Public Health Week Focuses on Public Health Threats

April 2-8 is National Public Health Week, and the American Public Health Association is taking the opportunity to describe "first steps to address the needs of the nation's vulnerable populations" in public health emergencies, including the "unique needs of schools K-12."  The APHA is urging schools to take the first step toward developing a comprehensive plan for their students and employees to be prepared for a public health threat, and the organization is offering to provide school administrators customized tools, recommendations, and strategies to prepare for public health threats they may face. More information is available at http://www.apha.org/membergroups/newsletters/sectionnewsletters/epidem/winter05/1436.htm.

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What's In a Name—Is It Drug Abuse or Addiction?

A United States Senator who says he has been working for 35 years to address the health and safety issues associated with drug and alcohol addiction now wants to change the names of two institutes in the National Institutes of Health to recognize that addiction is a disease that can be treated. In legislation introduced March 28, Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) proposes renaming the National Institute on Drug Abuse as the National Institute on Diseases of Addiction and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism as the National Institute on Alcohol Disorders and Health. The changes would remove the pejorative term "abuse" and would "more clearly link the concepts of addiction and disease," Biden said. "Identifying addiction as a neurobiological disease will diminish the social stigma, discrimination, and the personal shame that is often a barrier to seeking treatment, and it will further a common understanding of the diseases of addiction." Biden cited the fact that 1 in 10 Americans over the age of 12 suffers some form of substance dependency and said the economic costs of dependency and addiction are estimated to exceed half a trillion dollars annually in the United States, due to health care expenditures, lost productivity, and crime. Biden called his bill, S. 1011, Recognizing Addiction as a Disease Act of 2007, "a small but important stride towards helping those struggling with diseases of addiction."

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March News Alerts

The following information appeared during the month of March 2007 in the News Alerts section of the website of the Center for Health and Health Care in Schools, at www.healthinschools.org.

March 1, 2007
RWJF Announces New School-Connected Mental Health Services

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) announced today that it is making grants to programs in 15 communities to address the mental health challenges facing growing numbers of immigrant and refugee children. "These are special populations of children with mental health needs that are both unique and substantial," said Foundation program officer Wendy Yallowitz. The new program, called Caring Across Communities, will aim to improve the mental health of new residents by addressing the effects of social factors such as language skills, cultural differences, poor education, and poverty on the more than 30 million immigrant and refugee children currently living in this country, the Foundation said. Each of the 15 projects has been funded for three years for a maximum grant of $300,000. Information about project sites and the Caring Across Communities program is available from the national program office at the Center for Health and Health Care in Schools, www.healthinschools.org.

March 7, 2004
Bills Would Update School Nutrition Rules

Bills introduced with broad bipartisan support in both the House and Senate yesterday would require the Secretary of Agriculture to initiate a rulemaking process to update nutritional standards for foods sold in schools, including the federally subsidized school lunch and breakfast programs. The Senate bill's primary sponsor, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) pointed out that the Agriculture Department, which has responsibility for those programs, "Currently relies upon a very narrow nutritional standard that is more than 30 years old. Since that definition was formulated, children's diets and dietary risk have changed dramatically. It is time for public policy to catch up with the science." The House and Senate bills also call for the Secretary of Agriculture to apply the revised nutrition standards not only to the federal school lunch and breakfast programs but also "everywhere on school grounds and throughout the school day." Harkin noted that currently the Agriculture Department can only issue rules limiting "a very narrow class of foods" and can only stop even those sales "in the actual school cafeteria during the meal period." As a result, the senator said, "a child only needs to walk into the hall outside the cafeteria to buy a lunch consisting of soda, a bag of chips, and a candy bar." Calling this "a loophole that is big enough to drive a soft drink delivery truck through, literally," Harkin said his bill will not, by itself, solve the problem of poor diet and rising rates of chronic disease among children, "But it is a start." The Senate bill, S. 771, and the House bill, H.R. 1363, can be read and followed at http://thomas.loc.gov.

March 19, 2007
Court Says Company Can Refuse to Pay for Birth Control

In a ruling that Planned Parenthood called "shocking" and "a significant setback to women's health," a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled March 15 that health insurance plans a available to employees of the Union Pacific railroad can deny payment for prescription and non-prescription products for women that are "used for the sole purpose of contraception." The ruling by three judges can now be appealed to the full appeals court, but for the present is binding on courts in the Eighth Circuit, which includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota. The judges held that the railroad's health coverage is not sex discrimination, since the policy also does not pay for contraception employed by men, such as condoms and vasectomy. The case was brought by two women representing approximately 1,500 female employees of the Union Pacific who are of child-bearing age. The current health policies cover contraception only when "medically necessary for a non-contraceptive purpose such as regulating menstrual cycles, treating skin problems or avoiding serious health risks associated with pregnancy."

March 23, 2007
TB Still Low in U.S., but Drug Resistance Increases

World TB Day is observed on March 24 each year in commemoration of the date in 1882 when Dr. Robert Koch announced the discovery of Mycobacterum tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. Worldwide, TB remains one of the leading causes of deaths from infectious disease. In the United States, although the 2006 TB rate is the lowest recorded since national reporting began in 1953, the average annual decline in number of cases has slowed, and drug-resistant TB has become a major threat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Foreign-born persons and racial/ethnic minority populations continue to be affected disproportionately, with TB rates 8.4 times higher for blacks than for whites, 21.2 times higher for Asians, and 7.6 times higher for Hispanics. Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis—TB that is resistant to first-line therapies such as isoniazid and rifampin  and to second-line therapies such as fluroquinolone—is difficult and costly to treat and can be fatal. Although the United States has made progress in treating drug-resistant TB, "Recently, our success against MDR TB has slowed," said Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention. Reports on tuberculosis in the United States and worldwide appear in the March 23 edition of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, at www.cdc.gov/mmwr.

March 26, 2007
Report on School Food Delayed Again

After two days of a tightly closed meeting, a committee of the Institute of Medicine that is charged with setting nutrition standards for food served in schools postponed the release date for a final report to April or May of this year. That's the third time the report has been postponed, possibly reflecting controversy over its recommendations, which involve industries that sell alternative foods to schools as well as school nutritionists and administrators. Not known at this time is whether the report will challenge standards set by the Department of Agriculture for the federally subsidized school lunch and breakfast programs, though the report is expected to make recommendations concerning soft drinks and other minimally nutritious foods offered in vending machines in schools. Progress of the report can be tracked at www.iom.edu, click on "Reports."