Despite slowly declining teen birth rates in the United States, more than 367,000 young women and girls ages 15-19 had babies in 2010, according to a recent vital statistics report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This number accounted for almost 10% of all births that year. Making matters worse, nearly 1 in 5 of those teen births was a repeat birth, meaning it was at least the second time that teen mother had had a baby. Most of those repeat births were for a second child, but over 12% of them were for births of a third child or more.

Teenagers having babies can have negative consequences for mother and child alike. According to a study by E. Ruedinger and J.E. Cox at Children’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School, outcomes for both are worsened by the social and economic factors affecting the women independently of their status as teen mothers.

Having a child can limit a teenage mom's ability to attend school or get a job. Teenage mothers also experience high rates of depression, substance abuse, and higher levels of intimate partner violence. They also, compared to their peers, have higher rates of poverty.

Outcomes for their children are abysmal as well. Children born to teen moms experience abuse and neglect at higher rates than children born to adult moms, they have poorer language skills, and score lower on cognitive tests. When they become adults, these deficits persist – and they are then at higher risk for becoming teen moms themselves. They also have lower income levels, are at increased risk for mental illness and substance abuse, and are more likely to enter the prison system.

In just a few weeks, the City of Brotherly Love will welcome the third annual Philadelphia Science Festival — a 10-day-long, citywide celebration of science that features lectures, debates, hands-on activities, special exhibits, and a host of other science-related programming coming to a museum, bar, or random space near you.

We here at The Public’s Health will be participating in two events this year. On Friday, April 19 at 6 p.m. we will be hosting a discussion called Blogging and Beer: Public Health in Philadelphia. Our editor at the Inquirer, Don Sapatkin, will be joining us, as will some of our regular contributors. We expect to have a lively conversation at  Rembrandt’s Restaurant in Fairmount. If you want to participate and enjoy good food and drink, please come! There is no cover charge.

On Thursday, April 25 at 7 p.m. I will also be participating in a wacky evening that is appropriately titled Sounds Made  Up: Tales  from the History of Science.   It brings historians and comedians together at The Chemical Heritage Foundation at the edge of Old City to dramatize, in the silliest way possible,  absurdities from the histories of science, medicine and public health. Last year’s rather risque event —  the video above is from the year before — saw discussions of a medieval women birthing a cat, zombies, the history of the banana, and a discussion of Alfred Kinsey’s toothbrush.

This year is sure to bring even more bizarre history to light.

This small story from a recent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), the federal government's weekly compilation of case studies and public health advisories, caught my eye: “Fatal and Nonfatal Injuries Involving Fishing Vessel Winches — Southern Shrimp Fleet, United States, 2000–2011.”

We in public health—and probably much of the public—tend to think that our field is about large-scale prevention and intervention efforts on behalf of the population's well-being. Think anti-smoking laws and regulations, battles over soda size, and fights over the Affordable Care Act.

But most of what public health does is, in fact, fairly mundane. It thinks about the ways our daily routines can either harm us or make us healthier— in our eating habits or in our jobs, for example—and then finding ways capitalize on that information.

Take the fishing vessel winches.

I am of two minds on the court decision Monday striking down the New York City Board of Health’s ban on the sale of sugary drinks over 16 ounces one day before it was to kick in. I applaud both the judge’s ruling and the mayor’s  resolve.

The ban was declared “arbitrary and capricious” by New York State Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling, whose ruling called attention to the ban’s loopholes, which “effectively defeat the stated purpose of the Rule.” Judge Tingling was referring to the fact that the ban limited sales at some locations (restaurants, movie theaters, and food trucks) and not others (corner convenience stores and supermarkets), that some sugary drinks were included and not others, and that there were no limitations on refills of smaller cups. The judge also ruled that the city Board of Health exceeded its powers in passing the ban. That power, Tingling argued, should lie with New York’s City Council.

Mayor Bloomberg has promised to appeal, calling the ruling  “totally wrong.”

On the one hand, I applaud the court. The ban was public health at its worst — a potentially disaffecting policy that lacked compelling evidence of  benefits that might justify it.

Yes, there is absolutely no nutritional reason for consumers to drink such an obscene amount of soda in one sitting. And, yes, there is strong evidence that soda consumption is playing a significant role in the obesity epidemic.

By Michael Yudell

Results of an important study out of Spain published last week in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine suggests that a “Mediterranean Diet” supplemented by additional extra-virgin olive oil or nuts significantly lowered the risk of having a heart attack, stroke, or dying from heart disease.

But despite the media brouhaha—headlines like “Tasty Diet Curbs Heart Disease, Study Finds” and “Mediterranean Diet Study Rocks the Medical World”— the study's implications for you and me are still unclear.

Don’t get me wrong. This is a valuable study, the largest of its kind to date. And it confirms earlier research showing that the Mediterranean Diet — a high intake of olive oil, nuts, vegetables, and cereals; moderate consumption of fish and chicken; low consumption of dairy, red and processed meats, and sweets; and drinking wine in moderation with meals — can be effective in moderating cardiovascular risks.

By Michael Yudell

Whether you are rooting for Anne Hathaway’s gritty performance as mother-turned-prostitute-turned martyr Fontine in Les Misérables, or Bradley Cooper’s breakout performance in Silver Linings Playbook, you should also be thinking about something else while watching Sunday’s 85th annual Academy Awards — the Academy’s “Best Picture” nomination of the deeply troubling and historically inaccurate Zero Dark Thirty, Katherine Bigelow’s cinematic exploration of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

From senators to famed Hollywood actors, critics have pounded the film for its glorification of torture and for suggesting that torture played a critical role in finding bin Laden, when the evidence suggests it did not. Does this film really deserve the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ “recognition of the highest level of achievement in moviemaking”? Let’s review.

Unlike most historical films that begin with the qualification “Based on Real Events,” Zero Dark Thirty ups the ante, introducing us into the world of CIA interrogations and Al Qaeda with much less qualification. It is “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events.” By selling itself as something more than fictionalized history, Zero Dark Thirty suggests it’s something it is not. As Steve Coll has written in the New York Review of Books, the film “aligns its methods with those of journalists and historians, and it appropriates as drama what remains the most undigested trauma in American national life during the last several decades” (referring, of course, to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001).

By Michael Yudell

Earlier this month the United States Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed new minimum sound standards for hybrid and electric vehicles traveling under 18 miles per hour, a speed at which such cars travel in near silence. Under the new regulation, hybrid and electric vehicles will be required to produce a sound that pedestrians would be able to hear clearly, and one that will be easily recognized as coming from a vehicle.The NHTSA’s proposal is now open for public comment through early March, after which the agency will formulate its final regulation.

The new standard, a requirement of the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act (PSEA) of 2010, is necessary because at low speeds, with only the electric motor propelling it, hybrid and electric vehicles travel almost silently, resulting in a potentially dangerous situation for the blind and visually impaired who need to hear a car coming to avoid harm. The rule also protects cyclists who also depend on the sounds of an approaching car to stay safe.

According to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood,“Safety is our highest priority, and this proposal will help keep everyone using our nation’s streets and roadways safe, whether they are motorists, bicyclists or pedestrians, and especially the blind and visually impaired.”

By Michael Yudell

“We will respond to the threat of climate change knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” an emboldened President Obama declared in his inaugural address Monday. Following the disconcerting absence of climate change from campaign 2012 and limited climate policy action during his first term, the president has finally told us that not only will he act, but that we (and he) have an obligation to do so. What could be more important, after all, than acting on behalf of our children and future generations?

But the New York Times is already reporting that, even in the wake of the president’s eloquence on the imperative to act now, his path forward will be a restricted one. Instead of focusing on comprehensive legislative change, Obama will use the power of his office to administratively “reduce emissions from power plants, increase the efficiency of home appliances, and have the federal government itself produce less carbon pollution.” He can do this by directing the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, to issue regulations to decrease coal power plant emission, a move likely to face a litany of court challenges.

These types of actions build on Obama’s important but limited success on climate change from his first term. The rise in fuel standards for cars and trucks will help reduce the amount of carbon and other climate-warming pollutants spewed into the atmosphere. And the United States is on track to reduce, over the next seven years, its carbon pollution by 17% (from 2005 levels), just as Obama promised at the Copenhagen climate talks four years ago.

By Michael Yudell

President Obama's speech and executive orders were an important step forward to address gun violence. The president affirmed both his support for the Second Amendment and his commitment to quickly reduce gun violence in the wake of the national tragedies in Newtown, Aurora, Oak Creek, and Tucson.

As we’ve written here before, gun violence is a public health problem, and the president’s proposal — ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines, improve mental health services, close background check loopholes, and make schools safer — treats it as such.

Any changes to gun laws, including banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines, will have to be taken up by the legislative branch, and the president promised on Wednesday to push Congress to do just that. It will be a hard road ahead to pass such legislation, but hopefully our elected officials pay attention to the national mood on gun safety matters.