Another Friday means another Weekly Health Roundup!
We’re starting off this week in Kenya, where researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health spent a year collecting data from the 15 million cell phones used in the country. Why? To map how malaria spreads through the country. The results reveal some surprising information. First—and perhaps most distressing—is that mega-cities, like Nairobi, are seeing increased malaria cases, meaning mosquitoes are learning to adapt to big cities. However, the data also provide encouraging opportunities for better focusing malaria control efforts, as well as dispersing outbreak and treatment information to large groups of people at once.
State-side, the US continues to deal with more reported cases of the rare but non-contagious fungal meningitis thought to be caused by contaminated drugs administered via spinal injection. This interactive map from the New York Times provides updated information on reported cases. As the number of cases has risen, media coverage has turned its focus, in part, on exploring spinal injections’ big-picture risks, ones that existed well before this recent outbreak.
And before you start thinking that the news is entirely grim this week, a new report by the Centers for Disease Control might make you feel better. Their data indicate that while the average overall life expectancy in the U.S. has remained the same (78.7 years), death rates overall reached a record low. But the most positive finding was that death rates for five of the top 15 causes of death dropped in 2011. Even more encouraging are the declines in death rates from cancer and heart disease, which together, accounted for close to 50% of all deaths in the United States in 2011. Although HIV is not in the top 15 causes of death, it saw a 7.7% in death rate, but researchers warned that it is still a public health concern particularly among the 15-64-year-old populations.
