Mammography Rates Remained Steady After Change in Guidelines
The proportion of women undergoing screening for breast cancer every year did not change after U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released recommendations saying there wasn't enough evidence to support routine mammograms for women in their 40s, according to a new study published in the journal Cancer. In 2009, the Task Force changed their recommendations to state that women aged 50 to 74 should have a mammogram every other year, and screenings for women under age 50 should be evaluated by each woman with her doctor, according to individual risk factors. "When there are conflicting versions of guidelines, providers may err on the side of screening," said David Howard, a health policy researcher from Emory University in Atlanta, in an interview with Reuters. Read more on cancer.

Latest HIV Vaccine Study Halted
The National Institutes of Health halted a study testing an experimental HIV vaccine after an independent review board found the vaccine did not prevent HIV infection and did not reduce the amount of HIV in the blood. The trial, started in 2009, is the latest in a series of failed HIV vaccine trials, according to Reuters. The halted study included more than 2,500 volunteers in 19 U.S. cities. Study populations included men who have sex with men and transgender people who have sex with men. Read more on HIV.

CDC's Food Safety Report Card: Some Foodborne Illnesses Spiked in 2012
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released the "nation’s annual food safety report card," and it shows that 2012 rates of infections from two types of foodborne bacteria—campylobacter and Vibrio—have increased significantly when compared to a baseline period of 2006-2008, while rates of most others have not changed during the same period. The data are part of the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network report. Campylobacter infections have been linked to tranmission in many foods, including poultry, raw milk and produce. These infections were at their highest level since 2000, up 14 percent since 2006-2008. Vibrio infections, often associated with raw shellfish, were up 43 percent.

“The U.S. food supply remains one of the safest in the world,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, MPH. “However, some foodborne diseases continue to pose a challenge. We have the ability, through investments in emerging technologies, to identify outbreaks even more quickly and implement interventions even faster to protect people from the dangers posed by contaminated food.” Read more on food safety.

CDC: Nearly 1 in 3 Americans Suffers from High Blood Pressure
Nearly one in three Americans have high blood pressure, according a new study in the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The number climbed 10 percent from 2005 to 2009, demonstrating an increased need to focus on prevention and treatment. "What we are really concerned about as well is that people who have high blood pressure are getting treated. Only about half of those with hypertension have it controlled," said Fleetwood Loustalot, a researcher at the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Uncontrolled hypertension can lead to negative health consequences like heart attacks and strokes." A recent study in the journal BMJ found that even a small reduction in sodium intake can significantly reduce blood pressure, which in turn lessens the risk of heart disease. Read more on heart health.

Court Orders FDA to Make ‘Morning-After’ Pill Available to All Without a Prescription
Calling it the agency’s decision "an excuse to deprive the overwhelming majority of women of their rights to obtain contraceptives without unjustified and burdensome restrictions," a U.S. District Court judge has ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reverse its stance on “morning-after” contraception pills and make them available to all women without a prescription. The pills are currently available without a prescription only to women age 17 and older. "Women all over the country will no longer face arbitrary delays and barriers just to get emergency contraception," said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which was one of the groups that petitioned FDA to remove the restrictions. Read more on sexual health.

Teen Vogue, Toyota Campaign to Emphasize Safe Driving for Teenage Girls
With automobile collisions the leading cause of teenage deaths, Teen Vogue and Toyota are partnering on the “Arrive in Style” safe driving campaign targeting teenage girls and their mothers. The print, digital, video and social media campaign is set to run through early next year. Teen Vogue will also have monthly features with advice on safe driving. “Teen Vogue’s influential young readers are the perfect ambassadors not only to participate in this initiative, but also to help build awareness and educate their peer groups on the importance of driver safety,” said Jason Wagenheim, Teen Vogue Vice President and Publisher. Read more on safety.

Poll: 3 p.m. to Bedtime Offers Challenges to Fighting Obesity
Parents’ and kids’ activity during the “crunch time” period of 3 p.m. to bedtime—commuting, extracurricular activities, getting ready for the next day—can make it especially difficult to maintain a healthy lifestyle, according to a new poll from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NPR and the Harvard School of Public Health. The poll looked at families' eating and physical activity habits. Among other results, it found that 60 percent of parents said their children ate or drank something unhealthy and that 28 percent of kids did not get enough physical activity during this time window. Read more on obesity.

Mistakes in Primary Patient Care Can Cause Serious Complications
While there’s much focus on mistakes during surgery and medication prescribing, missed and incorrect diagnoses in primary care may lead to even more injuries and deaths, according to a new study in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers determined most mistakes were linked to doctors getting inaccurate patient histories, not doing full exams or ordering incorrect tests. "We have every reason to believe that diagnostic errors are a major, major public health problem," said David Newman-Toker, MD, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "You're really talking about at least 150,000 people per year, deaths or disabilities that are resulting from this problem." Read more on access to health care.

Targeted Pregnancy Prevention Program Increases Teens’ Use of Condoms, Birth Control Pills
A prevention program designed specifically for teenage girls at high risk of pregnancy made them more likely to use contraception methods, according to a new study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. The Prime Time program at primary care clinics utilizes personal case management and youth leadership opportunities. "Findings suggest that health services grounded in a youth development framework can lead to long-term reductions in sexual risk among vulnerable youth," according to the study. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, girls between the ages of 15 and 19 gave birth to 329,797 babies in 2011. Read more on sexual health.

On World AIDS Day, Saturday, December 1, I’m Positive, a new documentary produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation and MTV, will introduce three young adults living with HIV. The documentary is part of a project called GYT: Get Yourself Tested, a campaign to encourage testing for STDs, including HIV. GYT is a sexual health public information partnership between the Kaiser Family Foundation and MTV.

NewPublicHealth spoke with cast member Otis Harris, who is an HIV/AIDS peer advocate who lives in Chicago.

NewPublicHealth: How old are you and how old were you when you found out that you were HIV positive?

Otis Harris Jr.: I am 25 years old and I was 22 [when I found out I was HIV positive].

NPH: What do you wish you had known then that you know now?

Otis Harris Jr.: I wish that I could have been a little more educated about the virus and what to look for and how to protect myself. And if I would have known what I know now then I probably wouldn’t have been infected.

NPH: People have been working on HIV/AIDS education efforts for so many years now, but clearly they weren’t getting through. What are the ways in which they didn’t communicate well and how can they communicate better?

While the syringe has often been the visual image most closely associated with public health, in just a short time the cell phone could be the go-to icon.The Yale School of Public Health has announced a novel, two-year clinical trialthat will use participants’ cell phones, and the text messages those cell phones transmit, to develop mobile phone-based health interventions that target specific peer groups. The trial is being funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The participants in this first trial are young men ages 18 to 25 who have agreed to allow their cell phones to be tracked by Yale researchers. Each participant’s physical location will be tracked through global positioning systems, and a computer program will register all incoming and outgoing calls and text messages, which will not be shared outside the trial. The clinical trial will have three social networks which will each start with a single person and then recruit his friends, and then their friends, until each of the three groups has 40 active members. The researchers are specifically looking for text messages that relate to sexually transmitted diseases and substance abuse.

“Cell phones have made it easier to maintain and develop network ties,” says Trace Kershaw, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, and leader of the trial. “The nature of how this communication flows and how it relates to network characteristics and risk within networks will allow us to develop communication technology-delivered peer interventions by suggesting the most effective modes, frequency and patterns of information delivery.”

>>Bonus Link: Read about a smartphone-based trial being run by Asthmapolis, a Madison, Wisc., company that is using sensor-enhanced smart phones to help better understand when and where people with asthma develop symptoms.

>>Weigh In: What novels efforts is your community, company or research group using to collect or disseminate public health information?

CDC Recommends Against Using Popular Gonorrhea Treatment
Infectious disease experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended this week that the antibiotic Suprax (cefixime) no longer be used to treat gonorrhea. The CDC is discouraging use of Suprax because patients are developing resistance to the drug. As first line treatment, the CDC recommends use of the drug ceftriaxone in combination with azithromycin or doxycycline. Read more on sexual health.

Alcohol Ad Violations More Common in Magazines with High Youth Readership
As the youth readership level of a magazine goes up, so too does the likelihood that alcohol advertisements in the publication are in violation of industry standards, according to a new study. The study was conducted by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. The study looked at 1,261 advertisements for alcopops, beer, spirits or wine that appeared more than 2,500 times in 11 different with youth readership levels of at least 15 percent. CAMY Director and study co-author David Jernigan, PhD said the findings indicate the industry standards should be strengthened. Read more on alcohol.

SAMHSA Awards $11M to Treat Substance Abuse in Pregnant and Postpartum Women
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has awarded up to $11 million in grants under the Service Grants Program for the Residential Treatment for Pregnant and Postpartum Women (PPW). There are seven total grants to be utilized over the next three years. They will go toward improving substance abuse treatment, prevention and recovery support services for pregnant women, new mothers and their minor children. “This program offers vital help and hope to women at a crucial time in their lives and in the lives of their children,” said SAMHSA Administrator Pamela S. Hyde in a release. “By including families in the supportive services that are being provided for these women, we acknowledge that people with substance use disorders are more than just their addictions.” Read more on substance abuse.

>>EDITOR'S NOTE: On 9/13/2012 CeaseFire changed its name to Cure Violence.

Mandisa Madikane, a 20-year old, HIV-positive, newly minted journalist from Soweto, South Africa, was the star at a high-wattage Washington D.C. event Wednesday night hosted by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief in conjunction with the 2012 AIDS International Conference meeting this week. Her co-panelists, who spoke about empowering women to protect them from rape, poverty, discrimination and humiliation included Tom Frieden, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control; Rajiv Shah, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development; and Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador at Large for Global Women’s Issues. Discussion was helped by a video, “Mandisa’s Story,” aired at the event. Directed by the young journalist, it tells the story of her rape by a neighbor at age six, which is how Mandisa contracted HIV.

Mandisa is one of three HIV-positive young women from South Africa covering the AIDS conference who received their journalism training through GlobalGirl Media (GGM), a non-profit that teaches teenage girls from disadvantaged communities around the world, including the U.S., to become citizen-journalists. Launched in 2010 by a group of women broadcasters and journalists, GGM teaches girls to use print, video and electronic media to tell their stories in order to build their self-esteem and champion the role of girls throughout the world. The project currently has bureaus in South Africa, Morocco, Los Angeles and one opened just this month in Chicago. “The girls who train with GGM are a family, and we all have important stories to tell,” said Evelyn Mokele, one of the South Africa journalists in Washington this week. “When I found out I was HIV positive, I almost gave up on everything. But instead of letting my status be a death-sentence, I used it as a tool to find my voice.”

The choice of Washington, D.C. as the site of the 2012 International AIDS Conference is an important one – about 3 percent of the adult and teen residents of the city are HIV positive. That exceeds the definition of an AIDS epidemic by UNAIDS – 1 percent of a population.

A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation says that, “In many ways, the D.C. epidemic is a microcosm for what is happening nationally”: D.C. is a small, densely populated community with overlapping sexual networks that can fuel transmission, and also faces significant health care access challenges, poverty, drug use, high rates of other sexually transmitted infections, stigma and lack of knowledge about HIV status.

Blacks in D.C. have the highest HIV prevalence rates per 100,000 adults and adolescents (4,264.6)—more than twice the rate among Latinos (1,836.4) and three times the rate among whites (1,226.3). One difference is that in D.C., there is a higher prevalence of HIV among Black women (2.6%) compared with white men (2.4%).

Importantly, though, the report finds gains in HIV awareness and testing in the city. Over 100,000 HIV tests were done in DC last year, triple the number in 2007. And, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, D.C. was the first jurisdiction to adopt CDC recommendations for routine HIV testing in health care settings and actively works with providers to expand testing. More than four in 10 D.C. residents, ages 18-64, report being tested for HIV within the past year, the highest share of any state.

>>Bonus Link: The Washington Post has been live blogging the AIDS conference this week and the site also has some notable features including an important story on the stigma of AIDS in the South and obstacles in the U.S. to successful treatment for HIV/AIDS.

Growing Number of Boomers Abuse Drugs

Data from national surveys reviewed by researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) shows that the number of 50 to 59-year-old adults reporting past-month abuse of illicit drugs — including the nonmedical use of prescription drugs — more than doubled from 2002 to 2010. The number increased from 907,000 in 2002 to 2,375,000 in 2010, or from 2.7 to 5.8 percent of this population.

The NIDA researchers say younger baby boomers were more likely than previous generations to have used illicit drugs in their youth, but abusing these drugs may be particularly harmful in older adults. "As people get older, it is more difficult for their bodies to absorb and break down medications and drugs," says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the NIDA. "Abusing these substances can worsen age-related health conditions, cause injuries and lead to addiction.” Read more on substance abuse.

Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea Across Countries Prompts WHO Action Plan

Millions of people with gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease, may be at risk of running out of treatment options, according to an action plan released this week by the World Health Organization (WHO). Several countries, including Australia, France, Japan, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom, are reporting cases of resistance to cephalosporin antibiotics — the last treatment option against gonorrhea.

According to the WHO, every year an estimated 106 million people are infected with gonorrhea. The action plan calls for increased vigilance on the correct use of antibiotics, more research into alternative treatment regimens for gonorrhea, increased monitoring and reporting of resistant strains, and better prevention, diagnosis and control of the infections. Read more on sexual health.

Just Two to Three Head CTs May Increase Brain Tumor Risk in Kids

Two or three computed tomography (CT) head scans in kids can triple the risk of brain cancer later in life, according to a new study published in The Lancet. The study, which spanned twenty years, also found that the accumulated radiation in five to 10 scans during childhood may increase the likelihood of a child developing leukemia.

Recommendations include keeping radiation doses as low as possible and using alternatives to CT scans such as MRI and ultrasound, when possible.

The risk is about 1 in 10,000 according to the researchers, which may help physicians weigh the risk and benefit in each case. The study comes at a time when concern over sports-related head injuries may be increasing the number of head CT scans for kids. Read more on sports-related head injuries.

Birth Rates for U.S. Teenagers Reach Historic Lows for All Age and Ethnic Groups

The U.S. teen birth rate declined 9 percent from 2009 to 2010, reaching a historic low at 34.3 births per 1,000 women age 15 through 19. The rate dropped 44 percent from 1991 through 2010. Teen birth rates by age and race and Hispanic origin were lower in 2010 than ever reported in the United States, and fewer babies were born to teenagers in 2010 than in any year since 1946. Read more on sexual health.

Online Tool Estimates Youth Exposure to Alcohol Ads on the Radio

A new online tool from the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health determines the extent of exposure to radio alcohol advertisements among young people ages 12 to 20 in 75 different media markets. The free tool is the first service to provide parents, health departments and other key audiences with customizable information on youth exposure to radio alcohol advertising. Read more on alcohol and public health.

Non-cancerous Brain Tumors Linked to Frequent High-dosage Dental X-rays

A new study published in the journal Cancer suggests that risk of meningioma, a potentially debilitating type of non-cancerous brain tumor, was associated with receiving frequent dental X-rays before X-ray dosages were lowered.

Researchers from the Yale University School of Public Health analyzed data from 1,433 patients who were diagnosed with the tumor as well as a control group of 1,350 individuals with similar characteristics who did not have the tumor. The study found that over a lifetime, individuals who developed meningioma were more than twice as likely as those in the control group to report having received "bitewing exams" (which use X-ray film held in place by a tab between the teeth) on a yearly or more frequent basis.