Public Health

Let's say your 13-year-old son, whom you've raised to be a free spirit, runs through Center City at lunchtime, toppling an occasional food cart and knocking over a stroller. The baby is hospitalized. Are you responsible? Now let's say that same adolescent, who hasn't been immunized because of your concerns about vaccines, returns from a trip to France, where measles is spreading. Although he has not yet had symptoms, he nevertheless passes the infection to a baby too young to be vaccinated who ends up in the hospital.

HARRISBURG - Gov. Corbett's top health adviser said Friday that he wanted to make Pennsylvania the first state to create a registry to track illnesses in communities near the Marcellus Shale natural gas formation to determine what effect, if any, heavy drilling has on public health. Health Secretary Eli Avila told Corbett's Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission that creating such a registry is the timeliest and most important step the Department of Health could take, and that his agency is not aware of anything like it in other drilling states.

Declaring a goal of changing America's "sick-care system to a health-care system," the Obama administration Thursday announced a sweeping strategy to emphasize prevention in all walks of life. The plan builds on initiatives such as Michelle Obama's campaign for healthy eating and the Food and Drug Administration's new power to regulate tobacco. More broadly, it requires a range of federal agencies to consider prevention in everything they do - and asks the rest of the country to think of health care as something that goes well beyond drugs and scans to include safer streets, cleaner water, and easier access to healthy foods.

At a hearing Thursday about drilling for natural gas in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale formation, Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Krancer lamented the "radicalization" of the discourse. He said he was being "vilified" by drilling opponents. "This matter has been radicalized fairly recently. Some folks just don't want to debate at all how it can be done safely," said Krancer, a lawyer from Bryn Mawr. "They just want to kill it . . . they're pulling out all the stops to make sure it doesn't happen.

Add another one to the list of unintended consequences. As we try to button up our workplaces and homes for better energy efficiency, we may be creating or exacerbating other problems. If there's a damp and moldy basement, or radon seepage, those problems could worsen. Indeed, officials in this region, where radon is a problem, recommend retesting for radon if a home's air leaks are better sealed. A report by the Institute of Medicine and sponsored by the federal Environmental Protection Agency said people may face unexpected health problems from all this.

TRENTON - Gov. Christie and the Legislature are inching toward a deal to change health and pension benefits for public workers across the state through legislation instead of collective bargaining, Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver said Wednesday. Senate President Stephen Sweeney already is on board. The Republican governor and the two leaders met throughout Wednesday in their second meeting in a week. Sweeney (D., Gloucester) said more talks could occur this week. "We're at a stage of our discussions right now where he has an open ear," Oliver (D., Essex)

DAKAR, Senegal - The central African nation of Congo has been called the worst place on Earth to be a woman. A study released Wednesday shows it is even worse than previously thought: 1,152 women are raped every day, a rate equal to 48 per hour. That rate is 26 times more than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapes reported in one year by the United Nations. Michelle Hindin, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health who specializes in gender-based violence, said the rate could be even higher.

By Robert Field, professor of law and public health at Drexel University:   Do you know anyone who died of polio or from a cup of water? If you live in America, probably not. But in many countries, such tragedies are still common. We in the United States owe our good fortune to the work of public health. It protects our health and well-being on a national scale. Public health is different from health care. The latter is the range of services we receive from doctors, nurses, and others.

David Sencer, 86, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who brought together the best minds in science and medicine to advise him on the potential swine flu epidemic of 1976 - and then was fired when the project went awry - died Monday of suspected heart failure at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. In 1976, Dr. Sencer recommended to President Gerald Ford the launch of a national vaccination campaign. The campaign was halted in December of that year, though, after 32 vaccine recipients died, others contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, an autoimmune disorder, and the flu epidemic never materialized.

Delaware County officials announced Tuesday that they had hired a family-practice physician as a medical adviser for the county. The adviser, George K. Avetian of Radnor, will help coordinate public-health efforts in the county. The position was added in response to a study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released last year that found the county's public-health system lacking in leadership and coordination. Avetian has a medical practice in Upper Darby and is on staff at Delaware County Memorial Hospital.