School Notes: School of Public Health
May/June 2012

The success of antismoking measures

Quantifying for the first time the impact of antismoking measures on lung cancer mortality, a new study finds that more than 800,000 lives were saved in the United States over a 25-year period. The authors also note that 2.5 million people who died from smoking-related lung cancer in this same period might have survived if stricter tobacco control measures had been in effect. Researchers from the Yale School of Public Health and more than a dozen other universities and institutes formed the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network consortium and used various mathematical models, including one developed at Yale, to analyze trends in cigarette smoking and quantify the impact of various tobacco control measures.

YSPH students monitor food safety

Yale School of Public Health students are assisting state and local health department officials in an enhanced effort to monitor Connecticut’s food safety and speed up the detection of outbreaks of Salmonella and other potentially serious food-related illness. The students are part of the newly created Foodborne Diseases Centers for Outbreak Response Enhancement (FoodCORE) group that is administered by the Emerging Infections Program at the School of Public Health. One of the primary responsibilities of the student team will be to rapidly interview people involved in a case of foodborne illness. This information will help state and local health officials quickly detect clusters and possible outbreaks of foodborne diseases; and having a dedicated interview team will free up public health professionals to address other issues during an outbreak.

The educational costs of diabetes

While the health implications of diabetes are well understood, new research led by YSPH has found that the disease also comes with high nonmedical costs for patients in the form of educational achievement and future earnings potential. Researchers found that young people with the disease are 6 percentage points less likely than their healthy peers to earn a high school diploma and that their lifetime earning potential will be significantly curtailed as a result of the disease. A young adult with diabetes is also 10 percentage points less likely than others to find employment, the study found.