Health Behavior News Service - GoodBehavior: Coming Home to Roost

Coming Home to Roost

A B O U T_U S

The Center for the Advancement of Health translates to the public the latest research on prevention, chronic disease management and health care, with an emphasis on how social, behavioral and economic factors affect illness and well-being. The Center is an independent nonprofit corporation that receives core funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and The Annenberg Foundation.

D I S C O N N E C T

Since 1996, federal health officials have recommended that people 50 years and older be screened for colorectal cancer with a fecal occult blood test. However, a new analysis of data by CDC shows that only 17.2 percent actually received such screening in the
previous year.

T O P_M E D I A_H I T S

The two most used stories from
the Health Behavior News Service in October were about teenagers. Denise Dion Hallfors, in the American Journal of Health Behavior, found that risky sex and drug behavior may be the cause of depression, not the result. The story was picked up by the AP, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Web sites of Fox News and CBS News.

Edith Chen, in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, found that teens exposed to violence show biological changes that could affect their health for years to come. The story was used by the Web sites of MSNBC, ABC News and WLS-TV in Chicago, as well as by Reuters
news service.

Primarily, for the moment, the paramount threat of avian influenza is psychological – fear, ignorance, irrational behavior, panic. While pandemic bird flu will run its course spreading death and illness, there are specific things we can do. For instance, instead of wringing our hands, we could start washing them more often.

Jessie Gruman
President and Executive Director
Center for the
Advancement of Health

On a larger scale, pandemics are just the kind of crises that require political leadership as well as the expertise of the public health community.

But at the moment, authorities here and in other countries seems helpless. There is not enough vaccine to go around, no chance that any new vaccine can be produced in less than 18 months and no assurance that mass inoculations would confer continuing immunity against highly resistant germs.

In the United States, we are looking for answers from a government that botched swine flu, anthrax, terrorism alerts and hurricane responses. Perhaps Katrina will have had a silver lining, after all, if national authority is thoughtfully invoked.

In governments all over the world, “People are trying to do the right thing, but nobody knows what the right thing is,” says Laurie Garrett, head of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

One obvious step for public health authorities is to vaccinate health care workers first. But until and unless governments come up with reasonable planning, using what we already know about the spread of disease and using a little common sense might work.

Experts say that pandemics are a natural occurrence about every 12 years, and it has been almost 30 years since the last one. They also told us about 30 years ago that because of antibiotics, vaccines, pesticides and better public health responses we had seen the end of infectious diseases. They were wrong, and instead of dying out, 30 new ones have emerged. Why? Ecological and environmental conditions - i.e., human behavior - changed and so did the microbes.

We now live in an era of global trade and global travel, yet we are still slower to adapt and more provincial than mutating viruses. As a result, the chickens are now coming home to roost.