PubMed Commons: New comment forum on PubMed

From the PubMed Commons Blog: If you are one of the millions of people who visit PubMed today, be on the look-out for something different. On each abstract page, there’s now a section called PubMed Commons. It’s a forum for scientific discussion on publications open to any authors in the world’s largest biomedical literature database. Several …

Dangers of distracted walking

From the Well blog at the New York Times: Driving a car while talking or texting on a cellphone is a widely recognized risk factor for accidents. Now a new study reports that a growing number of people who walk while talking or texting are ending up in the emergency room. Using data from the …

There’s a fly in my tweets: How social media can help catch food-poisoning outbreaks

From the Gray Matter blog at the New York Times: Many important public health questions are difficult and costly to answer. What kind of risks do highly localized sources of pollution, like dry cleaners that use volatile chemicals, pose to the health of nearby residents? Are people with many friends healthier, or do those friendships …

CDC Director’s Hepatitis C Twitter Chat 5/30

Join CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden and experts Dr. John Ward, Director of CDC’s Division of Viral Hepatitis, and Dr. Hazel Dean, Deputy Director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention for a live Twitter chat on Thursday, May 30th about the importance of life-saving Hepatitis C testing. Hepatitis C …

Should you consider prescribing Facebook to older patients?

From iMedicalApps and the University of Arizona: A graduate student from the University of Arizona, Janelle Wohltmann, is studying whether Facebook use can improve older adult cognitive performance and make them feel more socially connected. Her preliminary findings show that after using Facebook, older adults performed about 25 percent better on tasks designed to measure …

CDC Twitter chat on global health threats – February 28

Join CDC Director Dr. Frieden for a live Twitter chat about CDC’s 24/7 work around the globe to protect people from health threats. CDC works to help build capacity and strengthen a country’s ability to improve global health security. A memorable example of global health security in action is CDC’s work with the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and Population …

Twitter chat 1/16 on binge drinking

Join CDC Director, Dr. Tom Frieden for a live Twitter chat about CDC’s new Vital Signs issue on binge drinking. This report shows that binge drinking is a serious, under-recognized problem among women and girls. 1 in 8 women and 1 in 5 high school girls binge drink, increasing their risk of breast cancer, heart disease, …

CareZone – Social media for health

From the New York Times: Social media is about sharing ever more information about ourselves with an ever-larger crowd. But some of the most valuable information, about things like health and children, needs to be kept close. Now there is a social site for that, too, and it comes from a well-known name in technology. …

New edition of health Communication Digest available

  Seth Noar introduces an Audience-Channel-Message-Evaluation (ACME) framework for health communication campaigns. Three studies highlight the negative impact of unhealthy mass media messages. Smoking is the focus of all three studies. Glantz et al. observe a substantial increase in onscreen smoking in youth-rated movies. Shandel et al. find that exposure to prosmoking messages is associated with acute changes in future smoking …

On the Horizon: Libraries and Social Media

And without further ado, I bring you the last in our On the Horizon series...social media and social networking.  Now that libraries are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging, etc., what’s next?  Is social media being overhyped?  Well, their success seems to vary somewhat depending upon the setting and their intended purpose. For us librarians, it …