E-News

Please send items of interest for the E-News -- and any other feedback -- to E-News editor Kevin Sherin, MD, MPH. . Thanks!

1) AAPHP Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 13 Rodney G. Hood MD
2) Renewal of AAPHP’s AMA Affiliate Status
3) AMA resolutions
4) Membership services
5) Public Health BLOGS, Dr. Kim Buttery: Travel Abroad for Health Care, Obesity, Probiotics
6) KPC resistant organisms
7) Tobacco Updates from Dr. Nitzkin
8) Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Continued High Prevalence
9) Victimization of Women and Children.
10) Please Help Us to Help You
11) To Contact E-New

1. MARK YOUR CALENDARS: The AAPHP annual meeting will be held
Saturday evening, June 13 at the AMA annual meeting in Chicago. The AMA meeting runs from the 13-15th, and is always held in Chicago. Our AAPHP meeting will be Saturday evening, June 13 at 5:30PM in the Chicago Hilton and Towers, Room Columbus C and D.I want as many AMA members who are AAPHP members as possible to attend this meeting.

Our speaker will be Rodney G. Hood, MD, Past President of the National Medical Association. His topic will be Health Equity and National Health Reform. There is a possibility that our forum may also include a speaker from AARP.

2. Every 5 years, the AMA requires the AAPHP to renew its AMA
specialty affiliate status. Arvind Goyal, MD, MPH, our AMA delegate has already received the packet from the AMA. This was due: April 1st.
It appears that we have met the membership requirements needed to maintain our status with the AMA..

3. Please make use of our AAPHP resolutions process to submit
important resolutions to the AMA for considerations in the house of delegates. This is your opportunity as an AAPHP member to submit quality resolutions that represent public health interests, or interests for health policy or the health of all Americans. AAPHP resolutions must be submitted to Arvind Goyal at Arvindkgoyal@aol.com I look forward to another great round of quality resolutions from our AAPHP.

4. Membership services: Sandra Magyar for Green Cove Springs FL
has been contracted for membership services. We look forward to rapidly getting your 2009 dues notices to you. It helps AAPHP with transaction costs if we can do this electronically. Please send your
PREFERRED email address to Sandy at magyarsf@bellsouth.net Remember,
renewal of your dues, membership, and updated information for AAPHP is vital as we are re-authorized by the AMA in the next two months!
THANKS.

5. Quality Public Health Blogs on AAPHP website: For years, Dr. Kim
Buttery, our webmaster, who is a Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has compiled high quality public health blogs.
Dr. Buttery’s posts, commentaries, and thought provoking analysis are second to none. I home that you will look at the blog site with great frequency, especially in this time of rapid change for public health, funding, and national health care policy. MARCH 23, 2009. The Latest Twist on CV disease and stroke. Now a new study finds that light-to-moderate drinking has been linked to a lesser risk of ischemic stroke and coronary heart disease. Other studies have shown that more social support is linked to less risk of mortality and cardiovascular disease.
Going Abroad to Find Affordable Health Care.
The new york times reported that 85,000 Americans traveled abroad in the past year seeking access to health care FDA Uncovers Additional Tainted Weight Loss Products Moderate obesity takes years off life expectancy From the University of Oxford in the UK obesity reduces life expectancy 3 years on average Family Medicine Residency slots 91% filled after reduction in number of available slots.
MARCH 19, 2009 New methods of delivering vaccines. New oral vaccine with probiotics Go to the AAPHP.org website and click blogs on the left, or go directly to the blogs and bookmark it to your browser
at http://blog.vcu.edu/cbuttery/ On this site you can fiind listed
quality blogs from the last date in March which will give you an idea of the overall quality and value for your rapid reading pleasure.

6. KPC Resistant Organisms
Please note the attached CDC MMWR publication of “Guidance for Control of Infections with Carbapenem-Resistant or Carbapenemase-Producing Enterobacteriaceae in Acute Care Facilities” released today.
Specifically Carbapenem-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae (CRKP) and Klebsiella pneumoniae Carbapenamase - (KPC-) Producing Organisms See laboratory guidelines for KPC posted on the CDC website today.http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/wk/mm5810.pdf (PDF of the MMWR) http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5810a4.htm?s_cid=mm5810a4_e
(HTM of
the article.
Overview of Klebsiella pneumoniae
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/ar_kp.html
Laboratory Testing practices for KPC-producing organisms http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/ar_kp_lab.html
Guidance for Control of Carbapenem-Resistant or Carbapenemase-Producing Enterobacteriacae in Acute Care Facilities http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5810a4.htm?s_cid=mm5810a4_e
CDC Clinician Outreach and Communication Activity:
Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae: Detection and Control

7. Tobacco Update: Joel Nitzkin: Late in March, Representative
Waxman’s FDA/Tobacco bill (H.R. 1256) passed in the house and forwarded to the Senate. As this note is being written (April 21), the likely fate of this bill in the Senate is unknown. Yesterday, in a surprise move, Senate Majority Leader Reid put the House version of the FDA/Tobacco bill on the house calendar, bypassing Senator Kennedy’s HELP committee and eliminating any possibility of HELP committee markup. In last year’s HELP Committee, the bill was amended to include large graphic warnings on the front and back of cigarette packages – a change not reflected in this year’s house bill. At this time we anticipate the bill coming to the Senate floor for consideration, possibly for amendment, and for vote two to three weeks from now. The politics are taking an ugly turn, with both Democrats and Republicans accusing each other of caving in to “big tobacco” and ignoring the health of the public. If the Democrats proceed to bring this bill to the floor of the Senate without allowing discussion or amendments – this will upset the Republican minority who is anxious for both discussion and amendment – with some of the amendments favorable to the public health and others favorable to the tobacco industry.

If the actual text of the bill matched the summary and glowing descriptions of this bill used to recruit both endorsements and Congressional co-sponsors, AAPHP would have enthusiastically endorsed it. Unfortunately, those of us who represent AAPHP as our Tobacco Control Task Force took the time to read and understand the full text of this then-160 page; now 195 page bill. We were surprised to discover the degree to which the text of the bill did not match the summary and descriptive hype. Since that time (February of 2007), we have been trying (without success) to secure amendments to the bill that would dramatically enhance it from a public health perspective, and do so without suffering the loss of Altria/Philip Morris support.
Our analysis of this bill, then and now, is to the effect that, from the perspective of future tobacco-related illness and death, no bill at all would be better than the currently proposed legislation. We have generated an updated summary and list of proposed amendments and posted this on the tobacco issues page of our www.aaphp.org web site.
Prior to doing so, we again queried AAPHP membership as to their level of comfort with our opposition to this bill in its current form, and our proposed amendments. Modifications based on member input were again incorporated into our position. Meanwhile, if you have any questions or concerns about our findings and recommendations, please feel free to contact Dr. Nitzkin, Chair of the AAPHP Tobacco Control Task Force at jln@jln-md.com or 504 899 7893 .

8. Fetal Alcohol syndrome’s continued high prevalence Fetal alcohol syndrome(FAS) continues to have high prevalence throughout the Unites States and globally. FAS affects, 35,-40,000 US infants per year. It is the leading cause of brain damage to US infants. The comprehensive lifetime cost of just one FAS vicitim could be as much as $4 million. The cost to US taxpayers for FAS is estimated at $5 Million per day. As the late Illinois US Senator Dirksen once said, “pretty soon you are talking real money”. Resources for FAS can be found at 1- 866-STOPFAS (866-786-7327) fasdcenter.samhsa.gov

9. Sexual assault and victimization of women One in 9 US women will be victims of rape during their lifetime.
Adolescents are particularly at risk for date rape. Your AAPHP president appeared recently with Dr. John Nelson on a Medscape module about intimate partner violence in adolescents.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/552047 Intimate partner violence
is the #1 social medical problem worldwide according to the United Nations. Human trafficking is an increasing global problem and has been reported throughout the US. Clinicians and providers must be alert and ask about victimization.

Public Health physicians should consider screening for victimization of women and children in all settings and alerting their colleagues to issues involving the victimization of women and children. A widely used screening tool for violence against women known as HITS can be scored electronically from this website.
http://www.medalreg.com/qhc/medal/ch38/38_03/38-03-07-ver9.php3
(The HITS tool is copyrighted by the AAPHP President and is available in English, Spanish and Creole and can be found on the orchd.com website). Other resources can be found at http://www.nccev.org/ for children, and http://www.preventioninstitute.org/pdf/violence.pdf a public health approach to violence

10. Please let AAPHP help you – AAPHP is the voice of public health physicians and welcomes all physicians who are committed to the public’s health.

AAPHP accomplishes its work with a maximum of volunteer labor and a minimum of cash expense. We are proud to make the E-News and other AAPHP materials available without charge to physicians and medical students interested in public health.

If you haven't done so already, please download AAPHP's 2009 Membership Form right away at http://www.aaphp.org/Membership/2009MembForm.pdf and send it to us by fax or postal mail. Please make your 2008 membership as generous as you can. Consider "Supporting" or "Sustaining" membership for 2009 if you are able to do so.

AAPHP is a 501(c) (6) professional membership organization that informs and represents Public Health Physicians. AAPHP dues may be deductible as an "ordinary and necessary" business expense under the Internal Revenue Code.
Details may differ based on your individual situation.

AAPHP dues can be paid by credit card -- either by faxing the membership form to Sandy Magyar, Our Membership Secretary at (904)
529-7761 or by calling her at (904) 860-4686. .

Please also tell your friends and colleagues about AAPHP's representation of Public Health Physicians. E-News subscriptions are still free, on request, to any interested physician or medical student. We welcome new subscribers and members. Thank you for your support!
Kevin Sherin, MD, MPH (ksherin@yahoo.com) AAPHP President-elect and E-News Editor

11. To contact E-news: AAPHP President- and editor of this e news, Dr. KEVIN SHERIN, Director, Orange County FL Health Dept. Phone:
321-239-2718; E- mail: ksherin@yahoo.com

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This message is an electronic update from the American Association of Public Health Physicians (AAPHP) to public health physicians.
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