California Department of Public Health

How do you talk about climate change and public health? This webinar series explores some of the climate-health communications tools in use today.

Join public health leaders from California and across the nation for the last two webinars in a dynamic series on communicating the powerful connection between climate change and human health. These webinars feature real-life examples and practical recommendations for increasing the impact of climate and health communications.

Part 3: Climate Change + Health Equity: Telling the Story With Data

Date: Aug 02 2017
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM PST

How do you talk about climate change and public health? This webinar series explores some of the climate-health communications tools in use today.

Join public health leaders from California and across the nation for the last two webinars in a dynamic series on communicating the powerful connection between climate change and human health. These webinars feature real-life examples and practical recommendations for increasing the impact of climate and health communications.

Part 3: Climate Change + Health Equity: Telling the Story With Data

Date: Aug 02 2017
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM PST

In this webinar you’ll have an opportunity to hear national and state leaders address health equity and data tools available to integrate equity into climate communications and adaptation planning.

Linda Helland, CDPH, Climate Change and Health Equity Program will be the moderator. It will feature Jacqui Patterson, NAACP, Environmental and Climate Justice Program; Dr. Gina Solomon, CalEPA, CalEnviroScreen and Climate Justice; and Nik Steinberg, Director of Analytics, Four Twenty Seven.

Part 4: Innovative Curricula for Public Health Priority Populations

Date: August 9
Time: 10:00-11:30 a.m. PST

How do climate change communications fit into existing public health programs? Register to listen to local leaders share effective, low-cost approaches to making
this connection.

This webinar will feature Nancy Villasenor, CDPH; Kathleen Karle and Morgan Feld, County of San Luis Obispo; Judy Robinson, Sacramento County; Darcy Pickens, Kings County; with closing comments by Dr. Penny Borenstein, County of San Luis Obispo.

These webinars are presented by the County of San Luis Obispo Public Health Department, with sponsorship from Building Resistance Against Climate Effects (BRACE): Community of Practice for Communications and Engagement and received funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the California Department of Public Health– Office of Health Equity (CDPH-OHE).

Continuing education units pending for nurses, planners, and landscape architects.

This asynchronous course is designed to teach public health professionals and librarians to use PubMed, HSRProj, and MedlinePlus to find reliable health information and data related to population health and Healthy People 2020. This course is geared toward basic/beginner users of MedlinePlus, PubMed, and HSRProj.

PubMed is a free resource developed and maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). PubMed gives free access to MEDLINE, NLM’s bibliographic database of citations and abstracts, currently from approximately 5,600 biomedical journals published in the United States and worldwide. Coverage extends back to 1946 with over 27 million citations.

HSRPROJ (Health Services Research Projects in Progress) is a database providing access to ongoing grants and contracts in health services research. Entries in this database cover both grants and contracts awarded by major public and private funding agencies and foundations. You can retrieve names of performing and sponsoring agencies, names and addresses of the principal investigator, beginning and ending years of the project, and information about study design and methodology. The records are indexed with NLM’s Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms.

MedlinePlus is the National Library of Medicine’s web site for consumer health information. The site offers links to free authoritative and up-to-date health information, A Spanish-language version is also available. MedlinePlus includes information on health topics, drugs and supplements, and current health news.

Course Content:

1. Population Health and Healthy People 2020
2. MedlinePlus: Supporting the Public With Easy-to-Read Consumer Health Information
3. An Introduction to PubMed: Finding Peer-Reviewed and Evidence-Based Public Health Articles
4. Looking for Trends and Partners for Health Services Research with HSRProj
5. Scenario Practices

Dates: August 1 – August 31
Cost: Free

CDPH in the News

California assisted suicide patients are mostly white, well-educated

from Sacramento Bee

California residents choosing legal assisted suicide are disproportionately white and well-educated, new figures show. Since California’s End of Life Option Act went into effect on June 9, 2016, hundreds of terminally ill patients have weighed the decision to end their own lives. In 2016, 111 individuals died from ingesting aid-in-dying drugs, according to the California Department of Public Health. Ninety more had been prescribed drugs but ultimately did not take them, while a total of 258 individuals had begun the end-of-life option process.
Of the 111 individuals, 87 percent were at least 60 years old and 44 percent relied solely on Medicare for health insurance. Participants were also overwhelmingly – 89 percent – white. Additionally, 58 percent had attained an associate degree or higher level of education. Highly educated whites tend to have higher household incomes.

County health program a breath of fresh air for students with asthma

from Daily Press

In an effort to help students dealing with asthma, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors recently approved funds for a special health-based program. The board approved funding for the county program that will include the “Breathmobile,” considered to be an asthma clinic on wheels that will serve students at 14 High Desert schools, 1st District Supervisor Robert Lovingood reported.Approximately 313,000 children and adults in the county were diagnosed with asthma in 2014, with nearly 73,000 children visiting the doctor and another 10,000 hospitalized, according to California Breathing, a division of the California Department of Public Health’’s Environmental Health Investigations Branch. Many medical experts believe the reasons for the high asthma numbers in the county stem from the high poverty rate, adults not properly administering medications, lack of medical insurance and pollution.

California health officials battle state’s largest hepatitis A outbreak in 2 decades

from Healio Infectious Disease News

The California Department of Public Health is working with local health officials in San Diego and Santa Cruz counties to contain the state’s largest hepatitis A outbreak in 2 decades. As of July 18, officials identified 251 cases and five deaths in San Diego, and 27 cases in Santa Cruz since the outbreak began in November, according to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). San Diego’s Health and Human Services Agency reported that 69% of cases in the county required hospitalization. A CDPH representative told Infectious Disease News that the overall case count is larger than that of all other hepatitis A outbreaks in California combined over the past 20 years. There were seven hepatitis A outbreaks in the state from 1998 to 2015, totaling 224 cases and one death.

Valley Fever cases spiked statewide last year

from 23 ABC News Bakersfield

There were more Valley Fever cases in California for 2016 compared to 2015, according to the California Department of Public Health. The CDPH said Thursday that 5,372 new cases of Valley Fever appeared last year. That is about 13.7 cases reported per 100,000 people.
Valley Fever, otherwise known as coccidioidmycosis or cocci, is a fungal infection. In California, it predominantly affects counties in the Southern Central Valley and Central Coast. People become infected when they inhale spores in certain soils. Last year’s statewide spike was the highest number of reported cases since 2011. More than 2,200 cases in 2016 were reported in Kern County, according to the CDPH.

How public health is addressing Humboldt County’s drug problem

from Times Standard News

It’s no secret that Humboldt County has a drug problem. The 2017 California Department of Public Health and California Conference of Local Health Officers County Health Status Profile shows that county drug related or induced death rates have more than doubled since the 1999 County Health Status Profile.
DHHS senior program manager Sue Grenfell administers the department’s alcohol and other drugs program. She said the county offers a substance abuse treatment program and outpatient mental health programs to fight overdose deaths.
“We try to help them with whatever their goals are, either reducing or eliminating their substance abuse,” Grenfell said. The two outpatient substance abuse programs DHHS runs are Healthy Moms, which helps pregnant mothers or mothers with young kids address their substance abuse issues, and Humboldt County Programs for Recovery, she said.

Napa LGBTQ program prepares for Upvalley expansion

from Napa Valley Register

Napa County’s Upvalley communities are about to have a new presence dedicated to working with LGBTQ youth. Thanks to a $1 million state grant, Napa’s LGBTQ Connection will be expanding its services so that it can support youth in Upvalley and Sonoma Valley in addition to Napa and Santa Rosa. LGBTQ Connection was awarded the grant from the California Department of Public Health last year to expand mental health-related services over the next five years. The money started flowing in this past March.

Dialysis industry needs to be reformed: Guest commentary

from San Bernadino County Sun

Three days a week a machine in a dialysis clinic does what my kidneys can no longer do – clean my blood so my body doesn’t poison itself from the inside out. During that time, I’ve learned a lot about the dialysis industry and its problems, and how much it needs to be reformed. As a former social worker, I know patients must speak out if we’re going to change conditions in our clinics.
The clinic staff spends most of their time scrambling to hook patients up to equipment and get them out the door as quickly as possible. A single dialysis worker can be left to monitor 10 or more patients at the same time. With so many patients in their charge, they can’t safely help patients use the restroom, much less monitor falling blood pressure, prevent fainting or other complications.
That has to change. Legislation moving through the California Assembly now would improve the safety of dialysis clinics and improve care for the patients like me who count on them for life-saving treatment. The legislation also requires 45 minutes between patients to allow more time for them to recover and for staff to sanitize the equipment. Federal regulators have warned the California Department of Public Health that allowing too little time between patients creates a risk of “cross contamination” as blood from dialysis patient after patient circulates through the same filtering machine.

Wednesday July 26, 2017, 1:30-2:30pm
Hearing Room 72.167
1500 Capitol Ave, Sacramento

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RSVP by Tuesday July 25th to Michael Sholinbeck at
msholinb@library.berkeley.edu or (510) 642-2510.
Please obtain your supervisor’s approval before you RSVP.

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Supervisors: Please encourage your staff to attend if appropriate.

* Does your work at CDPH require you to access environmental health information, data, or other resources?

* Are you interested in learning about tools to help you find everything from environmental legislation, to continuing education sources, to environmental screening methods?

* Interested in environmental health topics like environmental justice, climate change, or nanotechnology?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then please come to the Sheldon Margen Public Health Library’s Environmental Health Resources class!

Topics covered will include:
1. Tools for data visualization, continuing education, site assessment, and more
2. Information on selected topics in environmental health
3. Finding environmental health literature
4. Environmental health data sources

Class Objective:
To introduce CDPH staff to quality environmental health tools and resources that are freely available online. Use of these resources will assist with finding environmental health data, literature, and more; and in developing evidence-based environmental health programs.

These training sessions are free to CDPH staff. A certificate of completion will be available for those who attend the class.

A schedule of other upcoming training sessions is available online for you.