American Council on Science and Health – Public and Environmental Issues Information Resource

 

From the Internet Reviews column  (by Joni Roberts and Carol Drost) of the  July issue of College and Research Libraries News

The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) Web site is a collection of publications by ACSH staff and external publications/media reports on public and environmental health issues. The majority of the content comes from external sources, such as journals and news broadcasts.

The site is structured around six sections that are organized by tabs at the top of the screen: “Home,” “Health Issues,” “News Center,” “Publications,” “Events,” and “FactsAndFears.” However, the site is confusingly split between ACSH-related content and non-ACSH content….

…“FactsAndFears” has the newest and most abundant content; four to six new posts are added daily and are exclusively based on external sources (e.g., “Are Breastfed Babies Better Behaved?” from the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood). “FactsAndFears” content is excluded from the homepage and the site archive. The posts, however, can be found through the Quick Search box on most of the pages, and this section also has its own separate archive….

Read the entire article

Related articles

• Environmental Health Student Portal – Connecting Middle School Students to Environmental Health Information (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• K-12 Science and Health Education (Also, good ideas to keep kids busy this summer!) (jflahiff.wordpress.com)

Simple guidelines decreased unnecessary antibiotic use in Quebec, Canada

 

 

 

 

 

From the 26 July 2011 Eureka Alert

Antibiotic overuse and resistance have emerged as major threats during the past two decades. Following an outbreak of Clostridium difficile infections, which often result from antibiotic use, health care professionals in Quebec, Canada targeted physicians and pharmacists with an education campaign that reduced outpatient antibiotic use, according to a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and now available online.

The Quebec Minister of Health and the Quebec Medication Council collaborated with designated physicians and pharmacists to develop guidelines to improve prescribing practices. First issued in January 2005, the guidelines emphasized proper antibiotic use, including not prescribing antibiotics when viral infections were suspected and selecting the shortest possible duration of treatment. Approximately 30,000 printed copies of the original recommendations were distributed to all physicians and pharmacists in Quebec. An additional 193,500 copies were downloaded from the Medication Council’s website.

(The current versions of the guidelines are available online: http://www.cdm.gouv.qc.ca/site/aid=166.phtml.)

During the year after the guidelines were initially distributed, the number of outpatient antibiotic prescriptions in Quebec decreased 4.2 percent. In other Canadian provinces, the number of these prescriptions increased 6.5 percent during the same period.

According to study author Karl Weiss, MD, of the University of Montreal, “It is possible to decrease antibiotic consumption when physicians, pharmacists, state governments, etc., are working together for a common goal. This is the key to success: having everybody involved and speaking with a common voice.”

Dr. Weiss added, “Simple, short, easy-to-use guidelines have an impact on physicians when they are readily available. The web is an increasingly important tool to reach our audience and should now be used as such in the future. With handheld electronic devices available for all health care professionals, these downloadable guidelines can be accessed and used at any time and any circumstance.”

Related articles

• Superbug gonorrhoea found in Japan (newscientist.com)
• Drug-resistant STD prompts global warning (independent.co.uk)
• (Reuters) – Scientists have found a “superbug” strain of gonorrhea in Japan that is resistant to all recommended antibiotics and say it could transform a once easily treatable infection into a global public health threat. (theboldcorsicanflame.wordpress.com)

Heart disease prevention: A good investment for individuals, communities

From the 25 July 2011 Science Daily article

ScienceDaily (July 25, 2011) — Preventing heart disease before it starts is a good long-term investment in the nation’s health, according to a new policy statement from the American Heart Association.
The policy statement, published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, summarizes years of research on the value of investing in prevention, particularly through community-based changes to make it easier to live a healthy lifestyle:

• Every dollar spent on building trails for walking or biking saves $3 in medical costs.
• Companies that invest in workers’ health with comprehensive worksite wellness programs and health work environments have less absenteeism, greater productivity and lower healthcare costs.
• Initiating a nationwide plan to drastically cut the amount of salt in the food supply to support an average intake of 1500 mg per day may reduce high blood pressure in the country by 25 percent, saving $26 billion in healthcare costs annually.

As a call to action, the statement puts an equal amount of responsibility on individuals and on society — specifically federal, state and local policy-makers.
“People often don’t realize the power to stay healthy is in their own hands,” said William S. Weintraub, M.D., lead author of the statement and the John H. Ammon chair of cardiology and cardiology section chief at Christiana Care Health System in Newark, Del. “But it’s not something many individuals or families can do alone. It takes fundamental changes from society as a whole.”
It’s more difficult to make healthy choices in some neighborhoods because it’s hard to find a safe place to bike or a nearby store with fresh vegetables at an affordable price, he said.

Read the rest of this article

Mothers Have A Stronger Tendency To Mimic Their Daughters’ Consumption Behavior Than Vice Versa

From the 26 July 2011 Medical News Today article

A new study by a Temple University Fox School of Business professor finds that teenage girls have a strong influence on the products their mothers buy solely for personal use, as in makeup or clothing, and that mothers have a much stronger tendency to mimic their daughters’ consumption behavior than vice versa.

“This finding provides initial support for the notion of reverse socialization and suggests that the impact adolescents have on their parents is much more profound than has been credited to them,” Dr. Ayalla A. Ruvio, lead author and an assistant professor of marketing, writes in a forthcoming Journal of Consumer Behavior article

Read the rest of this Medical News Today article

Eating Before Swimming May Be Dangerous, After All

From the 25 July 2011 Medical News Today article

It appears that people who go swimming on a full stomach really do have a higher risk of drowning, researchers reported in Medicine, Science and the Law. Advice on how long one should fast before swimming varies widely, from 20 minutes to up to three hours. The authors say that previous studies had revealed scant evidence of a link between eating before going swimming and the risk of drowning.

Read this Medical News Today article

New Study Shows Online Dependency Increasing, Tips on Reducing Online Dependency

From the 26 July 2011 Medical News Today article

If you are reading this right now, you’re online. It is estimated that there were 2.1 billion Internet users worldwide, but what would happen if suddenly we were all unplugged and offline, back to basics if you will?

In a new survey of 1,000 people, 53% said they felt upset when they were denied access to the Internet, and 40% said they felt lonely when they were unable to log on to the World Wide Web. Participants were questioned about their attitudes towards the Internet, and were asked to go without technology for 24 hours. That meant no Facebook, Twitter, emails and text messages.

After the 24 hours were up, some volunteers compared the experience to quitting smoking or drinking, and one even described it as “having my hand chopped off.”

Read the rest of the article, including suggestions on how to reduce your dependency on the Web.

Related articles

• Does using Facebook put you at more risk elsewhere on the internet? (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
• Facebook, Twitter users are more trusting finds study (news.bioscholar.com)
• The move towards social 2.0: mirroring our offline and online social behaviour (econsultancy.com)
• Report: Facebook Users hate the new Chat (magnaefamae.com)

Impact of free access to the scientific literature, including empowerment of health care consumers

From the 21 July 2011 blog item at  Science Intelligence and InfoPros, by hbasset

An excellent review in the latest JMLA:

The paper reviews recent studies that evaluate the impact of free access (open access) on the behavior of scientists as authors, readers, and citers in developed and developing nations. (…)

• Researchers report that their access to the scientific literature is generally good and improving (76% of researchers think that it is better now than 5 years ago)
• Publishers (Elsevier and Oxford UP) reveal an increase in the number of journals available at a typical university and an even larger increase in the article downloads
• For authors, the access status of a journal is not an important consideration when deciding where to publish (journal reputation is stronger)
• The high cost of Western scientific journals poses a major barrier to researchers in developing nations
• There is clear evidence that free access increases the number of article downloads, although its impact on article citations is not clear
• Recent studies provide little evidence to support the idea that there is a crisis in access to the scholarly literature
• Author’s resistance to publication fees is a major barrier to greater participation in open access initiatives
• The empowerment of health care consumers through universal access to original research has ben cited as a key benefit of free access to the scientific literature
• overall, the published evidence does not indicate how (or whether) free access to the scientific literature influences consumers’ reading or behavior
• current research reveals no evidence of unmet demand for the primary medical or health sciences literature among the general public
• most research on access to the scientific literature assumes a traditional and hierarchical flow of information from the publisher to the eader, with the library often serving ans an intermediary betwwen the two. Very little has been done to investigate alternative routes of access to the scientific literature

Davis, Philip M. & Walters, William H. The impact of free access to the scientific literature: a review of recent research. J Med Libr Assoc 99(3):208-17 (2011).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21753913

available at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3133904/

Related posts

• How to obtain free/low cost medical articles in medical and scientific journals
• “Summaries for Patients” and other plain language summaries help patients and others understand medical studies and guidelines

 

 

 

Related articles

• Challenging the Access Crisis (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)
• Peter Suber, Open Access Overview (definition, introduction) (earlham.edu)
• Do we need an alternative to peer-reviewed journals? (arstechnica.com)
• Science Longevity Paper Retracted (news.sciencemag.org)
• How the quality of the scientific literature impacts the evidence (kevinmd.com)
• Should scientific articles be available free online? (slate.com)