New Rankings Showcase Community Health
Falls Church, Virginia, is only two square miles, but the tiny city has a huge designation: it has been named the healthiest community in the United States.
Shoppers browse for tomatoes at the City of Falls Church, Virginia, Farmers Market in April. The city topped a new list of 3000 healthy communities from US News & World Report and the Aetna Foundation.
Photo by Michele Late, The Nation’s Health.
Falls Church tops the US News & World Report and Aetna Foundation’s inaugural Healthiest Communities rankings, an analysis of nearly 3000 communities across the country on a wide range of health markers, such as education, income, public safety, walkability and bikeability, life expectancy, transportation, and infrastructure. The top 500 communities are ranked in order, and data from all 3000 are online now.
Addressing social determinants of health, including access to food, housing and education, is what makes the Healthiest Communities rankings important, said APHA Executive Director Georges Benjamin, MD.
“Community is very, very important,” Benjamin said. “I’m excited about the US News rankings; they’re designed to raise awareness of many of the things that affect your health outside the doctor’s office.”
The rankings are the first of their kind to pull data from a wide variety of resources, including metrics from the US Census Bureau, environmental information from the US Environmental Protection Agency, and more data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The data were then analyzed using a framework from the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics.
Garth Graham, MD, MPH, FACP, FACC, president of the Aetna Foundation, said the categories were weighted as the communities were evaluated. But no category was given more weight than equity. So a community may be wealthy or well educated, but if its most at-risk residents are not cared for, it can drop in the rankings.
— Lindsey Wahowiak
Read the full article in The Nation’s Health at http://nathealth.smart01.highwire.org/content/48/4/1.1
Gun Violence Research Hurt by Shortage of Funding, Data
On an average day in the United States, gun violence ends the lives of nearly 100 people. Yet across the country, only about 30 researchers are dedicated full time to studying the public health crisis—and in many ways, they have only begun to scratch the surface.
“This area of research has been so underfunded that while we’ve learned some things, we should know so much more by now,” David Hemenway, PhD, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told The Nation’s Health. “You need good data that’s consistent and comparable across sites and years and you need money for research, both of which we don’t have.”
Right now, researchers hoping to better understand gun violence and help shape effective interventions face two imposing barriers: a scarcity of detailed data and a near total lack of federal funding support, which would typically play a major role in addressing any other public health crisis similar in size and scope to the nation’s gun violence problem.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), firearms were responsible for more than 36 000 deaths in 2015, with the age-adjusted death rate from firearms increasing nearly 8% between 2014 and 2015. More than 60% of such deaths were from suicide and nearly 36% from homicide. CDC researchers estimate there are about 67 000 firearm-related injuries each year. About 1300 children die and nearly 5800 are injured by guns annually.
Research on gun violence prevention does occur, despite barriers. For example, researchers are slowly building an evidence base on the effects of state gun policies, and studies show a clear connection between firearm access and fatal suicide attempts. But those in the field are doubtful that the research can ever truly be on par with the scale of the problem without considerable shifts at the federal level.
— Kim Krisberg
Read the full article in The Nation’s Health at http://nathealth.smart01.highwire.org/content/48/4/1.2