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In the United States, groups advocating for and against abortion rights often deploy public health arguments to advance their positions. Recently, these arguments have evolved into state laws that use the government health department infrastructure to increase law enforcement and regulatory activities around abortion. Many major medical and public health associations oppose these new laws because they are not evidence-based and do not protect women's health. Yet state health departments have been defending these laws in court. We propose a 21st-century public health approach to abortion based in an accepted public health framework. Specifically, we apply the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 10 Essential Public Health Services framework to abortion to describe how health departments should engage with abortion. With this public health framework as our guide, we argue that health departments should be facilitating women's ability to obtain an abortion in the state and county where they reside, researching barriers to abortion care in their states and counties, and promoting the use of a scientific evidence base in abortion-related laws, policies, regulations, and implementation of essential services.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: High rates of unintended pregnancy and need for reproductive health services (RHS), including abortion, require continued efforts to train medical professionals and increase availability of these services. With US approval 12 years ago of Mifepristone, a medication abortion pill, abortion services are additionally amenable to primary care. Family physicians are a logical group to focus on given that they provide the bulk of primary care. METHODS: We analyzed data from an annual survey (2007-2010) of third-year family medicine residents (n=284, response rate=48%-64%) in programs offering abortion training to examine the association between such training and self-reported competence and intentions to provide RHS (with a particular focus on abortion) upon graduation from residency. RESULTS: The majority of residents (75% in most cases) were trained in each of the RHS we asked about; relatively fewer trained in implant insertion (39%), electric vacuum aspiration (EVA) (58%), and manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) (69%). Perceived competence on the part of the graduating residents ranged from high levels in pregnancy options counseling (89%) and IUD insertion (85%) to lows in ultrasound and EVA (both 34%). Bivariate analysis revealed significant associations between number of procedures performed and future intentions to provide them. The association between competence and intentions persisted for all procedures in multivariate analysis, adjusting for number of procedures. Further, the total number of abortions performed during residency increased the odds of intending to provide MVA and medication abortion by 3% and 2%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Findings support augmenting training in RHS for family medicine residents, given that almost half (45%) of those trained intended to provide abortions. The volume of training should be increased so more residents feel competent, particularly in light of the fact that combined exposure to different abortion procedures has a cumulative impact on intention to provide MVA and medication abortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented about the use of sterilization of women in the U.S. and Puerto Rico in controlling the population. It states the difference of sterilization among Puerto Rican and Mexican women relative to historical context. Moreover, it features the sterilization abuse committed by women of Mexican origin.

The article presents information on a study that examined the treatment of asthma in adults. In the treatment of asthma exacerbations, nebulizers are preferred over metered-dose inhaler. However, some studies indicate that both are equivalent. To further compare both methods, this study was conducted in two phases. Physicians began treatment with nebulizer during the first twelve months. Then for the following eighteen months, patients were treated with albuterol delivered via metered-dose inhalers. Results indicated that treatment with albuterol using metered-dose inhalers was as effective as treatment by a nebulizer in adult asthma patients.

Introduction: There is an urgent need to address pervasive inequities in health and healthcare in the USA. Many areas of health inequity are well known, but there remain important unexplored areas, and for many populations in the USA, accessing data to visualize and monitor health equity is difficult., Methods: We describe the development and evaluation of an open-source, R-Shiny application, the "Health Equity Explorer (H2E)," designed to enable users to explore health equity data in a way that can be easily shared within and across common data models (CDMs)., Results: We have developed a novel, scalable informatics tool to explore a wide variety of drivers of health, including patient-reported Social Determinants of Health (SDoH), using data in an OMOP CDM research data repository in a way that can be easily shared. We describe our development process, data schema, potential use cases, and pilot data for 705,686 people who attended our health system at least once since 2016. For this group, 996,382 unique observations for questions related to food and housing security were available for 324,630 patients (at least one answer for all 46% of patients) with 65,152 (20.1% of patients with at least one visit and answer) reporting food or housing insecurity at least once., Conclusions: H2E can be used to support dynamic and interactive explorations that include rich social and environmental data. The tool can support multiple CDMs and has the potential to support distributed health equity research and intervention on a national scale., Competing Interests: None., (© The Author(s) 2024.)