Public Health - General
lborkowski | November 15, 2010Haiti's health ministry has reported that the death toll from the cholera epidemic has reached 917, and 14,642 victims have been hospitalized. The disease has been detected in six of the country's ten provinces, and the World Health Organization predicts that 200,000 Haitians will fall ill with cholera over the next six to 12 months.
The UN has made a plea for nearly $164 million in order to supply doctors, medicines, and water-purification equipment. The BBC points out that less than 40% of the aid for Haiti's post-earthquake reconstruction has reached the country, and the first portion of…
lborkowski | November 11, 2010The United Nations humanitarian office reports that 9,971 cases of cholera have been confirmed in Haiti, and 643 people have died from the disease.
The Associated Press reported earlier this week that the epidemic has spread into Port-au-Prince, where close to half of the city's nearly 3 million residents are living in tent camps erected for those left homeless after the January earthquake. Conditions in the camps have deteriorated as a result of Hurricane Tomas, and many fear the disease will spread quickly through Port-au-Prince's camps and slums.
Haitian healthcare workers and…
lborkowski | November 8, 2010It's a relief that Hurricane Tomas didn't destroy the camps in and around Port-au-Prince where 1.3 million survivors of Haiti's January earthquake are crowded. The storm hit western Haiti hardest, causing flooding and killing 20 people.
There are still concerns about how flooding will affect Haiti's cholera outbreak. The outbreak's official death toll is 544, CNN reports, and more than 8,000 cholera cases have been confirmed. So far, none of the confirmed cases is in Port-au-Prince, but 91 residents of a Port-au-Prince slums are being tested to see if they've been infected.
Cholera…
lborkowski | November 4, 2010The United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-HABITAT, is tasked with promoting "socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all." The agency's new executive director, former Barcelona mayor Joan Clos, gave his first formal address to the UN General Assembly and outlined some of the priorities for improving settlements in the coming the years.
Clos started with some good news: between 2000 and 2010, the lives of 230 million slum dwellers were improved - an achievement that exceeds the Millennium Development Goal target of…
lborkowski | November 2, 2010The Associated Press article title "Study: Alcohol more lethal than heroin, cocaine" succeeded in getting me to click through to the article. When I did, I wasn't surprised to learn that the study in question didn't actually find alcohol to be more lethal than heroin. What it concluded was that alcohol is the most harmful drug (out of 20 studied) when harms both to users and to those around them are tallied.
The study -- authored by David J. Nutt, Leslie A. King, and Lawrence D. Phillips and published in The Lancet -- used multicriteria decision analysis modelling to assess the harms caused…
lborkowski | September 20, 2010If you're working on a major global problem like poverty, it's important to have goals to work towards. Back in 2000, world leaders came together and adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which commits to reducing extreme poverty and sets out a series of goals to be reached by 2015. Each of the eight Millennium Development Goals, as they've come to be known, has between one and five specific targets, many of which involve reducing the proportion (by half, two-thirds, etc.) of people who suffer from a particular condition or lack access to an essential resource like clean drinking…
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…
lborkowski | July 12, 2010For the first few weeks after a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti on January 12th, Haiti seemed to be on everyone's mind. Six months later, many of us think little about the quake survivors who are still struggling. In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive of Haiti and Bill Clinton, co-chairs of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, report, "only 10 percent of the $5.3 billion pledged by governments at a United Nations conference in March has been disbursed to the Haitian government. Without reliable schedules for disbursement, the commission is unable to plan…
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…
lborkowski | June 29, 2010The ScienceBlogs Book Club continues the discussion on Mark Pendergrast's Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service - come on over and join in! In my post today, I look at the difference between solving disease puzzles (figuring out what the agent is, how it's being transmitted, etc) and solving problems (the conditions that let these disease outbreaks occur). Here's an excerpt:
Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points…
lborkowski | June 22, 2010The ScienceBlogs Book Club has come back to life, and is now featuring Mark Pendergrast's Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. Mark Pendergrast's introductory post is well worth a read. He describes Alexander Langmuir, the "visionary leader" who founded the Epidemic Intelligence Service within the CDC in 1951; gives examples of some of the many different kinds of outbreaks EIS officers deal with; and identifies some of the ways the EIS has evolved over the past several decades.
I'll be putting up a couple of posts about Inside the Outbreaks…
lborkowski | June 1, 2010DemFromCT had a great post up at Daily Kos this past weekend about risk communication. He considers the somewhat unusual circumstances of the Gulf oil spill, noting, "unlike pandemics and hurricanes, this volatile mixture in the water has an equally volatile mix of politics, companies, government and media to sort out policy and communication." The post also includes insights from risk communication expert Peter Sandman, who (with input from Jody Lanard) gave a detailed response to this question from DemFromCT:
Given the potential for failure of the top kill approach, and the length of time…
lborkowski | May 31, 2010So far, 5,462 US service members have died from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since the Reveres don't have their own blog anymore, I'll post what they've posted for Memorial Day in years past:
This is Priscilla Herdman's version of Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda."
lborkowski | May 28, 2010Officials from G8 countries will be gathering in Toronto next month, and scientific bodies from the eight countries (e.g., the Royal Society of Canada and US National Academy of Science) have developed a joint statement about what the G8 should do improve the health of women in children. They begin by citing the Millennium Development Goals of reducing under-five child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015; they note that we've seen "some progress in global child health" but the maternal-mortality reduction goal "remains a distant target." The statement…
lborkowski | May 16, 2010We're delighted and honored to be joining the ScienceBlogs community. It's a bittersweet occasion, because we're starting out here just as the Reveres are folding up their stellar public health blog Effect Measure. It's fair to say that The Pump Handle probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for the Reveres; they inspired us to launch our blog on Wordpress (old site here) back in November 2006, and have been a constant source of support as well as actual blog content. We're lucky that the Reveres have agreed to continue occasional posting here at TPH, so the blogosphere won't lose them…