Local communities coming together to promote health

King County launched a new health education campaign, Let's Do This, earlier this week. The campaign focuses on the relationship between neighborhood and health and inspires residents to become involved. The campaign features Mia, an eleven year old King County resident who wants to be a healthy kid and notices aspects of her neighborhood that make it difficult to be healthy.

The campaign is part of King County's Communities Putting Prevention to Work program.

Free tobacco prevention webinar

Understanding Tobacco's Toll on Individuals, Families, and Communities
December 2, 2010
12:00 noon - 1:30 p.m.

Gain new tools to address tobacco policy and smoking cessation.

Understand the role and effectiveness of quit lines.

Learn about the available resources to help reduce smoking in your community.

Hear from local communities about their successes.

To register, visit www.CADCA.org.

Preventing deaths & saving money

To follow up with the previous post . . . it is estimated that Washington's tobacco prevention program prevented 13,000 deaths over ten years and saved about $1.5 billion in health care costs. Prevention does work!

Tobacco prevention funds to be cut

According to the American Heart Association, "In a last minute move at the end of session, the (Washington State) legislature passed additional cuts for the current budget year that will completely shut down the Tobacco Prevention and Control Program (TPCP) for May and June."

In our state, tobacco prevention strategies have successfully decreased smoking rates. In six years, the TPCP has

1) reduced the number of kids smoking by 65,000 (50%) and

2) saved $2.1 billion in future healthcare costs.

The TPCP shows that prevention does indeed work!

Tobacco prevention funding

Here is an opinion piece that appeared in The Seattle Times about losing funding for tobacco prevention.

Free seminar on tobacco prevention

Preventing Tobacco Use and Related Health Risking Behaviors in Early Adolescence: Results from the Community Youth Development Study

featuring David Hawkins, PhD, founding Director of the UW Social Development Research Group

Wednesday, February 4, 3:30 - 5:00 p.m.

UW School of Social Work, Room 305 (Commons)

Seminar is free and open to the community. Please RSVP to kriggs@u.washington.edu if you plan to attend.

Public lecture on prevention at UW School of Social Work

The University of Washington's Social Development Research Group is co-sponsoring a lecture by Steve Sussman on “Tobacco Prevention and At-Risk Adolescents”.

Date: Wednesday, January 7

Time: 3:30 - 5:00 p.m.

Place: UW School of Social Work Commons (Rm. 305)

Dr. Sussman is first author on the book Developing School-Based Tobacco Use Prevention and Cessation Programs (1995) and is the lead author on the upcoming text The Social Psychology of Drug Abuse. He was the principal investigator of Project Towards No Tobacco Use (Project TNT), a tobacco-use prevention and cessation project among young teens that is being disseminated nationally by the Centers for Disease Control as a "Program That Works" and by the Centers for Substance Abuse Prevention as a model program.