by Kevin Schofield
This weekend’s read is a new report titled “Building the CDC the Country Needs.” It’s been a rough three years for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, better known as the CDC, and its reputation has suffered greatly as a result of the enormous demands and intense scrutiny it has worked under since the beginning of the pandemic.
Continue reading Weekend Reads | Rebuilding the CDCby Ronnie Estoque
Last month, the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) announced several resources for teachers and students to learn more about the intersection between climate change and health. The DOH partnered with the Puget Sound Educational Service District (PSESD) to create the Washington Tracking Network (WTN), which is the nation’s first Environmental Public Health Tracking program to offer learning modules for high school students. The free materials lead students through various lesson plans that utilize DOH data to understand topics such as the connections between asthma and wildfires.
Continue reading DOH Creates Resources to Highlight Intersections of Climate Change and Healthby Sally James
State health officials sounded a familiar, late-stage refrain on COVID-19 Wednesday: Washington is seeing diminishing cases, but the pandemic is not over.
There has been an uptick in cases in King County, according to the Seattle & King County Public Health dashboard, which showed cases were up 42% — from about 175 to 250 daily cases — in the past week.
Continue reading Cases Down Statewide, but Uptick in King County for COVID-19by Lynniah Grayson
Everyone lost to gun violence is someone’s beloved. Beloved is a multi-media campaign exploring gun violence in-depth in four phases: The Problem of gun violence as a symptom of illness (or infection) caused by systemic inequality; The History of gun violence, root causes, and local and national data trends. The Solutions to end gun violence including King County Public Health’s regional approach to gun violence prevention and treatments; and finally, the ideation of a world without gun violence, The Beloved Community. The Beloved project is brought to you in partnership with Seattle Office of Arts & Culture Hope Corps program, King County’s Public Health team, Converge Media, Black Coffee Northwest, Toybox Consulting, Creative Justice, The Facts Newspaper, Forever Safe Spaces, Northwest African American Museum, Presidential Media, and the South Seattle Emerald.
I once heard someone say, “It won’t be long until Black men in America are extinct.” That statement shook me to my core, and new thoughts flooded my mind around the notion that it might become true.
Could it be that mass incarceration and gun violence made them believe this?
Continue reading OPINION: 911! We Must Act Quickly to Save Our Beloved Communityby Elizabeth Turnbull
After over a year of pushing through the pandemic, state and county health officials are hopeful about declining COVID-19 cases and hospitalization rates. But at the same time, significant pockets of Washington State and King County residents remain unvaccinated as restrictions are set to be lifted statewide next week.
“We still have people that have not been vaccinated, we still have people who are unprotected, and we still have people that are going to be at risk for COVID-19,” said Dr. Umair Shah, the Washington Secretary of Health at a press conference on Wednesday, June 23. “We want to make sure that that message of vaccination continues to be there.”
Continue reading As State Prepares to Reopen, Some Communities Still Have Lower Vaccination Ratesby Erica C. Barnett
(This article was previously published at PubliCola and has been reprinted with permission.)
Six months after the City Council allocated $100,000 to “develop and implement a publicly accessible sink program that utilizes the Street Sink style handwashing station model developed by the Clean Hands Collective,” Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) has finally chosen two vendors to receive the money.
Slightly more than half, $60,000, will go to the Clean Hands Collective, an organization founded by Real Change that includes landscape architects and public health experts; the rest, $40,000, will go to Seattle Makers, a South Lake Union “makerspace” that designed a prototype “handwashing station” at an estimated cost of $7,250 per unit — about 10 times the price of Clean Hands’ Street Sink. According to Seattle Makers’ website, the City reached out to them to design the sink.
Tiffani McCoy, the advocacy director at Real Change, said she thinks “we can easily put up 45 sinks for the $60,000,” assuming it will cost about $10,000 to roll out the program — a process that will include building and maintaining the sinks as well as finding new locations for many of them.
Continue reading City Finally Funds Street Sinks Six Months After Funding From City Councilby Carolyn Bick
There was nothing but good news at the Public Health – Seattle & King County COVID-19 briefing on Wednesday, May 12.
Public Health – Seattle & King County (PHSKC) Health Officer Dr. Jeff Duchin announced in the press conference that the data suggests that not only has the County started to “turn the corner” on its most recent surge of COVID-19 cases, but that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has officially approved the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) emergency use authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer vaccine to be administered to young people aged 12-15.
Continue reading Seattle and King County 12-15-Year-Olds Become Vaccine-Eligibleby Shann Thomas
Dr. Stephaun E. Wallace already had a lengthy list of job titles: the director of external relations for Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s (Fred Hutch) HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), faculty appointments at Fred Hutch and the University of Washington (UW), as a staff scientist and clinical assistant professor respectively, in addition to launching the inaugural Office of Community Engagement for the UW/Fred Hutch Center for AIDS Research.
After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, however, Wallace expanded his current job as director of external relations for HVTN to include the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN), which coordinated all major COVID-19 vaccine efficacy trials except Pfizer-BioNTech’s.
Wallace smiles, and says, “My mother and my team accuse me of … being a triplet; because they’re like ‘We don’t understand how one person can do all that you do and still … absorb as much information’ as I do, and have the mastery of having to categorize it and spit it back out without much concern or draw there.”
Continue reading Behind the Mask: Public Health Innovator Dr. Stephaun E. Wallaceby Asqual Getaneh, MD
In February 2020, International Community Health Services (ICHS) was the first of the nation’s nearly 1,400 federally qualified health centers — serving 30 million people, most of them low-income immigrants and refugees — with a positive COVID-19 diagnosis.
Our staff have seen the tragic costs of a pandemic that has infected more than 100 million people worldwide and claimed more than 2 million deaths. So, when the first doses of the Moderna vaccine rolled through our doors on Dec. 23, we felt ready.
Continue reading OPINION: More Will Die From Covid Without Meaningful Change to Health Careby Carolyn Bick
King County will be committing $7 million to ramp up vaccination efforts to prevent against COVID-19, with two high-volume vaccination sites slated for South King County in the near future, King County Executive Dow Constantine announced in a public health briefing on Jan. 8.
Continue reading King County Commits $7 Million to Increased Vaccination Efforts, Won’t Change Jail COVID Protocols
