New CDC data pinpoint heart disease hot spots
Data from Medicare records of more than 28 million people each year between 2000 and 2006 in the 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands were used to create a county-level report on hospitalizations because of heart disease.
The CDC’s “Atlas of Heart Disease Hospitalizations Among Medicare Beneficiaries” shows that the highest hospitalization rates occur among blacks compared to other racial and ethnic groups and rates were highest in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, Texas and Oklahoma.
For more county-level health data, be sure to take a look at the County Health Rankings recently released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin.
Reporters use county rankings for analysis
Filed under: Health data, Public health, Public records, Studies, Tools
On Feb. 17, rankings of the relative health of counties in each American state were released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin. The rankings used data from 13 distinct (mostly federal) sources, including the National Center for Health Statistics, the Census Bureau and the Dartmouth Atlas. With that data, researchers computed eight separate composite scores, which were then weighted to produce one overall score. The ratings are navigated by clicking through a national map to the state and county level. Enough clicks will even bring you to the raw data itself. The state only compares counties, not states, because data collection varies from state to state and isn’t always standardized.
It’s a combination of data, analysis and an intuitive interface, and journalists have been quick to localize the story. Many reporters reached beyond the easy numbers (”our county is 67th!”) to use the system for deeper stories.
For example, Robin Erb of the Detroit Free Press dissected the ratings process and how individual factors and disparities played into them before launching into the standard state breakdown.
Writing for Health News Florida, David Gulliver took a broader state view and considered how various socioeconomic factors played into the rankings of Florida counties. Gulliver’s analysis:
The strong-performing coastal counties, like Collier, St. John’s Sarasota, Charlotte, Palm Beach and Broward, all benefit from having heavy concentrations of retirees who have guaranteed health care access via Medicare. …
[Dr. Kevin Sherin, director of public health for Orange County] said that in Florida’s tourism and service industries, workers tend to be transient and less likely to have insurance or consistent primary care.
He noted the low-ranked counties were some of the poorest in Florida, like Union and Bradford in the rural north, and Glades and Okeechobee, with heavy populations of migrant workers. Those counties also tend to have more people who speak only Spanish, Creole or other languages.
Gulliver localized the story on a county level for his Sarasota Health News site.
In USA Today, Mary Brophy Marcus took the national view and looked for broad trends and generalizations. Marcus’ story was accompanied by a map by Frank Pompa highlighting each state’s healthiest and least healthy counties.
Survey looks at use of leftover pain meds
One in five people in Utah have been prescribed pain medication in the past year, according to new figures from the Morbidty and Mortality Weekly report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While the survey only takes into account the use of pain medications in Utah, the CDC notes that “This percentage is comparable to the 18.4% of insured persons aged ≥18 years who reported receiving a prescription for opioids in a national study in 2002.”
The report says that deaths in Utah as a result of “poisoning by prescription pain medications” increased nearly 600 percent from 1999 to 2007. It also looks at the problem of leftover medication and people using medications not prescribed to them:
An estimated 72% of respondents who were prescribed an opioid had leftover medication, and 71% of those with leftover medication kept it; during the same period, 97% of those who used opioids that were not prescribed to them said they received them from friends or relatives.
The state has set out some recommendations for health care providers aimed at reducing the availability of unused medications.
The data comes from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, an on-going telephone survey system that collects information about health risk behaviors, preventive health practices and health care access. Utah is apparently the first state to include pain medication questions in the BRFSS, “although Kansas added a module of questions regarding chronic pain in 2005 and 2007 with one follow-up question asking how the pain was treated.”
Report measures health factors at county level
Filed under: Health data, Health policy, Public health, Studies, Tools
A county-by-county collection of reports set to be released tomorrow could be a good source for local data on a number of health factors. The County Health Rankings, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, is the first of what is expected to be an annual look at health within each state.
The rankings will “show how counties measure up within each state in terms of how healthy people are, how long they live, and how important factors affect their health, such as tobacco use, obesity, access to healthcare, education, community safety, and air quality,” according to a press release.
A Feb. 17 briefing will include experts representing public health, health policy, education, and business who are expected to discuss the rankings and ways that communities can become healthier. The briefing, which starts at 9:30 a.m. EST, will be webcast. You can RSVP for this event online and a link will be sent to those who RSVP as soon as it’s available. For those in Washington, D.C, the briefing will be at the Columbus Club at Union Station, 50 Massachusetts Ave. NE - you also will need to RSVP.
Speakers are expected to include:
- Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A., President and CEO, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
- David R. Williams, M.P.H., Ph.D., Norman Professor of Public Health, Harvard School of Public Health
- Patrick Remington, M.D, M.P.H., Associate Dean for Public Health, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health
- Andrew Webber, President and CEO, National Business Coalition on Health
- Judith A. Monroe, M.D., FAAFP, State Health Commissioner, Indiana State Department of Health
- Donald Shell, M.D., M.A., Health Officer, Prince George’s County Health Department
(Full disclosure: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is one of a number of organizations supporting AHCJ’s educational efforts.)
Update
See how many news organizations have covered the rankings.
‘Gold mine’ of workplace toxicity data released
Filed under: Health data, Hot Health Headline, Public health, Public records
After a long FOIA battle that ended with a federal lawsuit, Adam Finkel, former OSHA director of health standards programs for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (bio and contact information), has “acquired data on some three million samples, taken at about 75,000 locations from 1979 to 2009,” the Center for Public Integrity reports as part of its “Data Mine” series.
The air and “wipe” samples in question were taken to determine workplace exposure to toxic substances. Finkel plans to analyze this data “gold mine” and make it available to the public in an easily digestible format (a project for which he has already secured grant money). At some point, OSHA itself may do the same.
Asked if OSHA plans to make the sampling data public, agency spokeswoman Diana Petterson responded in an e-mail that “it is under consideration and must address certain concerns including the data integrity and the completeness of the data.” Finkel, who left OSHA after accusing the agency of failing to test its own inspectors for dangerous levels of beryllium, is skeptical. “They made it as hard as they possibly could,” he said. “This database is up to 30 years old, and they’ve shown no interest in making it accessible or doing anything useful with it internally.”
The Data Mine series, a collaboration between The Center for Public Integrity and the Sunlight Foundation, will highlight inaccessible or poorly presented information from the federal government.
From the CIA to the CDC, we’ll be looking at data that needs to be public, with regular posts on the Center’s and Sunlight’s websites. We’ll describe each data set, as well as officials’ plans for putting it online – or not.
Mumps outbreak hits more than 1,500 in N.Y., N.J.
More than 1,500 cases of mumps in New York and New Jersey have prompted the CDC to update the public on the outbreak in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
According to the CDC, the outbreak appears to have originated with an 11-year-old boy who returned from a trip to the United Kingdom and then attended a summer camp for observant Jewish boys. The illness was transmitted to other attendees and staff members and has since spread as those people returned home. The CDC says 97 percent of the people with mumps “are members of the tradition-observant Jewish community.”
Child with mumps (Photo: Public Health Image Library)
The CDC’s report includes information about how many of the people found to have mumps have been vaccinated - 88 percent had received one dose and 75 percent had received two doses.
The CDC says that, since 1967, when the mumps vaccine was licensed, to the early 2000s, the number of reported cases has gone from 186,000 to less than 500 annually but points out that “the effectiveness of the mumps component of the MMR vaccine is lower than that of the measles and rubella components.”
“The CDC hypothesized that the relatively closed social world of the communities and the large family sizes within them have played a role in preventing the disease from spreading further,” according to a brief from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
Calif. maternal death on rise, according to report
Filed under: Government, Hot Health Headline, Public health
Citing investigators who wrote a yet-to-be-released report, Nathanael Johnson of California Watch reports that the “mortality rate of California women who die from causes directly related to pregnancy has nearly tripled in the past decade.”
The state’s Department of Public Health has held the report without releasing it for the past seven months, according to Johnson.
In a Sentinel Event Alert sent to hospitals nationwide last month, the Joint Commission advised doctors to be aware of medical conditions that contribute to maternal death, including pre-pregnancy obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. Johnson writes that the alert may signal that the problem is national.
The California report was presented to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 2007 - to gasps from the audience, Johnson reports.
The state of California has yet to share the report with the public. Researchers say that, after reviewing the report in 2008, officials in the Department of Public Health asked for technical clarifications. Revisions were complete and approved in the first half of 2009, according to [Shabbir Ahmad, the scientist in California’s Department of Public Health who organized the statewide review].
Network to warn pharmacists of drug errors
Filed under: Health data, Hospitals, Public health
The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Landro spotlighted a new national network designed to send e-mail alerts to as many as 55,000 pharmacists.
The network is designed to alert pharmacists of dangerous and life-threatening errors as well as to educate them on how to prevent those specific errors from also occurring in their own respective practices. The system is intended to help the same errors from being repeated time after time across the country.
Photo by jypsygen via Flickr.Landro wrote that “Medication errors cause at least one death every day and injure approximately 1.3 million people annually in the United States,” and added that there are some indications that the weakening economy has had a negative impact on medication safety.
Here’s Landro explaining the new network:
The non-profit Institute for Safe Medication Practices, which is certified by the federal government to collect error reports and other information about quality breaches, and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists are launching a new National Alert Network for Serious Medication Errors. The network, which was unveiled last month, will be used to send email alerts to 35,000 pharmacists working in hospitals and health systems, as well as physicians and nurses, when a dangerous or life-threatening error is reported to ISMP. The two organizations are also in discussions to extend the network to as many as 26 other organizations that promote safe medication use. The hope is that widely spreading the word about such errors will cause doctors and pharmacists to be more cautious—and ultimately prevent future mix-ups. Relevant alerts will also be sent to 20,000 drugstore pharmacists.
Landro also mentioned ISMP’s consumer med safety alert portal and the FDA’s consumer-focused error reporting tool. She also goes into greater detail as to how drug mishaps happen, and into what can be done to prevent them.
Related
Addressing the growing demand for kidneys
Josephine Marcotty of the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently wrote a series addressing the increasing demand for kidneys, a need spurred by an aging population, increases in diabetes, obesity and high-blood pressure. 
She found that it is a public health crisis that costs the nation $33.6 billion a year, and there is no end in sight.
Marcotty covered one woman’s search for a kidney, the ethics of paired donations and how the medical center decided who would get organs.
In this article for AHCJ members, she shares what she learned about kidney donation and how she reported the story.
Related
‘Kidney pirates,’ organized crime and health care
AP looks at drug resistance worldwide
Filed under: Health policy, Hot Health Headline, Public health
The Associated Press has neatly wrapped up its wide-ranging look at drug resistance and the threat it poses to global health into a flash-based multimedia presentation. The presentation consists of stories, infographics, videos and a photo/audio slideshow.
The two videos explain drug-resistant strains of various infectious diseases. The first looks at the wide availability of powerful antibiotics without guidance or prescription, addresses the problem as it has emerged both in the United States and in locales like Mexico and the Philippines. The second, which is about the use of antibiotics in large-scale livestock operations, relies on just one source, Dr. Craig Rowles of Elite Pork Partnership.
The AP uses infographics to establish the spread and scope of the problem, relying heavily on various world maps. I particularly like the timeline that accompanies the malaria graphic (click “statistics” in the upper right, then “malaria”); it shows the span of time from when each malaria-fighting drug was introduced to the date at which a resistant strain emerged.
Finally, they drive the problem home with three strong anecdotes, including a Southeast Asian boy with drug-resistant malaria, a man fighting the drug-resistant tuberculosis that killed his HIV-positive partner, and a woman who lost an infant daughter to MRSA.
Stories in the series:
- New form of malaria threatens Thai-Cambodia border
- South African doctor sees drug-resistant HIV
- First case of highly drug-resistant TB found in US
- Solution to killer superbug found in Norway
The package is accompanied by this video.
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Health Journalism 2010, AHCJ's annual conference, features a world-class program with story ideas, sources, stronger reporting skills, chances to meet newsmakers and network with other journalists.
- Health and education: Covering these intersecting beats
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health reporting resources for journalists on state and local government beats
- Shortened Lives: How location, lifestyle affect health
- Covering a complex story for the long haul
- Aging in the 21st Century: Presentations and tip sheets
- AHCJ calls for better information from Joint Commission Web site
