Medical Device Daily

ATLANTA – The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta) gets most of its attention following the outbreak of a new infection and the resultant worldwide public scare. And the headlines then call up images of age of white-suited and white-hooded figures sealing off potential victims behind plastic or glass in some foreign locale.

But during an opening session of the CDC's National Health Promotion Conference, Center , its very first, Director Julie Gerberding, MD, yesterday served to emphasize that the real disasters are usually more immediate and closer to home. And she told the 1,500 or so attendees at the conference that they were “a very, very powerful” sign of the willingness to emphasize day-to-day disease prevention and health maintenance.

In a nod to the reorganization that the CDC is undergoing under her leadership – and one drawing considerable internal negative critiquing, according to a recent article in Atlanta's main newspaper, the Journal-Constitution — Gerberding noted that she recently had spent two weeks working at a hospital in San Francisco, and that the diseases facing the patients there were AIDS, liver disease, undiagnosed cancer, not one the victim of a hurricane or terrorism, or ill as a result of an anthrax episode.

Instead – and getting to the heart of the subject at hand – she said these were disease problems that the CDC is giving more focus to, diseases that affect individuals and families in the U.S. every day, and not requiring heroic measures but simply calling for healthier lifestyle choices.

“If we all focused on a few things, we could really make a difference,” she said, adding that the CDC's strategy for preventing disease is to be a “good partner” to other organizations with that mission.

Gerberding was joined by Janet Collins, PhD, director, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion – CDC ; Lynn Nicholas, CEO of the American Diabetes Association (ADA; Alexandria, Virginia); Rose Marie Robertson, MD, chief science officer, American Heart Association (AHA; Dallas); and John Seffrin, CEO, American Cancer Society (Atlanta).

Chronic illnesses, Collins said, are not always the hottest, most visible health subjects, but they affect many in the U.S. in very real ways, including length of life, quality of life and healthcare costs. And she echoed Gerberding's sentiment by calling these the “urgent realities of our day.”

The ADA, AHA and ACS representatives all emphasized their joint efforts to collaborate, saying they were needed to set aside competition for members and donated dollars in order to come together in a united front against disease.

Seffrin said that when representatives of the three groups met, they found a common agreement that 80% of all deaths in the U.S. are a result of cancer, stroke, heart attack or diabetes. And as he pointed out, such diseases all interrelated and almost always brought on by poor lifestyle choices.

“These disease processes are highly preventative,” Seffrin said, saying that the representatives thought that the organizations together “could make an impact we couldn't make alone.” And he pointed to research indicating that there is no single voting person in the U.S. who doesn't recognize at least one of these three advocacy groups.

Nichols told the audience there are three central goals of the group's Preventative Health Partnership Plan: increasing people's awareness of healthy lifestyles; increasing awareness of providers' attention on healthy lifestyles; and buttressing these two goals with pertinent legislation.

The “four basic pillars” for individuals are the things many people's parents tell them: Eat Right; Don't Smoke; Get Active; and See Your Doctor. The partnership's theme is “Everyday Choices for Healthier Lives” and features a “multi-faceted strategy” include a toll-free number, brochure and web site (www.everydaychoices.org).

To make the same point, Robertson relayed a story from the days after 9/11 during the anthrax scares, when Larry King asked a guest on his CNN interview what people should do to protect themselves, if they were worried about dying.

The guest, Robertson said, replied simply: “Stop smoking and fasten their seatbelts.”

“We obviously have to be concerned with global threats,” she said, but one in four Americans has high blood pressure, which will prove more important than any other factor in determining the length and quality of life.

She later added, “We need to find ways to present information [to the public] that is not alarmist” and that organizations such as the AHA are “absolutely dependent on the media” to get out the desired messages.

Earlier in the morning, speaking on the topic of “Health Promotion is Everyone's Business,” Edward Hill, MD, past president of the American Medical Association (Chicago), said that the media is probably has the “single most influence” of any group regarding behavior.

Illustrating this, he said a 16-month old child can act out what he sees on TV, “which means that he can take in information and analyze it.”

Rather than wanting sex education in schools, which he noted sometimes overlooks “the hormone theory,” he said he supports teaching appropriate decision-making skills at a very early age. Hill suggested that solid decision-making may result in a teenager making the right choices about sex than any other program intended to reduce risky teenage sexual behavior.

And he suggested that any health education program should be local in nature and determined at the local school district level.

“Just like all politics is local, all health education is local,” he said.

Responding to a question regarding how to integrate mental health education into health education, Hill suggested that mental health always suffers from both recognizing illness and having insurers pay for it.

“We first have to quit denying that mental illness is a big problem in our society,” he said, though he acknowledged that the stigma of mental illness has been eased – particularly in regard to depression — with health education efforts.

And he argued that the best was to address the high costs of mental illness would be to allocate money in public school systems for good counselors and school psychologists who can identify and help parents act on potential imbalances early in a child's life.

“It would be expensive,” Hill said, but much less so than the cost of treatment later in life.