Prevention Matters

The signing of a law giving the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco was named Partnership for Prevention's "Best Prevention Idea of the Week," while the national trend of people waiting too long to be tested for HIV/AIDS was named the "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.

President Barack Obama , who still struggles with his own addiction to cigarettes, on Monday signed into law the most sweeping federal anti-tobacco legislation to pass Congress in decades.
The law gives the Food and Drug Administration broad authority to regulate the marketing and manufacture of tobacco products. It bans fruit- and spice-flavored cigarettes, slaps expansive new warnings on packages and gets rid of the monikers "light" and "low-tar."

An analysis of data from 34 states suggests that many people still do not undergo HIV testing until late into the course of infection, when treatments may have limited effectiveness. In a study of subjects who were diagnosed with HIV from 1996 to 2005, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 45 percent had a diagnosis of AIDS within 3 years: 38.3 percent within 1 year of their initial HIV diagnosis and another 6.7 percent in the next 2 years.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently unveiled LEAN Works! (Leading Employees to Activity and Nutrition), a free web site designed to help businesses address obesity. CDC’s LEAN Works! can help employers calculate the cost of obesity for their organization and develop a tailored approach to help control these costs through nutrition and physical activity interventions.

I know that an untreated chlamydia infection can result in infertility, but many young women do not know. In today's Wall Street Journal, consumer health writer, Melinda Beck, addresses the facts about chlamydia infections and the challenges to getting young women screened routinely. In developing the article Melinda interviewed several members of the National Chlamydia Coalition (www.prevent.org/NCC) which is convened and operated by Partnership for Prevention, in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Susan Maloney
Senior Program Manager
Partnership for Prevention




URL to link to

WASHINGTON - Prevention was one of six priority areas cited by a federal panel in its recommendations as to how the Secretary of Health and Human Services should spend $400 million in stimulus-bill funding for comparative effectiveness research. The Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) issued its findings in a report issued today. Partnership for Prevention testified before the Council at a May 13 field hearing in Chicago and urged that prevention be made a priority in the recommendations.

"Many effective interventions for improving health are likely to involve prevention and community intervention, but these areas are currently understudied," the council concluded. "For example, behavioral change and prevention have the potential to decrease obesity, decrease smoking rates, increase adherence to medical therapies, and improve many other factors that determine health."

The high-priority interventions cited by the council were medical and assistive devices, procedures/surgery, behavioral change, prevention, and delivery systems.

"Due to astonishing achievements in biomedical science, clinicians and patients often have a plethora of choices when making decisions about diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, but it is frequently unclear which therapeutic choice works best for whom, when, and in what circumstances," the council said. It said CER "should identify interventions that yield the most health improvement and represent the best value wherever and however the interventions are delivered."

Partnership for Prevention President Robert J. Gould expressed appreciation to the council for making prevention a priority and for encouraging Partnership's participation in their listening sessions.

"The council's decision is an important step in giving prevention the footing it needs to take its rightful place in the spectrum of health-care decisionmaking," Gould said. "Everyone wins when consumers and health professionals can make informed decision based upon science-based comparisons that show how we can get the most health benefits for the dollars spent."

"We hope HHS Secretary Katherine Sebelius will follow this blueprint when she makes her final decisions on the federal investment in CER," he said.

The council's report was mandated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is designed to help the HHS Secretary and lawmakers improve the quality of care for patients, and provide patients and doctors the best information possible to make decisions about health care. The report is available at www.hhs.gov/recovery/programs/cer.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, wrote a column for Yahoo.com in which he made a strong call for the inclusion of prevention and wellness services as part of health reform.

"It’s not enough to talk about how to extend insurance coverage and how to pay for health care – as important as those things are," Harkin said. "It makes no sense just to figure out a better way to pay the bills for a system that is dysfunctional, ineffective, and broken. We also have to change the health care system itself, beginning with a sharp new emphasis on prevention and public health.

"We also have to realize that wellness and prevention must be truly comprehensive. It is not only about what goes on in a doctor’s office. It encompasses workplace wellness programs, community-wide wellness programs, building bike paths and walking trails, getting junk food out of our schools, making school breakfasts and lunches more nutritious, increasing the amount of physical activity our children get, and so much more."

Screening and brief intervention programs can spot addiction and mental health problems among elderly patients that traditional healthcare interactions may miss, findings from a new Florida study indicate.

Reuters reported June 12 that researchers screened more than 3,000 elderly Florida residents during a three-year study, using a tool called BRITE to assess subjects for six risk factors. The study authors found that 10 percent of those screened had problems with alcohol misuse, 26 percent had problems with prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) medication, 64 percent suffered from depression, and 2 percent were at risk for suicide.

A new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that an average of one out of every 14 patients with clinically significant abnormal results don't get this information from their doctors. Failure to disclose such results can put a patient's health at serious risk.

Doctors' offices without clear procedures for handling test results dropped the ball for as many as one in every four patients; those with standard procedures did so very infrequently or not at all.

The study recommends that patients call for results after a certain period of time if they haven't heard from their doctor. Every responsible physician should get a copy of lab result, sign it, and inform patients directly of the results or ask staff to do so, the authors say. Also, staff should document that a patient has been informed of a test result each time this occurs.