Public Health

Photo credit: Sam Pullara

Everywhere we look, we see stories about high-risk pools, insurance exchanges and the crisis facing the U.S. health system.  But there is another health crisis in America that few are talking about – oral health.

It’s an unfortunate reality: many Americans see oral health as unnecessary or cosmetic.  When money is tight, dental visits are often the first to go.  But oral health is critical to overall health.  Though largely ignored in national health reform, oral health is important, and for some – like 12-year old Deamonte Driver who died from an untreated tooth infection – it’s a matter of life and death. 

Today at the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C., a unique event is in progress: leaders from the health, finance and community development sectors are coming together to discuss how their collaboration could help build healthier communities.

Hosted by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (a Burness client), it's an event that starts from a premise that we've been working with nonprofits to communicate for years: that where we live, learn work and play can have a tremendous effect on our health, and that if we want to make Americans healthier, we've got to look beyond health care to the social factors that affect health - from education, to transportation, to community design and beyond.

We'll be following the event during the day via the live streaming video and Twitter coverage at #fedhealth.   I hope you'll join us there!

Deaths from breast cancer are four times higher among some Asian-born women in the United States than among their U.S.-born counterparts. Rates of vaccine-preventable liver and cervical cancer among the Hmong in California are three to four times higher than those of other Asian American groups. Some Pacific Islander-Americans have among the highest rates of pre-term births, with one-in-five mothers delivering pre-term.

These are just a few of the findings included in the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). In this first-ever issue of a major public health journal devoted to Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations, an array of new research highlights alarming disparities. 

  “Medicine shouldn’t be [about constantly] operating on a population that is steadily killing itself, which is essentially what we are in the first steps of doing with a third of our children [being] obese.”

That’s Bill Clinton, describing the status quo on childhood obesity at a March 17 event hosted by Newsweek.   Some people, President Clinton said, will always be “biologically vulnerable” to heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and other conditions that require expensive, risky treatments and surgeries regardless of obesity.  But as it stands, our nation is burdening Americans needlessly with disease— Americans who could be healthy if we tackled the factors that cause obesity: neighborhoods without spaces for physical activity, deficient access to healthy foods, high-calorie school lunches.  It’s for this reason that the 42^nd President called childhood obesity the “number one public health problem in the country”. 

Today, there is broad agreement: childhood obesity is a public health epidemic. One in three American children is now overweight or obese. Obese children are at increased risk for other serious problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, gallbladder disease and certain cancers.

But momentum around fighting this urgent health problem is building. Lawmakers are holding hearings on strengthening school health programs. Michelle Obama’s national “Let’s Move!” program to fight childhood obesity is kicking into gear. And last week, that new energy and momentum was on display at a briefing hosted by health policy journal Health Affairs (a Burness client).

The threat of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) is not news. Hospitals, policymakers and advocates have known for years: sometimes, patients can pick up dangerous infections in the very places they came to get well. Whether the culprit is improper sterilization in surgery or a dirty ventilator tube, the danger is real.

But who’s to blame when patients die in the hospital? They may have caught an infection during their stay, but many were sick before they got it. Was the hospital-acquired infection really at fault?