American journal of preventive medicine
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Low- and middle-income countries, where emerging diseases often make their debut, are also likely to bear the harshest consequences of a potential influenza pandemic. Yet public health systems in developing countries are underfunded, understaffed, and in many cases struggling to deal with the existing burden of disease. As a result, developed countries are beginning to expand assistance for emergency preparedness to the developing world. ⋯ Evidence from the U. S. and other developed countries suggests that some investments in bioterror and pandemic emergency preparedness, although initially implemented as vertical programs, have the potential to strengthen the general public health infrastructure. This experience may hold some lessons for how global funds for emergency preparedness could be invested in developing countries to support struggling public health systems in responding to current health priorities as well as potential future public health threats.
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The VERB campaign promoted physical activity to U. S. children aged 9-13 years (tweens) by surrounding them with appealing messages that were associated with the VERB brand and tag line It's what you do. To maximize the impact of the campaign, VERB had a two-level strategy for its marketing. ⋯ This article focuses on VERB's market segmentation strategy and reports how messages for the general audience were adapted to reach specific racial or ethnic segments of the U. S. population. Findings are reported from qualitative studies conducted with tweens and the parents of tweens from these ethnic groups, and the marketing strategies used to reach each ethnic group and the results of evaluations of those strategies are also described.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Clinical skills and self-efficacy after a curriculum on care for the underserved.
Despite calls for medical school curricula that address care for the underserved, published evaluations of such curricula are few and often do not assess clinical skills. This study assesses the changes in self-efficacy and clinical skills resulting from faculty-led or web-based curricula on care for the underserved. ⋯ Web-based and faculty-led curricula improve medical student self-efficacy and clinical skills. Results from specific self-efficacy and skill items facilitate targeted curricular improvement.
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Recent national surveys document racial and ethnic disparities in receipt of smoking-cessation advice. This study updates and expands prior analyses using survey data for 2005, and evaluates the association between smokers' race and ethnicity and three separate measures of healthcare-encounter-based tobacco interventions: screening, smoking-cessation advice, and use of smoking-cessation aids. ⋯ Despite progress in smokers' being advised to quit during healthcare encounters in the past 5 years, black and Hispanic smokers continue to be less likely than whites to receive and use tobacco-cessation interventions, even after control for socioeconomic and healthcare factors. Further actions are needed to understand and eliminate this disparity.