A new state audit shows that of $32 million in fees collected to fund driver education for Georgia teens over the last three years, none of the money has gone for that purpose. Motor vehicle crashes are the No. 1 cause of teen deaths in the U.S., and in 2005 the Georgia Legislature passed “Joshua’s…
Story provided by Public Health News Bureau – When Farhad Jameel, case manager at Gwinnett County’s tuberculosis control clinic, arrives at work each morning, he collects his surgical mask and several large, resealable plastic bags, the kind normally used to store food. The bags contain the individual medications for four to six homebound tuberculosis (TB)…
Earlier this year, a prominent state legislator called Georgia’s Public Health division “a mess.’’ And to clean up that mess, legislation was passed to move Public Health out of a larger state agency. On July 1, it was launched as an independent department. The health challenges facing the new agency are enormous. Georgia ranks 36th…
Smoke from wildfires in and near the Okefenokee Swamp in South Georgia filled the air over Savannah and other coastal areas last week, eventually reaching Augusta. The arrival of weekend rains eased the situation in parts of the Okefenokee, but the problem is far from over. Georgia Health News spoke about possible health effects from…
In the months he has been chairing the roundtable of public officials that will set metro Atlanta’s transportation priorities, Norcross Mayor Bucky Johnson has learned a lot about how the region’s notoriously congested traffic affects community health. He knows about the effects that ground level ozone and fine particulate matter in the air have on…
AIDS research pioneer Dr. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi recently visited Emory University in Atlanta, where she spoke about the deadly disease. Barré-Sinoussi, a French virologist, shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her work in discovering HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. This month marks the 30th anniversary of the first CDC report of AIDS cases in…
Georgia health officials have launched a campaign to stop persistent fraud in a $300 million federal nutrition program for low-income women and children. The anti-fraud initiative in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has led to a handful of recent arrests, state officials say. “The arrests are part of a…
A group of children clad in white golf shirts drop their clubs under a huge tree and tackle a paper-and-pencil quiz. The questions include: What does diabetes mean? What is glucose? What can a person do to avoid Type 2 diabetes? Their parents, meanwhile, are warming up for an aerobics class or hiking on a nearby street with…
In a new Commentary piece, Dr. James Curran, dean of Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health, reflects on the 30th anniversary of the first AIDS cases being diagnosed in the U.S. Curran led a CDC task force investigating the first reported AIDS cases in 1981. ‘’We must learn from the lessons of the last 30…
State revenues intended to fund driver education for Georgia teens are being spent for other, unrelated purposes. In 2005, the Georgia Legislature passed “Joshua’s Law,” named for a teenager who died after losing control of his truck on a wet road two years earlier. Joshua Brown had never taken driver training classes, which cover hydroplaning…