Feature Channels: Public Health

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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.

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A Rutgers University infectious diseases expert discusses the myths and facts of the measles outbreak and the “vaccine gap” that has put certain adults at risk.

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Teens who use tobacco products are likely to use more than one product, including e-cigarettes, hookahs and pipes, and smokeless tobacco, according to a new study by RTI International.

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The American College of Surgeons recently released a statement emphasizing that the allocation of trauma centers should be based upon the needs of the population, rather than the needs of individual health care organizations or hospital groups.

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New research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that a prolonged illness associated with Lyme disease is more widespread and serious in some patients than previously understood.

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Columbia Engineering Professor Samuel Sia has developed a low-cost smartphone accessory that can perform a point-of-care test that simultaneously detects three infectious disease markers—HIV and syphilis—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 without requiring any stored energy: all necessary power is drawn from the smartphone. February 4, Science Translational Medicine.

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In a study with mice, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers have found that e-cigarettes compromise the immune system in the lungs and generate some of the same potentially dangerous chemicals found in traditional nicotine cigarettes.

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One of the global regions highly affected by hepatitis C is West Africa. In developed countries, hepatitis C, a blood-borne disease, is transmitted through intravenous (IV) drug use. “In West Africa, we believe that there are many transmission modes and they are not through IV drug use, but through cultural and every day practices,” says Jennifer Layden, MD, PhD principal investigator on a study recently published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

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Children under age 5 living in sub-Saharan Africa were 54 percent less likely to develop malaria if they had been given a single large dose of vitamin A, new research led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests.