Vaccination: A Key Piece of the Puzzle (CDC videos)

Vaccination: A Key Piece of the Puzzle. Nothing protects babies better from more than 14 serious diseases by age 2.



Babies are on the move-- visiting grocery stores, playgrounds and other places with their parents and caregivers. As they come into contact with others, babies can be exposed to serious diseases, like measles and whooping cough:



The Immunization Baby Book: Flipping through this baby book, you can learn what vaccines babies need, when they're needed, and why it's so important to follow CDC's recommended immunization schedule.



For more information about vaccines, visit http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents

My Firm Wins Two IABC Golden Flame Awards for Writing Excellence

Below is a reprint of my company news release from last night's IABC Atlanta Golden Flames Awards.

Strategic messaging and editorial services firm Anne Wainscott, Inc. received two 2012 International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Golden Flame Awards in the writing category last night during the Atlanta chapter’s annual awards gala at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta.

Wainscott earned a Silver Flame Award for “CDC 24/7: What’s Really in a Cigarette?” that appeared in the employee intranet portal, CDC Connects, on May 23, 2012. The article took employees inside CDC’s Tobacco Lab at a time whennew tobacco legislation has increased the partnership between CDC and FDA. A condensed version of the story also appeared on CDC.gov’s 24/7 page. 

“The relationship between CDC and FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products is of critical importance for advancing the efforts to reduce disease and death from tobacco product use. This article clearly highlighted this relationship and how the collaboration between these two agencies will make them both more effective in carrying out their missions,” said David Ashley, PhD, Director, Office of Science in FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products.  

This was Wainscott's third IABC award for writing work supporting CDC in the last two years.  She previously received a 2011 IABC Golden Flame Award and a 2010 IABC Southern Regional Silver Quill Award for feature articles on CDC Guinea worm eradication efforts and on employees living with childhood cancer. 

 Anne (second from left) with the Cbeyond team and their three Golden Flame Awards.

Wainscott's client, Cbeyond, a technology ally to more than 60,000 small and mid-sized businesses, also received three awards, including a Bronze Flame Award for recurring feature articles and a Bronze Flame for the company's "Era of Transformation" Change Management Communications efforts.

Wainscott was recognized for writing  weekly department spotlights for CWorld, the  employee e-newsletter -- efforts that helped engage employees during a period of major change.  

Golden Flame award winner Amy MacKinnon, internal communications leader at Cbeyond, said, “We’ve received great response. The spotlights not only helped employees understand what their colleagues  do every day, but also they helped explain how they’re a part of the transformation. The stories did an excellent job of showcasing how we’re all touching the transformation in some shape or form.”

About IABC Atlanta's Golden Flames Awards

IABC's Atlanta Golden Flames are awarded annually to recognize excellence in writing, graphic design, video, live events, media relations and social media, among other categories. The awards acknowledge merit for form, function, process and creativity, and, most importantly, measured results.  Entries are judged by members of other IABC chapters across North America, and scored on their own merit.

About Anne Wainscott Inc.    

Anne Wainscott Inc. is a strategic messaging and editorial services firm founded in Atlanta in 1999. The company's founder, Anne Wainscott Sargent, brings nearly two decades of experience as a journalist, author and award-winning writer. The firm offers a unique, senior-level storytelling experience to every client engagement -- balanced with an understanding of clients' big-picture positioning goals. For more information, visit: http://annewainscott.com.

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Hemophilia educational videos by CDC

Hemophilia belongs to a family of inherited lifelong bleeding conditions that prevent blood from clotting properly. Patients with these disorders bleed for longer than normal, either as a result of injury or spontaneously without an external cause.

The severity of bleeding depends on the amount of clotting factor that is missing or not functioning properly, which in hemophilia A and B - the most common types of hemophilia - is the coagulation factors VIII and IX, respectively.

In addition to external bleeding, patients more commonly have internal bleeding around the joints and muscles, which can be extremely painful and cause permanent disability. Bleeding into major organs such as the brain is especially difficult to manage and can be fatal.

Here are 2 hemophilia educational videos by CDC:  Playing it Safe With Hemophilia: Friends with hemophilia talk about playing sports growing up and the importance of making smart decisions.



Starting the Conversation: Hemophilia. How to talk to your friends about hemophilia. A group of friends ask their friend Billy questions about his hemophilia:



Hemophilia care has undergone substantial improvements during the past 40 - 50 years. Early clotting factor concentrates were not sufficiently refined to enable self-administered treatment at home until the 1970s.

Long-term substitution therapy (prophylaxis) of the missing clotting factor is the recommended treatment in severe hemophilia. The major side-effect of treatment, development of inhibitors to the infused concentrate, is the main threat to the health of patients.

Mnemonic: Differential Diagnosis of Bleeding Disorders: F-CAP

Fibrinolysis - tPA
Coagulopathy - hemophilia, vWD
Angiopathy - conditions affecting blood vessels, e.g. Osler-Weber-Rendu syndrome
Platelets - thrombocytopenia or thrombocytopathia

Initial diagnostic tests = 3P:

Platelets
PT - INR
PTT

References:

http://www.cdc.gov/NCBDDD/video/Hemophilia_sports/index.html

http://www.cdc.gov/NCBDDD/video/Hemophilia_Friends/index.html

Making haemophilia a global priority - The Lancet, 2012.

Modern haemophilia care - The Lancet, 2012.

Secondhand smoke is nothing to kid about - CDC video

CDC: This 30-second TV ad features vignettes of children talking about when they're exposed to secondhand smoke. As the narrator points out, secondhand smoke is nothing to kid about. It can hurt lung growth and damage lung function in children. When smoking around your kids, it's like they're smoking.

Screening for Familial Hypercholesterolemia - CDC Expert Commentary

Screening for Familial Hypercholesterolemia - CDC Expert Commentary (video). Renée M. Ned, PhD, MMSc discusses the benefits of cascade screening to identify familial hypercholesterolemia, a common genetic disorder that causes high levels of low-density lipoprotein (or LDL) cholesterol.

CDC Discourages Patients from Ordering Personal Genomic Tests

Dr. Khoury comments on the personal genomic tests that consumers can buy on the Internet to measure their genetic risk for multiple diseases.

Direct-to-consumer genomewide profiling to assess disease risk provides information about a person's genetic risk of 20 to 40 common polygenic diseases. The tests simultaneously genotype approximately 500,000 variant bases of a person's DNA. Consumers can purchase these tests, currently priced between $400 and $2,000, on the Internet

Proponents argue that providing this type of information directly to consumers may result in improved compliance with health-screening practices and more healthful lifestyle choices.

Skeptics assert that such testing has the potential to cause harm, including anxiety and increased use of unnecessary and expensive screening and medical procedures.

The clinical validity and utility of these tests have not been demonstrated, and given their cost, many observers argue that their sale raises consumer-protection issues.

In a recent study published in the NEJM, subjects who chose to undergo direct-to-consumer genomewide testing, had no short-term changes in psychological health, diet and exercise behavior, or use of screening tests.

References:

Effect of Direct-to-Consumer Genomewide Profiling to Assess Disease Risk. NEJM, 2011.

Beware the fortune tellers peddling genetic tests - BMJ http://goo.gl/F0DQt
"Genetic testing eases pain of hypochondria" - BBC  http://goo.gl/IRCPP
Feedback of DNA based risk assessments does not motivate behaviour change - BMJ, 2012 http://goo.gl/3HaRy

The Deadly Menace of MRSA

My blog is normally devoted to talking about communications trends, writing tips, etc. When I headed to Danya International yesterday, a government contractor that works with CDC on health communications and program evaluation activities, to hear about Maryn McKenna’s new book SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, about the growing epidemic of drug-resistant staph, I fully expected to leave with insights into this frightening epidemic, and into the writing path that got McKenna to this book.  

Afterall, she was an award-winning health reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who got her nickname “Scary Disease Girl” during her tenure covering CDC and the government’s investigations of major disease outbreaks.

I was completely blown away by what I learned about MRSA and the lack of a coordinated response to this spreading crisis by the medical community here in the U.S. I suppose it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise, given that it’s an industry that polices itself.  

First, some facts:

• One-third of the U.S. population walks around all the time with MRSA on their skin and in their noses.  It’s a very common bacterial found on large numbers of people.
•  In the U.S. in a single year, there are 19,000 deaths and 370,000 hospitalizations from MRSA. Overall healthcare spending on combating it is conservatively estimated at $4.8 billion a year.
•  In 1968, it arrived in the U.S. strictly as a “hospital infection” targeting mostly the elderly.
•  In 1980, it struck a hospital in Washington State, when a car accident victim in Texas was transported to Seattle and passed the skin infection on in the burn unit and later the ICU.
• Community-based strains of MRSA are affecting kids – specifically, student athletes as the news headlines continue to report. The kids are not showering and are not cleaning their sports equipment. They are getting it from skin-to-skin contact.

One Mother's Nightmare

But MRSA also has infected healthy women after they give birth in hospitals. Women like Diane Lore, a 20-year journalist and former medical editor of the AJC, who is featured in McKenna’s book. She contracted a community-based strain of MRSA in June 2003 after giving birth to her third child, when her baby daughter first clamped down so hard that she tore her mother’s right nipple. 

Family video footage inside the hospital room before the breastfeeding occurred showed a gloved nurse inserting a finger into the child’s mouth to calm the crying baby. Lore, who lost six months of bonding time with her infant daughter combating the infection, eventually overcame it after enduring incorrect diagnoses, and multiple courses of antibiotics until she finally received the right treatment.  Not surprisingly, she and her husband also faced a formidable battle with their  insurance company on covering the expensive treatment. Lore held up a bottle of some of the leftover course of antibiotics, which she held onto even after her bout with MRSA passed out of fear of a return of the infection. The cost of one little white pill was a staggering $100.

“It was a horrible, traumatic time,” Lore said, “I don’t’ remember my little girl at all. I was quarantined up in my son’s bedroom (out of fear that she was infectious.)” At one point, she and her husband drew up their will and had their “last talks.”

“MRSA was a hospital infection but it’s not – it was just MRSA’s first epidemic,” notes McKenna, explaining that contingents within the medical establishment were very reluctant to acknowledge that community-based strains could actually hit inside a hospital.

The third wave of the epidemic is now cropping up in another area -- agriculture – infecting both farmers and their animals, notably pigs, which means it will find its way into the food chain. The culprit? Widespread use of antibiotics and the overcrowded living conditions of the animals on industrialized farms.

What We Can Do 

So, what can be done about preventing MRSA’s spread?

Hygiene is king -- McKenna urges everyone to wash their hands frequently.  If you are going to the hospital or have a loved one going in, get screened for MRSA first. People entering ERs should be screened before being admitted into the general hospital population.  This practice of isolation and detection is widely used in parts of Europe and a CDC trial of a Veteran’s Hospital in Pittsburgh was so effective that it’s now in full force in all hospitals in the VA system, McKenna says.

And, hospital staff needs to be educated on hygiene practices, including frequent hand washings and glove changes. “Non-stop messaging” and the threat of lost executive bonuses helped one Charlotte, N.C., hospital get hand-washing hygiene up to 98 percent from 50 percent.     

McKenna holds out hope that the move toward electronic healthcare records, which would enable “people’s records to be portable with them,” could help doctors more quickly diagnose MRSA in patients.  Also, new rapid test equipment, currently very expensive, can detect MRSA within 24 hours. She also urges people to not be afraid to ask questions of doctors and nurses. Lore urges that if you have a loved one sick in the hospital, be a watchdog and advocate by their bedside.

Word of Mouth 

Mike Greenwell, Danya's vice president of Health Marketing and Communications, notes that Danya will be assisting CDC with a public service campaign on MRSA in the coming months, and he sought input on whether the campaign should target healthcare workers or consumers. The consensus was the general public.On the communications front, word of mouth through social media and leveraging mommy bloggers are important outreach methods, which are going to be relied on more given the cutbacks in investigative, in-depth health reporting in newspaper rooms around the country. 

So, stay tuned, you will be hearing more about  MRSA' s menace and what we as a society need to do to combat its spread. And keep your hands clean.

Listen to Mckenna's March 23 interview on NPR's Fresh Air program.