Public Health

In March madness

March 23, 2009

Basketball

There’s one thing we know for sure this week. The men’s Tar Heels are still in the game, and the women defeated UCF to advance to the second round. That’s a great way to start the week. I was really relieved to see Ty Lawson back in the men’s game Saturday night. The women play tonight.

White House garden

The most frequently e-mailed article in the New York Times last week was the story about Michelle Obama breaking ground for the new White House garden, where the First Family will grow fresh fruits and vegetables. There was a follow-up article in the Sunday paper. Issues our School has been studying and advocating about for many years now are coming front and center. Nutrition professors Marci Campbell, PhD, Alice Ammerman, DrPH, and others here (including Biostatistics’ Survey Research Unit), in collaboration with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Duke University (where I played a small role in the study) and other colleagues showed that a variety of strategies, including church gardens, resulted in modest but significant increases in fruit and vegetable consumption among people in eastern N.C. The Body and Soul program now has been disseminated nationwide, with good results. Alice Ammerman’s Gillings Innovation Lab on local foods is consistent with the national interest in locally grown foods as both good health and good economic strategies. And a UNC undergraduate student and Morehead-Cain Scholar, David Baron, has been given land by the city to start a HOPE garden. David and his colleagues will reach out to involve homeless people who also will receive some of the produce from the garden.

While we are on nutrition, Barry Popkin, PhD, Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition and director of UNC’s Interdisciplinary Obesity Center, has an important editorial in Archives of Internal Medicine this week. He highlights the interrelated concerns about meat consumption-e.g., cancer and other health risks from eating meat and impact on energy consumption and climate change from producing meat-in an editorial that accompanies results of a very large study led by the National Cancer Institute. In one of the largest studies ever conducted, the authors concluded that “reducing meat consumption has benefits beyond better health” and that “eating red and processed meat was associated with increased risk of death.”

Erin Shigekawa, a junior health policy and management major and dean’s office assistant, along with Aileen Sammon, a junior in Nutrition, were recognized as 2009 UNC Social Entrepreneur Fellows.  Erin and Aileen’s project, Camino Adelante (I Walk Forward), will partner with Carrboro Community Health Clinic to provide a group walking program for Hispanic women in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area. The program will offer health education ‘charlas’ (workshops) on the benefits of proper nutrition and exercise.

Budget woes

We are dealing with the consequences of the State’s serious budget shortfall. Chancellor Thorp’s memo last week communicated the need for all units to cut at least 5% from their budgets effective July 1st. He has communicated openly and thoughtfully about this difficult task.  I will send a separate communication about the budget in the next day or two. For now, I will say that this is incredibly painful, but many schools of public health have it much worse. I am so impressed and gratified that across the School, our department and unit heads are working really hard to save jobs and to find every possible way to cut budgets that will not result in job cuts. It will be painful, but with the extraordinary people here, we will do everything we possibly can to protect jobs and the quality of our work. The people here are our most important resource.

Departments

There’s exciting work in all our departments. I read the new Biostatistics newsletter, BiosRhythms, over the weekend and was really impressed with how much has been happening in the department and the many awards our folks received at recent statistical meetings. Similarly, our HPM students won first place in a national health care case study competition hosted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I got a chance to participate in the department’s Faculty Planning Day last week and to hear Winston Crisp, JD, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Student Affairs, talk about millennial students, followed by two student presentations on the subject. It was fascinating. I have really been impressed by the outstanding students accepted into HBHE who want to study global health. Recent faculty recruitments in the department have made HBHE even more attractive to applicants. It’s clear we need even more faculty members in the global health arena. We are all very excited about the new WHO Collaborating Centre in MCH, led by Bert Peterson, MD, professor and chair. Growth in the PHLP program shows that they have hit upon a very important model for program delivery. And there’s been interesting news out of the Middle East in the last couple weeks about a conference our ESE, EPI and Nutrition faculty members helped plan and execute as part of our contract with The Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi.

Interesting Article

Science (March 13 issue) had a good editorial by Christopher Reddy, PhD, director of the Coastal Ocean Institute, part of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Woods Hole, Mass. He discussed a topic that really resonated with me-scientist citizens.

“Now more than ever, issues such as climate change, obesity, stem cell research, green technology, and evolution are migrating from scientific journals to the non-science community, from school halls to the halls of Congress. It’s critical that scientists venture beyond their laboratories to put these issues into the correct contexts and help the public understand what is known, unknown, and under debate.”

He urged, and I agree, that we all have a responsibility to communicate and inform about science. And many people in our School do a superb job in that regard.

There’s a lot going on. Happy Monday. Barbara


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The views expressed in this blog are Barbara Rimer’s alone and do not represent the views and policies of The University of North Carolina or the Gillings School.