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The Kentucky Department of Public Health has teamed up with the Kentucky Pharmacists Association to buy a mobile pharmacy unit.
The trailer will allow Kentucky Pharmacists Association member pharmacists to provide volunteer services such as patient care and counseling, immunizations, public health education, medication preparation and dispensing.
It seems like I’ve been seeing a lot of mobile medicine vehicles lately. Specifically, I see sedans marked that are marked with mobile dentistry lab information. Are these travelling dentists? Has anyone else seen one?
I know there are mobile dentists, but I’ve only heard about trailers that are essentially mobile offices that provide service. Maybe these are support vehicles. Either way, it seems like mobile dentistry could be a booming business in Kentucky, given the state’s notoriously bad record for oral health.
Okay, so they’re not unkillable, but wild rats in urban environments are hard to eliminate. Cats don’t catch them very well and poisons haven’t been working, either. The urban rat is crafty, and apparently very likely to overrun Louisville.
Glass – who started off studying cotton rats in the Midwest – traps the animals with peanut butter baits and monitors the diseases they carry. (Hantavirus, once known as Korean hemorrhagic fever, and leptospirosis – which can cause liver and kidney failure – are of particular concern.) Lately he’s been interested in cat-rat interactions. Cats, he and his colleagues have noticed, are rather ineffectual rat assassins: they catch mainly medium-sized rodents, when they catch any at all. This predation pattern may actually have adverse effects on human health: some of the deceased mid-sized rats are already immune to harmful diseases, while the bumper crops of babies that replace them are all vulnerable to infection. Thus a higher proportion of the population ends up actively carrying the diseases at any given time.
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Even the poshest neighborhoods are afflicted: rats, Glass says, gravitate to fancy vegetable gardens, leaving gaping wounds in tomatoes. (Celery crops, one assumes, would be safer.) Recent surveys suggest that the rat populations of Baltimore neighborhoods haven’t changed much since the Hopkins studies began in the 1940s.
This post comes from WFPL’s Stephanie Crosby.
Many of us frequent certain websites throughout the day to keep up with what’s going on in the world. Today, while browsing the featured stories on Yahoo.com, I saw a photo of that oh-so-familiar shot from Indiana: the Louisville skyline. Underneath those glistening buildings were the words “U.S. Cities With The Most Smokers”. And one click away was the information that was surprising and not-so-surprising.
According to the CDC:
The Smokiest U.S. Metro Areas % of Population who are Current Smokers
Wichita Falls, Texas 30.9
Hagerstown, MD/Martinsburg, WV 28.9
Huntington, WV/Ashland, KY 27.9
Louisville, KY 27.5
Winston-Salem, NC 25.3
That’s right. Our smoking rate is higher than that of a town sometimes referred to as “Camel City” because of the city’s prominent tobacco industry. And our friends in eastern Kentucky are smoking even more.
The CDC report also found that for the first time in a decade, the national smoking rate increased from 2007 to 2008.
Some silver lining? The smoking rate of young adults (18 to 24) fell 3.6%.
We know that Louisville is one of the most unsafe cities for pedestrians, but what can be done?
Wired digs into the Transportation for America study a bit further and puts forth a few suggestions for making streets safer and offers an explanation for the mortal threats posed on city streets. In some places a plethora of Robert Moses wannabes made it too easy to drive into foot traffic.
The report finds wide disparities in the amount each state spends. For example, Providence, Rhode Island, spends $4.01 per person to increase pedestrian and cyclist safety, while Orlando spends 87 cents.
“Too many transportation agencies have focused their investments on serving vehicles that result in unsafe, unhealthy environments for walking and bicycling,” said Anne Canby, president of the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership. “It’s time recipients of federal taxpayers’ money were held accountable for addressing this epidemic of preventable deaths.”
The report finds minority and low-income communities are disproportionately impacted. African-Americans, for example, have a pedestrian fatality rate of 3.01; the rate is 2.88 for Hispanics. Nationally, the rate for all people is 1.53. People 65 and older are at a higher risk, too, with a pedestrian fatality rate of 2.69.
The authors offer some solutions that parallel a national trend toward reconfiguring streets to make them safer and more appealing to pedestrians without adversely impacting traffic flow.
By using traffic calming techniques like reconfiguring road alignments and installing barriers like roundabouts to slow drivers, streets become more accessible. Expanding the Safe Routes to Schoolprogram, which installs or improves crosswalks, signals and other features, would make walking and biking safer for children. And more cities are adopting so-called complete streets policies that give all modes of transportation, from walking to driving to riding the bus, equal access and the same priority.
If 43,000 pedestrians dying in 10 years seems like too many to you, what do you think should be done to make roads safer for people who aren’t in cars?
Louisville Metro Government’s first public H1N1 clinic is open today and tomorrow at Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium. If you miss out, don’t fret, more doses are coming soon. And while the city hasn’t decided where it will hold future clinics, you can keep up to date with this handy Google Map. The blue icons are H1N1 vaccination locations while the red are for seasonal flu. Thanks Google maps…Double true.
You’ve replaced your Nalgene. You’ve thrown out those baby bottles. You think you’re safe from the possibly-toxic chemical BPA. Well, if you’re worried about BPA, spit out those green beans, because it’s in a lot of canned food.
This Consumer Reports story points out that BPA is still a prominent chemical in the canning industry, and even some foods touted as BPA-free aren’t.
(link via LEO)
Tuck your pants into your socks, Louisville is the 4th most city at risk for a rodent invastion. Here’s the list, from Reuters.
1. New York
2. Atlanta
3. Houston
4. Louisville
5. Philadelphia
6. Chicago
7. Boston
8. San Antonio
9. Milwaukee
10. Detroit
Louisville was number four in 2007, too. The list was compiled based on city infrastructure spending, weather, home foreclosures and a host of other factors.
With a new push against distracted driving picking up in Kentucky, I thought I’d share this link. Mental Floss looks back at the last 50 years in crash safety:
In September 1959 a group of insurance companies in the U.S. got together and formed the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Their mission: “to conduct, sponsor, and encourage programs designed to aid in the conservation and preservation of life and property from the hazards of highway accidents.” They appointed Dr. William Haddon Jr. as their president, and he brought with him a whole passel of research and statistics that allowed the IIHS to make model-by-model damage comparisons in vehicular crashes. Cynics are likely to point out that, to the folks at AAA or State Farm, fewer traumatic personal injuries equals smaller claims paid, and that the overall reduction in deaths and catastrophic injuries thanks to safer vehicles is just so much icing on the cake.
Click over to see more videos like this:
We’ve talked about poor oral health in Kentucky. There are a few reasons for folks in the commonwealth to have bad teeth:
1. It’s hard to find a dentist in some places.
2. It’s hard for most people to afford a dentist.
3. It’s culturally acceptable in some areas to have bad teeth.
Governor Beshear is using $2.2 million (much of it federal grants) to fight reason #1 for kids.
From the Herald-Leader:
The program’s initial focus, Beshear said, will be on creating a training curriculum to teach Kentucky dentists effective techniques in working with young children.
Most dentists not specializing in pediatric dentistry currently receive limited training in working with patients younger than age 6, who pose special treatment challenges, Beshear said.
Helping spread pediatric dentistry is a good step. I’ve spoken with a few dentists who say it’s just not financially inciting to set up shop in many parts of Kentucky, and it’s even harder to get by if you focus on treating kids. Some dentists have huge student loan debt and need to work where they can make enough to pay off their education.
We know the problems Kentucky has with poor oral health. As U of L Executive VP of Health Affairs Larry Cook says, “We do terribly as a state in terms of dental parameters. Whether you talk about the number of people without access to dental care, whether you talk about the incidents of caries in our children and I am told Kentucky leads the nation in toothlessness.”
Leading the nation in toothlessnes? That’s worse than being the 52nd smartest city.
Slate has been doing a series on American dentistry, and Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing takes issue with one of the article’s claims.
From Slate:
The main problem is a lack of decent low-cost options. Chester Douglass, emeritus professor in the department of Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology at Harvard’s School of Dental Medicine, puts it this way: “If you want to buy a good, inexpensive car, Volkswagen proved you could do it, then other people started being able to do it.” The Volkswagen of dentistry has yet to be built.
BB’s response:
…it’s not easy for rural Americans to see a dentist. Particularly if they’re on Medicaid, which often pays far less than the going rate for dental services–as little as half in some states. And a lot of rural Americans rely on Medicaid–more than city dwellers do, in fact. With education loans to pay off and expensive businesses to run, most dentists just can’t afford these low-payoff clientele. In the country, it’s not uncommon to drive 30, 70, even 100 miles to get to the nearest dentist.
And that’s where The Dental Health Aide Therapist program comes in. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to using a Nurse Practitioner as your primary care physician. People like Aurora Johnson are recruited to serve the communities they already live in. Their training is much shorter, and less expensive, than a dentist’s. But at the end, DHAT’s can take care of their neighbors’ basic and preventative dental health, and they can afford to charge less for their work.
If you’re in Louisville, though, things may be a little better. The University is expanding the School of Dentistry.
