Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last week announced awards of more than $80 million to 197 school-based health center programs across the country, made possible by the Affordable Care Act.
This funding will allow school-based health centers to serve an additional 384,000 students, and continue the expansion of preventive and primary health care services.
“These new investments will help school-based health centers establish new sites or upgrade their current facilities to keep our children healthy,” said Secretary Sebelius.
School-based health centers enable children with acute or chronic illnesses to attend school and improve the overall health and wellness of all children through health screenings, health promotion and disease prevention activities.
Typically, a school-based clinic provides a combination of primary care, mental health care, substance abuse counseling, case management, dental health, nutrition education, health education and health promotion activities.
“Healthy children are more productive children,” said Health Resources and Services Administrator Mary K. Wakefield, Ph.D., R.N. “These grants will improve access to care for children, and help maximize their potential to learn.”
The Affordable Care Act provides $200 million in funding from fiscal years 2010 – 2013 for the School-Based Health Center Capital Program (SBHCCP).
The grants are the third in the series of awards that is made available to school-based health centers under the Affordable Care Act.
For a full list of awards, visit: www.hrsa.gov/about/news/2012tables/121218schoolbasedawards.html .
To learn more about the Affordable Care Act, visit www.healthcare.gov . The Health Resources and Services Administration oversees the SBHCCP.
Those considering how to maintain a healthy weight during holiday festivities, or looking ahead to New Year’s resolutions, may want to think twice before reaching for traditional staples like cookies or candy – or the car keys.
A new study by University of Illinois researchers, led by computer science and mathematics professor Sheldon H. Jacobson, suggests that both daily automobile travel and calories consumed are related to body weight, and reducing either one, even by a small amount, correlates with a reduction in body mass index (BMI).
“We’re saying that making small changes in travel or diet choices may lead to comparable obesity reduction, which implies that travel-based interventions may be as effective as dietary interventions,” said graduate student Banafsheh Behzad, a co-author of the study, published in the journal Preventive Medicine.
Obesity is a multidimensional problem with many social and medical factors, but maintaining body weight essentially is a result of energy consumed and energy expended.
Other studies look at the two issues individually, or at a local or individual level, but Jacobson’s group wanted to look at both sides of the equation through a national lens.
As an outgrowth of previous work examining the relationship between driving and obesity, they decided to use driving as a proxy for physical activity.
“An easy way to be more physically active is to spend less time in an automobile. Any time a person sits behind the wheel of a car, it’s one of the most docile activities they can do in a day,” Jacobson said. “The automobile is the quickest mode of transportation we have. But a consequence of this need for speed in getting things done may be the obesity epidemic.”
The researchers used publicly available data on national average BMI, caloric intake and driving habits. To capture the complexity in the relationship among the three variables, they developed a multivariable model showing how calories consumed and miles driven correlate with BMI.
They found that if all adults in the United States drove 1 mile less per day, the model predicted an associated decrease in the national average BMI by 0.21 kg/m2 after six years. The national average BMI in 2010, the most recent data available, was 27.55.
In comparison, reducing diet by 100 calories per day would be associated with reducing national average BMI by 0.16 kg/m2 after three years.
“One mile is really not much,” Behzad said. “If they would just consider even taking the bus, walking the distance to the bus stop could have an impact like eating 100 calories less per day. The main thing is paying attention to caloric intake and moving more, together, can help reduce BMI.”
Even a modest decrease in BMI, like that predicted by the model, could represent significant cost savings. If drivers nationwide traveled 1 mile less by car each day, not only would fuel consumption fall, but annual health care costs could drop by billions of dollars as fewer people would be classified as obese or overweight, Jacobson estimates.
“The most important thing for people to learn from this study is that they have a choice,” Jacobson said. “One has to be just as careful about when you choose to drive as when you choose to eat. These small changes in our driving and dietary habits can lead to long-term significant changes in obesity issues. Those are the kind of changes we advocate.”
Scientists at Columbia University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have announced a new system that adapts techniques used in modern weather prediction to generate local forecasts of seasonal influenza outbreaks.
By predicting the timing and severity of the outbreaks, the system can eventually help health officials and the general public better prepare for them.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Homeland Security. NCAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
From year to year, and region to region, there is huge variability in the peak of flu season, which can arrive in temperate areas of the Northern Hemisphere as early as October or as late as April.
The new forecast system can provide “a window into what can happen week to week as flu prevalence rises and falls,” says lead author Jeffrey Shaman, an assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.
In previous work, Shaman and colleagues had found that wintertime U.S. flu epidemics tended to occur following very dry weather. Using a prediction model that incorporates this finding, Shaman and co-author Alicia Karspeck, an NCAR scientist, used Web-based estimates of flu-related sickness from the winters of 2003–04 to 2008–09 in New York City to retrospectively generate weekly flu forecasts. They found that the technique could predict the peak timing of the outbreak more than seven weeks in advance of the actual peak.
“Analogous to weather prediction, this system can potentially be used to estimate the probability of regional outbreaks of the flu several weeks in advance,” Karspeck said. “One exciting element of this work is that we've applied quantitative forecasting techniques developed within the geosciences community to the challenge of real-time infectious disease prediction. This has been a tremendously fruitful cross-disciplinary collaboration.”
In the future, such flu forecasts might conceivably be disseminated on the local television news along with the weather report, says Shaman.
Like the weather, flu conditions vary from region to region; Atlanta might see its peak weeks ahead of Anchorage.
“Because we are all familiar with weather broadcasts, when we hear that there is a 80 percent chance of rain, we all have an intuitive sense of whether or not we should carry an umbrella,” Shaman says. “I expect we will develop a similar comfort level and confidence in flu forecasts and develop an intuition of what we should do to protect ourselves in response to different forecast outcomes.”
A flu forecast could prompt individuals to get a vaccine, exercise care around people sneezing and coughing, and better monitor how they feel.
For health officials, it could inform decisions on how many vaccines and antiviral drugs to stockpile, and in the case of a virulent outbreak, whether other measures, like closing schools, is necessary.
“Flu forecasting has the potential to significantly improve our ability to prepare for and manage the seasonal flu outbreaks that strike each year,” says Irene Eckstrand of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
Worldwide, influenza kills an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 people each year. The U.S. annual death toll is about 35,000.
The seed of the new study was planted four years ago in a conversation between the two researchers, in which Shaman expressed an interest in using models to forecast influenza. Karspeck “recommended incorporating some of the data assimilation techniques used in weather forecasting to build a skillful prediction system,” remembers Shaman.
In weather forecasting, real-time observational data are used to nudge a numerical model to conform with reality, thus reducing error.
Applying this method to flu forecasting, the researchers used near-real-time data from Google Flu Trends, which estimates outbreaks based on the number of flu-related search queries in a given region.
Going forward, Shaman will test the model in other localities across the country using up-to-date data.
“There is no guarantee that just because the method works in New York, it will work in Miami,” Shaman says.
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation.
Want your children to be healthier snackers?
A new Cornell study finds that serving children combined snacks of vegetables and cheese led them to eat 72 percent fewer calories – and be just as satisfied as those who were served only potato chips.
“Snack combos are fun to eat, and they take longer to eat than potato chips. This is why kids find them satisfying and why they eat so much less,” said Brian Wansink, professor of marketing at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University.
In the forthcoming Pediatrics study, 201 elementary school students were given all of the potato chips, vegetables, cheese, or vegetables-and-cheese they wanted while watching an hour of television.
Those given the cheese-vegetable combo ate 72 percent fewer calories than those given chips. This result was even stronger for heavier children.
Wansink and his co-authors, Cornell researchers Mitsuru Shimizu and Adam Brumberg, also found that children reported being just as satisfied after eating a vegetable-and-cheese snack as they did after eating chips.
“That is really the key take-away — that you can substitute the healthier snack without a total rebellion on the kids’ part,” Brumberg said.
“This was inspired by the White House’s ‘Let’s Move’ program to encourage healthier eating,” said Wansink.
The paper, “Association of Nutrient-Dense Snack Combinations With Calories and Vegetable Intake,” is posted online in the journal, Pediatrics, and forthcoming in January.
It was sponsored by Bell Brands of cheese, which were the single-served wheels and wedges used in study.
“There is no magic food or ingredient that will end childhood obesity, but learning to substitute certain foods – such as choosing a combination snack of vegetables and cheese instead of potato chips or sweets – can be an effective tool to induce children to reduce their caloric intake while snacking,” Wansink said. “What’s cool is this worked best for the heaviest, pickiest kids. Its fun to eat and it makes snack time last longer.”