Prevention Matters

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has awarded more than $119 million to states and U.S. territories to support public health efforts to reduce obesity, increase physical activity, improve nutrition, and decrease smoking-the four most important actions for combating chronic diseases and promoting health. This money supports the one of several components in the Department's comprehensive prevention and wellness initiative, Communities Putting Prevention to Work, which is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Millions of adults living in the U.S. are not up to date on their needed immunizations, leaving them at risk for preventable illnesses and even death, according to a new report released by Trust for America’s Health (TFAH), the Infectious Diseases Society and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

According to the report, key reasons for the low immunization rates include a lack of knowledge about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, limited access to immunization and limited research and development of new vaccines in the United States.

If there were no advertising of unhealthy food on US television, between one in seven and one in three obese American children might not be obese, according a new study in the European Journal of Public Health.

"Limiting the exposure of children to marketing of energy-dense food could be part of a broader effort to make children’s diets healthier, said the study's authors, who built a mathematical simulation model to estimate the potential effects of reducing the exposure of 6- to 12-year-old US children to TV advertising for food on the prevalence of overweight and obesity.

The model was based on body measurements from NHANES 2003–04, the CDC-2000 cut-offs for weight categories, and scientific literature that relates advertising to consumption levels and consumption to body mass.

Los Angeles County officials have rejected requests that they require performers in pornographic films to use condoms. HIV/AIDS activists had demanded such a requirement, to be enforced by county health officials.

"It is very, very difficult to implement. There are roughly 200 production companies with about . . . 1,200 actors," said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, the county's public health chief. "All you need is a room and a camera and a bed, basically, to do this kind of shoot, and we have no ability to police this."

In 2009, health spending in America as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose from 16.2% to 17.3%, according to a new paper in Health Affairs. That's the largest one-year increase since such 1960, when such statistics began to be closely tracked. The percentage is still very much higher than that of any industrialized country.

Total health spending in the U.S. amounted $2.472 trillion last year (or, as WSJ's Jacob Goldstein notes, at a rate of $282 million a hour). Health-care prices rose by 3.2% in 2009, significantly above the overall inflation rate, while utiilization of health care rose by 1.5%.

A new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine suggests that people respond well to free counseling programs on weight loss or smoking cessation, but participation falls dramatically when services are no longer free. The cost of counseling also appears to make a difference to the doctors or health-care providers who refer patients to the programs, according to the study.

The authors reviewed a program that used an electronic database system to suggest health-care counseling for adults with unhealthy behaviors. For a time, free counseling was provided until funding ran out. Under the free program, 1,860 of 5,679 people who were evaluated were determined to have at least one unhealthy habit, and 407 of them were given referrals for intensive counseling, the study reported.

After the funding ceased, 729 of 2,510 people who were evaluated were determined to have unhealthy habits and just five were referred for counseling -- a 97 percent decrease in the referral rate, according to the study. Even when clinicians did offer a referral, 81 percent fewer patients followed through and got counseling when the counseling was not free.

The Lancet has finally retracted its 1998 article that has fueled a worldwide movement against use of MMR vaccine for infants. The article by Dr. Andrew Wakefield claimed there was link between MMR and autism. The retraction comes days after the U.K.'s General Medical Council, a government regulatory agency, ruled that Dr. Andrew Wakefield acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his research.