Report looks at oil-spill fallout for children, families
As the gulf oil spill dragged on, coverage of its psychological and economic aftermath gained momentum. Now, Poynter’s Al Tompkins has spotlighted coverage of what is sure to be a flood of follow-up reports and post-mortems. Based on research conducted from July 19 through 25 (the well has been effectively capped since July 15), the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University has released its “Impact on Children and Families of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill,” subtitled “Preliminary Findings of the Coastal Population Impact Study.”
Photo by kk+ via Flickr
As Tompkins points out, the study has already pulled in significant media coverage. Shaila Dewan’s story in The New York Times, for example, covered both specifics and context:
“There’s been a very overt effort by BP and the Coast Guard to project a sense that the crisis is over, but this is far from the case,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the center and president of the Children’s Health Fund, a sponsor of the survey. “Our survey shows a persistent and overwhelming level of anxiety among families living near the coast, driven by both medical symptoms in their children as well as a substantial level of psychological stress.”
The survey included 1,200 coastal residents in Louisiana and Mississippi, most of whom live within 10 miles of the ocean.
One in five reported that their household income had dropped since the spill. Forty-three percent said they had been directly exposed to oil, either at beaches, on their property or in helping with the cleanup. Those who had been exposed were more than twice as likely to report that their children had developed physical or mental health problems since the spill. Also, families that had more concerns about their children’s mental health were more likely to report that they are considering moving.
Related
- For psyches, Gulf is Valdez on ‘fast forward’
- CDC says monitoring system finds no ill from spill
- Mental health impact of the BP spill multiplies
- Resources for reporting on health and the oil spill
- Assessing the Effects of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill on Human Health: A Summary of the June 2010 Workshop
- Tip sheet: reporting on the intersection of health, environment
- CDC Emergency Response and Preparedness
- A recent Dart Centre Europe panel looked at covering the human consequences of environmental disaster.
- Grief in the Gulf: Tanya Paperny writes about the challenge of reporting a slow-motion disaster.
- Dart Center resources for covering the Deepwater Horizon Spill
CDC: Obesity rises unabated, no state meets goals
Filed under: Government, Health policy, Hot Health Headline
According to Vital Signs, a new part of the CDC journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (more on that in a minute), the number of adults whose self-reported numbers indicated obesity rose 1.1 percent between 2007 and 2009. Nationally, 26.7 percent of adults were obese in 2009, a number that’s even higher for non-Hispanic blacks (36.8 percent), Hispanics (30.7 percent) and folks who didn’t graduate from high school (32.9 percent.) [PDF transcript of today's briefing.]
States ranged from Mississippi (34.4 percent) to Colorado (18.6 percent) and none met the federal Healthy People 2010 obesity target of 15 percent.
Healthy People 2010 was started by the HHS in 2000 as an effort to improve public health and eliminate disparities across the country. Obesity percentages were a key benchmarks, as were tobacco use, access to health care, mental health, environmental quality and immunization.
The objectives for Healthy People 2020 are being considered now. They would keep the obesity-related goals from the 2010 effort and augment them with nutrition-based standards.
The CDC says Vital Signs, which will be published on the first Tuesday of each month, “is designed to provide the latest data and information on key health indicators – cancer prevention, obesity, tobacco use, alcohol use, access to health care, HIV/AIDS, motor vehicle passenger safety, health care-association infections, cardiovascular health, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, asthma and food safety.”
AIDS conference coverage online
Once again, the Kaiser Family Foundation is offering extensive coverage of the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria.
Today’s program features sessions about people with HIV and tuberculosis; prevention of mother-to-child transmission; HIV testing; the role of families in prevention, treatment and care; policies and measure ins Europe and more.
The Foundation is offering webcasts of sessions and interviews with newsmakers, as well as daily observations from Science magazine reporter Jon Cohen.
The conference website include slides, audio synched to the slides, rapporteur reports, links to abstracts and webcasts.
In related news, health journalists have been discussing an embargo break on a study that was presented at the conference. AHCJ board member and Reuters Health Editor Ivan Oransky has covered the situation here and here on his Embargo Watch blog.
APHA: Transportation policies impact health
Filed under: Health policy, Public health, Studies
Transportation policies and public health are inextricably linked, according to a new report released by the American Public Health Association.
Photo by Nrbelex via Flickr
“The Hidden Health Costs of Transportation” (PDF) attempts to put a dollar amount on the cost of transportation-related health outcomes and explores how such policies affect public health.
Our dependence on automobiles and roadways has profound negative impacts on human health: decreased opportunities for physical activity, and increased exposure to air pollution, and the number of traffic crashes. The health costs associated with these impacts, including costs associated with loss of work days and wages, pain and suffering, and premature death, may be as high as several hundred billion dollars.
The report lists other things that are impacted by transportation policy, such as noise, water quality, mental health and/or stress, equity and social capital or social cohesion.
The report cites a 2008 report from the Government Accountability Office that recommended the United States refocus its transportation planning to incorporate cost-benefit analyses and the APHA says those analyses should take health costs into account.
Perhaps somewhat predictably, the report says “Investment should shift toward transit, pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure in order to facilitate healthy, equitable and environmentally sound mobility.”
Public health loses leading blogger
Revere, the pseudonym behind the leading public health blog EffectMeasure, has announced that (he/she/they) will be hanging up the tri-cornered hat and passing the baton to The Pump Handle. While we have nothing but respect for The Pump Handle’s work, it’s sad to see Revere go. Revere’s farewell post has already attracted 85 comments, and AHCJ board member Maryn McKenna posted a eulogy on her SuperBug blog:
For more than 5 years now, Revere (a collective voice of an unknown number of public health experts — for simplicity, let’s say “he”) has been a reliable, thoughtful, expert, humorous and deeply knowledgeable guide to the intricacies of public health and public health politics. … And though few would admit it, Revere’s posts have been consistent agenda-setters in newsrooms all across the planet; insiders knew that, if Revere said something, it would start showing up in newspapers and on wires about 12 hours later.
Patients at risk after free public screening
UPDATE: Commenter CT points out that the students involved were not medical school students but were in the University of New Mexico physician assistant program, a fact confirmed on the university’s web page about the incident.
Following news this week that two drug companies were hit with punitive damages after vials of the anesthetic propofol were re-used and infected patients with hepatitis C, The Associated Press’ Susan Montoya Bryan reports that “a group of New Mexico medical school students failed to properly change needles on devices used for blood glucose testing” putting people at risk for contracting serious diseases, such as hepatitis and HIV.
Photo by AlishaV via Flickr
More than 50 people were tested during a free event during the American Indian Week Pueblo Day on April 24 in Albuquerque, N.M., which was attended by people from all over the world: “The center’s visitor list for that Saturday included more than 1,600 people from across the nation and abroad – including Canada, Italy, Sweden and Germany.”
Bryan reports that the students used devices, similar to home glucose testers, which contain six lancets that are triggered to draw a blood sample. “With each use, the device must be advanced manually to load a new lancet.”
A spokesman for University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center says “the devices should not have been used at the public event and not all of the students were properly trained to use them. ”
Public health authorities have requested that those who participated in the testing event call 888-899-6092 or visit the UNM website for more information and referral for screening.
In reversal, Mich. agency releases H1N1 documents
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Public health, Public records
Michigan’s Department of Community Health has reversed an earlier decision to withhold documents about how the state has spent money on H1N1 prevention.
Todd A. Heywood of the Michigan Messenger reports the department had turned down a Freedom of Information Act request from that publication for “information related to a $25,000 budget item for the involvement of the Civilian Air Patrol. It also refused to release information about an exercise which was budgeted at nearly $50,000 and refused to identify which ‘partner agencies’ had received gloves, masks and other supplies purchased by the department.”
In its denial, the department said releasing the information would violate the state’s anti-terrorism laws. Heywood reports the documents that have been released do not appear to have any relationship to terrorism or national security.
“It’s absurd to think that releasing plans for preventing and treating H1N1 would compromise the state’s security or increase its vulnerability to terrorism,” said Charles Ornstein, president of AHCJ’s board of directors and a senior reporter at ProPublica.
“I’m pleased the Michigan Department of Community Health released the requested documents, and I hope reporters in other states will ask for similar information.”
AHCJ has been concerned about the withholding of information about H1N1 around the country. Last fall, an informal poll of AHCJ members and a review of press releases and news reports revealed a wide variation in what information local and state health officials are disclosing about H1N1 deaths.
At the time, Felice Freyer, chair of AHCJ’s Right-to-Know Committee, said, “in some places, officials are withholding more information than necessary, perhaps because of a lack of clear guidelines about what should be revealed. This comes at a high cost; health officials lose the public’s trust when they hide information. Anyone may wonder: If they won’t even say how old the victim was, what else are they concealing about the sicknesses affecting my community?”
After being approached by AHCJ, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers agreed to organize a group of state officials, public information officers and health-care writers to develop guidelines on reporting deaths that are of concern or interest to the public. We will learn more details soon, says Freyer, a reporter at The Providence (R.I.) Journal, but “we are happy that ASTHO agrees the issue is worthy of discussion and intends to include us.”
In California, Ryan Sabalow of the Redding (Calif.) Record Searchlight put together a local take on ongoing inconsistencies in how local health departments release outbreak-related information to the public. He wrote about examples from local health departments and explained the nuances of when and how certain health departments choose to disclose infections, and how inconsistent those standards can be in practice.
(Hat tip to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.)
Journal focuses on AA and NHPI health disparities
The May issue of the American Journal of Public Health, published online today, focuses on data showing significant health disparities among Asian American, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, and Asian immigrant populations.
The issue explores the health threats faced by these minority groups – particularly from cancer, which is often under-recognized and undertreated among Asian American ethnic groups.
More specifically, it details serious health issues for these groups related to breast cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer and cervical and liver cancer.
Members of AHCJ receive complimentary press access to the American Journal of Public Health – if you haven’t registered for access yet, please click here to do so.
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: Nation lacking in epidemiologists
Nearly 1,500 more epidemiologists are needed nationwide to sufficiently carry out public health duties, according to a survey of state epidemiologists earlier this year.
The Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists has released its 2009 Epidemiology Capacity Assessment (PDF), intended to report on the “epidemiology capacity of state and territorial health departments in the United States, structured around the Ten Essential Services of Public Health” in eight areas: bioterrorism/emergency response, chronic diseases, environmental health, infectious diseases, injury, maternal and child health, occupational health, and oral health.
The analysis found that there are fewer epidemiologists resulting in a reduced capacity for surveillance and epidemiology – especially in the areas of bioterrorism and emergency response. It also reveals that a number of states lack the ability to perform several of the essential services of public health, that states are lacking in the technology to conduct surveillance and that many epidemiologists with high levels of training are leaving the public health sector.
The assessment is based on an online survey filled out by state epidemiologists or their delegates between April and July of 2009.
The 122-page report includes recommendations and an in-depth examination of the workforces, the functions that are in jeopardy, the funding sources for state health departments and more.
The CSTE Web site also has a handy directory of state epidemiologists that includes e-mail addresses.
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Spend a week at the CDC studying public health, meeting sources. Apply for the AHCJ-CDC Health Journalism Fellowships today!
- Reporting on the intersection of health, environment
- Tip sheet: Covering cuts to Medicare reimbursements
- Briefing: Reporting on health reform between now and 2014
- Covering high-risk insurance pools: Tips for reporters
- Health care reform has passed: What's next?
- 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
