Abstract
OBJECTIVES:
Reliable methods are needed to monitor the public health impact of changing laws and perceptions about marijuana. Structured and free-text emergency department (ED) visit data offer an opportunity to monitor the impact of these changes in near-real time. Our objectives were to (1) generate and validate a syndromic case definition for ED visits potentially related to marijuana and (2) describe a method for doing so that was less resource intensive than traditional methods.
A report of the Injury Surveillance Workgroup Region 9, Safe States Alliance, December 2016.
Impetus for this report: On October 1, 2015 in the United States, ICD-10-CM replaced ICD-9-CM for coding information in hospital discharge, emergency department, and outpatient records for administrative and financial transactions. This change will impact national and state-based injury and violence surveillance activities that use these records.
National Health Statistics Reports, Number 100, January 23, 2017.
High rates of morbidity and mortality among Americans related to opioid use constitute a public health epidemic, leading multiple jurisdictions to declare formal states of emergency or public health emergency. Declaring a state of emergency grants states and localities additional resources to address the epidemic immediately. The Fact Sheet, developed by the Network for Public Health Law and released July 20, 2017, provides a brief summary of the emergency declarations in six states.
This Fact Sheet, created by the Network for Public Health Law in May 2017 and updated as of December 6, 2017, provides a snapshot of current and proposed laws, regulations, and sub-regulatory sources governing mandatory disease reporting and a description of the laws and regulations governing reporting of overdoses in the jurisdictions that require or explicitly permit it.
This report, published January 27, 2017 by the Office of Epidemiology and Prevention Services with the West Virginia Department of Health & Human Resources, is an outbreak report developed in response to an opioid-related overdose incident that occured in Huntington, West Virginia on August 15, 2016.
Drs. Arens, Vo, van Wijk, and Coffin will present a cluster of opioid-related poisoning cases and deaths in San Francisco following ingestion of counterfeit pills designed to look like prescription medication. They will describe the clinical cases and detailed the coordinated public health response, which included the local PCC, a toxicology lab, a public health officer, the local medical examiner, and affected hospitals.
Presenters:
Ann Arens, MD and Kathy Vo, MD, Medical Toxicology Fellows, California Poison Control System, San Francisco Division
This paper continues an initiative conducted by the International Society for Disease Surveillance with funding from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to connect near-term analytical needs of public health practice with technical expertise from the global research community. The goal is to enhance investigation capabilities of day-to-day population health monitors.
Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable illness and deaths in Georgia. About 10.1% of deaths among adults in Georgia are linked to smoking related illnesses. Most first use of cigarettes occurs by age 18 (87%), with nearly all-first use by 26 years of age (98%). Although cigarette smoking has declined significantly since 1964, very large disparities in tobacco use remain across different sub- groups of the population. Multiple environmental, psychological, and social factors have been associated with tobacco use, including race and ethnicity, age, SES, educational accomplishment, gender, and sexual orientation. These factors within the social environment have a huge influence on motivation to begin and to continue using tobacco products for not just the individual but also certain community group within the population. Established in 2000, Georgia Tobacco Use Prevention Program (GTUPP) is a program designed to meet the overall goal of reducing the health and economic burden associated with tobacco use for all members of the community. By working with various partners, GTUPP plans, implements and evaluates policy, systems, and environmental changes designed to reduce tobacco- related illnesses and deaths. Best practice strategies focus on the following goals: preventing the initiation of tobacco use among young people; promoting quitting among young people and adults (e.g. Georgia Tobacco Quit Line (GTQL); eliminating exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke; and identifying and eliminating the disparities related to tobacco use among various population groups.
Objective
To analyze tobacco use in Georgia to influence policy, systems and environmental changes as tools to reduce its burden on health outcomes
There is a resurgence in the need to evaluate the economic burden of prescription drug hospitalizations in the United States. We used the Wisconsin 2014 Hospital Discharge data to examine opioid related hospitalization incidence and costs. Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, is frequently being used for as an intraoperative agent in anesthesia, and post-operative recovery in hospitals. According to a 2013 study, synthetic Fentanyl is 40 times more potent than heroin and other prescription opioids; the strength of Fentanyl leads to substantial hospitalizations risks. Since, 1990 it has been available with a prescription in various forms such as transdermal patches or lollipops for treatment of serious chronic pain, most often prescribed for late stage cancer patients. There have been reported fatal overdoses associated with misuse of prescription fentanyl. In Wisconsin number of total opioid related deaths increased by 51% from 2010 to 2014 with the number of deaths involving prescription opioids specifically increased by 23% and number of deaths involving heroin increased by 192%. We hypothesized that opioids prescription drugs, as a proxy of Fentanyl use, result in excessive health care costs.
Objective
In this paper we used hospital charges to assess costs incurred due to prescription drug/opioid hospitalizations