SACRAMENTO – Assemblymember Mariko Yamada (D- Davis), chair of the Assembly Committee on Aging and Long-Term Care has announced an informational hearing at 2 p.m. Tuesday, March 19.
The hearing, which will take place in room 126 of the State Capitol, is open to the public.
An expert panel will explore issues related to the status of California’s protections for the growing population of elders and persons with disabilities who wish to live independently.
“California has come a long way in improving homecare for those who receive state benefits,” said Assemblymember Yamada. “Our hearing will focus on what middle-class families face as they attempt to navigate the private homecare maze.”
Panelists will include a representative of the homecare industry, a member of the California Senior Legislature and an expert on aging medicine.
The committee also will consider Assembly Joint Resolution 7 (Bonta), which addresses three social programs integral to Washington’s current budget debate – Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.
For more information, please contact the Assembly Committee on Aging and Long-Term Care at 916-319-3990.
LAKEPORT, Calif. – Sutter Lakeside Hospital announced that its Mobile Health Services Unit (MHSU) will be back in service by Monday, March 18, following a two-month hiatus due to maintenance.
Brad Greaves, MHSU physician assistant, temporarily practiced from the Sutter Lakeside Family Medicine Clinic while the MHSU was out of service.
The Family Medicine Clinic welcomed back Nancy Allen, FNP on Feb. 19.
Sutter Lakeside Hospital’s Family Medicine Clinic sees patients from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday.
“The clinic has been extremely busy over the past several months while the MHSU has been undergoing repairs. We’re so grateful to have Nancy back and that Brad was able to see his patients from our location,” said Clinic Site Supervisor Tammy Carter.
Resuming on March 18, 2013, the MHSU will be located in the following locations in Lake County:
The Mobile Health Services Unit has served more than 650 Lake County patients since it opened in 2010.
This literal “medical-office-on-wheels” was purchased with gifts from the Lake County community, coupled with a matching grant from Sutter Health, and brings medical care directly to those who need it most.
The MHSU has two exam rooms, runs off solar energy and is ADA compliant.
Certified Physician Assistant Brad Greaves sees patients of all ages, from babies and children to senior citizens.
While the MHSU is not a “free clinic”, it provides financial assistance if patients meet certain income and family size requirements.
The MHSU also offers a 25-percent discount for medical bills that are paid in a timely manner.
The MHSU accommodates both walk-ins and scheduled appointments.
To schedule an appointment or to find out more information about services that the Mobile Health Services Unit provides, please call 707-262-5076.
Two types of environmental conditions – cold-dry and humid-rainy – are associated with seasonal influenza epidemics, according to an epidemiological study led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center.
The paper, published in PLoS Pathogens, presents a simple climate-based model that maps influenza activity globally and accounts for the diverse range of seasonal patterns observed across temperate, subtropical and tropical regions.
The findings could be used to improve existing current influenza transmission models, and could help target surveillance efforts and optimize the timing of seasonal vaccine delivery, according to Fogarty researcher Cecile Viboud, Ph.D., who headed the study.
“The model could have a broader application, encouraging researchers to analyze the association between climatic patterns and infectious disease across a wide range of diseases and latitudes,” said Viboud.
Human influenza infections exhibit a strong seasonal cycle in temperate regions, and laboratory experiments suggest that low specific humidity facilitates the airborne survival and transmission of the virus in temperate regions.
Specific humidity is the ratio of water vapor to dry air in a particular body of air while relative humidity – commonly used in weather forecasts – the amount of water vapor in the air relative to its capacity to hold water vapor, and is primarily a function of temperature.
Data from animal studies indicate low temperature and humidity increase the duration of the virus’s reproduction and expulsion in infected organisms and virus stability in the environment, increasing the probability of transmission through coughing, sneezing or breathing. In contrast, high temperature seems to block airborne transmission.
According to James Tamerius, Ph.D., a geographer at Columbia University, New York City, and the first author of the study, the effect of low specific humidity on influenza could cause annual winter epidemics in temperate areas.
“However, this relationship is unlikely to account for the epidemiology of influenza in tropical and subtropical regions where epidemics often occur during the rainy season or transmit year-round without a well-defined season,” he said.
After assessing the role of local climatic variables on virus seasonality in a global sample of study sites, Viboud and her colleagues found that temperature and specific humidity were the best individual predictors of the months of maximum influenza activity, known as influenza peaks.
The team discovered that in temperate regions, influenza was more common one month after periods of minimum specific humidity. These periods happen to coincide with months of lowest temperature.
In contrast, sites that maintained high levels of specific humidity and temperature were generally characterized by influenza epidemics during the most humid and rainy months of the year.
“The models we used predicted the timing of peak influenza activity with 75 to 87 percent accuracy,” said Viboud.
"Anecdotal evidence suggests that colder climates have winter flu while warmer climates that experience major fluctuations in precipitation have flu epidemics during the rainy season, and the current study fits that pattern,” said Viboud. “In contrast, the seasonality of influenza is less well-defined in locations with little variation in temperature and precipitation, and is a pattern that remains poorly understood. One hypothesis that is often used to explain tropical influenza activity is that people congregate indoors more frequently during the rainy season, increasing contact rates and disease transmission. There is little data to confirm this, however, and it’s an interesting area for future research."
To reach these conclusions, the researchers used a recently developed global database that provides information on influenza peaks from 1975-2008 for 78 sites worldwide.
The study spanned a range of latitude that was between 1 and 60 degrees, with 39 percent of the sites located in the tropics.
Additionally, epidemiological data from nine countries participating in FluNet, the World Health Organization’s global influenza surveillance program, was used to ensure independent validation.
The nine countries – including Spain, Tunisia, Senegal, Philippines, Vietnam, Colombia, Paraguay, South Africa and Argentina – were not represented in the original 78-location database and were chosen because each country provided several years of data.
“We’ve shown the importance of thresholds in humidity and temperature which are predictive of whether influenza activity occurs during winter months, the rainy season or throughout the year,” said Viboud. “The predictions of our climate-based models compared favorably to epidemiological information collected independently of the dataset used for the model-building exercise.”
Though the study offers researchers a new tool in the global effort to track the spread of influenza, climate is only one of several potential drivers of influenza seasonality.
“Further work should focus on examining the role of population travel and other factors in influenza transmission,” noted Mark Miller, M.D., director of Fogarty’s Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies. “More broadly, additional analysis of the link between climate and infectious diseases is needed – particularly for respiratory and intestinal pathogens that display marked seasonality.”
The authors concludes, “A better understanding of the environmental, demographic and social drivers of infectious disease seasonality is crucial for improving transmission models and optimizing interventions.”
The study was conducted in the context of the Multinational Influenza Seasonal Mortality Study, an ongoinginternational collaborative effort led by Fogarty to better understand the epidemiological and evolutionary patterns of influenza.
Fogarty, the international component of the NIH, addresses global health challenges through innovative and collaborative research and training programs and supports and advances the NIH mission through international partnerships.
For more information, visit: http://www.fic.nih.gov .
SACRAMENTO – Assemblymember Mariko Yamada (D-Davis) recently introduced AB 602, legislation requiring state hospitals and developmental centers to report abuse, neglect, sexual assault and other serious incidents directly to outside law enforcement agencies.
“The current internal process to report and investigate these violations is inadequate,” Assemblymember Yamada said. “These matters should be investigated by local law enforcement agencies to ensure that state hospital and developmental center residents have access to the same protections as those who do not reside in state institutions.”
Incidents at the state’s developmental centers, which provide care for persons with serious developmental disabilities, and at State Hospitals, for persons suffering from mental illness, are initially reported to the Office of Protective Services (OPS), a state-funded law enforcement agency housed at each facility.
OPS’s ability to ensure resident safety, however, has been under scrutiny over the past decade.
In 2002, a report commissioned by the State Attorney General’s Office found a number of problems with the agency, known then as the Law Enforcement Division, including inadequate officer training and a lack of experience dealing with crime scenes.
In 2012, after the investigative media organization California Watch found that OPS had left a large number of abuse and sexual assault incidents uninvestigated, a joint hearing of the Senate Human Services Committee and a Budget subcommittee was convened to question agency officials.
Yamada, whose district includes the Sonoma Developmental Center, where many of the incidents are said to have occurred, and the Napa State Hospital, where a patient murdered a psychiatric technician in 2010, was recently appointed by Speaker John A. Perez to Chair the Assembly Select Committee on State Hospital and Developmental Center Safety to address ongoing concerns at these institutions statewide.
Joining Yamada on the Select Committee are Assemblymembers Katcho Achadjian (R-San Luis Obispo), Ian Calderon (D-Whittier), Wes Chesbro (D-North Coast), Marc Levine (D-San Rafael), Alan Mansoor (R-Costa Mesa) and Norma Torres (D-Pomona).