Strategic Communications Counsel

Improving Treatment of Chronic Pain

Research shows that serious, chronic pain is the primary reason most Americans seek medical treatment, but intense public and political scrutiny of pain treatments, particularly prescription narcotics, has forced many patients to live with crippling pain unnecessarily. Many patients believe pain, as a side effect of injury or disease, must be tolerated rather than controlled with medications, while some doctors and nurses feel they must err on the side of under-prescribing powerful narcotics for fear of legal prosecution.

Preserving the Diversity of the World’s Food

Seven years ago, a new organization was formed, driven by the conviction that a series of seemingly unrelated events—like the re-emergence of a crippling wheat fungus in Uganda; the loss of Afghanistan’s valuable seed collection during the country’s civil war; and the steady, silent, and permanent loss of crop diversity due to poor funding and equipment failures—could one day imperil the survival of the human race.

Improving Health Care Quality

In a country known for training the best doctors in the world, it is disquieting that patients still need to worry about falling victim to medical mistakes and poor care. But the fact is that people in the United States -- no matter where they live -- receive the appropriate, recommended care only half the time.

This was the major finding of a landmark study released by the RAND Corporation's Elizabeth McGlynn, Ph.D., in the New England Journal of Medicine and, in McGlynn's words, it fundamentally shattered the belief that the U.S. health care system is the best in the world.

Campaigning Against Infectious Disease

Vaccination ranks as the single most important public health achievement of the 20th century.  In the industrialized world, diphtheria, measles, and whooping cough – once causes of great fear, suffering, and death – are, for the most part, rare occurrences that minimally impact families and communities. Other scourges of the past, killers of millions, have largely been eliminated through polio and smallpox vaccines.

Connecting Urban Sprawl and Public Health

America is suffering from an obesity epidemic. 

Just a few years ago, that statement would have raised eyebrows. But recently, obesity has taken center stage in discussions about public health. In 2004, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that poor diet and physical inactivity were quickly gaining on tobacco as the leading causes of preventable death in the United States. Since then, policymakers, researchers and consumers have begun to investigate and confront America’s obesity epidemic.

Defeating One of Humanity's Oldest Killers

Doctors often refer to people who have never been infected with a malaria parasite as “malaria naïve.” That also would be an apt term for the world in general in 2001 when Burness Communications began our partnership with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI).

Halting Childhood Obesity in Arkansas

If today's childhood obesity epidemic continues unabated, we will be faced with a daunting prospect: raising the first generation of American youth with a shorter life expectancy than their parents. Indeed, one-third of American children ages two to 19 are currently either obese or at risk of becoming obese. This marks a dramatic spike in the obesity rates among children of all ages nationwide since the 1960s. The related health risks are alarming. Obese children are increasingly being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes -- an affliction previously associated primarily with adults.

Improving Health Care in Metropolitan Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C. is not a healthy city. Compared to the rest of the U.S., the D.C. metropolitan area has higher than average rates of heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and infant mortality—as well as one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the country. Not surprisingly, the most dire health statistics are found in the region’s low-income and minority neighborhoods.

Restoring Science to its Rightful Place

In the late 1990s, the U.S. Congress helped launch, through funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a renaissance in American medical discovery. During the renaissance, human genome sequencing was completed, powerful new research tools suddenly made the impossible seem possible, cancer and other disease rates began to decline as better diagnoses and treatment options were identified, and the potential to transform medicine seemed limitless.

Giving Choice Back to People with Disabilities

Many of us take for granted the basic human right to direct our own daily lives: deciding for ourselves when to get up in the morning or go to bed at night, when to take a shower, and when and what to eat. But until recently, people with disabilities who receive Medicaid-funded personal assistance with these types of daily activities have not had much say in how or when those services are provided, or even who provides them.