Public Health 101 Online was developed by the Pennsylvania & Ohio Public Health Training Center, a project of the Center for Public Health Practice, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, funded through the ASPH/HRSA cooperative agreement.  The course is a free continuing education accredited on-line introduction to the field of Public Health.  It provides information on the fundamentals of U.S. Public Health including public health history, legal underpinnings of the US public health system (with specifics of PA's & OH's public health systems), and public health core functions (with practical examples from people within the field).

Public Health 101 addresses the basic public health sciences skills competency (from the Council on Linkages).

Note:  You must create an account before you can take the course.

Source: Molly M. Eggleston, Project Coordinator at: 412-383-2230, or mme@pitt.edu.

The Assistant Secretary for Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, initiated a program this year to showcase best practices in public health from around the country. View different Websites offering best practices. It looks as if the best practices documents will be coming out monthly. Join the listserv to be notified when these best practices come out. 

View the MCHB training modules, and a link to the CDC-developed module.

Recognizing the need for training for use and interpretation of the 2000 CDC Growth Charts, the Health Resources Services Administration/Maternal and Child Health Bureau has collaborated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop a new training website.  This website provides self-directed and interactive training modules for clinical and public health professionals who use growth charts to assess physical growth in infants, children, and adolescents. 

MCHB-developed training modules include: Accurate Weighing and Measuring; Using the CDC Growth Charts for Children with Special Health Care Needs; Adolescent Physical Development: Uses and Limitations of Growth Charts; Children with Poor Growth; and Head Circumference.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have developed related modules, including: Overview of the CDC Growth Charts, Using the BMI-for-age Growth Charts, and Overweight Children and Adolescents: Recommendations to Screen, Assess and Manage.  Each module contains learning objectives, text, examples to complete, and a glossary of new terms.  Users complete modules at their own pace and may choose to listen to audio clips and complete self-tests to gauge their understanding.

Source: Carolyn Gleason, MS, RD, Public Health Advisor, and Stephanie Blum Magill, MS, RD, HRSA Seattle Field Office

This is a well-designed Website. The content flows quite nicely.

The logo for this site says, "Don't give up giving up". Says it all.

This site captures information around tobacco control and the development of tobacco control alliances in the North West.  There is also material on Smoking Cessation Services in the region. The site holds evidence, policy documents, reports, some promotional material and news of conferences around tobacco control.

The down side of the site is that it takes forever to get any information. Slow, slow, slow. Plus, they use frames.

This is a MMWR publication. Recommendations and Reports, September 20, 2002 / 51(RR14);1-8.

There is a link from this page to a PDF file that lists insects, reptiles, birds, mammals, bacteria, fungi, viruses etc, and their public health importance/clinical significance.

Want to learn more about public health through (PowerPoint) lectures? This is the place to go. Get lectures on anything from learning epidemiology to public health history done by the giants in the field of public health. International in scope. My personal favorite site for learning about public health. Site creator is Ron LaPorte, UPitt. 

Get lectures by topic, author, alphabetical order, new lectures or a listing of all lectures.

This is really a super site.

Press Release

Also get the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines (formerly Essential Drugs List or EDL) which is available in 5 languages

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) now offers a checklist for hospitals to use when evaluating existing emergency plans, or assessing their capacity to handle potential victims of bioterrorist attacks. The "Bioterrorism Emergency Planning and Preparedness
Questionnaire for Healthcare Facilities" covers subjects such as on-call nursing policies, emergency overflow patient areas, pharmaceutical supply, and in-hospital laboratory capacity. The survey is available on
the AHRQ Web site.

If the PDF checklist is set up for you to use to enter the data as you collect it, it should be quite valuable

This sounds like something you'd might want to convert to carry around with you on your PDA for collecting the date and answering subsequent questions.

Press release reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Story originally by Kemper, Los Angeles Times, 8/27.

The Institute of Medicine Committee on Assessing Integrity in Research
Environments has issued a report concluding that no established measures for assessing integrity in the research environment exist. The report states that there is lack of evidence to definitively support any one
approach to promote and evaluate research integrity. Although education in the reasonable conduct of research is critical, the report concludes that such effort is likely to be of only modest help unless it is done appropriately and creatively.

Information: Go to http://www.nap.edu/books/0309084792/html/

On August 8, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hosted a satellite program on the West Nile Virus, led by CDC Director Julie L. Gerberding, M.D., M.P.H. The broadcast provided information on
pathogenesis, epidemiology, clinical diagnosis, laboratory testing, and prevention strategies for West Nile Virus infection. Videotape copies of the program and an archived version of the Internet broadcast are available.

Course materials are available for viewing.

Information: Public Health Foundation, 1.877.252.1200

Use resource listings, event information, and contacts on this site to get involved in your region's Healthy People 2010 activities and priority area(s). Click on the map or state listings to find information for your HHS region.  For each region's priority area(s), you can download, print, or search listings of action resources in Acrobat Reader. Two-page resource listings describe Healthy People
2010 companion resources, sites with evidence-based strategies, and other tools to achieve and promote relevant objectives.

"The Data Warehouse on Trends in Health and Aging, created at the National Center for Health Statistics with the support of the National Institute on Aging, is a web-based tool providing access to current information on the health and well being of older Americans. This system shows trends in health-related behaviors, health status, health care utilization, and health care costs of the older population. The information in the Data Warehouse is presented for older men and women of various ages, races, and ethnicities and is organized in Beyond 20/20® tables. Beyond 20/20® is user-friendly, easy-to-use software that NCHS utilizes to allow the user to retrieve and display customized tables, analyze the data with graphs and maps, and access explanatory information about the health indicators."

Lots of really good public health news here. This site includes Agriculture News, Climate Change News, Earthquake News, Environment News, Genetics News, Pollution News, Water Resource News. Worth bookmarking, that's for sure. 

The supplement to this document is called
Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity [PDF]

Another valuable document this time dealing with a pervasive problem, mental health, from the Surgeon General's Office.

Get all the Surgeon General's reports from: http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/

Although not a public health book, with the move to improving leadership in public health, this book is great for nurturing team growth. Abstract with an opportunity to purchase.

The final regulation amending the HIPAA health information privacy regulation has been announced.  Background information and an the Final Rule can be found on the web site of the Office for Civil Rights, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) at http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/.

"The Web-based Medical Information Retrieval System (WebMIRS) is a research tool that facilitates the dissemination of multimedia biomedical database information across the Internet...In its initial implementation, it is based on data from the multi-year NHANES II and NHANES III surveys (National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys) collected by the National Center for Health Statistics. Subsequent versions will expand the number of data repositories to which access is provided.

Some of the fields for which WebMIRS is potentially relevant include: epidemiology, multimedia databases, medical imaging, radiology, bioinformatics, vertebral morphometry, and computerized x-ray image understanding and analysis. Examples of biomedical research areas that may potentially benefit from the use of WebMIRS data include all of those targeted by the NHANES II and NHANES III surveys, such as: osteoarthritis, cardiovascular conditions, kidney and bladder disease, tobacco use, and exposure to pesticides (for NHANES II); and diabetes, high blood pressure/cholesterol, gallbladder disease, musculoskeletal conditions, respiratory and allergy conditions, diet, vision and hearing, and dental care (for NHANES III)."

Source: Marj Cahn, NICHSR and the Website.

This site was developed by the National Center for Education in Maternal and Child Health at Georgetown University with funding from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, and offers a variety of resources useful to faculty and students of MCH training programs for staying abreast of current MCH information, conducting research, and accessing descriptions of MCH programs.

The site links to full text information in a variety of ways:

• Knowledge paths on high interest topics (such as asthma in children, nutrition, physical activity, adolescent pregnancy prevention and others)
• bring together the best Web and print resources, which have been researched and evaluated by library staff;
• MCHLine®, an online catalog of NCEMCH's library of more than 20,000 volumes on a wide range of maternal and child health (MCH) topics, lists research and training reports, program development materials, policy and planning documents, historical publications about the development of the MCH field in the 20th and 21st centuries, and other resources;
• Organizations and MCH Projects databases identify further sources of authoritative information; 
• NCEMCH publications in pdf format are included.

In addition, the MCH Alert, a weekly electronic newsletter, provides timely information about the latest research findings, policy developments, recently released publications, and initiatives affecting the maternal and child health (MCH) community. MCH faculty can subscribe for themselves, and can encourage students to subscribe to the MCH Alert, so they are up to date on recent MCH information. (To subscribe, send an e-mail to MCHAlert@list.ncemch.org with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line.

You do not need to enter any information in the message. You will receive confirmation that the subscription is being processed; you will receive your first issue of the MCH Alert within the next week.) Below is a copy of a recent issue.

Source: Laura Kavanagh  (HRSA)

This is a really great site. The staff have done a terrific job of pulling togehter information for practitioners.

This Web site features a searchable list of over 1000 Kaiser-produced health education videos which may be borrowed at no cost by groups or individuals. Topics include general health issues, specific diseases and conditions, and medical education. Some are available in Spanish, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Materials may also be purchased; online order forms are available for both loans and purchases.

Source: Jean Pasche, Librarian, Pacific Northwest Research Institute

Commercial software site that sells a suite of software being used by the New York City DOH.

FoodandHealth.com provides public health nutritionists and hangers-on with clipart images that can be used for free.   I loved the 5 a day image so I included it here. Yum.