Johnnie Collier, 71, recently went to Mercy Care’s downtown Atlanta facility to have a tooth extracted. He said it had been hurting him for many years. Another patient, David Perlete, 63, who is uninsured, also had a painful tooth pulled there. Other facilities charge hundreds of dollars, he said. Despite the work of charity clinics…
Researchers at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health have opened a new center that aims to improve the lives of people with mental and substance use disorders. The Center for Behavioral Health Policy Studies is bringing together a team of faculty, staff and students from Emory, Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech, the University of South Carolina,…
A ‘‘C’’ grade sounds pretty average, at best. But Georgia’s ‘‘C’’ on a newly released report card on premature births represents significant improvement on a statistic that can be a matter of life and death. Georgia lowered its preterm birth rate to 12.7 percent from 13.2 percent, according to the March of Dimes 2013 Premature…
The horrors of bullying burst into the news again this week with the report of an 8-year-old Carroll County girl having her hair pulled so hard that her scalp ripped. Third-grader Aolani Dunbar was bullied so severely that she had to be taken to a hospital emergency room, her Roopville family said. Aolani’s family said…
The 131 hand-crafted scarecrows planted at the Atlanta Botanical Garden this Halloween season include fairy godmothers, mermaids and a purple people eater. One scarecrow, though, has a distinct public health message. “Edgar Allan Crow’’ is the work of the TB Elimination Team from the CDC, and he is “a-ravin’’ against tuberculosis. The disease remains a…
A two-year-old Georgia program has served more than 1,600 women at high risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer. The Genomics Consortium is a partnership between the Georgia Center for Oncology Research and Education (Georgia CORE) and the state Department of Public Health. The project is funded by the CDC to raise awareness about cancer…
Consider this alarming scenario: A doctor prescribes the wrong dosage of a drug for a patient. The nurse working the case does not spot the doctor’s error. The pharmacist also fails to notice the problem, and fills the prescription as written. Who’s at fault for putting the patient in danger? More than any individual, flaws…
Friday was payday for the CDC’s employees. Or, rather, half a payday. Employees of the Atlanta-based public health agency received roughly half their pay last week due to the federal shutdown. Workers were paid for the one week prior to the shutdown, but the second week of the pay period was affected by the shutdown….
Charles Sperling knows the torment and desperation of drug addiction. More than 30 years ago, when he was young and living in New York, far from his Alabama roots, he got hooked on heroin. In 1986, though, Sperling stopped using the drug and started to turn his life around. “I got drug-free and I got…
The government shutdown has damaged the CDC’s ability to detect and prevent disease, the agency’s director said Monday. Roughly 9,000 of the 13,000 employees of the Atlanta-based public health agency have been furloughed by the shutdown, which is actually a reduction in federal operations due to a budget impasse in Washington. It is going into…