DONNA STROUP: Thank you Bill, I am delighted to be able to welcome you here at your third Plenary conference. Here you are almost half way through your conference, and you are being asked to define your field. I think that is quite an exciting thing for us to be doing. Well, we are waiting for the first slide to come up. I want to ask a favor. Those of you who are in the audience, who would consider yourself students in degree programs or close enough to degree programs, that you still feel like a student, would you mind standing up for a minute? Thank you, I’d like the rest of you to look around.
We want to welcome these folks, who are students with us here, and I would like you to notice where they are, and go up and speak to them during the break. I would argue to you that this is the face of the future of the MCH EPI field, and we need to pay attention to these folks. Thanks and welcome.
Well, what is MCH EPI? We are certainly concerned with the safety of reproductive health, and of the perinatal age of infants, but I think this session may show you that this is not your mother’s MCH field anymore. We have heard sessions at this conference on teenage and unintended pregnancies on the reproductive health issues of an aging population. Reproductive health issues associated with man, obesity, and diabetes among kids and pregnant women, mental health, and quality of life issues. So a broadening of the field of Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology. I want to very quickly argue that you should be thinking about MCH EPI in terms of sort of a three-legged stool. Surveillance program and research, and for the purpose of a welcome, and to make this go quicker think about policy and legislation as being included in that program, leg of the stool.
First of all, for surveillance, we really want to make it clear that we see in the MCHs field data being important for healthcare providers for the public, and for people who are in the position of making policy. Our PRAMS system, which many of you are familiar with is still alive and well. We are looking at new ways of helping you with analysis of PRAMS data as well as coordinating with other data systems in the states to reduce burden and increase the utility of this data system. Our Assisted Reproductive Technology System historically has been used to monitor success rates and adverse events associated with this procedure. Currently, we are looking at making state-specific data available, and developing new measures of success of this technology. In the future, we would like to look towards linkages to birth defects registries, and longitudinal follow-up of children who are born as a result of ART. In terms of program policy and legislation, we work with many, many partners, and as this slide shows the number and type of our partners are increasing greatly. As just an example of some of these initiatives, I would like to update you in the President’s Healthier US initiative, which is an effort to help all Americans take steps to improve personal health, and fitness, and encourages all of us to be physically active, eat a nutritious diet, get appropriate preventive screening, and make healthy choices avoiding risk behavior. Specifically, this initiative is concerned with the increasing prevalence of overweight among children and teens.
Shown here from 1983 to 2000 among boys and girls aged 6 to 19. The cooperative agreement that has been awarded by CDC this summer, focuses on these core health areas, diabetes, asthma, obesity, physical activity, nutrition, tobacco use, and delivery of health care services. The STEPS awardees, which were awarded grants at the end of fiscal year 2003, last September are shown in this slide. They are a combination of state coordinated small city and rural communities, tribes, and tribal entities, and large cities and urban communities. Many of you will find yourself in an area covered by one of these STEPS grants. Some of the proposed interventions involve school activities, organize community interventions, environmental interventions, and policy interventions. There can be more information found on our website. Another example of how we are reaching out to the community that you service through your work is our VERB campaign. VERB is a campaign developed by teens for tweens.
Tweens is that interesting age of children between ages about 9 and 13. The essence of the campaign is to feel their own exploration, discovery, and the navigation of their dreams. Values focused on kid power, fairness of level playing field across all ages, grades, and cultures, where the things were most excited about, and it’s to enable or support a kid in hard activity that is there for these tweens 24 x 7. In terms of the campaign strategy for CDC, the initial activities last year were to generate awareness, and brand affinity, which is ongoing. We are now in phase II, which is to incite trial and action, and phase III will be to encourage, and reinforce everyday play, and you will notice that my language here is play and not exercise or physical activity. The phase II, which we are currently involved with, there is an awareness to activation adjective, which is to motivate tweens to actually incorporate physical activity into their everyday lives.
But we do this in a way that surrounds the child with opportunity, sort of like surround sound in a media activity, in the family, in their school, in their place where they go after school, on the web, on the TV. So even though we are trying to motivate them not to sit there and watch TV, we realized that that’s where they go for lots of their information, so we are partnering with TV media in order to do that. Here is an example of one of the TV ads to give you a flavor of this campaign. This one is called “Basketball”. And imagine if you will of the TVs shot starts, by zooming in with these kids playing basketball in a backyard, who netted there garage, and then the camera spans out, and you see that there is a professional sports caster and a TV camera, and the notion here is to make playing basketball in the backyard as exciting for kids as is in fact major league sports.
One of the most exciting parts of this campaign is our outreach to different ethnic communities, African, American, Native American, and Hispanic. Here are three examples of school posters for the African-American communities, Hip Hop scotch, Marco Water Polo, and KB Ball, and the objective here is to show how everyday play that can be done without a lot of external rules or equipment. Can be fun for these kids, and can be incorporated as part of their everyday activities. We take advantage of things that are happening in the community. Anyway you all may remember we changed time zone in many parts of the country last October. We took advantage of that, and we called it extra hour for extra action, had a big media blitz on that day, and this is where my favorite little cartoons to the extra foot for extra action get the idea.
We also use electronic media for reaching tweens and adults. There are three different websites depending on whether you consider yourself a tween, a partner or a somebody who is interested in getting more information. For time I am just going to take you very quickly through some of the tween websites. This is the homepage for that website, and these little buttons are very cool when you mouse over and they give out really cool little sounds that the kids seem to like. One of the things that’s most impressive to us is the use of VERB recorder, where I can go and log in activities that they do during the day. This is what the recorder looks like, and when they are done, they can register at the end for some prizes, and some giveaways. Beside it is also linked to activities in their area. For example if they tell us they are interested in outdoor activities, then they get links to the parks and preservation sites close by.
Another exciting aspect of this activity is our pro-VERB campaign, which is partnering with professional sports leagues to leverage aspirational messages, and to elevate the coolness factor of the VERB brand. There is some science to this activity as well. The initial evaluation campaign analysis shows a 74 per cent awareness among this age group of the activity, which our market researchers tell us is truly an amazing figure for this point in the campaign. So if you are interested in this, there are three places that you can go depending on whether you are a tween or a parent or a partner. And finally our research activities, just to give you an example of this, this year collaborators released results from the CDC NICHD Women’s Contraceptive and Reproductive Experiences Study.
This was a very vigorous and carefully designed study to explore the use of oral contraceptives and their increase on the risk of breast cancer among women 35 to 64 years of age. And the bottom line to the question if does the use of oral contraceptives increase the risk of breast cancer, it’s critically important to millions of women across this country, who are taking or contemplating taking oral contraceptives. What these researchers showed is that the answer to that question is no, which is a very reassuring message for research to be sending among women 45 to 64 years of age, neither former use nor current use of oral contraceptives significantly increase breast cancer in this population. Another exciting area our research relates to providing the guidance for the World Health Organization’s family planning guidelines. These researchers classify the family planning activities into four categories ranging from no restriction to an unacceptable health risk. Here is an example for the case of smoking and contraceptive use, about how the guidelines come out.
So the column shows you various categories of women by age, and by smoking status, and then various types of contraceptives, so it is an easy way for folks, clinicians to look at the evidence and make recommendations to women about the use of contraceptive. The website for the full text of the guidelines is available here and just to close to let you know that Dr. Gerberding at CDC is very committed to a new strategic direction for our agency. She sights critical challenges for CDC as building a 21st Century Public Health System as preparing for health threats here and abroad and finally is transforming knowledge into impact, so all of these three activities do have a reproductive health at Maternal and Child Epidemiology component. Her Public Health Research agenda is to mobilize the academic community to solve public health problems through a vigorous peer review and linkages with NIH and other funding institutions.
Our research is continues among the way from the fundamental research to application and then the feedback loop back again. In that they, Dr. Gerberding has established an office of Public Health Research, which will create and apply public health research agenda and coordinate investigator initiated in young investigator grand awards. So enclosing let me encourage you to enjoy this conversation on Maternal and Child Epidemiology and really help us to reinvent this field for the future of public health.
Thank you