Feature Channels: Public Health

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To help the public better understand how measles can spread, an NIH-funded team of infectious disease computer modelers at the University of Pittsburgh has launched a free, mobile-friendly tool that lets users simulate measles outbreaks in cities across the country.

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When subjects in a smoking cessation program tweet each other regularly, they’re more successful at kicking the habit, according to a study by UC Irvine and Stanford University researchers. Specifically, daily “automessages” that encourage and direct the social media exchanges may be more effective than traditional social media interventions for quitting smoking.

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Penis size nomograms may be useful in clinical and therapeutic settings to counsel men and for academic research.

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Raising the minimum age to buy cigarettes to 21 would save lives by preventing adolescents from ever taking up smoking, a new report suggests. The minimum age to buy tobacco products in most of the country is 18.

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“Secure, healthy caregiving is just as important as genetic factors in preventing physical and emotional problems,” according to South Dakota State University nursing professor Marylou Mylant. That’s the premise behind research on strengthening families to fight a dramatic increase in obesity among Native American preschoolers. Less than 25 percent of the preschoolers at the intervention site have normal BMIs.

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Smokers may be more likely to successfully quit their habit if simple adjustments were made to how an existing anti-smoking medication is prescribed, according to a new study by a University at Buffalo research team.

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One-quarter of the health plans being sold on health insurance exchanges set up through the Affordable Care Act offer benefits that appear to violate a federal law requiring equal benefits for general medical and mental health care, according to new research led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Commentary provides evidence that the degree of income inequality can lead to a long list of health issues.

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The cascade of events leading to bacterial infection and the immune response is mostly understood. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying the immune response to the bacteria that causes tuberculosis have remained a mystery — until now. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have now uncovered how a bacterial molecule controls the body’s response to TB infection and suggest that adjusting the level of this of this molecule may be a new way to treat the disease. The report appears this week as an advance online publication of Nature Medicine.

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A new study by researchers affiliated with New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR), is now online ahead of print in Drug and Alcohol Dependence and it is one of the first national studies to examine risk factors for use of synthetic marijuana among a large, nationally representative sample of teens.

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It's time to clear up the confusion and debunk the false reports surrounding the potentially serious health risks of Hormone Therapy.

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Violence during the civil war in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996 resulted in the development of significant mental health problems and conditions for the county’s people, according to a new multi-institution study from researchers under the Guatemala-Penn Partnership.

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Sexual biology may be the key to uncovering why Anopheles mosquitoes are unique in their ability to transmit malaria to humans, according to researchers at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and University of Perugia, Italy.

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An aggressive campaign to reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics has helped cut the rate of infection with a dangerous drug-resistant bacteria at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ, by nearly 40 percent.

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New research that focuses on the mechanism by which Ebola virus infects a cell and the discovery of a promising drug therapy candidate is being published February 27, 2015, in the journal Science.

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Targeting mechanisms in the central nervous system that sense energy generated by nutrients might yield the beneficial effects of low-calorie diets on healthy aging without the need to alter food intake, suggests new research from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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The Scripps Research Institute scientists have captured the first images showing how immune molecules bind to a site on the surface of Marburg virus and have described an antibody that binds to both Marburg and Ebola viruses, pointing to new antibody treatments to fight an entire family of viruses.

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Locating full-service supermarkets within neighborhoods considered to be “food deserts” may not result in healthful dietary habits or reductions in childhood obesity -- at least in the short term, according to a new study by NYU Langone Medical Center researchers in the February 26th online edition of the journal Public Health Nutrition.

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Children of undocumented Mexican immigrants have a significantly higher risk of behavior problems than their co-ethnic counterparts with documented or naturalized citizen mothers, according to a new study.

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In this month’s release, find new embargoed research about the health of black children with foreign- born parents; risky drinking behavior associated with flavored alcohol beverages; and the risk for heart failure among veterans with PTSD.

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Underage drinkers of flavored alcoholic beverages who exclusively consume the supersized versions are more than six times as likely to report suffering alcohol-related injuries compared to underage youth who drink other types of alcoholic beverages, according to a new study.

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A doctor’s recommendation and a patient’s race may influence flu vaccination rates, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Researchers found that 90 percent of patients received vaccination if their physician advocated for it compared to 58 percent of patients whose physician did not.

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A new themed supplement issue of the American Journal of Public Health takes on topics regarding public health education advancements.

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Public health experts have long known that tobacco smoke exposure (TSE) can be harmful for children with bronchopulmonary dysplasia, a lung disease that often accompanies premature birth.

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Patients receiving a brief intervention to help them quit smoking before surgery are still more likely to be nonsmokers at one-year follow-up, reports a study in Anesthesia & Analgesia.

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A University of Iowa expert on policing will share her planned national initiative to improve police officers' health and wellness to President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, meeting in Washington on Monday, Feb. 23.

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University of Michigan researchers today released a detailed draft analysis of policy options for hydraulic fracturing, the natural gas and oil extraction process commonly known as fracking

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- In a first-of-its-kind analysis of worldwide dietary patterns, a team including researchers from t Tufts University found overall diet quality worsened across the world even as consumption of healthier foods increased in many countries. The study compared trends in intakes of healthy versus unhealthy foods in 1990 and 2010 and found major differences by country.

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Public health researchers have analyzed soda consumption data in order to characterize people’s exposure to a potentially carcinogenic byproduct of some types of caramel color. Caramel color is a common ingredient in colas and other dark soft drinks. The results show that between 44 and 58 percent of people over the age of six typically have at least one can of soda per day, possibly more, potentially exposing them to 4-methylimidazole (4-MEI), a possible human carcinogen formed during the manufacture of some kinds of caramel color.

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Heavily marketed as a safer, healthful alternative to smoking, electronic cigarettes are under fire from California health officials who have declared “vaping” a public health threat, hoping to head off the type of deceptive manipulation that tobacco companies succeeded with for decades, according to researchers.

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Alcohol and caffeine have joined the ranks of milk, juice and other substances that now come in powdered form. Of the two, caffeine is more concerning, says one Penn State Hershey physician.

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Many of the most serious and potentially fatal poisonings reported in children occur by the ingestion of medication. Approximately half of the poisonings in the USA occur in children 6 years or younger.

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“The rise in opioid consumption has resulted in a doubling in visits to the emergency department for nonmedical OPR use but I also see patients who make errors with medications they are legitimately supposed to be taking,” says Megan Rech, emergency medicine pharmacist, Loyola University Health System. Loyola, an academic medical center, has a dedicated pharmacist with expertise specific to the Emergency Department.

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In a remarkable new advance against the virus that causes AIDS, scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have announced the creation of a novel drug candidate so potent and universally effective, it might work as part of an unconventional vaccine.

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New research, editorials and commentaries featured in the themed supplement focused on public health services and systems research.

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A study of more than 1,500 cigarette smokers who were not ready to quit smoking but were willing to cut back on cigarette consumption and combine their approach with varenicline (Chantix) increased their long-term success of quitting smoking. The multinational study is published in the February issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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Public health researchers report the freqency of two muscle-weakness disorders that strike mostly boys: Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Becker muscular dystrophy. The team found that about 1 in 5,000 boys in the United States, between 5 and 9 years old, have the inherited disorders. They also find that the diseases appear to affect Hispanic boys more often than white or African-American boys, for unknown reasons. Results appear in the journal Pediatrics.

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In an attempt to address the significant problem of childhood obesity in the United States territory, Puerto Rican officials have proposed a $500 - $800 fine for parents whose children have obesity and have not improved after parent-focused education. While some public and pediatric health organizations have called the bill “unfair,” The Obesity Society (TOS) and The Obesity Action Coalition (OAC) go further to call it a misguided policy that ignores the core scientific understanding of obesity as a disease.

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An investigation by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development found that more than a quarter of New York City retailers did not request identification from young adults buying cigarettes. The study, published online in the BMJ journal Tobacco Control, was conducted in anticipation of the minimum purchase age for cigarettes rising from 18 to 21.

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As the price of gasoline drops, the number of automobile crashes increases, according to analysis of monthly crash data. from the Minnesota Office of Traffic Safety for 1998 to 2007. However, the time frame within which this occurs varies based on the driver’s age, according to South Dakota State University sociologist Guangqing Chi. He led the multi-institutional team of researchers who analyzed crash data from Minnesota, Mississippi and Alabama in relationship to gasoline prices.

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Experience with the Ebola outbreak highlights local health departments' essential role in responding to global health threats posed by infectious diseases, according to a special article in the March/April issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.

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Growing global trade is critically important for providing food when and where it’s needed — but it makes it harder to link the benefits of food and the environmental burden of its production. A study published this week in the journal BioScience by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment proposes to extend the way we characterize global food trade to include nutritional value and resource consumption alongside more conventional measures of trade’s value.

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Fatalists trump rational thought: A new study by a political scientist at the University of Arkansas examines perceptions of U.S. citizens about the benefits and risks of immunizations.

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Each year nearly 600,000 people—mostly children under age five and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa—die from malaria, caused by single-celled parasites that grow inside red blood cells. The most deadly malarial species—Plasmodium falciparum—has proven notoriously resistant to treatment efforts. But thanks to a novel approach developed by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and described in the January 20 online edition of ACS Chemical Biology, researchers can readily screen thousands of drugs to find those potentially able to kill P. falciparum.

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A Georgia State University expert is available to discuss the measles outbreak in the United States.