CDC Report Finds Comprehensive Sex Education Programs Effective, Abstinence-Only Inconclusive

Sex education programs that advise students to delay sexual activity while also offering instruction on ways to avoid unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections effectively reduce risky sexual behavior, increase condom use and decrease spread of STIs, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-commissioned report released on Friday, the Washington Post reports. The report said there is insufficient evidence to determine whether programs that focus on abstinence until marriage reduce the chance adolescents will engage in risky sexual behavior, become pregnant or contract an STI.


The report was authored by a 19-member expert panel assembled by CDC to examine the efficacy of various sex education programs. For the report, the panel reviewed an analysis of 83 studies on sex education programs from 1980 through 2007. The findings come as Congress considers whether to approve President Obama's request to redirect federal funding from abstinence-only sex education to programs that have been validated by scientific research.

CDC's Randy Elder -- who works with the Task Force on Community Preventive Services, an independent 15-member panel that issues public health recommendations -- said the study found "sufficient evidence that comprehensive risk reduction efforts are effective." However, "after a similar look, the task force determined that based on a number of problems with the studies presented to them there was insufficient evidence" to determine the efficacy of abstinence-only programs, Elder said.

Lung Association Report Shows States Should Do More to Help Smokers Quit

The American Lung Association is releasing its second annual "Helping Smokers Quit: State Cessation Coverage" report. The report addresses state coverage of cessation treatments through Medicaid, state employee health plans, private insurance, and quitlines in 2009. It shows that states are not doing enough to help smokers quit, when they could be saving lives and money by doing so.

Currently, only six states provide comprehensive coverage for Medicaid recipients: Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon and Pennsylvania. Just five states provide comprehensive cessation coverage for state employees: Illinois, Maine, Nevada, North Dakota and New Mexico.


The Lung Association recommends that private insurance plans also offer comprehensive cessation coverage and encourages states to require all insurance companies to cover these treatments. Currently, only seven states (Colorado, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon and Rhode Island) have such requirements.

This lack of comprehensive cessation coverage in most states leaves smokers without clinically-proven treatment options when they want to quit.

The report makes recommendations on how to provide all smokers with access to cessation treatments in health care reform, and urges policymakers to provide this coverage. It also calls on each state to provide all Medicaid recipients and state employees with comprehensive, easily-accessible tobacco cessation medications and counseling. Finally, it recommends that private insurance plans offer comprehensive cessation coverage and encourages states to require all insurance companies to cover these treatments.

You can download the report here, and you can find detailed, state-specific information on cessation coverage through an online State Tobacco Cessation Coverage Database.

Pedestrian Deaths are Preventable. Demand Safer Streets!

The following guest post was written by Sean Barry with Transportation for America - a national coalition seeking to align our national, state, and local transportation policies with an array of issues like economic opportunity, climate change, energy security, health, housing and community development.


In the last few years, health advocates have increasingly urged Americans to walk, bike and exercise more often, noting regular physical activity is paramount to good health. Unfortunately, a new report released this week by Transportation for America and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership reveals that walking in many of our communities is far more dangerous than it should be.

Dangerous by Design: Solving the Epidemic of Preventable Pedestrian Deaths (and Making Great Neighborhoods) shows that the level of pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. is roughly equivalent to a jumbo jet going down every month. But there is no national sense of urgency about pedestrian safety.

Under current federal transportation law, projects that benefit pedestrians and bicyclists are labeled “enhancements” and attacked by some as luxuries that detract from core road and highway building.

Current transportation policies vastly shortchange people who walk or bike. Less than 1.5 percent of total federal funds are ultimately spent on pedestrian safety, despite walkers comprising 11.8 percent of all traffic deaths and a comparable percentage of all trips. In this decade alone, 43,000 Americans have died preventable deaths while walking or crossing a street in their community. Although members of every demographic group are affected, ethnic minorities are suffering disproportionately, with African-American fatalities 70 percent higher than whites, and Hispanics 62 percent higher.

It should not come as a surprise that our inadequate investment in roads safe for all users adversely affects safety and health. For many Americans, daily physical activity is no longer a part of their daily existence. Seniors, the disabled and low-income Americans who cannot or chose not to drive face limited alternatives. Lower rates of physical activity are linked to rising obesity and pollution from automobiles increases the risks of asthma.

Dangerous by Design ranks America’s major metropolitan areas according to a Pedestrian Danger Index that measures how safe they are for walking. The report also profiles communities across the country that have successfully stepped up and reversed current trends.

In St. Petersburg, FL, for example, a “Vision 2020” planning process resulted in 13 additional miles of sidewalks and 32 rapid-flashing signals at crosswalks, improving driver-yielding compliance by 83 percent. In Charleston, SC, two-thirds of area residents say they are getting more exercise after the launch of a three-mile pedestrian and bike path. And, the installation of 1,600 speed humps in residential Oakland, CA led to a 50 to 60 percent reduction in the odds of injury or death among children walking.

There is growing movement for action in Congress as well. Last year, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA) introduced the Complete Streets Act. This legislation would ensure that new road projects emphasize safety and accessibility for all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists and transit riders.

Transportation for America is working to arrange a meeting with U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, perhaps as soon as next week. At this meeting, we plan to deliver the message from our hundreds of partner organizations and thousands of supporters across the country that safer streets must be a priority.

Sign our petition today and help us send a strong message to the USDOT!

We hope the release of this report will fuel a greater sense of urgency about pedestrian safety and the need for a more balanced transportation policy. With health care remaining in the headlines, let’s convey to our representatives that making our streets safer is no longer just an “enhancement,” but an essential.

H1N1 Rapper, Dirty Cruise Ship Restrooms Named "Best, Worst Prevention Ideas of the Week"

A rap video for swine flu prevention was named Partnership for Prevention’s “Best Prevention Idea of the Week,” while the widespread presence of dirty restrooms on cruise ships and their link to norovirus outbreaks was named “Worst Prevention Idea of the Week.”

The Best/Worst Idea awards are a regular feature of Prevention Matters, the blog of Partnership for Prevention. Each week, Partnership for Prevention's staff will choose the designees based on nominations of items in the previous week's news submitted by members, staff and the public at large. To submit a nomination or for more information, contact Damon Thompson at dthompson@prevent.org.

BEST

Cigna Enlists Rapper on H1N1 Prevention

http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/news10832.html

Health care provider Cigna Corp. has produced a rap video to teach kids how to avoid getting "swine" flu. The video, featuring University of Massachusetts physican Mache Seibel, a.k.a. DocRock, teaching five prevention steps, such as sneeze into your sleeve, wash your hands and "keep you fingers outta your eyes, mouth and nose, cuz that the places H1N1 goes." The 30-second video is free on YouTube at www.youtube.com/cignatv.

WORST

Dirty Restrooms on Cruise Ships "Widespread," Linked to Norovirus Outbreaks
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/cruises/item.aspx?type=blog&ak=620000957.blog

A team of researchers from several Boston-area institutions report in the current issue of the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases that they found "widespread poor compliance" with regular cleaning during unannounced inspections of dozens of cruise ships. Moreover, the researchers found a link between the dirty restrooms on ships and outbreaks of norovirus -- a common gastrointestinal illness that has caused problems for the industry.

Motion Sensors Used in Research to Prevent Falls among Elderly

The New York Times' Steve Lohr reports that geriatric experts are using "the digital tools of low-cost wireless sensors in carpets, clothing and rooms" to help them learn how to prevent falls among older people. Researchers say the devices provide continuous measurement and greater precision in monitoring an older person’s walking and activity, and that promise to deliver new insights on risk factors and tailored prevention measures.

"For an older person, a fall is often a byproduct of some other health problem: cardiovascular weakness, changes in medication, the beginnings of dementia, gradual muscle degeneration," Lohr writes. "Motion analysis aided by inexpensive sensors and computing, researchers say, may well become a new 'vital sign,' like a blood pressure reading, that can yield all sorts of clues about health."

More than one-third of people ages 65 or older fall each year, with about one fall in 10 resulting in a serious injury. The estimated economic cost of falls ranges widely, up to $75 billion a year in the United States, if fall-related home care and assisted-living costs are added to medical expenses.

Radon and Lung Cancer--Confident in My Ignorance

The following guest post is from Gloria Linnertz, an advocate in the lung cancer community who hails from Waterloo, Ill.:

We think we know about radon and lung cancer, but do we?

"Why was I so confident in my ignorance?" is the question I ask myself very often. In the months prior to my husband’s diagnosis of lung cancer, he mentioned to me that perhaps we should check our home for radon gas. Of course, I didn’t know anything about radon gas, but thought I did. I said that our home was relatively new—only twenty years old—and we had a tight basement. I was confident in my ignorance! Because radon cannot be detected through our senses, the only way to know if this silent killer is intruding into your home is to test. Recognizing what we can’t see, taste or smell is the problem.

In the year before his diagnosis, my husband Joe also said to me that he might have cancer. My husband had previously had two triple artery bypasses twenty years apart. Again, I said: "You don’t have cancer; you have heart disease." I thought he was just worrying too much. I thought I knew, but I didn’t. My husband Joe was a person to take preventive and safe measures. For 27 years he worked and exercised every day, kept a low fat, low cholesterol diet, and didn’t smoke. We had smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and fire extinguishers in our home; and we didn’t burn candles. Joe only lived six weeks after his diagnosis of lung cancer that had spread to his liver and bones. We had been living with a radon level of 17.6 picocuries per liter of air in our home for 18 years.

Knowing the word radon and that it is a gas does not constitute knowledge of the element and its danger. You’ve heard the saying “A little knowledge can be dangerous.” I would change that to “A little knowledge can be deadly.” We, the general public, don’t know the facts. We must replace our limited knowledge with a full base of all the facts on radon.

Dr. Bill Field, an American Academic Scholar and Professor in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health and Department of Epidemiology within the College of Public Health at the University of Iowa, who has recently been appointed to the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health by President Obama, stated that protracted radon progeny exposure is the seventh leading cause of cancer mortality in the United States and the leading environmental cause of cancer mortality. It is the leading cause of lung cancer deaths among non-smokers.

Large and recent studies confirm that radon in homes increases lung cancer risks. Throughout our world up to 18% of the lung cancers can be attributed to indoor radon according to Professor Bill Angell, Chair of the Prevention and Mitigation Working Group of the World Health Organization’s International Radon Project. . Radioactive particles from radon gas are inhaled and attach to the air sacs in the lungs. These particles change the characteristic of the cells to cancer, and those mutated cells divide and multiply.

Radon is a radioactive gas that emanates from rocks and soils and tends to concentrate in enclosed spaces like houses. Soil gas infiltration is the most important source of residential radon and is present in every home (except ones on stilts) because of the way our homes are built and designed.

The analysis from recent studies in Europe, North America, and Asia indicates that lung cancer risk increases proportionally with increasing radon exposure according to the World Health Organization (WHO). There is no known threshold concentration below which radon is safe. On September 21, 2009 WHO, in view of the latest scientific data, released a reference level of 2.7 picocuries per liter of air (pCi/L) as a minimum level to minimize health hazards due to indoor radon exposure.

Radon is easy to measure. Every home needs to be tested for radon because each home has its own individual footprint on the earth. The homeowner cannot rely on the results of surrounding houses in the neighborhood. A short term (3-7 days) and/or long term (3-12 months) test kit can be used. Radon professionals can also perform the test with electronic devices. Test kits can be obtained from the radon hotline at (785) 532-6026 or email at Radon@ksu.edu or Web site: www.sosradon.org. Radon test kits can also be purchased at the local hardware stores.

It is easy to protect from radon gas. Addressing radon is important in new construction as well as existing buildings. Radon prevention strategies focus on sealing radon entry routes and using soil depressurization techniques to prevent the gas from entering the home. The cost is very reasonable. “How little it can cost to save a life!” is what I would say to someone who complained about the expense of a radon mitigation system installed by a licensed radon professional.

I write this in memory of my husband Joe --who was so very dear to me—my friend, my partner, my companion, my love. I ask you to test your home for radon during this month of November—National Lung Cancer Awareness Month. If your level is above 2.7, spend that little extra money to help save a life. That life may be someone you love.

HHS Launches Blog for Physical Acivity Professionals

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has launched its new "Be Active Your Way" blog. The Blog is designed to stimulate dialogue among professionals who encourage Americans to get the physical activity they need according to the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.

Several "supporter" organizations serve as blog contributors, and a new blog item is posted each Wednesday. Anyone interested in the conversation can participate, as supporters and other professionals who work in the field of physical activity are welcome to share lessons learned by posting comments.