HHS’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released a new report that shows about 1 in 5 American adults engage in a high level of overall physical activity, including both activity at work and during leisure time. At the other end of the spectrum, about 1 in 4 American adults engage in little or no regular physical activity.
The U.S. government announced that it will begin testing a system using handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs) for transmitting urgent information about biological agents to clinicians. The three-month pilot test of the PDA network is designed to gauge the best ways for federal officials to communicate effectively with front-line clinicians in the event of a bioterrorist attack. The project will evaluate how and when clinicians download this urgent information and whether they find it useful to receive it via their PDAs. “This important new project will allow us to harness the power of technology to communicate with many of the doctors, nurses, and other clinicians who will be called on to diagnose and treat patients quickly in the event of a bioterrorist attack,” HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson said.
Americans’ life expectancy hit an all-time high in 2001, while age-adjusted deaths hit an all-time low, according to a new report released today by HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. The report from HHS’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) documents that the national age-adjusted death rate decreased slightly from 869 deaths per 100,000 population in 2000 to 855 deaths per 100,000 in 2001. There were declines in mortality among most racial, ethnic and gender groups.
The U.S. government today proposed a plan to create a smallpox vaccination compensation program to provide benefits to public health and medical response team members who are injured as a result of receiving the smallpox vaccine. It is based on a similar compensation package that is currently available to police officers and firefighters.
HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson today announced the award of two contracts totaling up to $20 million in first-year funding to develop safer smallpox vaccines. The three-year contracts were awarded to Bavarian Nordic A/S of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Acambis Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) will administer the contracts.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson has announced the release of a comprehensive research plan from HHS’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fight autoimmune diseases, a collection of disorders including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis that affect an estimated 14 to 22 million Americans. The plan will foster research to identify genetic, environmental and infectious causes of autoimmune diseases and to develop new treatments and prevention strategies.
The Bush Administration said it will ask Congress for legislation requiring drug companies to conduct pediatric clinical trials on new medicines. Clearer legislative authority is needed, instead of pursuing appeals in the courts, the administration believes. “The fastest and most decisive route for establishing clear authority in this area is to work with Congress for new legislation,” Secretary Tommy Thompson said. “Children are a special population that need to have access to drugs that can benefit them, and these drugs need to be properly tested for pediatric use, not prescribed and sold without testing. Congress alone can speak clearly on the authority that FDA needs and the provisions that may be appropriate for drug manufacturers when they are required to carry out these tests.”
HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson today invited all persons with questions about smallpox and the President’s vaccination plan to visit www.smallpox.gov for comprehensive and up-to-the-minute information. “This is a complicated issue that involves a careful balance between the possibility that smallpox might actually be released at some time by terrorists, and the known risks that are associated with the vaccine itself,” Secretary Thompson said. “I know from my own experience that this issue is complex and difficult, and we need to have answers easily available.”
The federal government today published its biennial Report on Carcinogens, adding steroidal estrogens used in estrogen replacement therapy and oral contraceptives to its official list of “known” human carcinogens. This and 15 other new listings bring the total of substances in the report, “known” or “reasonably anticipated” to pose a cancer risk, to 228. Among the other new additions: wood dust and ultraviolet light.