Featured stories about SPH people, research and impact.
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University of Washington research is helping clean up lead contamination in a village near Hanoi, Vietnam, where children suffer from high levels of exposure.
Lead can cause a variety of health problems and detrimentally affect a child's developing brain.
Many Vietnam communities make money by recycling lead from used car batteries. While the extra income helps provide daily essentials, widespread lead contamination is an unintended consequence.
Jeff Harris, director of the UW Health Promotion Research Center (HPRC), recently kicked off the CEOs Against Cancer Challenge, a collaboration between the American Cancer Society and HPRC's Workplace Solutions wellness program. It will track the efforts of large Washington employers to provide evidence-based interventions designed to reduce cancer and improve the health of their employees.
To date, participating organizations include:
More than two-thirds of high-school athletes who suffered concussions reported playing with symptoms, according to a study by the UW Schools of Public Health and Medicine.
Dr. Donald Patrick, professor of health services at the University of Washington School of Public Health, served on an Institute of Medicine committee assessing military efforts to prevent psychological disorders among active-duty service members and their families.
Rosa Solorio, assistant professor of health services and adjunct in global health, recently launched an HIV-testing campaign for Latino men who have sex with men. Called Tu Amigo Pepe, it focuses on free confidential HIV testing for 18- to 25-year-olds.
Christine Khosropour was fascinated by viruses and bacteria as an undergraduate. "I had a love for the bugs – they're brainless but they're so smart," says Khosropour, a third-year PhD student in epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health.
Got a pain in your neck? The more massage the better, a new study says. Researchers from the University of Washington School of Public Health and Group Health Research Institute in Seattle found that several 60-minute massages per week for four weeks were more effective in treating chronic neck pain than fewer or shorter sessions.
About 50 University of Washington students signed up for health insurance March 17 at an event in the lobby of the Health Sciences Building.
More evidence that fish is good for you: A study from the University of Washington School of Public Health found that people who ate high levels of oily fish tended to live longer than those who ate no fish at all.
Jennifer Bethune, a UW senior majoring in public health, is the current recipient of the Rattlinggourd Scholarship established by Dylan and Susan Wilbanks. She is a descendant of Native Americans from North Dakota—the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Her grandfather grew up on a reservation before moving to the Pacific Northwest.
Storytelling has long been a powerful way to pass on knowledge in Native American communities. Now, a center within the School is honoring that tradition as a way to spark discussions about environmental issues and public health within Tribal communities. The Center for Ecogenetics & Environmental Health, in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, has produced a 32-page comic book called The Return, A Native Environmental Health Story.
Many generations of native people, and later immigrant communities from around the world, have relied on the Duwamish River as a source of sustenance. By the 20th century, Seattle came to rely on the river valley as a source of family-wage jobs.
Pollution from that industrial legacy led the lower Duwamish River to be designated as a Superfund site in 2001 by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). For what is probably the first time in Superfund history, a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) was part of the proposed plan for cleanup.
Tony Gomez is still haunted by the fatal shooting. When he was a college student, his best friend's five-year-old got hold of the family's gun and unintentionally shot himself in the chest. "That was in the Denver area and it was a terrible loss and hard on the entire community," says Gomez (BS, EH '84), a clinical faculty instructor in the School's Department of Health Services.
Jean V. Scott turned 90 in November and still drives, walks short distances and dances the "Cupid Shuffle"—a hip-hop line dance good for the hips, legs and lungs. She credits her mobility to a three-times-a-week exercise program called EnhanceFitness. "Exercise gives people like me, who live in a retirement community, something to get up for each day," says Scott, who lives in the Heritage Community of Kalamazoo, MI, and is the first in her family to live into her 90s. "It makes us feel good."
The winners of the 2013 Gilbert S. Omenn Awards for Academic Excellence share a common mission: improving the health of those most at risk. Claire Allen (MPH, Health Services '13) and Vanessa Galaviz (PhD, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences '13) won the Omenn awards— named for the School's former dean—which annually recognize a master's level and a PhD student for their outstanding scholarship and commitment to public health.
Bird flu. SARS. West Nile virus. These and many other emerging infectious diseases have spread to humans from the animal world. Scientists wonder where the next big outbreak will come from. The School's new Human-Animal Medicine Project, which came here from Yale University in 2013, explores these and other links between humans, animals, and the environment to improve health and prevent disease. The research is led by Peter Rabinowitz, associate professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and an associate professor of Global Health.
For a decade, public health experts assumed that living close to a supermarket was linked to a better diet and lower obesity. The closer you lived to one, the theory went, the more likely you were to eat more fruits and vegetables.
Imagine two dozen jumbo jets crashing every week, killing all aboard. Then you'd have an idea of the scope of cardiac arrest in America, a leading cause of death. Every year, about 400,000 people suffer cardiac arrests at home, work or play. Unless their hearts are restarted within minutes, few will live. In a year, about 200,000 people suffer major traumatic injuries. Improving survival rates of both conditions is a major public health goal.
Efforts to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases should begin long before most people start having sex, say authors of a new study on STDs and childhood from the University of Washington Schools of Public Health and Social Work.
It's a dream assignment: Helping the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation tackle some of the world's most pressing health problems. For the last two-and-a-half years, more than two dozen UW graduate students have been doing just that, under an innovative program in the Department of Global Health called START (Strategic Analysis, Research & Training).
