public health
tsmith | June 18, 2012This is the sixth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Anna Lyons-Nace.
Natural…unprocessed…raw. These terms are often used by consumers, nutritionists and health experts to denote the most healthful, high-quality food options available for consumption. However, when pertaining to the recent increasing trend in raw milk consumption, can consumers be confident that they are choosing the safest and most healthful option? Statistical data and health studies would suggest otherwise.
Before we delve into the discussion any further, we should first establish what is considered raw milk and…
tsmith | June 16, 2012This is the fifth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by E. Jane Kelley.
Did you know that some dogs might have a tapeworm in their small intestine that can cause the development of large cysts in people’s livers, lungs, and brains? This is not very common in the United States currently, though there are cases reported periodically (2), but in some areas of the world it is a huge problem. An infection that can spread from animals to humans or vice-versa is called a zoonotic infection.
The tapeworm is called Echinococcus granulosus and the cystic disease it causes is called hydatid disease (…
tsmith | June 15, 2012This is the fourth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Eric Wika.
Let's face it, it's a dangerous world to be a brain. The brain is so soft and squishy it cannot even support its own weight. That's right, even gravity itself is enough to take out an unprotected brain. Besides these passive threats, there are several factions out there that active try to damage your brain! Zombies are an ever present menace which wish to eat our brains. TV will rot our brains, drugs will fry our brains and bullies will offer to “beat your brains in”. It's no wonder mother nature had to come up with the…
tsmith | June 15, 2012This is the third of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Mary Egan.
Murine typhus has been in the news recently in Austin, TX, where in May of this year, two people were found to be positive and one died. This rings a number of alarm bells for me, since I live in Texas, and specifically in Austin. I know of another Austin veterinarian who got sick with murine typhus in 2008, when it was first noticed in Austin and investigated by the CDC. I was also working as a relief vet at the Town Lake Animal Center, the municipal shelter, and at the Austin Humane Society, the main nonprofit adoption…
tsmith | June 14, 2012This is the second of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Eileen Ball.
The beauty of dogs and cats as companions is that we don’t have to raise them to go out into the world and be successful. As pet parents we can set the household “rules” according to what works for us and get on with enjoying our pets; hopefully for many years. According 2011-2012 APPA National Pet Owners Survey cats have now surpassed dogs as the most common household pets in the United States. Despite this fact the same survey reports that in 2010 only 30% of US veterinary patients were cats. As a companion animal…
tsmith | June 14, 2012This is the first of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Riva Ben-Ezra.
Acai fruit comes from the Brazilian Amazon forests and is one of the main dietary staples of the native population. It has been touted as having potent antioxidant properties 1,2 as well as being a stimulant for weight loss3, a cancer cure and an anti-aging miracle drug. Whether these claims are true or not remains to be seen4,5; however the FDA has clamped down on Acai products claiming to perform health benefits without classifying themselves as drugs (see here, here and here).
Something that the FDA has not taken…
lborkowski | June 7, 2012Via Ezra Klein, here's a striking infographic from the Bipartisan Policy Center comparing what makes us healthy to how we as a nation spend our health dollars:
Infographic from the Bipartisan Policy Center
As it illustrates, behaviors are major contributors to our health status, but a tiny fraction of US health spending goes to encouraging healthy behaviors like physical activity.
The Bipartisan Policy Center report Lots to Lose: How America's Health and Obesity Crisis Threatens our Economic Future offers several recommendations for improving nutrition and physical activity in the US. In…
lborkowski | May 21, 2012by Kim Krisberg
"We will pay for this by taking money from one of the slush funds in the president's health care law."
That's an April quote from U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on how Republicans plan to offset the cost of stopping scheduled hikes in student loan interest rates. And the "slush fund" in question? The Prevention and Public Health Fund, the historic $15 billion investment in prevention authorized via the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The April move by House Republicans wasn't the first attempt to raid the fund. Several tries have been made to repeal the fund entirely or…
lborkowski | May 7, 2012A recent Freakonomics podcast tells one of my favorite public health stories: how observant physician Ignaz Semmelweis figured out how to slash the incidence of childbed, or puerperal, fever, a disease that killed 10-15% of the women who gave birth in the doctor-staffed ward of the Vienna General Hospital in the mid-nineteenth century. (Death rates were similarly alarming elsewhere, since germ theory hadn't yet taken hold.)
As the podcast explains, Semmelweis observed that the death rate from childbed fever was lower among women who delivered babies in the ward staffed by midwives compared to…
lborkowski | April 25, 2012Today is World Malaria Day, and the World Health Organization has launched a new initiative, dubbed T3: Test, Treat, Track. It urges countries where malaria is endemic to test every suspected malaria case, treat every confirmed case with anti-malarial medicine, and track the disease with "timely and accurate surveillance systems." The good news is that scaled-up malaria prevention and control efforts -- including delivery of 145 million insecticidal bed nets in 2010 alone -- have saved a million lives over the past decade. But, the WHO points out, there's still a long way to go in combating…
tsmith | April 5, 2012The ecology of antibiotic resistance on farms is complicated. Animals receive antibiotic doses in their food and water, for reasons of growth promotion, disease prophylaxis, and treatment. Other chemicals in the environment, such as cleaning products or antimicrobial metals in the feed, may also act as drivers of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic-resistant organisms may also be present in the environment already, from the air, soil, or manure pits within or near the barns. Ecologically, it's a mess and makes it more difficult to attribute the evolution and spread of resistance to one…
lborkowski | April 2, 2012This week (April 2-8) is National Public Health Week. As Kim Krisberg described a couple of weeks ago, localities and groups across the country are recognizing it with a wide range of activities, from a health film festival to a safe sex carnival to a 1950s-themed health fair featuring the jitterbug and hula hoops. (Go here to find an event in your area.) This year, the American Public Health Association (which has organized National Public Health Week since 1995) has made the week's theme "A Healthier American Begins Today: Join the Movement!" The NPHW website explains the theme's…
lborkowski | March 29, 2012by Kim Krisberg
A couple weeks ago on the southern-most tip of the continental United States in Key West, nearly 70 residents gathered at a town hall meeting to talk about mosquitoes. And not just any mosquito. A special, genetically modified mosquito designed to protect people's health.
While the modified mosquito has yet to make the two-mile wide island its home, local mosquito control officials are busy making the case that its intentional release will help safely contain the risk of mosquito-borne dengue fever, which made a startling reappearance in Key West in 2009. The male mosquito is…
tsmith | March 27, 2012The emergence of "new" diseases is a complicated issue. "New" diseases often just means "new to biomedical science." Viruses like Ebola and HIV were certainly circulating in Africa in animal reservoirs for decades, and probably millenia, before they came to the attention of physicians via human infections. Hantavirus in the American southwest has likely infected many people, causing pneumonia of unknown origin, before the Four Corners outbreak led to the eventual identification of the Sin Nombre virus. Encroachment of humans into new areas can bring them into contact with novel infectious…
tsmith | March 7, 2012I mentioned last month that we are planning an Emerging Diseases conference here in April. Things are moving quickly and registration is now open (here). Abstract submission is also up and running here.
The details:
Oral and poster presentation research abstracts are due by 5:00pm on March 23, 2012. Individuals may submit up to two research abstracts. Abstracts must not exceed 250 words in length. There are a limited number of spots available for those interested in providing a 15-minute oral presentation. Abstracts submitted for oral presentations that are not selected for a talk will…
tsmith | February 28, 2012Typically when we think of flying things and influenza viruses, the first images that come to mind are wild waterfowl. Waterbirds are reservoirs for an enormous diversity of influenza viruses, and are the ultimate origin of all known flu viruses. In birds, the virus replicates in the intestinal tract, and can be spread to other animals (including humans) via fecal material.
However, a new paper expands a chapter on another family of flying animals within the influenza story: bats.
I've written previously about the enormous diversity of microbes that bats possess. This shouldn't be…
tsmith | February 21, 2012I recently gave a talk to a group here in Iowa City, emphasizing just how frequently we share microbes. It was a noontime talk over a nice lunch, and of course I discussed how basically we humans are hosts to all kinds of organisms, and analysis of our "extended microbiome" shows that we share not only with each other, but also with a large number of other species. We certainly do this with my particular organism of interest, Staphylococcus aureus. There are many reports in the literature showing where humans have apparently spread their strains of S. aureus to their pets (dogs, cats,…
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."…
tsmith | January 19, 2012Back in November, I blogged about one of our studies, examining methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Iowa meat products. In that post, I mentioned that it was one of two studies we'd finished on the subject. Well, today the second study is out in PLoS ONE (freely available to all). In this study, we focused only on pork products, and included 395 samples from Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. We also looked at not only conventional meats, but also "alternative" meat products. Most of the latter were products labeled "raised without antibiotics" or "raised without antibiotic…
lborkowski | January 19, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It only takes a few minutes of talking with Scott Becker to realize just how passionate he is about public health. In fact, his enthusiasm is contagious. Maybe that's why he isn't mincing his words.
"What keeps me up at night is how we are going to maintain the core and critical services we have," said Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. "If the question is 'how low can we go?' My answer is 'we're there.' I used to be on a more hopeful note, but I can't do that anymore."
Becker is talking about the worrisome state of public health…