According to the CDC news release:

…binge drinking puts women at increased risk for many health problems such as breast cancer, sexually transmitted diseases, heart disease, and unintended pregnancy. Pregnant women who binge drink expose a developing baby to high levels of alcohol, which can lead to fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and sudden infant death syndrome.

In addition, the report finds that about 1 in 8 women and 1 in 5 high school girls report binge drinking. Binge drinking was most common among women aged 18-34 and high school girls, whites and Hispanics, and women with household incomes of $75,000 or more. Half of all high school girls who drink alcohol report binge drinking.

Binge drinking is defined as consuming four or more drinks on an occasion for women and girls. Drinking too much, including binge drinking, causes about 23,000 deaths among women and girls in the United States each year.

At issue is this simple question: Does being overweight make you die sooner, or might it actually be protective? But of course, very little is simple in the world of nutrition studies, or when links between Body Mass Index and health are concerned.  Here’s the conclusion from the study, that in effect, very obese people tend to die earlier, but more mildly overweight people may tend to live a bit longer:

Relative to normal weight, both obesity (all grades) and grades 2 and 3 obesity were associated with significantly higher all-cause mortality. Grade 1 obesity overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality. The use of predefined standard BMI groupings can facilitate between-study comparisons.

And here’s Walt Willett on NPR today:

“This study is really a pile of rubbish and no one should waste their time reading it,” he says.

Willett says it’s not helpful to look simply at how peoples body mass indexes, or BMIs, influence their risk of death — as this paper did without knowing something about people’s health or fitness. Some people are thin because they’re ill, so of course they’re at higher risk of dying. The study doesn’t tease this apart.

Also, he says the analysis doesn’t address the bigger, more important issues of quality of life. If an overweight person does live longer — is he or she living with chronic diseases?

If you’re hard-core, read the study yourself here, The New York Times report on it here or the boston.com report that explains more of the methodological issues here, and let us know what you think in the comments below.

My personal takeaway: The study’s lead author, Katherine M. Flegal of the CDC, strikes me as brave to take on accepted wisdom about ideal weight. But Walt Willett is a towering figure in nutrition research. So I think I’m going to use the ambiguities raised by this study and Flegal’s earlier work to reinforce the resolution I wanted to make anyway: This year, I’ll try to eat better but not make myself crazy about it.

His mother, Kathy Riffenburg, had seen her share of sniffles (she has two older daughters, 8 and 5) and didn’t think much of it. “It was just a little cough and sneeze,” she said. “I wasn’t too worried.”

But a few days later, on January 6, Brady’s fever spiked to 104 degrees. So, in the middle of the night, Riffenburg and her husband Jonathan decided to take the baby to the emergency department at Baystate Children’s Hospital in Springfield, Mass. near their home in Chicopee. Brady tested negative for flu and a common respiratory virus. By early morning, his fever was gone and the family was sent home.

Three weeks later Brady would be dead, a victim of pertussis, or whooping cough, a preventable but highly contagious bacterial disease that has been on the rise in recent decades.

At home, Brady’s breathing became slightly more labored; he’d been diagnosed with bronchiolitis, a swelling and buildup of mucus in the tiny air passages of the lungs, usually due to a viral infection. After another examination later in the week, a pediatrician prescribed albuterol to ease Brady’s symptoms.

On January 16, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Brady started spitting up more and his breathing worsened. This time he was admitted to Baystate’s pediatric ICU, his mother said. A medical team assessed him; and an infectious disease doctor suggested he might have pertussis, though the diagnosis remained uncertain. Indeed, the family didn’t get confirmation of Brady’s pertussis until after his death, when a test for the disease came back positive. “I could have bet my whole life that it wasn’t pertussis,” Riffenburg said, recalling her reaction when the illness was first mentioned. “He wasn’t coughing like I would have imagined. And I didn’t know any infant who ever had pertussis.”

But pertussis, or whooping cough, or “the cough of 100 days” for its generally long duration, has been on the rise since the 1980s, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease is characterized by violent, uncontrollable coughing (including the characteristic “whoop” sound) that can make it hard to breathe. But sometimes there is no “whoop.” And infants with pertussis don’t always cough, but may have apnea, a long pause in their breathing. The disease is most common in young children; babies under one are particularly vulnerable and face the greatest risk of death.

In 2010, there were 27,550 reported cases of pertussis nationally, the CDC says. That year, in California, 9,143 cases of pertussis — including ten infant deaths — were reported, the greatest number of cases in 63 years, according to the CDC. Vermont had a pertussis outbreak last year. And on April 3, Washington State officials declared a pertussis “epidemic,” with over 1,000 cases reported.

The CDC recommends pertussis vaccines for infants, adolescents and adults (most recently, pregnant women), summarized here:

Infants and children are recommended a dose of DTaP (Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Acellular Pertussis) vaccine at 2, 4 and 6 months, 15 through 18 months, and 4 through 6 years of age. Everyone 11 years and older, including pregnant women, is recommended one dose of Tdap (combined Tetanus, Diphtheria and Acellular Pertussis) vaccine, preferably at 11-12 years of age. Pregnant women are recommended to receive a dose of Tdap vaccine, preferably during the third trimester or late second trimester (after 20 weeks gestation). By getting Tdap vaccine during pregnancy, maternal pertussis antibodies transfer to the newborn, likely providing protection against pertussis in early life, before the baby starts getting DTaP vaccines. Tdap will also protect the mother at time of delivery, making her less likely to transmit pertussis to her infant.

A CDC spokesperson adds: “Everyone needs Tdap vaccine as an adolescent/adult even if they were fully vaccinated with DTaP or DTP vaccine as a child.”

What, exactly, is driving the increase in pertussis cases isn’t totally clear. Experts speak of a convergence of factors, including waning immunity after vaccination, low vaccine compliance among adults (who had coverage rates of only 8.2 percent in 2010, according to the CDC) and a general perception that whooping cough isn’t a dire condition. Another factor may be that pertussis is going undiagnosed in many cases — since not everyone “whoops” — allowing for disease to spread. In addition (though the CDC disputes this) declining use of antibiotics by doctors wary of overuse and drug resistance may also be a cause.

Some put the blame on parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. But officials at the CDC say it’s more likely that declining protection in vaccinated people rather than vaccine refusal is contributing to the increase.

At first, Brady (who was scheduled to have his first immunizations, including the vaccine for pertussis, on January 27) began to improve — the hospital staff even moved him to a room with three other roommates. After eight days in the hospital, Brady started a course of antibiotics; and a formal pertussis test was conducted, his mother said. He was then moved back into a single room.

That’s when things got really bad. On January 23, doctors inserted a breathing tube; on the 24th they changed his ventilator. “His CO2 levels are on the high side,” Riffenburg wrote on her Facebook page, where she had been updating far-flung family members.

It became harder to keep Brady stable, she said, so on January 26 two new doctors were brought in to assess him. Within hours, one of them said the boy had to be rushed to Boston Children’s Hospital because Baystate didn’t have the necessary equipment to handle Brady’s deteriorating condition. Unable to fly to Boston from western Mass. due to weather, the family was left to travel by ambulance. Riffenburg said it took three hours to stabilize her son for travel and staff told her he had a 50-percent chance of surviving the 90-mile trip. A priest finalized a rushed baptism as Brady entered the elevator en route to the ambulance.

He almost didn’t survive the road trip. At exit 11 off the Mass. Turnpike, just outside Boston, Brady stopped breathing and his heart rate declined, Riffenburg said. A Children’s Hospital team met the ambulance on the highway and started doing compressions on the baby until they pulled up to the hospital where surgeons were waiting.

Doctors were able to get Brady on the heart-lung bypass machine, but by this time, his brain had already been deprived of oxygen and it was unclear how much damage was done.

Early in the morning of January 28, Riffenburg took a shower and rushed to Brady’s room. “He was very still — and he was puffy, very red. His foot was purple — it didn’t look like him,” she said.

After several long, hard discussions about Brady’s lack of substantive brain activity and the increasing difficulty of sustaining his blood pressure, a decision was made to take him off the machines. “We went into a room, said a couple of prayers, annointed him with oil and at 2:53 they pronounced him in my arms,” Riffenburg said. “I had to say goodbye to my baby. Then we had to go home that night without our son; we had to tell our girls what had happened and that Brady wasn’t coming home.”

Now, the family hopes to raise awareness about the dangers of pertussis through a site they created called Brady’s Cause. They want to reiterate the importance of childhood vaccinations, and in particular, tell every adult they know to get the vaccine. “A lot of adults, we don’t think about that,” Riffenburg said. “My husband was saying, when you have a newborn baby, you’re so caught up in the moment, if no one tells you to get a vaccine, you just don’t think of it.”

Riffenburg, a 29-year-old counselor at an after school program for kids, does not know how Brady contracted pertussis. Though most infants who develop the disease get it from an older child or adult in the family, everyone in Brady’s immediate family tested negative, she said. (Riffenburg and her daughters had been vaccinated; their father wasn’t but now is.)

Because pertussis is a preventable infectious disease, the state Department of Public Health has launched an investigation to try to pinpoint exactly where and how Brady got infected and if appropriate, provide treatment. John Jacob, a spokesman for the agency, says that since 2006 the state has reviewed 281 cases of pertussis in infants and of those, the source has been determined in about 65 percent of the cases. (Of the cases identified, family members were most often the source, he said. That’s why public health officials are pushing the concept of “cocooning,” that is, making sure all of the people around the infant are immunized.)

But Riffenburg said the state health investigator assigned to her case isn’t terribly optimistic about finding the source. “She said there is no way we will ever know where Brady contracted whooping cough.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just announced that the prevalence rate for autism is up to 1 in 88 children in the U.S. That’s a 23 percent increase from the previous 1 in 110 rate reported three years ago by the CDC.

Debate continues to rage about what is driving the apparent increase; is it genetics, the environment, some combination or other factors? The CDC’s new report doesn’t address any of those tough questions, but suggests better screening and detection is at least in part behind the new numbers. (The NIH’s “working assumption” is there are more children effected and more detected.)

Here’s the agency’s press release:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 in 88 children in the United States has been identified as having an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), according to a new study released today that looked at 2008 data from 14 communities. Autism spectrum disorders are almost five times more common among boys than girls – with 1 in 54 boys identified.

The number of children identified with ASDs ranged from 1 in 210 children in Alabama to 1 in 47 children in Utah. The largest increases were among Hispanic and black children.

The report, Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorders – Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 14 Sites, United States, 2008, provides autism prevalence estimates from 14 areas. It was published today in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

“This information paints a picture of the magnitude of the condition across our country and helps us understand how communities identify children with autism,” said Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “That is why HHS and our entire administration has been working hard to improve the lives of people living with autism spectrum disorders and their families by improving research, support, and services.”

“One thing the data tells us with certainty – there are many children and families who need help,” said CDC Director Thomas Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “We must continue to track autism spectrum disorders because this is the information communities need to guide improvements in services to help children.”

The results of CDC’s study highlight the importance of the Obama administration’s efforts to address the needs of people with ASDs, including the work of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The IACC’s charge is to facilitate ASD research, screening, intervention, and education. As part of this effort, the National Institutes of Health has invested in research to identify possible risk factors and effective therapies for people with ASDs.

Study results from the 2008 surveillance year show 11.3 per 1,000 8-year-old children have been identified as having an ASD. This marks a 23 percent increase since the last report in 2009. Some of this increase is due to the way children are identified, diagnosed and served in their communities, although exactly how much is due to these factors is unknown. “To understand more, we need to keep accelerating our research into risk factors and causes of autism spectrum disorders,” said Coleen Boyle, Ph.D., M.S.Hyg., director of CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.

The study also shows more children are being diagnosed by age 3, an increase from 12 percent for children born in 1994 to 18 percent for children born in 2000. “Unfortunately, 40 percent of the children in this study aren’t getting a diagnosis until after age 4. We are working hard to change that,” said Boyle.

The most important thing for parents to do is to act quickly whenever there is a concern about a child’s development.

• Talk to your child’s doctor about your concerns.
• Call your local early intervention program or school system for an assessment.
• Remember you do not need a diagnosis to access services for your child.

Here’s more information about the study and here are some tools for tracking children’s development. For more about the CDC’s research and the government’s overall response, look here and here.

The president of the advocacy group Autism Speaks told CommonHealth contributor Karen Weintraub that the new numbers constitute a “national emergency,” and called for a more coordinated national response. Read Karen’s full story on the report for USA Today.

One of our most popular recent posts was Aayesha Siddiqui’s primer on How to Outsmart The Stealty Stomach Bug — I think I’ll read it again right now. From the CDC:

The number of people who died from gastroenteritis (inflammation of the stomach and intestines that causes vomiting and diarrhea) more than doubled from 1999 to 2007, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings will be presented today at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta.
…
Over the eight-year study period, gastroenteritis-associated deaths from all causes increased from nearly 7,000 to more than 17,000 per year. Adults over 65 years old accounted for 83 percent of deaths. Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) and norovirus were the most common infectious causes of gastroenteritis-associated deaths.

There was a fivefold increase, from approximately 2,700 to 14,500 deaths per year, for C. difficile, a type of bacteria often associated with health care settings. C difficile, which causes diarrhea, accounted for two-thirds of the deaths. Much of the recent increase in the incidence and mortality of C. difficile is attributed to the emergence and spread of a hypervirulent, resistant strain of C. difficile.

Norovirus was associated with about 800 deaths annually, though there were 50 percent more deaths in years when epidemics were caused by new strains of the virus. Norovirus is highly contagious. It spreads through person-to-person contact and contaminated food, water, and surfaces. People can get norovirus illness throughout the year, but cases peaked between December-February. Norovirus causes more than 20 million illnesses annually, and it is the leading cause of gastroenteritis outbreaks in the United States.

“While C. difficile continues to be the leading contributor to gastroenteritis-associated deaths, this study shows for the first time that norovirus is likely the second leading infectious cause,” said Hall. “Our findings highlight the need for effective measures to prevent, diagnose, and manage gastroenteritis, especially for C. difficile and norovirus among the elderly.”

More bad stomach news from the CDC: Foodborne disease outbreaks linked to imported foods also appear to be on the rise.

KISUMU, Kenya — When I was an undergraduate student in Boston some 25 years ago, I didn’t know what I would do in my life.

A roommate at Harvard-Radcliffe College suggested that I work with a cardiologist in Colombia, and I said, “Sure, why not?” It didn’t last long, but the kind doctor helped me find work in the maternity ward and emergency room of a provincial hospital. That experience opened lots of doors and eventually led to a master’s degree in public health at Harvard, and later, three years in the Amazon jungle studying malaria among the Yanomami tribe for my doctorate.

The beginning of my career is very similar to many others who have been inspired by teachers and students in colleges and universities everywhere. All of us seized an opportunity and got hooked.

What hooked us — and what is hooking so many young university students today — is not only the adventurous life of living in the Amazon or on the shores of Lake Victoria here in Kisumu, but the chance to make a difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of people whose health has been neglected for too long.

Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms don’t invest in research for diseases affecting mostly impoverished people. It’s not a mystery: there isn’t a market to support such investment. But something is stirring, striving to end this period of neglect. The U.S. Government’s support for global health research and development, along with new partnerships between the private and public sectors, is creating a rich pipeline for new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic tools.

Today, there are hundreds of U.S.-funded scientific studies under way in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the United States. In just Kisumu alone, I oversee approximately 60 scientific studies under the umbrella of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) conducted by 1,700 researchers and experts. This field station is one of CDC’s largest platforms overseas. Every four months, we collect information about the health and demographic status of 220,000 people. What we learn here we can apply to other life-saving public health research.

A recent HIV prevention trial is a great example of how KEMRI/CDC works. It involved couples in which one was HIV-positive and the other was not infected. The study found that if the HIV-positive partner started early on antiretroviral treatment, the virus was not passed to the uninfected partner in 96 percent of the cases. This discovery has the potential to change the course of the epidemic and prevent millions of HIV infections. KEMRI/CDC was one of 13 sites for the study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Another example is the Phase 3 trial of RTS/AS01 malaria vaccine candidate in African children. It showed the candidate protected about half of the 5 to 17 month old children from getting the disease. In a place where one out of every five children do not live to see their fifth birthday, RTS/AS01 has remarkable potential. KEMRI/CDC was one of the trial sites for the study supported by GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, and the Gates Foundation.

I remember when I was doing research with the Yanomami Indians, I took blood samples of those with malaria, brought the samples back to a lab in Boston, and discovered something almost never seen: The entire tribe was infected by a single strain of the malaria parasite. Usually, a person’s infection contains many strains. We could trace the passage of malaria from person to person, showing clearly how the illness spread among the tribe. This helped us understand how malaria can affect a population that had not been previously infected.

Research in global health is important to all of us. We can dramatically increase the quality of life, save lives and extend life expectancy for children and adults around the world.

During our upcoming 25th class reunion, a group of fellow Harvard-Radcliffe graduates will hold a symposium on our global health work. We hope to follow the footsteps of many other Boston researchers who have made many important research discoveries. Support for research must remain strong so that we can continue to unlock more live-saving mysteries.

Kayla Laserson is director of the KEMRI-CDC Research and Public Health Collaboration, based in Kisumu, Kenya.

“Okay,” your doctor says. “I’ll write you out a prescription for the chemo drug methotrexate.”

Not exactly a realistic scenario, is it? So then why, when you’ve got garden-variety winter phlegm, might you push your doctor to do your bidding and write you an order for antibiotics?

That’s a point paraphrased from a recent talk by Dr. John Powers, a physician and researcher at the George Washington University School of Medicine, and formerly the lead medical officer for antimicrobial drug development and resistance initiatives at the FDA.

I share it now because it’s the season of bugs and crud, and chances are you’ve been kissing and hugging a lot of people who were sharing their germs along with their cheer. That means you may soon be tempted to demand a nice little course of a “-cillin” or a “-mycin” from your doctor — but hold on a minute:

Antibiotics remain tremendously valuable treatments when prescribed appropriately for bacterial infections, but the reasons to avoid using them unnecessarily have been multiplying of late, and the information below might tip you a bit toward restraint.

Personally, I just got over a cough so violent that each spasm threw me backward like the recoil of a rifle. Friends told me to get a lung X-ray and to ask for antibiotics, but under the influence of Dr. Powers and others like him, I decided to just wait and see. The message had finally started to penetrate that if an upper respiratory infection is likely to be a virus — and yes, my children had just been through one — time might be the best cure. (It was.)

No question, antibiotics can work wonders. But they’re also hugely over-used, particularly for coughs. A study last month in the journal “Pediatrics” found that American pediatricians order unnecessary antibiotics at least 10 million times a year, for conditions the drugs do not affect such as asthma and flu.

Health authorities say that what doctors and patients alike need to aim for is the sweet spot known as “judicious use” of antibiotics. But where is it? And how do we get there when we tend to focus on the wonder-drug aspects of antibiotics rather than the downsides?

I asked Dr. Ben Kruskal, director of infection control at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates and director of infectious disease at Atrius Health, who has worked on “judicious use” campaigns both within Harvard Vanguard and as part of a statewide project. (The CDC works on the issue at the federal level; its”Get Smart” materials are here.)

How resistance can affect you

He began with a powerful new reason not to overdo antibiotics, based on research from the last several years: If you take unneeded antibiotics now, it could translate into trouble with other infections later.

That is, you may have heard that when we take antibiotics, our bacteria tends to evolve resistance to them. That resistance is normally presented as a long-term public health problem: “Watch out, if too many of us take antibiotics, the canny bugs could become all but unstoppable.”

But it’s now clear that there are individual consequences for us as well. Our own personal bugs can become more resistant.

“Recent research has shown that for several months after taking antibiotics, the risks of subsequent infections being resistant to that antibiotic — and often to other unrelated antibiotics — are often substantially increased,” Dr. Kruskal said.

Why should we care? I asked him for a scenario.

Let’s say, Dr. Kruskal said, that you have a bad cough and you beg your doctor for antibiotics. You score a prescription for five days of Zithromax. The cough eventually goes away, which it might well have anyway.

A couple of months later, say you get a urinary tract infection, and the germ that you have is now less susceptible to a broad range of the usual antibiotics that would normally be used for that new infection. But your doctor can’t know that, and writes up the usual prescription. You feel better for a couple of days, as the drug suppresses but does not kill the germs; but then you get symptoms again.

Now what might once have been handled over the phone if you’re generally healthy requires an office visit, Dr. Kruskal said. Your urine must be tested, you spend extra days suffering, you may have to pay more out of pocket, and your doctor’s options for treating you may become uncomfortably narrow.

Recalibrating your attitude

Sounds bad. But maybe, I thought, not bad enough to tip a frightened patient or parent. Overall, I told Dr. Kruskal, I think we laypeople have the impression that antibiotics occasionally set off allergies or rashes, but otherwise tend to be effective and have very few downsides. How, I asked, would you correct that?

Using several impressive sets of numbers, Dr. Kruskal did indeed recalibrate my attitude.

To begin with, the overall risk is not as tiny as I’d thought: “The numbers are that up to about 10% of antibiotic prescriptions can cause some adverse effects,” Dr. Kruskal said. “These include minor things like rashes, major things like severe allergic reactions prompting Emergency Room visits, and diarrhea, which can range from mild to severe to life-threatening.”

Then there’s the risk of that individual resistance. Research suggests that in the months after you take antibiotics, the risk approximately doubles that an infection of yours will be resistant to one or more classes of antibiotics.

Now here are numbers that convey a sense of just how massively overused antibiotics are. Among cases of acute bronchitis in otherwise healthy people, Dr. Kruskal said, only about 6 percent are caused by bacteria and even then, most improve about as quickly without antibiotics as with them.

But quality measures of health care consider a medical staff to be A+ material if just 20% of acute bronchitis patients are prescribed antibiotics, he said. And in many practices well over half of acute bronchitis patients get the drugs.

“This culture has evolved over the course of many years,” he said. “I think this is, in a sense, the long-term consequence of the ‘antibiotics as miracle drugs’ image starting in the 1960s. The good news is, this is also susceptible to change.”

Just one more troubling point of particular relevance for parents, this one from Dr. Powers: “Emerging evidence shows that antbiotic use, especially in small children, is associated with an increase in allergic diseases and possibly obesity with its associated risk of diabetes.”

The human story

Numbers, of course, can only go so far in changing attitudes. Dr. John Powers acknowledged as much when he spoke recently at a conference on drug-resistant germs held at Boston University.

He shared the story of an otherwise healthy young woman who had a persistent cold, was prescribed antibiotics and was hit by a violent reaction that made her skin slough off. She died.

“Is this common? No,” he said. “But this is completely preventable because this person didn’t need an antibiotic to begin with.”

I tend to block out the memory, but my late mother had a similar reaction to the drug Bactrim, prescribed for a urinary tract infection. Already in a coma after a car accident, she spent days in a burn unit where the heroic staff painstakingly treated her peeling skin. Of all our tear-drenched months after her accident, that was the low point.

What’s the worst thing that could happen?

And yet, and yet — so often antibiotics do no harm and work. What, I asked Dr. Kruskal, should be our rule of thumb about when to push a little harder to get them?

“I think pushing for antibiotics is probably almost never necessary,” he said. “Doctors are already overprescribing such that I think there are very few circumstances when a patient should get an antibiotic and isn’t offered it.”

When, then, should we push back against antibiotics?

“I wouldn’t say ‘pushing back’ as much as ‘not demanding,’” he said. “And if a doctor offers an antibiotic in a way that the patient doesn’t clearly understand, the patient should ask: ‘What’s likely to happen? And what’s the worst thing that could happen if I don’t take this?’ ”

Test your own knowledge on antibiotic use at the CDC’s”Get Smart” Website here and see their wisdom on other ways to relieve symptoms here. Personal note: Hot baths!

It’s a challenge to portray zombie madness as pro-social, but in one exceptional case, it is: The CDC has undertaken a clever campaign to use zombies as a vehicle for getting people to prepare for emergencies (whether zombie-related or otherwise.) And the ploy does seem to work for getting people’s attention, as we found when Rachel posted about zombie apocalypse preparedness. Once the CDC has people listening, it can give them pointers about stockpiling food, water and other supplies.

Now the CDC Foundation, whose motto is “Helping CDC do more, faster” is taking the clever zombie campaign to the next step: $12 T-shirts. They say “CDC” on the front and “Zombie Task Force” as well as “Don’t be a zombie, be prepared” on the back. The perfect gift for loved ones obsessed with public health emergencies — and maybe I should order one for Rachel, our official zombie correspondent?