Workplace barriers contribute to low rates of breastfeeding. Research shows that supportive state laws correlate with higher rates, yet by 2009, only 23 states had adopted any laws to encourage breastfeeding in the workplace. Federal law provided virtually no protection to working mothers until the 2010 enactment of the "reasonable break time" provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The Public Health Law Research program has released its 2011 call for proposals, for awards aimed at building the evidence base for strengthening the use of regulatory, legal, and policy solutions to improve public health.
A member of the PHLR Methods Core, Jeffrey Swanson is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. Swanson is a medical sociologist (Ph.D., Yale, 1985) with expertise in psychiatric epidemiology and mental health law and policy studies, and the author or co-author of more than 140 research publications on topics including violence and severe mental illness, the impact of involuntary outpatient commitment law, and psychiatric advance directives.
PHLR has awarded seven travel scholarships to public health law researchers and practitioners to attend the PHLR Annual Grantee Meeting in Tempe, Arizona. This meeting provides a forum for current PHLR grantees to share research progress and findings, discuss methodological concerns and innovations, and identify effective ways to disseminate research results to inform public health law practice and policy debates. The 2011 travel scholarship winners are:
Sara Abiola, J.D., doctoral candidate, PhD Program in Health Policy, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences;
Philadelphia, Nov. 24, 2010 –Thirteen new research projects on the public health impacts of laws and regulations on issues such as lead exposure, vaccinations, emergency preparedness, and the structure of state health agencies were funded today by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) Public Health Law Research (PHLR) program.
TODAY, THE Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will launch a campaign to stop the overuse of antibiotics, which are fast becoming useless in the war against resistant infections.
The CDC is right on target. We cannot afford to simply wait for new antibiotics to solve this crisis. It takes years to develop new drugs and meanwhile resistant micro-organisms like the one carrying the NDM-1 gene are spreading fast.
An analysis commissioned by Public Health Law Research has found that laws aimed at spurring development of new drugs have also led to unintended public health problems.
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Health Affairs, September 2010
Alex C. Wagenaar, associate director at PHLR, and Mildred M. Maldonado-Molina recently published an article in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
They write that more than "a hundred studies have established the effects of beverage alcohol taxes and prices on sales and drinking behaviors. Yet, relatively few studies have examined effects of alcohol taxes on alcohol-related mortality. We evaluated effects of multiple changes in alcohol tax rates in the state of Florida from 1969 to 2004 on disease (not injury) mortality."
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