 Examples of Public Health 2.0 activities from around the worldSeptember 2011September 14 "It seems like Canada is the place to be when it comes to public health 2.0 at universities these days. University of British Colombia offers graduate classes on Social Media in Health and Medicine and University of Toronto is 23. September hosting a one-day conference on Public Health 2.0. The conference is led by graduate students from at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health as part of an annual student led conference event." - Nina Bjerglund, Public Health Science Communication 2.0 (blog)August 2011August 15 & 16 Our keynote speaker, Dr. Alex Jadad, was featured on TVO's The Agenda. Click on the links below to download the pod casts.
August 15 Giving low-income Americans access to healthy foods"Despite attempts to increase SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] recipients' access to wholesome foods, just a small fraction of the federal money, one-hundredth of a percent, is spent at farmers markets. To boost that, cities like Boston are trying a different tactic. At the Copley Square Farmers Market, HIV-positive members from the Boston Living Center shop for produce using Bounty Bucks -- the city's program that doubles Federal SNAP benefits. It's a dollar-for-dollar match up to ten dollars." - Jessica Ilyse Smith, Public Radio International August 9 Online 'greeting cards' notify for sex infections "The electronic 'greeting' cards are for people with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) who wish to notify their sex partners they should get tested. Recipients may not be happy to get such messages, but they will likely be grateful for the inSPOT (Internet notification service for partners or tricks) service just launched by the BC Centre for Disease Control." - Pamela Fayerman, Vancouver Sun August 8 "If we, as nurses, are committed to promoting the health of people, then we must participate in shaping the social determinants of health and promoting healthy communities." - Janice Petrella Lynch, Nurses.com July 2011July 28 "An upcoming article in the New England Journal of Medicine makes the point that Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are becoming increasingly useful tools in the public healthcare system." - Hot Button Blog, Globe & Mail
July 18 "Four out of 10 people worldwide don't have a safe way to poop. Find out why we need a toilet revolution. We need new ideas to help reduce disease and find new ways to turn crap into valuable stuff, like fuel, fertilizer, and fresh water." - Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 10 things we can learn from your health-related Twitter rants "Unprecedented new research uses billions of tweets to reveal surprising patterns about cancer, obesity, and other ailments." - Hans Villarica, The Atlantic
June 27 "A growing segment of the medical community believes that is a realistic possibility and is increasingly looking at ways to harness the power of blogs, news outlets and social-networking websites to detect disease patterns around the world." - Carly Weeks, Globe & MailJune 19 "Pachube [is] a platform that allows anyone to post and share real time data from the environment. So, maybe that’s your energy use, or the temperature in different parts of a city. Or as is currently the case in Japan, Geiger counter radiation readings." - Nora Young interviewing Usman Haque, CBC SparkJune 16 Health unit targets drinking"The Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit is using social media -- blogs, twitter and Facebook -- in addition to traditional media to raise awareness of the health impacts of drinking beyond the low-risk drinking guidelines." - Orillia Packet and Times Smartphones: A new tool for population health surveys "Could the rocketing use of smartphones be a boon for population health surveys? Trent Buskirk, an associate professor of biostatistics at the St. Louis University School of Public Health, thinks so." - Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Blog Innovation and new technologies needed to accelerate HIV response "Countries are using task-shifting and task-sharing to make progress despite the chronic shortages of health workers. They are involving local communities in counselling and testing and provision of support services. More and more, they are integrating HIV services with other health services in innovative ways." - Margaret Chan, Introductory remarks at the 2011 High-level meeting on AIDS June 7 Ghana-Kenya: Mobile phone revolution goes medical"Taking the battle against counterfeit medicines to an unlikely field, mPedigree recently launched a mobile phone application that monitors the authenticity of a drug at the point-of-sale." - Prince Ofori-Atta, The Africa Report
June 6 "The United Nations counts internet access as a basic human right in a report that bears implications both to on-going events in the Arab Spring and to the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers." - Adam Clark Estes, The Atlantic Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse "There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency." - Ali Khan, CDC Public Health Matters Blog May 11 SlutWalk sparks worldwide protest movement "SlutWalk, the in-your-face response to violence against women that began with a march in Toronto, has gone viral, inspiring plans for similar protests in more than 60 cities around the world and setting off a debate among feminists about using loaded language even if it brings huge attention to their cause." - Elizabeth Church, Globe and Mail
May 7 A single health vision binds 4 towns "The 'Community Health Summit' gathered the town’s different stakeholders in health—educators, religious leaders, farmers, fisherfolk, mothers and other government officials. Their success was manifested in the improved health indicators of SSB [Sultan sa Barongi]." - Maricar Tolosa, Inquirer Mindanao April 26 Crowdsourcing Japan's radiation levels "A group of motivated individuals have come together to create a community approach to gathering radiation data in Japan." - Dorothy Parvaz, Al Jazeera
February 9 Films for health "In 2004, the NFB 'embedded' film-maker Katerina Cizek at St. Mike's, where she worked with hospital staff and clients to create a series of multimedia project exploring various issues of health care." - David McDonald, Canadian Medical Association Journal
January 11 HealthMap: The crowdsourced infectious disease tracker that was build on nights and weekends "Two Boston-based entrepreneurs have started one of the world's leading publicly-accessible, crowdsourced websites and smartphone apps to track the spread of disease as outbreaks hit." - J. Nerenberg, Fast Company
December 2010December 16 Social Media Reshaping Healthcare: Twitter as a Public Health Surveillance Tool for the 21st Century"Dr. Gunther Eysenbach and Cynthia Chew, both researchers at Toronto’s Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, mined and archived over 2 million Twitter posts between May 1 and December 31, 2009. After carrying out an in depth analysis of these “tweets”, they validated Twitter as an effective medium to capture real-time content, sentiment, and public attention trends. Infoveillance methods include data mining, aggregation, and categorizations of online text and together form the toolkit for the new study of 'infodemiology'." - Mark Curtis, Cross-Border Biotech Blog
July 2010July CIHR Synapse Flickr Gallery The Canadian Institutes of Health Research posts health research-related images for the public to view and comment on |
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Public Health 2.0 in the News |