Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
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Report on ONC's Public Health Data Systems Hearing: Ensuring a Data-Driven Response to COVID-19
As part of HHS's response to President Biden's Executive Order on Ensuring a Data-Driven Response to COVID-19 and Future High-Consequence Public Health Threats, ONC's Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) recently held an expert panel hearing to understand the performance of public health data systems during the COVID-19 pandemic response and other gap areas in current infrastructure ... Forthcoming recommendations from the Public Health Data Systems Task Force will identify and prioritize policy and technical gaps to be addressed in order to help ensure a more effective response to future public health threats. These recommendations are expected to be issued later this summer.
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RNRN Launches Fundraising Drive For Healthcare Workers In Ebola-Stricken Nations
The Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN), a project of National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest professional organization of RNs, has initiated a national fundraising campaign to provide desperately needed personal protective equipment for frontline healthcare workers caring for patients stricken by the Ebola virus...
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Roadblocks To Public Health Data Sharing
The sharing of public health data, so essential to health care decision-making in the information age, is being held back by multiple barriers, according to a new study published in the journal BMC Public Health...
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Safety Foul-Up Exposes CDC Staff To Anthrax
A breakdown in safety procedures has exposed 84 CDC staffers in Atlanta to live anthrax, the agency said....
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Scientists Scour the Globe for a Drug to Kill Deadly Brain-Eating Amoeba
The deaths hit the headlines every summer, sometimes five or six of them across the country. They’re newsworthy for their rarity and for how innocuous the events leading up to them are — it’s usually a young person who was swimming in a lake, got some water up their nose, and within days, was dead. The cause is an amoeba called Naegleria fowleri, which when it infects the brain, causes massive swelling that is almost always fatal. Over the past half-decade, 137 people in the US have died of the infection...
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Second MERS Case Confirmed In Netherlands
A second case of the potentially deadly MERS virus has been identified in the Netherlands, a spokeswoman for the country's National Public Health Institute told CNN...The cases in the Netherlands involve two family members who had traveled together to Saudi Arabia.
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Simple Ways to Deter Improper Antibiotic Prescribing
Inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics is a long-standing practice that once seemed benign but whose consequences are coming into sharper focus. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria kill at least 23,000 Americans annually and cause more than 2 million illnesses in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). There are some good ideas that can help physicians steer their patients away from antibiotics when they will do more harm than good...
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Sleep Deprivation Is Killing You And Your Career
The next time you tell yourself that you'll sleep when you're dead, realize that you're making a decision that can make that day come much sooner. Pushing late into the night is a health and productivity killer...
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Smartphone, Finger Prick, 15 Minutes, Diagnosis—Done!
A team of researchers, led by Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has developed a low-cost smartphone accessory that can perform a point-of-care test that simultaneously detects three infectious disease markers from a finger prick of blood in just 15 minutes. The device replicates, for the first time, all mechanical, optical, and electronic functions of a lab-based blood test. Specifically, it performs an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) without requiring any stored energy: all necessary power is drawn from the smartphone...
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Stop Killing The Good Guys! Protect Your Child's Microbiome From Antibiotic Overuse
...The average child in the United States will receive between and 10 and 20 courses of antibiotics by the time he or she is 18 years old. (2) We are so accustomed to antibiotics being prescribed for childhood illnesses that we assume that they are as safe as they are common...
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Study Links Pesticide Exposure In Pregnancy To Autism
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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Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S.
Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year. The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates.
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Study: Hospitals Give Patients Antibiotics For No Reason At All
Some hospital patients are on antibiotics for good reason: They have an infection, or they're at high risk for getting one. But according to a new study, other patients are given antibiotics for no reason whatsoever...
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Superbugs Spread Across U.S.
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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Tech’s Role In Fighting The Ebola Outbreak
...The U.S. government is eyeing body sensors, ruggedized tablet computers, broadband communications and big data capabilities to aid its Ebola response. A high priority on the list is using innovative technologies to improve the protective gear worn by healthcare workers on the frontlines...
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