all, there are things that are so loony, so out there, that one seriously has to worry about whether they are the result of…
lborkowski | February 20, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Amanda DeSimpelare was always interested in science, but she was wary of what a career in the field would be like. She pictured herself being tucked away in a laboratory all day. It wasn't too appealing.
Then, in the summer of 2010, she discovered public health.
"When I pictured science before, I pictured it happening in a lab somewhere," said the 18-year-old college freshman. "But I'd rather be out talking with people and working directly with the public. Then I came to camp and realized that you can connect science and data collection while working directly with people."…
lborkowski | November 7, 2011By Mark Pendergrast
As I watched the blockbuster bio-thriller Contagion, I was struck by how realistic it was in many ways. That isn't surprising, since many epidemiologists, including those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, served as advisors. The film was based on a simple premise. What if a new, deadly virus that kills one out of four people it infects were also easily transmissible from human to human?
I knew more about the subject than most people in the audience, because I spent five years researching and writing Inside the Outbreaks, a history…
lborkowski | June 10, 2011After blaming cucumbers, backpedaling on the cucumbers and blaming bean sprouts, then backpedaling on the sprouts, German authorities have now concluded that bean sprouts are, in fact, to blame for the spread of E. coli O104:H4, which has sickened more than 3,000 people and killed 31. Patients with the most severe cases have suffered kidney and neurological damage.
This morning, authorities announced in Berlin that epidemiologic evidence, rather than laboratory results, pointed to bean sprouts from an organic farm in Lower Saxony as the source of the outbreak. The New York Times' Alan Cowell…
lborkowski | June 5, 2011Thirty years ago today, the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published a report of five young men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia who were treated at three different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. The authors observed that all five patients had no known common contacts, but had in common the fact that they "reported having frequent homosexual contact with various partners" and using inhalant drugs. An accompanying editorial note explained:
Pneumocystis pneumonia in the United States is almost exclusively limited to severely immunosuppressed patients (1). The occurrence…
lborkowski | May 24, 2011I've written before about "Ten Great Public Health Achievements of the 20th Century," which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in 1999. Now, CDC has put together a list of ten great public health achievements from 2001 to 2010, based on nominations from the agency's public health scientists. Here are the ten achievements from the first decade of the 21st century:
Vaccine-Preventable Diseases -- Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases have dropped over the past decade, and the impact of the pneumococcal conjugate and rotavirus vaccines has…
lborkowski | April 6, 2011It's National Public Health Week, and this year's theme is "Safety is No Accident: Live Injury Free." The American Public Health Association notes that in the US each year, nearly 150,000 people die from injuries, and almost 30 million people visit emergency rooms for injuries. They offer safety tips for home, work, play, transportation, and communities.
CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control provides detailed information on what kinds of injuries kill people of different age groups. Here are a few statistics (2007):
Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for…
mikethemadbiologist | February 17, 2011If you care about science, then contact your representatives and ask them to oppose the Republican NIH funding cut proposals. As JuniorProf notes, most of the leads in terms of therapeutics are happening in the public sector, not the private sector.
While you're at it, how about mentioning the CDC too?
Thank you.
lborkowski | September 3, 2010When I first started to get interested in public health several years ago, I thought of it mostly as dealing with things like vaccines and handwashing. From one of my friends who enrolled in a Master of Public Health program, I learned that it actually covers a whole range of issues that affect the population's health and quality of life - things like workplace and highway safety and smoking cessation, in addition to control of infectious diseases.
The word "population" is key to understanding public health. Healthcare providers focus on individual patients; public health workers focus on…
tsmith | July 28, 2010At his new digs, PalMD discusses recent news revealing the presence of dengue virus in the Florida Keys--the first appearance in the state in almost 75 years. Dengue is a mosquito-borne virus that can cause serious disease, including a hemorrhagic manifestation, and the current outbreak is pitting public health professionals against the tourism industry in the Keys. It's also brought to public attention the closing of CDC's vector-borne disease branch due to funding difficulties. The intersection of these--viral emergence, politics, and economic interests--has the potential to cause a huge…
lborkowski | July 6, 2010The ScienceBlogs Book Club continues the discussion on Mark Pendergrast's Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. In my post this week, I look at how Congress influences federal agencies' work on public health - an issue that crops up throughout the book. Here's an excerpt:
Congress's creation of federal agencies is clearly a huge achievement, and they've also periodically given new powers to already existing agencies. For instance, Mark Pendergrast tells the story of the Dalkon Shield, an IUD that turned out to cause infections while failing…
sb admin | July 6, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: I wrote last week about how federal agencies can solve the problems that create conditions for disease outbreaks - or fail to solve them, as is too often the case. This week, I wanted to focus on the role Congress plays in public health agencies' effectiveness, because that's another angle that crops up repeatedly in Inside the Outbreaks.
Congress's creation of federal agencies is clearly a huge achievement, and they've also periodically given new powers to already existing agencies. For instance, Mark Pendergrast tells the story of the Dalkon Shield, an IUD that turned…
lborkowski | July 6, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: I wrote last week about how federal agencies can solve the problems that create conditions for disease outbreaks - or fail to solve them, as is too often the case. This week, I wanted to focus on the role Congress plays in public health agencies' effectiveness, because that's another angle that crops up repeatedly in Inside the Outbreaks.
Congress's creation of federal agencies is clearly a huge achievement, and they've also periodically given new powers to already existing agencies. For instance, Mark Pendergrast tells the story of the Dalkon Shield, an IUD that turned…
sb admin | July 2, 2010Steve Schoenbaum writes: In his blog this week, Mark Pendergrast challenges someone/anyone to take on explaining the differences between case-control studies vs. cohort studies. As an EIS officer, back in late May/early June 1968, I did a case-control study as part of the investigation of a common source outbreak of hepatitis in Ogemaw County, Michigan, so I will try to pick up the challenge. I believe it was only the second time case-control methods were used in a CDC epidemic investigation. In using this method I learned about the power of comparison, not just that numerators need…