Kyle Fluegge – Issue Analyst

I recently found an exhibit which brought up a case example of childhood lead exposure and the consequences on health that can result, even for relatively minor exposures.  However, their focus was early childhood exposure, which is a valid research point from a public health perspective.  However, I sought to go a little deeper and do some investigating on the effects of prenatal lead exposure and was surprised by some of the latest research. a)    Schell and colleagues (2009) examined the effects of prenatal lead exposure on a variety of … [Read more...]

It  is  often  unfortunately  easy  to  understand how drug resistance happened with tuberculosis (TB) - an entirely man-made phenomenon in which patients either could not or did not comply with the long treatment regimens,  often suffering extremely unpleasant side effects from the medications. Thus, new mutations in susceptible TB strains can occur within a patient. But what about malaria? Resistance  has  been  confirmed  by  the World Health Organization at the Cambodia-Thailand border and spreading to the Greater Mekong area. … [Read more...]

I was recently asked to comment on identifying one public health threat within nutrition, identify the population most at risk for this threat, and describe a specific strategy that you feel will be most effective at addressing this threat. I ran across an article in my brief research on the topic and came up with the following. A significant public health threat with regard to nutrition is a misguided focus on what constitutes a healthy diet among indigenous populations. That is to say, (Western) public health nutritionists and doctors try to … [Read more...]