What's your story (morning glory)?

There are some new guests at APHA’s 137th Annual Meeting showcasing the importance of public health professions in a very big way. You may be familiar with them if you, like this blogger, are an avid National Public Radio fan. StoryCorps has made its way to APHA!

StoryCorps, an independent nonprofit partner of NPR, is one of the largest national oral history projects. The group stages interviews (that are more along the lines of an informal conversation), between two people who have an intimate or personal relationship with one another. Each interviewee selects the person who will interview them. This may be a mentor, a colleague, a friend or anyone they are comfortable with. The goal is to capture, preserve and honor the story behind one’s life, and in APHA’s case, StoryCorps is doing just this for leaders in the field of environmental public health.

StoryCorps founder and radio documentarian Dave Isay, conceived of the project as a way to give people the time and space to tell their stories. Each conversation is recorded on CD and preserved at the Library of Congress.

Throughout the APHA Annual Meeting, StoryCorps is providing a dynamic group of 17 APHA members and leaders in the environmental public health field with the opportunity to tell their stories. One facilitator working with StoryCorps noted that this venue is particularly fitting, as public health professionals have a “strong sense of purpose in their respective areas of expertise and this passion is conveyed through the recorded conversations.”

This blogger got a glimpse at one scheduled interview between APHA Executive Director Georges Benjamin and his wife Yvette Benjamin. The two emerged from the interview room excited to share their stories with the world.

“We’re a public health family,” Georges Benjamin said. “Capturing this story is wonderful for the public record.”

Yvette Benjamin emphasized the importance of providing younger generations, especially those with public health interests, with a deeper understanding of the context in which “we’ve gotten to where we are today.”

When asked if they learned anything new about each other in the process, both Benjamins smiled and shook their heads.

“After 30 years of marriage, there’s not much new news to share” said Georges Benjamin.

Check back on the environmental public health section of the APHA Web site to access the stories in the coming weeks.

— M.S.

A little birdie told me so: Tweet of the Day

Today's Tweet of the Day from those of you using the #apha09 hashtag is from Twitter user iamrrm:

"Hey #APHA09 talk reminds me that I have not had a cigarette in 5 months! Yay me! (Now if I could just see my feet again.)"

Congrats!

Healthy People 2020 needs you!

When Penelope Slade-Sawyer touted the life-saving value of prevention this morning during a session on Healthy People 2020 and said “I hope I’m preaching to the choir here” it was clear that she was, indeed.

“The ultimate goal of Healthy People is to have a healthier nation, and prevention is how to get there,” said the director of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion to an overflow crowd.

Slade-Sawyer heads the arm of HHS in charge of getting Healthy People 2020 in shape and ready for public distribution by the end of next year. One of her eye-catching pie charts drove home the woeful state of prevention funding — 95 percent of current health care dollars pay for curative medicine, and just 5 percent for preventive measures.

The Healthy People initiative has grown exponentially since kicking off in 1979. Healthy People 2010 had 467 goals, and it looks like Healthy People 2020 will have close to 600.

One challenge is to balance between the traditional “encyclopedic approach” and one that’s user-friendly. That’s where you come in.

“Give us your opinion,” said Slade-Sawyer, at the Healthy People 2020 site. And in the never-ending search for evidence-based best practices, “evaluate what you do. Let us hear about it.”

New topic areas for Healthy People 2020 will include adolescent health, quality of life, social determinants of health and health care-acquired infections, to name a few. Carter Blakey, known affectionately by her HHS colleagues as “Mrs. Healthy People,” said federal health officials are working to make the new objectives more user-friendly than the telephone book-sized Healthy People 2010 that’s been tough to update and cross-reference.

“Hopefully we’ll go farther than just giving you objectives this decade but also give you some strategies,” Blakey said.

The dream is Healthy People 2020 relational databases, with data available down to the county level. People like Richard Klein, chief of the Health Promotion and Statistics Branch of the National Center for Health Statistics, are working to make that happen using GIS mapping technology.

“Funding- and weather-permitting, we hope to have a much better database,” Klein said.

Click here for current Healthy People data.

— D.C.

Press club

Now that this blogger (and formally trained reporter) has finally stopped gushing over these photos, I can tell you what they’re all about. Today, about a dozen sixth-graders from Stewart Middle School in Norristown, Pa., visited the APHA Annual Meeting in Philly to do a little reporting for their school newspaper, the Stewart Healthy Times. Student reporters grilled public health researchers on everything from tobacco to H1N1 flu to how to prevent getting sick in the first place.

To learn more about Healthy Times, a school-based newspaper program that engages students in promoting health, fitness, nutrition and safety, visit the Food Trust, or stop by session 5084 on Wednesday morning from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. in Marriott 413 to hear more about the Healthy Times program.

Above at top and middle: Young reporters from Stewart Middle School show off their press badges and take notes during a news conference. Bottom: Past APHA President Walter Tsou takes questions from the young reporters.

Peak your interest?

At Monday morning’s session on public health in an era of resource depletion, the panelists did their best to put a positive spin on what can be a very depressing topic. Energy, food and water security are daunting issues that will surely test the world sooner than we’d like.

Howard Frumkin, of CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, highlighted the concept of “peak oil” and its relevance to public health. It’s scary when you realize how much we rely on petroleum products in our everyday lives — and how quickly, relatively speaking, our society became so reliant on petroleum for transportation and the manufacturing of so many everyday products.

Even if you walked over to the conference from your hotel today, you probably used something made from petroleum without even realizing it. Did you put in contacts? Take a medication? Drink from a disposable cup or bottle?

We in public health need to work with our colleagues in transportation, agriculture, housing, planning, architecture, manufacturing, etc. as we work toward a society less reliant on petroleum — because it won’t always be cheap and plentiful. Although Frumkin emphasized the need for planning and educating the public over the more apocalyptic story lines, he still said it’s not a matter of if, but when the dwindling quantities remaining in oil reserves become too difficult and expensive to extract. The scientific consensus is that the world will reach maximum oil production, also known as “peak oil,” sometime between 2005 and 2030.

Turning to water, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food and Water Watch, described water access as one of the most devastating crises, but said she is encouraged by a growing grassroots movement to amass political will to improve access to clean water and reduce the massive burden of water-related diseases worldwide.

“The good part of the story is there is this water justice movement that is growing,” she said, as is increased pressure on the international financial institutions she said are responsible for many of the failed policies that have privatized and taxed water out of reach of the people who most need it.

Click here to read more about Food and Water Watch’s take on the Water for the World Act, legislation introduced in Congress to provide clean water and sanitation to 100 million by 2015.

— P.T.

In a good mood? Don't read this

H1N1 flu. The economic recession. Health reform. Just a few issues described as “late-breaking” in a Monday morning session on recent developments affecting public health. Though I can think of a few more words to describe the topics: Huge, overwhelming, scary, exciting, nerve-wracking, stressful, confusing…..

“Stressful” would be a good way to describe Stephen Ostroff’s presentation on H1N1 flu trends in Pennsylvania. The state’s physician general, Ostroff said between 7,000 and 8,000 cases of H1N1 flu are being reported to state health officials each week, constituting an “unprecedented” fall wave of the virus. In fact, instead of describing the surge of flu cases as a “wave,” Ostroff called it the H1N1 “fall tsunami.” Luckily, Ostroff said H1N1 doesn’t seem to be any more virulent than regular seasonal flu, though it does differ in its magnitude of transmission and in the age groups most affected, mostly young people ages 5 to 19. (Squirt. Sorry, that was me. Just applying more hand sanitizer.)

Steffie Woolhandler, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, put a bit of a damper on this blogger’s elation over the passage of Saturday’s national health reform bill. Woolhandler predicted that millions of Americans would still go uninsured even if the health reform bill goes into effect, noting research recently published in the American Journal of Public Health that found that 45,000 Americans die every year due to a lack of health insurance. She urged attendees to continue the call for real universal health care, cautioning them to watch carefully as health reform continues its way through the halls of Congress.

“It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the power of the insurance industry,” she said.

Carolyn Cannuscio, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, reported on health and the economic recession, eliciting a good few chuckles from the crowd as she highlighted businesses that haven’t seemed to suffer: the makers of the canned, inexpensive meat Spam, condom makers and candy sellers. (Perhaps, she said, candy sales can be explained because people are self-medicating?) But with the nation’s unemployment rate above 10 percent, it’s certainly not all laughs. Unemployment or the stress of possibly losing one’s job puts a heavy strain on people’s mental health and well-being, as does the horrific event of losing one’s home to foreclosure, she said. Plus, the research is clear: Lower incomes often lead to greater health risks.

“Are we doing our best to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy,” Cannuscio asked.

Are you?

— K.K.

Life on the inside

Life is hard enough for an adolescent girl or boy, but can you imagine what it would be like if your mom was in prison?

Kids whose mothers are behind bars don’t have it easy, said Jane Siegel, PhD, an associate professor of criminology at Rutgers University. Speaking at a Monday morning session on women and correctional health, Siegel said that over the last three decades the incarceration rate has been increasing far faster for women than for men, even though women make up a small percentage of the U.S. prison population.

Concerned about the health and safety of incarcerated women’s kids, Siegel recently interviewed 17 children — ages 8 to 18 — whose moms had been in a state prison for a year. Most of the children were living with relatives.

Siegel’s research turned up some interesting findings. The good news: “These kids were incredibly resilient,” Siegel said, noting that they have had to overcome obstacles in their lives that most people, even adults, would never dream of having to deal with. The kids she interviewed — nine girls and eight boys — didn’t tend to have behavioral problems and were “all about trying to be just like other kids,” she said, with video games, shopping and hanging out with friends topping their to-do lists.

But the big burden of having a mom behind bars is the “emotional difficulty these kids have to face,” said Siegel, who was struck by the children’s “sense of longing” for family. Most of the kids were sad or depressed, she said, and to make matters worse, the children have to deal with reconciling their negative images of their mothers with their love for their mothers.

“These kids have an awful lot to cope with,” Siegel said.

— T.D.J.

Sounds of music

The Sounds of Philadelphia wowed crowds of APHA Annnual Meeting attendees on Sunday night with their musical revue and fancy footwork.

Photos courtesy Jim Ezell/EZ Event Photography