public health

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Serious Risks and Few New Benefits from FDA-Approved Drugs

Donald W. Light | Health Affairs Blog | July 6, 2015

Over the past year, the U.S. Senate and The New York Times have been investigating the failure of the nation’s auto safety regulators to protect citizens from cars with occasionally dangerous faulty devices. But neither august institution has paid attention to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) failure to protect the 170 million Americans who take prescription drugs from adverse reactions that are killing more than 2,400 people every week. Annually, prescription drugs cause over 81 million adverse reactions and result in 2.7 million hospitalizations...

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She’s Got a Radical Approach for the Age of Superbugs: Don’t Fight Infections. Learn to Live with Them

Usha Lee McFarling | STAT | May 19, 2017

As her father lay dying of sepsis, Janelle Ayres spent nine agonizing days at his bedside. When he didn’t beat the virulent bloodstream infection, she grieved. And then she got frustrated. She knew there had to be a better way to help patients like her dad. In fact, she was working on one in her lab. Ayres, a hard-charging physiologist who has unapologetically decorated her lab with bright touches of hot pink, is intent on upending our most fundamental understanding of how the human body fights disease...

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Shutdown Leaves Program Feeding Women And Infants In Lurch

Eliza Barclay and Allison Aubrey | NPR | October 1, 2013

Among those affected by the chaos of the government shutdown are 9 million low-income women and children who may be worrying where next week's meal is going to come from. Read More »

Shutdown Salmonella Outbreak Continues. CDC Food Safety Chief: ‘We Have A Blind Spot.’

Maryn McKenna | Wired | October 10, 2013

We’re 11 days now into the federal shutdown and four days since the announcement of a major foodborne outbreak in chicken that is challenging the shutdown-limited abilities of the food-safety and disease-detective personnel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture. Here’s an update. Read More »

Slow Ebola Response Blamed On False Assumptions About Its Course

Steven Ross Johnson | Modern Healthcare | September 17, 2014

Health experts and humanitarian organizations waging war against the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa hope plans announced Tuesday by the Obama Administration to send additional aid to affected regions will encourage more philanthropic support and health worker recruitment. Both money and volunteers have come in at a slower pace in this crisis than in past disasters...

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So I Survived HIMSS19…

This was perhaps more of a fete than it initially seems. The conference was massive, with over 40,000 attendees. It centered around a trade show exhibit hall that spanned multiple football fields in length. In some ways, it was so big that I felt somewhat discouraged from attending some educational sessions because they were located so far from where I was hanging out that I could get back and forth in time. So I spent most of my time at the Interoperability Showcase since HLN was participating in two of the use cases: Immunization Integration & CDS, featuring our ICE open source immunization evaluation and forecasting system...

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Social Media Holds Big Potential For Public Health

Benjamin Harris | Government Health IT | September 10, 2013

Another example of the growing convergence between our public and private, our digital and our "actual" selves: NPR reports that targeting via Facebook population groups at risk for diseases such as HIV has an impact and can increase awareness and testing. Read More »

Some Barriers and Challenges to the CDC's Data Modernization Initiative

As we have discussed in earlier posts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has launched a Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) focused on improving the data management capacity of public health in the United States. The major focus of this initiative is on investments in both people as well as systems and data to improve public health response. Though Congress has appropriated a significant amount of funding for Federal and state, territorial, local, and tribal (STLT) public health agencies, there are some sizable barriers and challenges to seeing the vision for DMI come to fruition:

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Some U.S. Hospitals Weigh Withholding Care To Ebola Patients

Julie Steenhuysen and Sharon Begley | Reuters | October 22, 2014

The Ebola crisis is forcing the American healthcare system to consider the previously unthinkable: withholding some medical interventions because they are too dangerous to doctors and nurses and unlikely to help a patient.  U.S. hospitals have over the years come under criticism for undertaking measures that prolong dying rather than improve patients' quality of life...

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South Africa’s Quadruple Burden of Disease

Three years ago, I found myself on a bus in South Africa, with fifteen of my college classmates. We were on our way to Kruger National Park, after a week of volunteering and researching in Cape Town. As I stared out the window, appreciating rural South Africa’s beauty, a large billboard, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, caught my attention. “Relay for Life: A Fundraiser for the American Cancer Society.” This poster piqued my curiosity. I had always associated South Africa with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. In fact, I had documented a handful of posters in Cape Town that aimed to combat HIV/AIDS by reducing stigma and encouraging testing...

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Stanford’s John Ioannidis On “Underperforming Big Ideas”

Press Release | Stanford Medicine | July 28, 2016

In a thought-provoking JAMA commentary out today, Stanford’s John Ioannidis, MD, DSc, and two colleagues call for biomedical researchers — and funding institutions — to “sunset underperforming initiatives.” Nothing controversial there, until you go on to read that some of those initiatives are in the popular fields of gene therapy, stem cell therapy or precision medicine. And, they write, perhaps some less-successful projects have been pursued simply because they fall within a top research field.

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Study Links Pesticide Exposure In Pregnancy To Autism

Kathryn Doyle | Reuters | June 23, 2014

In a new study from California, children with an autism spectrum disorder were more likely to have mothers who lived close to fields treated with certain pesticides during pregnancy...

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Substance Abuse In The Military Is A ‘Public Health Crisis,’ Study Finds

Bob Brewin | Nextgov | September 17, 2012

Drug and alcohol abuse by military personnel and their families constitutes a “public health crisis” that requires the intervention of senior leaders to develop consistent and cohesive prevention, screening, and treatment services, the Institute of Medicine charged in a report released today. Read More »

Success Of GNU Health Goes Beyond Free Software

Jen Wike | opensource.com | March 12, 2013

In 2006, Luis Falcón founded GNU Health, a free health information system that recently recieved the "Best Project of Social Benefit" award given by the Free Software Foundation. Read More »

Superbugs Spread Across U.S.

Brian Hughes | Washington Examiner | October 6, 2014

As Americans worry about Ebola, the swiftly spreading virus that has traveled from West Africa to Texas, a more silent killer poses a greater danger...Drug-resistant bacteria killed 23,000 people in America last year and caused 2 million illnesses...

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