Tag: updates

CDPH in the News

Fresno heart surgeon files claim against state agency that he says falsely accused him
from Fresno Bee

A high-profile Fresno cardiac surgeon who is accused of leaving an open-heart surgery before his patient’s chest was closed has filed a multimillion-dollar claim against the state agency that investigated the alleged incident at Community Regional Medical Center. Dr. Pervaiz Chaudhry says the report by the California Department of Public Health falsely accused him of leaving the operating room during the surgery in April 2012 and falsely reported that he admitted the wrongdoing to a state interviewer. Chaudhry says staff at the California Department of Public Health did an inadequate and sloppy investigation and published a "substantially inaccurate and damaging" report that has damaged his reputation, caused him economic harm and emotional distress.

Q&A with Tony Yang of George Mason University
from AJPH Talks

In their new research article, "Sociodemographic Predictors of Vaccination Exemptions on the Basis of Personal Belief in California", authors Tony Yang, Paul Delamater, Timothy Leslie, and Michelle Mello examine the sociodemographic profile of communities in which a high proportion of parents opt out of mandatory school-entry immunizations citing “personal beliefs”. The authors find that personal belief exemptions are more common in areas with a whiter, higher-income population. In this Q&A, this interdisciplinary research team offers further insight into this research.

Homeless camp takes root in Roseland
from Press Democrat

Wearing a bright yellow raincoat and looking a little like a Bodega Bay fisherman, John Ruano used a shovel to clear gravel from several narrow trenches that were keeping Camp Michela from flooding. As residents of the southwest Santa Rosa homeless camp hunkered down for a cold and wet day, Santa’s stand-ins dropped by Monday morning four days before Christmas bearing some much-needed gifts. The camp’s latest site falls within the long-awaited Roseland Village neighborhood development and is only temporary, according to homeless advocates and county officials. The encampment was named in honor of Michela Wooldridge, a homeless single mother who was murdered just days before she was to receive a space at the Sam Jones Hall shelter in 2012. Epple, a co-organizer of the camp, cites statistics from the California Department of Public Health which say that an average of about 30 homeless people die in Sonoma County each year.

Polio-like syndrome has no known cause
from San Diego Union Tribune

Nearly 60 cases of a rare polio-like syndrome have been identified in California since 2012, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported Tuesday. And despite intensive investigation, the cause remains unknown. Called acute flaccid myelitis, the syndrome is characterized by a quick onset of muscle weakness in one or more limbs, along with evidence of spinal cord motor neuron damage. Children are most affected. Out of the 59 cases, the median age was 9, with 50 cases in people younger than 21. The illnesses occurred between June 2012 and July 2015. In most cases, the weakness lasted for at least several months. For the 45 patients with follow-up data, 38 had persistent weakness at the followup. The followup occurred at a median time of 9 months, spread over a range of 3 to 12 months. Two patients, both immune-compromised, died within 60 days of diagnosis. Researchers examined records collected at the request of the California Department of Public Health, which acted after learning of three such cases in the fall of 2012. This was unusual, the study stated, because no such cases had been identified in the previous 14 years.

Gambia: Bringing Home a New Health Concept
from all Africa

The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare is rolling out a health concept called HiAPs – Health in All Policies. Recently the ministry, in collaboration with the World Health Organisation (WHO), organised a two-day training session and forum on the implementation of HiAPs. HiAPs, though it has been applied by nations like the US and other countries around the world some years ago, is somehow a new concept in The Gambia; hence it deserves more promotion or explanation for it to be better understood in our society. HiAP was created by the Public Health Institute, the California Department of Public Health, and the American Public Health Association in response to growing interest in using collaborative approaches to improve population health by embedding health considerations into decision-making processes across a broad array of sectors.

Although the Public Health Library will be closed to the public from December 21 to Jan 4, we are open for CDPH services on December 21 to 23 from 8am to 5pm and December 28 to 30 from 9am to 5pm. If you wish to visit the library on any of these days, please let us know beforehand by calling 510-642-2510 so we can open the door for you and make sure that a librarian will be here to assist you.

Please plan ahead and anticipate your project needs, especially if you will be using our Document Delivery service.

You will still be able to reach us as usual from 8am to 5pm from December 21 to 23 and 9am to 5pm from December 28 to 30 by calling (510) 642-2510 and by logging in to the web portal.

Thank you for continuing to use our valuable library services. We encourage you to let your new and existing colleagues know about our services and resources if they do not already use them.

CDPH in the News

WEST NILE: State, county break records for deaths
from Press Enterprise

A record number of people have suffered West Nile virus-related deaths this year in California and Riverside County, while the county also reached an all-time high number of infections. As of Nov. 6, the most recent figures available on the California Department of Public Health?s West Nile website, the state listed 512 human cases of West Nile virus in 30 counties. State numbers on the site lag behind the more up-to-date county numbers.

California’s rural counties struggle with rising number of suicides
from Sacramento Bee

The suicide rate in California’s rural counties is rising twice as fast as the rate in its urban centers, according to a Bee review of the latest data from the California Department of Public Health. Twenty-seven California counties have fewer than 175,000 residents. The suicide rate in those counties was almost 19 per 100,000 residents in 2013, up 23 percent from 2004.The suicide rate in urban counties rose by about 11 percent during the same period. The suicide rate in rural California counties was more than 80 percent higher than the rate in urban counties during 2013, state figures show.

Health Officials Warn: Invasive Mosquito That Can Carry Yellow Fever Found in San Jacinto
from Banning-Beaumont Patch

An invasive mosquito that can carry yellow fever and other diseases has been detected in San Jacinto, one of 35 California cities where it has been located. A resident in south San Jacinto brought an adult mosquito to the Riverside County Vector Control program staff last week. Because the mosquito appeared to be an Aedes aegypti mosquito, traps were set in the area and eight more adult mosquitoes and several larvae were collected. They were positively identified as Aedes aegypti Monday (10/26) by county staff and the California Department of Public Health.

O.C. overdue for a needle-exchange program
from Orange County Register

Needle-exchange programs are an effective means of preventing the spread of HIV, connecting individuals in need with social services and even preventing the improper disposal of drug paraphernalia. According to the latest figures from the California Department of Public Health, Orange County reported 972 Hepatitis C cases and 502 of Hepatitis B in 2011. As of June 30, 2014, the county also had the fourth-highest number of HIV cases in the state. Injection drug use is a significant risk factor for all of them and a known factor in the majority of Hepatitis C cases and roughly 10 percent of HIV infections. So, one wonders why a needle-exchange program, which allows injection drug users to turn in used needles for sterilized ones, has yet to take root in this county, the largest in California to lack one.

City prepares ban on e-cigarette stores
from Napa Valley Register

With public health reports showing teenagers increasingly favoring e-cigarettes over tobacco products, the American Canyon City Council is preparing to pass a new law barring businesses that exclusively sell such products. The California Department of Public Health issued a report earlier this year that warned the rise in e-cigarette popularity posed a serious health threat, particularly among young people. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported as well that the use of e-cigarettes among middle school and high school students tripled from 2013 to 2014. Given the large number of young families with school-age children in American Canyon, council members say they want to discourage kids from smoking tobacco cigarettes or "vaping" smokeless e-cigarettes that use nicotine and other ingredients to make them enticing to youth.

California’s Newborn Cystic Fibrosis Screening Shows Promise
from Medscape Medical News

California’s three-step newborn screening model for cystic fibrosis (CF) shows high efficiency, sensitivity, and positive predictive value and low false positives in the first 5 years, according to an analysis published online November 16 in Pediatrics. The three steps consist of measuring immunoreactive trypsinogen in all dried blood spot specimens, testing from 28 to 40 selected CF transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) mutations in specimens with immunoreactive trypsinogen values of at least 62 ng/mL (top 1.6%), and performing DNA sequencing on specimens found to have only one mutation in step 2. "Program sensitivity was 92%, and the positive predictive value was 34%. CF prevalence was 1 in 6899 births," Martin Kharrazi, PhD, MPH, from the California Department of Public Health, Richmond, and colleagues write.

The Public Health Library will be closed on Wednesday, November 11, 2015 for Veterans Day.

The Public Health Library will also close at 5pm on Wednesday, November 25, and will be closed Thursday, November 26, and Friday, November 27, 2015 for Thanksgiving.

Although the Public Health Library will be closed to the public from December 21 to Jan 4, we are open for CDPH services on December 21 to 23 from 8am to 5pm and December 28 to 30 from 9am to 5pm. If you wish to visit the library on any of these days, please let us know beforehand by calling 510-642-2510 so we can open the door for you and make sure that a librarian will be here to assist you.

Please plan ahead and anticipate your project needs, especially if you will be using our Document Delivery service.

You will still be able to reach us as usual from 8am to 5pm from December 21 to 23 and 9am to 5pm from December 28 to 30 by calling (510) 642-2510 and by logging in to the web portal.

Thank you for continuing to use our valuable library services. We encourage you to let your new and existing colleagues know about our services and resources if they do not already use them.

CDPH in the News

CA officials move to vaporize e-cigs
from CalWatchdog.com

With public opinion in flux and anti-tobacco activists on edge, the California Department of Public Health has rolled out "Wake Up," a slick new ad campaign to discourage the use of e-cigarettes, or "vapes." Recently, CDPH pronounced e-cigs a threat to public health. In a statement explaining the campaign, CDPH described two new TV ads emphasizing "the e-cigarette industry’s use of candy flavored ‘e-juice’" and "exposing the fact that big tobacco companies are in the e-cigarette business."

Clinical, demographic factors identify patients at risk for measles transmission
from Helio

Clinical and demographic features of patients in particular regions may be used to identify those at risk for measles transmission during an outbreak, according to data presented at IDWeek 2015. "Our preliminary findings indicate that certain demographic and clinical features of measles cases are associated with transmitting measles (or not)," Jennifer Zipprich, PhD, of the immunization branch of the California Department of Public Health, told Infectious Diseases in Children. "These findings are part of a larger project to help us understand how to prioritize measles contact investigations in the setting where multiple investigations are occurring, such as a large, statewide measles outbreak."

Study results showed that coughing increased the likelihood of measles transmission (OR = 3.3; 95% CI, 1.1-9.7). Furthermore, children who received at least two doses of measles vaccine reported coughing (P < .0001), coryza (P < .0001), conjunctivitis (P < .0001), fever (P <. 01) and hospitalization (P = .03) less frequently than children who received one dose or no vaccine.

Experts baffled by cadmium contamination in spinach
from The Californian

Regulators have yet to discover the source of cadmium that caused Salinas spinach to be recalled in September. Over a month ago, the California Department of Public Health found that a batch of baby spinach grown by organicgirl Produce LLC contained 10 times more cadmium than average. Although no one was sickened by the incident, and cadmium wasn’t found in any other produce during or since, the levels were high enough to raise concerns about long-term exposure.

The CDPH will continue to investigate the issue in the coming year. The department is planning to conduct additional sampling and monitoring during the next growing season. CDPH will continue to work with the industry and other agencies such as [California Department of Food and Agriculture] to better understand the issue, including the sources of the cadmium, how spinach may uptake cadmium in the growing environment, and what mitigation strategies might prove effective.

California Department of Public Health Study Shows Prenatal Vaccination Decreases Severe Illness and Death in Pediatric Pertussis Casess
from Sierra Sun Times

The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) Director and State Public Health Officer Dr. Karen Smith today announced the results of a CDPH study that shows additional benefits of prenatal pertussis vaccination. Vaccination of pregnant women against pertussis (whooping cough) has been found to prevent whooping cough in their infants, however no vaccine is 100 percent effective and some infants of vaccinated women develop pertussis.The study found that infants were significantly less likely to have severe illness or die from pertussis if their mother had received the Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis) vaccine during pregnancy.

"Prior studies have demonstrated that prenatal Tdap vaccination reduces the risk of whooping cough among infants less than two months of age," Dr. Smith said. "However, this is the first study that CDPH is aware of that has evaluated the impact of Tdap vaccine during pregnancy on the outcomes of infants who do become infected with pertussis. This study provides more evidence that getting the Tdap vaccine is the best way for pregnant mothers to protect their babies from pertussis and its complications."

Californians are naming their kids after ‘Game of Thrones’ characters
from SFGate

Ever since the fantasy drama "Game of Thrones" premiered on HBO in 2011, the names of the show’s most popular characters have been popping up in up-and-coming baby names lists pulling ideas from pop culture.

These trend predictions always seem far-fetched – what parent would give their kids the "difficult to spell and pronounce" names Khaleesi or Daenerys? Turns out, here in California, enough are doing this to declare it a trend. SFGate took a close look at the California Department of Public Health’s (CDPH) baby name data and found that a small yet increasing number of parents have an affinity for fantastical names inspired by the television hit. One of the more convincing examples we found: Before 2011, the ‘Game of Thrones’ name Khaleesi wasn’t included in CDPH data. In 2011, the name popped up five times. There were 31 instances in 2012 and 38 in 2013. In 2014, parents named 54 babies Khaleesi. In comparison, only 21 babies were named Betsy.