{"id":14656,"date":"2018-09-18T13:16:27","date_gmt":"2018-09-18T13:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/ner\/?p=14656"},"modified":"2018-10-25T13:54:42","modified_gmt":"2018-10-25T13:54:42","slug":"health-literacy-is-not-a-new-topic-for-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/2018\/09\/18\/health-literacy-is-not-a-new-topic-for-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"Health Literacy is not a new topic for Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Smoke

August 10, 2018 CNN satellite photo of California wild fire<\/p><\/div>\n

Health Literacy is not a new topic for Americans.\u00a0 As a nation we have been adjusting to the latest developments on how to keep ourselves healthy for decades.\u00a0 Whether that be following the national Food Pyramid to the updated \u201chealthy plate\u201d or changing our perspective of how we prevent illness as we age.\u00a0 We follow an upbeat track to health \u2013 well we intend to do that.\u00a0 Sometimes we just aren\u2019t ready or prepared.\u00a0 When attending the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conference in Atlanta this past week I\u2019ve discovered campaigns that try to innovate ways to communicate the \u201cget and stay healthy\u201d message.<\/p>\n

Several sessions caught my attention and I\u2019d like to share them.\u00a0 First, I attended a Pre-Conference on Health Literacy as a Driver of Healthier Communities.\u00a0 This session provided links to the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy @ http:\/\/www.health.gov\/communication\/HLActionPlan<\/a>.\u00a0 We reviewed the Needs Assessment with an \u2018honest\u2019 approach to who will participate versus who we really want to participate when we are looking into changing community health behaviors.\u00a0 One large component of this assessment is that we are all trying to organize the same action plan and with the right resources\/tools we can get the job done.\u00a0 Examples used were the National Assessment of Adult Literacy which has state and county estimates and can be found at: http:\/\/nces.ed.gov\/naal\/estimates\/StateEstimates.aspx<\/a>; and Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit at http:\/\/www.ahrq.gov\/qual\/literacy\/<\/a>.\u00a0 These resources can help with program planning.<\/p>\n

Another message I\u2019d like to share with you from this conference was from the \u201cChallenging Traditional Methods of Public Health Messaging\u201d session.\u00a0 One speaker reminded us to look to the behavioral change not by generalized demographics but to look within each group by segment.\u00a0 For example, teens should not be grouped by age but by the things that are meaningful to them. In this case, it was music.\u00a0 The teens were branded as popular, country, alternative, hip-hop and a moderate\/traditional group.\u00a0 Within the traditional group they were less likely to use tobacco or be part of unhealthy behaviors.\u00a0 This group was about 30% of all teens.\u00a0 The second group falls into popular and are more apt to follow others, perhaps for attention and they were more likely to smoke and drink in high school.\u00a0 The other teen groups, alternative (Goth was mentioned), country or hip-hop had positive behavior changes in reducing or removing negative health habits (smoking, drinking) from their lifestyle when advertisements were paired with their group\u2019s popular musicians tell their audiences that they don\u2019t smoke or drink.\u00a0 Studies showed that this messaging works!<\/p>\n

The last two messages that had an environmental direction in health was regarding a Citizen Science study called Smoke Sense.\u00a0 This is a downloadable app from the Environmental Protection Agency (www.epa.gov\/air-research\/smoke-sense<\/a>) that provides information about air quality, wild land fires, and smoke from those fires across the U.S.\u00a0 This mobile application provides a way for users to learn how smoke affects their health, allows them to anonymously log health symptoms and smoke observations, and promotes preventive healthy behaviors around wild land fire smoke exposure.<\/p>\n

The final segment is all about ticks, yes, those nasty little virus hoarding parasites that apparently are almost as dangerous as the world\u2019s most deadly creature, the mosquito.\u00a0 Unbeknownst to me, ticks are prolific all year around.\u00a0 Dr. Mather, aka the Tick Doctor, had a great presentation regarding tick identification, removal of these little pests and how you could be a \u201ctick spotter\u201d https:\/\/tickencounter.org\/tickspotters<\/a>\u00a0 as a Citizen Science project for your school or public library.\u00a0 One neat fact I learned is that not all ticks are inactive in the fall and winter.\u00a0\u00a0 Another reason to learn more about my environment.\u00a0 Happy sleuthing!<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Health Literacy is not a new topic for Americans.\u00a0 As a nation we have been adjusting to the latest developments on how to keep ourselves healthy for decades.\u00a0 Whether that be following the national Food Pyramid to the updated \u201chealthy plate\u201d or changing our perspective of how we prevent illness as we age.\u00a0 We follow… Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1165,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[319,14],"tags":[348,110],"class_list":["post-14656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-of-us","category-public-health-review","tag-citizen-science","tag-health-literacy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14656"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14729,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14656\/revisions\/14729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}