Public Health Scene

On April 27, after reviewing information about the confirmed cases of swine flu, the World Health Organization raised the level of influenza pandemic alert from the current phase 3 to phase 4.

What does this mean? And what should you know about the swine flu? We talked with Nick Kelley, a research assistant with the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

For starters, there's a lot that public health experts don't know yet, he says. But he recommends that people stay home if they are sick and says that families should develop their own personal and family emergency plan.

Listen to Kelley on Public Health Scene (4 min. 53 sec)

Resources
World Health Organization
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota
Minnesota Department of Health

Posted by Mark Engebretson at 10:31 AM
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Public health experts have been warning us about the next flu pandemic. Is swine flu it?

It's too soon to tell, says Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

“What makes this so difficult is we may be somewhere between an important but yet still uneventful public health occurrence here — with something that could literally die out over the next couple of weeks and never show up again — or this could be the opening act of a full-fledged influenza pandemic," Osterholm told Fox News.

“We have no clue right now where we are between those two extremes. That's the problem.”

More from Fox News
More from CIDRAP

Posted by Mark Engebretson at 12:08 PM
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Regularly eating red meat that is burned or charred may increase your risk of pancreatic cancer by almost 60 percent, according to a study by Kristin Anderson, a University of Minnesota cancer researcher.

“Our findings in this study are further evidence that turning down the heat when grilling, frying, and barbecuing to avoid excess burning or charring of the meat may be a sensible way for some people to lower their risk for getting pancreatic cancer,” Anderson said.

Meanwhile, University of Minnesota researcher Jian-Min Yuan has found a direct link, for the first time, between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

“We’ve known for a long time that smoking increases a person’s risk for getting lung cancer, but we have not been able to clearly answer why one smoker would eventually develop lung cancer and another one would not. Now we know one definitive link,” Yuan said.

More about Anderson's study from MPR
Read the release about Anderson's study

More about Yuan's study from CNN.com
Read the release about Yuan's study

Posted by Mark Engebretson at 9:08 AM
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Research led by Katherine Bauer at the University of Minnesota found a significant increase in the amount of fast food that adolescents are eating today compared with the late 1990s.

She also discovered increases in the amount of fast food the adolescents ate as they moved from middle school to high school, and in male adolescents as they moved from high school into young adulthood.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is that male high school athletes eat more fast food.

Using data from Project EAT, a study of more than 2,500 Twin Cities adolescents, Bauer found that 27 percent of high school girls reported eating fast food more than three times per week in 2004, compared with only 19 percent in 1999.

Listen to Bauer on this installment of Public Health Scene

Posted by Mark Engebretson at 2:09 PM
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