Three Things Thursday highlights three things I am paying attention to as an epidemiologist each week. Over the weekend, I visited my favorite co-op grocery store in Erie where I bought a stash of granola and a really, really good grilled cheese sandwich. It was grilled cheese on sourdough bread with pesto, artichokes, tomato, lettuce, onion, and cucumbers.
It was an amazing sandwich.
I meant to take a picture of it.
I meant to save half of it for David.
But I ate the whole thing.
It was delicious, and it rekindled my love of sandwiches.
In the spirit of sandwiches, this week’s three things is a positivity sandwich — two positive health stories sandwiching some (continued) bad news about measles.
Hoping this post helps to educate and empower you
to be healthy and create healthy communities.
$1 Million for Violence Prevention
On Tuesday, MacKenzie Scott announced that her organization, Yield Giving, would be giving away $640 million to 361 nonprofit organizations. Note: this is double the amount of money Scott originally planned to give.
One of the awardees is near (literally) and dear to my heart.
Women’s Services Inc. (right here in Meadville, PA) — which aids women and children who have experienced sexual abuse and domestic violence — was awarded a $1 million gift! According to the Women’s Services Board President, the receipt of the Yield Giving Award —
“Recognizes the incredible work that the organization has done and our top-level team of staff, board members, and community partners.”
Bruce Harlan, the Executive Director of Women’s Services, says that the money will go toward “moving upstream” services.
In other words — it will go toward PREVENTION.
Cheers 🥂 to everyone at Women’s Services.
Here’s to preventing sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Measles
As of March 14 (last week), a total of 58 measles cases have been reported in the United States (in 17 different states). This is the same number of cases that were reported in all of 2023.
2024 is going to be a banner year for measles. Note: this is NOT good for our health.
I was recently asked by a student in my high school Deadly Diseases class why we should care about these cases of measles. There are only 58 of them. Why should we care about them when 1.9 million new cancer cases are diagnosed in a year? Or when more than 375,000 Americans die of a heart attack each year?
The number of measles cases is so small in comparison.
Why should we care?
Here are the reasons why we all MUST care —
#1 — every single case of measles is preventable.
#2 — 1 in 5 cases of measles will require hospitalization. These individuals will use resources (staff, ventilators, medications) that could be used by others. Hospitalizations are preventable.
#3 — in rural communities, like mine, where healthcare facilities are not capable of handling severely ill children, pediatric cases are often sent to neighboring hospitals (sometimes hours away). Children are separated from their parents and sent to an unfamiliar hospital (if a bed is available). Families are faced with hospital bills, hotel charges, and travel expenses, not to mention the complications of being separated and dealing with the stress of a sick child. All of this is preventable.
#4 — A case of measles puts every child under 1 year of age (and unable to be vaccinated) at risk for measles and all the complications listed above.1
#5 — A kid with measles will miss a couple of weeks of school (parents will miss work, too). All of these missed school days are preventable.
Measles can be prevented with a vaccine that costs less than $1 per dose.
In a world with countless health problems that are not vaccine-preventable — we need to take advantage of opportunities to full-on prevent diseases like measles from occurring in the first place. This will give us the time, money, resources, person-power, and brain space to tackle other health problems that are not vaccine-preventable.
In light of the rising cases of measles — the CDC used its Health Alert Network on Monday to tell clinicians that infants 6 months of age and older who are traveling internationally should receive their measles vaccine before their trip.
$ to Support Women’s Healthcare Research
On Monday, President Biden signed an Executive Order to expand women’s healthcare research. Specifically, it will “help improve the health and lives of women across the country.” This Order came with a pledge that $200 million would be available to support initiatives to improve and better understand women’s health. According to the Executive Order, the money will go to NIH.
The President noted that several diseases — such as heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease — have different risk factors, present differently, and kill women at different rates compared to men. Additionally, there are diseases, such as endometriosis and fibroids, that are unique to women.
This new money and the Executive Order will create opportunities to research and better understand the unique differences between men and women as well as provide a space to study diseases that are specific to women.
According to Knowable Magazine —
“The state of women’s health in the US is shocking … Women in the US fare poorly in one way or another compared with women in other high-income countries, compared with US men, and even compared with previous generations of American women. And there’s no sign that these patterns are improving.
Mortality statistics show that US women live substantially shorter lives than women in other high-income countries. While US women’s life expectancy at birth was similar to the average across 23 comparison nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 1980, by 2019 the US had fallen to the bottom of the pack. That year, US women’s life expectancy was 81.4 years — 3.2 years lower than the average across those comparison nations and more than four years lower than in Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain, and Japan.
US rates of maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity — “near-miss” events that could have resulted in death — are inexcusable. They have been rising for decades, with troubling increases in recent years. Between 2018 and 2020, the US maternal mortality rate increased from 17.4 deaths per 100,000 live births to 23.8. For comparison, in 2020, the US maternal mortality rate was more than three times higher than that of 10 other high-income countries, including Canada, the UK and Germany. A 2022 CDC report suggests most pregnancy-related deaths in the US are preventable.
Delivery isn’t the only risk to pregnant people in the US: They die even more often from homicide than they do from pregnancy-related causes. Homicide also ranks among the top five causes of death for girls and women up to age 44 in the US overall.”
In my opinion — this investment in women’s healthcare is long overdue.
Questions? Thoughts about MacKenzie Scott’s gifts, measles, or women’s health?
Please share this good news sandwich with your friends and family —
Epi(demiology) Matters is written by Dr. Becky Dawson, PhD MPH — an epidemiologist, teacher, mom, wife, and dedicated yogi. She is a tenured professor at Allegheny College, Research Director at a community hospital, and an exclusive contributor (all things health & medicine) at Erie News Now (NBC/CBS). Her goal is to create healthy communities for all. She writes Epi Matters — first & foremost because epidemiology does matter (to all of us) and she hopes that each post will help to educate and empower readers to be healthy and create healthy communities.
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Law & Order SVU highlighted the consequences of an unvaccinated child with measles transmitting the disease to another child under the age of 1 in an episode, titled Selfish (season 10 episode 19). While some of the public health vocabulary is not exactly right and the episode jumps the shark and lands on another important epidemic, it clearly illustrates the community consequences of one measles case.