Room with a view

I think knowing that a view like this is waiting for me outside might make it a little harder to concentrate inside. But, I'll try....

View from the San Diego Convention Center terrace

P.S. Get Personal

Upon checking in at the San Diego Convention Center, you’ll receive a handful of helpful stuff: a 136th APHA Annual Meeting tote bag, a nifty nametag and a phonebook for southern California. Oh wait....that’s not a phonebook, it’s the Annual Meeting final program!

Seriously, the phonebook comparison is a bit of an exaggeration. But just by a bit. This year’s APHA Annual Meeting spans five days, offers hundreds of scientific sessions, presents thousands of scientific papers on the latest public health research and practice, and welcomes more than 700 booths to the Public Health Expo. So, the final program is no small potato — it’s more like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

But here’s where a little public health preparedness comes in handy. If you’ve already registered for the meeting, you can go online now and access the APHA Personal Scheduler. The scheduler allows you to browse the entire program, including room numbers and locations, and prepare a personalized meeting itinerary that you can access from any computer with an Internet connection.

And you can change and update your itinerary whenever you please as well as print out a hard copy. Now, how convenient is that?

Go West!

The wind is blowing a little cooler, the trees are getting a bit barer and this blogger has already seen her first Christmas commercial. All signs point to one thing: It’s APHA Annual Meeting time!

In less than one month, sun-filled, sandy beached San Diego will welcome about 13,000 public health workers for APHA’s 136th Annual Meeting, which this year has a theme of “Public Health Without Borders.” So, pack your bags, roll up your posters, and slip a few hundred business cards into your wallet (the Annual Meeting is a social networker’s dream come true) and join the public health pilgrimage to California.

Just a few of 2008’s must-see highlights include opening session speaker Michael Marmot, chair of the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health; a Wednesday afternoon closing session featuring three former U.S. surgeons general; a Monday afternoon town hall meeting on health system reform to which representatives from both presidential campaigns have been invited; and the Sunday night showing of Emmy Award-winning Sarah Jones’ “A Right to Care,” her one-woman performance piece.

And, of course, don’t forget to sign up for daily e-mails from APHA’s Annual Meeting Blog. We’ll be posting multiple times a day, covering scientific sessions, social gatherings and other blog-worthy, can’t-miss events. And this year, the blog will also feature a list of daily top picks posted every morning, bright and early.

For all the details, including this year’s online program, check out APHA’s Annual Meeting Web site.

See you in 22 days!

Meeting by the sea

Already getting ready for APHA’s 136th Annual Meeting in October in San Diego? So are we. And not only are we looking forward to some hot topics inside the convention center, we’re looking forward to the hot weather outside the convention center (and not lugging our big winter coats from room to room). We can already smell the salty breeze......

But before you pack your favorite beach towel, don’t forget to subscribe to the Annual Meeting daily blog so you can begin receiving updates via e-mail in the fall. Daily postings will begin shortly before the Annual Meeting starts and go throughout the meeting, covering scientific sessions, social events and much more.

And don’t forget your sunscreen!

Until we meet again

Another year, another successful APHA Annual Meeting.

Final counts put this year’s meeting attendance at more than 14,000 people — that’s 14,000 people who may be more motivated to contact their legislators and advocate for public health; 14,000 who could have learned a new, innovative way to improve their community’s health; 14,000 who made new public health friends; and 14,000 who hopefully returned home with a renewed sense of mission.

APHA’s new president, Linda Degutis, DrPH, MSN, certainly seemed energized during her remarks at yesterday’s Closing Session, calling on attendees to be public health advocates and educate decision-makers about public health’s critical role. She emphasized that public health must be the voice for those who are too sick, too scared or too young to speak for themselves. Degutis spoke loud and clear: denying State Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage for uninsured kids is unacceptable; sending troops into war and then denying them access to care upon their return is unacceptable; and keeping maternal health services out of reach for undocumented immigrants is also unacceptable.

Step into the advocacy arena, she told attendees, and don’t be “intimidated by those with more money and power.”

Speaking of advocacy, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, MD, broke some good news at the closing, announcing that this week Texas voters passed Proposition 15, a $3 billion bond plan to support cancer research and prevention. Tuesday’s vote on Proposition 15 was the reason Gupta, a member of the Lance Armstrong Foundation board, replaced original session speaker Lance Armstrong, who was in Texas gathering support for the measure.

Gupta told attendees that now — more than ever before — cancer is an important topic in presidential candidate circles. In fact, a number of top White House contenders recently spoke at a presidential forum hosted by the Lance Armstrong Foundation, he said. And they should be talking: “Cancer is and continues to be a national threat,” Gupta noted.

At the Closing Session’s end, APHA’s Executive Director Georges Benjamin, MD, FACP, sent his public health colleagues home with a not-so-small homework assignment: to help pass a strong SCHIP bill, eliminate health disparities and continue supporting a robust public health infrastrucutre.

“It can be done — it must be done,” he said.

On that positive note, see you next year in San Diego for APHA’s 136th Annual Meeting, “Public Health Without Borders.”

— K.K.

The body politic

Abortion. The HPV vaccine. Maternal mortality. Three very different issues, but all serving as poignant examples of the inherent dangers of allowing politics to supersede women’s health.

These three topics were the central issues discussed in today’s special session, “Women’s Health: In the Political Crossfire,” which shined a spotlight on the detrimental health effects of allowing politics and ideology to dictate evidence-based public health practices.

Abortion — perhaps the most obvious women’s health issue that finds itself overshadowed by politics — was discussed within the slippery-slope framework of increasing regulation. As noted by panelist Louise Melling, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, the 2007 Supreme Court ruling on partial-birth abortion — which upheld a federal ban on the procedure — demonstrated the degree to which the nation’s highest court has reversed course since 1973’s landmark Roe v. Wade. Melling provided telling examples to support the idea that increased limitations on a women’s right to choose fly in the face of efforts to protect and improve women’s health.

In his discussion of recent attempts to mandate HPV vaccinations, panelist Lawrence Gostin, JD, LLD, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, also argued that politics present real dangers to women’s health. Gostin, who feels that mandating the vaccine should be a last resort, argued that issues of social justice arise when a vaccine is mandated for one group and not another. This is significant, he said, because although men and women are equally affected by HPV, states that do mandate vaccination only require women to get immunized. And though the vaccine has been approved by federal safety agencies, the HPV vaccine has not been subjected to large-scale, long-term clinical trials.

The final panelist, Deni Robey, JD, added a global perspective to the discussion. Robey works for Americans for UNFPA, an organization that works to build American support for the United Nations Population Fund, which provides critical reproductive health services to women worldwide. She discussed how U.S. politics not only affect women domestically, but globally. Looking specifically at the disturbingly high rates of maternal mortality around the world, Robey illustrated the connection between the current U.S. administration’s refusal to fund certain international contraceptive programs and the continued numbers of women dying — needlessly — during childbirth. The U.S. government — the only government that won’t contribute to UNFPA because of ideological differences — has withheld close to $200 million in funding since 2002. That’s $200 million less that can be used to help the upwards of 16 per 100 women who die while giving birth in nations with the worst maternal mortality rates.

In the end, women’s health and politics will probably continue to mingle in the same circles for quite some time, but the question remains: What will we do to change the situation?

— B.L.

Best in show

Before the events of the past few days begin to fade from memory and we all slide back into our usual routines, let us know what your favorite part of the 135th APHA Annual Meeting was. If everyone will look to their right, you'll see a conveniently placed poll to help you answer that question. Was it the Public Health Expo, the scientific sessions, a Section social...or the curious "other." (If it was "other," please satisfy our curiousity and leave us a comment.)

And don't forget to check in with this blog on Thursday for highlights from the Closing Session as well as last-minute news from meeting.

A side of subsidy with your veggies?

What does the government tell us we should eat more of? Fruits, vegetables and whole grains. What foods does the government support with the vast majority of its food subsidies? Dairy and meat products.

What’s wrong with this picture? In the quest for a modern federal farm bill, public health experts need to be at the table, said the speakers at yesterday’s panel entitled “Farm Bill Renewal: Going Forward with Nutrition and Food Policy Outcomes.”

You’ve heard statistics on the rising rates and costs of obesity and chronic disease in the United States. Yet the government provides our most vulnerable populations — those who rely on federal nutrition assistance programs — with high-cholesterol, high-fat foods from subsidized agriculture.

As panelist Hope Ferdowsian, MD, MPH, of the Washington Center for Clinical Research and George Washington University, put it: “As public health professionals, we need to be adamant about shifting subsidy supports to more healthful foods. It’s up to us to at least get in there and participate in the conversation.”

While the farm bill is obviously very complicated and requires input from multiple sectors, it makes sense to base agricultural subsidies on health considerations and eliminate subsidies that promote unhealthy foods, Ferdowsian said. In Poland, changes in subsidy regulations led to increased fruit imports and was actually associated with a reduced incidence of heart disease, she added.

Roni Neff, PhD, SM, of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health (and the school’s Center for a Livable Future), linked the concept of the human right to food with food agricultural policy. Analyzing the issue within a human rights framework establishes policy responses as obligations rather than charity or economic strategy, and holds countries to standards that protect individuals, Neff said. The right-to-food approach considers sustainability, economic access, energy conservation and nutrition programs to overlap with the overall goals of the farm bill.

Thus far, Neff noted, the right-to-food ideology has been irrelevant to policy development, and agricultural stakeholders continue to dominate the debate.

“I believe nobody in Congress would necessarily think about the right to food, or care, unless we in public health and our allies make them care,” Neff said.

Currently, the federal farm bill, which includes funding for nutrition and food security programs, is being debated on the floor of the U.S. Senate. To take action and encourage your senators to support a healthy farm bill, visit APHA’s advocacy site.

Extra food for thought: In the United States, the average vegetable travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate.

-P.T.