Last week our geospatial expert, Meredith Barrett, hit the road to speak at the American Public Health Association’s 141st Annual Meeting and Exposition. The annual meeting, held on November 2-6 in Boston and attracting 13,000 attendees, was a terrific showcase of the ground-breaking work that’s happening in public health right now, and we were proud to be in such exemplary company.
This year’s theme was “Think Global, Act Local” — highlighting the best practices and lessons learned from around the world and embracing how these findings can be applied to diverse, local communities.
Barrett presented on results from the Louisville Asthma Innovation Project, a one year program spearheaded by Greg Fischer, mayor of Louisville, that outfitted 500 Louisville residents with the Propeller system with the dual goals of helping to improve individual asthma control and awareness and enriching the city’s public health surveillance system with real-time, geospatial asthma data.
Barrett’s presentation highlights included results of:
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Reduced asthma symptoms and improved control for patients
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Maps of asthma “hotspots” around the city of Louisville where there were higher densities of recorded asthma symptoms
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Significant associations between the number of asthma symptoms per day and air pollution levels
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Predictive modeling to test the impact on local asthma risk of city-wide interventions, such as reduced PM 2.5, particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter
Other conference highlights included sessions on asthma and COPD in both local and global contexts. One of the best sessions, featuring some of the top experts on COPD in the country, highlighted the most current data on COPD. COPD is the fourth leading cause of death worldwide, and the third leading cause of death in the US, yet population-based data have been limited in the past. Speakers from the CDC, COPD Foundation and universities walked us through the current state of knowledge and raised awareness about the impact of COPD on quality of life. David Mannino, MD, professor and chair, University of Kentucky Department of Preventive Medicine and Environment, and international expert on the epidemiology and impact of COPD, presented data from around the world on the disease. Interestingly, COPD prevalence is 10.1% in Kentucky, yet may be as high as 22.1% in South African men.
The conference also gave Barrett time to catch up with our friends at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at their event Monday night. Beyond interesting science, Boston was aglow with fall color and the recent World Series win!
