RWJF’s Pioneer Portfolio and Ashoka’s Changemakers have launched a global search for individuals and institutions who help people make better decisions regarding their health and the health of others. Now through April 1, 2009 you are encouraged to enter your idea as part of the new online, open-source competition “Designing for Better Health.”

What can often make the difference in the health-related options we choose are the nudges we get. Nudges are innovative little pushes that can help us make better choices. They entail an individual or institution intentionally creating a choice environment that makes it easier for people to make decisions that can improve their health.

View details of the competetion online at http://www.rwjf.org/pioneer/product.jsp?id=37528 [posted on RWJF Contents Alert]

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has released an updated and improved version of the Surgeon General’s Internet-based family health history tool. This new tool makes it easier for consumers to assemble and share family health history information.  It can also help practitioners make better use of health history information so they can provide more informed and personalized care for their patients. For more information please visit the following URL: https://familyhistory.hhs.gov/fhh-web/home.action

DisabilityInfo.gov’s Community Life Section offers a wide range of information and resources to help people with disabilities live independently and participate fully in all aspects of community life. http://tinyurl.com/yv69xv (or start on the home page http://www.disabilityinfo.gov/ and select the Community Life tab) Included in this section are “Emergency Preparedness” and “Multicultural Populations Resources“.

You can view this video clip from ABC’s “What would you do?”  It’s titled “We don’t speak Mexican”. Be sure and watch the entire clip.  http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=6581200

Planning for the health and safety of those attending mass gatherings is an enormous challenge for local officials. Mass gatherings are defined as those attracting more than 1,000 participants and include events like the Olympics, Super Bowl, religious services conducted by the Pope, state funerals, and presidential inaugurations. Public health concerns range from ensuring adequate drinking water, food safety, first aid, and toilet facilities to planning for the extremes of possible major accidents, dangerous weather and even terrorist threats.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has compiled a Web page of links to information on the public health aspects of planning for all kinds of mass gatherings, http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/massgatherings.html. These resources include a search of PubMed for medical journal article citations as well as documents from government and other sources. Topics include preparedness for large numbers of casualties and management of disease outbreaks.

Health tips for those attending inauguration weekend outdoor activities are available from the US Department of Health and Human Services at http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2009pres/01/20090112a.html.

For more information on the Disaster Information Management Research Center at NLM, please visit http://disasterinfo.nlm.nih.gov/

Special Olympics, Healthy Athletes, Health Literacy Blog
http://healthlit.wordpress.com/ {Health Literacy listserv]

Identical Fake Testimonial Diet Sites Spreading Like Herpes
http://consumerist.com/5127945/identical-fake-testimonial-diet-sites-spreading-like-herpes

National Assessment of Adult LiteracyReport
Today, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released the National Assessment of Adult Literacy: Indirect County and State Estimates of the Percentage of Adults at the Lowest Literacy Level for 1992 and 2003, which provides estimates on the percentage of adults – for all states and counties in the U.S. – who lack basic prose literacy skills.  The study provides data for 2003 and 1992. This new data is currently the only available snapshot of adult literacy rates for individual states and counties.
The report can be found at:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009482
The Interactive Web Tool can be accessed at:
http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates/index.aspx [Health Literacy Listserv]

Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy
Since 2002, reading has increased at the sharpest rate (+20 percent) among Hispanic Americans, Reading rates have increased among African Americans by 15 percent, and among Whites at an eight percent rate of increase. http://librarian.lishost.org/?p=1980 [REFORMANET listserv]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123128697040459161.html
By Laura Landro
The Wall Street Journal
January 7, 2009
This article includes some tips on the differences between commercial and government/nonprofit web sites. It also includes reviews on two National Library Of Medicine websites: HazMap (http://hazmap.nlm.nih.gov) and ToxTown site  (http://www.toxtown.nlm.nih.gov)

New Website for Medication Safety Information
The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) recently launched ConsumerMedSafety.org (http://www.consumermedsafety.org), the first website exclusively designed to alert healthcare consumers to specific drug safety issues with a focus on medication error prevention. This interactive website provides visitors with reliable, expert advice on medication safety as well as the first national error reporting program for patients [posted on Kansas Rural Health Information Service (KRHIS). ]

AHRQ Announces New Web Site on Emerging Issues in Medical Therapeutics
A new educational Web site offers expert perspectives, advice and guidance on drugs, biological products and medical devices from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Centers for Education and Research on Therapeutics (CERTs), a federally sponsored network of more than a dozen leading research centers nationwide. The Clinician-Consumer Health Advisory Information Network (CHAIN) (http://www.chainonline.org) links clinicians and consumers with therapeutics information to assist in clinical practice and health care decisionmaking in areas where evidence is undergoing significant and rapid changes. [posted on AHRQ updates]

A new online tool for calculating colorectal cancer risk in men and women age 50 or older has been launched, based on a new risk-assessment model developed by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health. This new tool may assist health care providers and their patients in making informed choices about when and how to screen for colorectal cancer and can be used in designing colorectal cancer screening and prevention trials. The risk assessment tool is available on the NCI Web site at http://www.cancer.gov/colorectalcancerrisk, and people using this tool should work with their health care providers to interpret the results.

Using easily obtainable information (e.g., personal and family medical history, lifestyle behaviors, and age), the tool provides an estimate of an individual’s risk of developing colorectal cancer over certain time periods (within five years, 10 years, and over the course of a lifetime). This risk-assessment model is the first to provide an absolute risk estimate for colorectal cancer (i.e., the probability of developing colorectal cancer over a given period of time) for the general, non-Hispanic white population age 50 or older in the United States.

For more information please visit the following website: http://www.nih.gov/news/health/dec2008/nci-29.htm [posted on Kansas Rural Health Information Service (KRHIS)]

http://frontierus.org/index.htm
The National Center for Frontier Communities is the only national organization dedicated to the smallest and most geographically isolated communities in the United States - the Frontier. The debate about the frontier has been going on for more than a century. Today there is a new consensus that the most sparsely populated and remote areas of the country are an enduring American frontier.

The mission of the National Center for Frontier Communities is to be the national clearinghouse, conduct research, provide education, and offer leadership on issues of importance to frontier communities. This website contains many resources, including, maps, reports and policy Issues, each developed to help frontier communities, policy makers, and other organizations work to improve local economies, programs and services. [posted on Kansas Rural Health Information Service (KRHIS)]