This paper describes how the Philadelphia Police Department instituted a large-scale randomized controlled trial of foot patrol as a policing strategy and experienced 23 percent fewer violent crimes during the treatment period. The authors examine whether activities patrol officers were conducting might have produced the crime reduction. The activities of foot and car patrol officers research takes a closer look at what types are examined separately and differences between car patrol activities pre-intervention and during the intervention are explored.
Observers worry that generic patent challenges are on the rise and reduce the effective market life of drugs. A related concern is that challenges disproportionately target high-sales drugs, reducing market life for these “blockbusters.” To study these questions, this study examines new data on generic entry over the past decade. The results show that challenges are more common for higher sales drugs. The study also demonstrates a slight increase in challenges over this period, and a sharper increase for early challenges.
University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, Center for Public Health Practice
Overall annual influenza vaccination rate has slowly increased among health care workers but still remains below the national goal of 90 percent. One hundred fifty hospitals required influenza vaccination, 84 with consequences (wear a mask, termination, education, restriction from patient care duties, unpaid leave) and 66 without consequences for noncompliance. Hospitals whose mandates have consequences for noncompliance included a broader range of personnel, were less likely to allow personal belief exemptions, or to require formal declination.
The world faces a worsening public health crisis: A growing number of bacteria are resistant to available antibiotics. Yet there are few new antibiotics in the development pipeline to take the place of these increasingly ineffective drugs. This study reviews a number of proposals intended to bolster drug development, including such financial incentives for pharmaceutical manufacturers as extending the effective patent life for new antibiotics.
The existence of different types of accreditation legal frameworks, embedded in complex and varying state legal infrastructures and political environments, raises important legal implications for the national voluntary accreditation program. The findings from the mapping study delineate the accreditation, certification/assessment, performance management, or quality improvement program currently in place and the type of legal framework supporting it.
This study revisited the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment and explored the longitudinal deterrent effects of foot patrol in violent crime hot spots using Sherman’s concepts of initial and residual deterrence decay as a theoretical framework. It also explored whether the displacement uncovered during the initial evaluation decayed after the experiment ended. Multi-level growth curve models revealed that beats staffed for 22 weeks had a decaying deterrent effect during the course of the experiment whereas those staffed for 12 weeks did not.
This paper explores associations between awareness of New Jersey’s HIV exposure law and the HIV-related attitudes, beliefs, and sexual and seropositive status disclosure behaviors of HIV-positive persons. The study finds 51 percent of participants knew about the HIV exposure law. This awareness was not associated with increased sexual abstinence, condom use with most recent partner, or seropositive status disclosure. Contrary to hypotheses, persons who were unaware of the law experienced greater stigma and were less comfortable with positive serostatus disclosure.
Parental involvement (PI) laws require that physicians notify or obtain consent from a parent(s) of a minor seeking an abortion before performing the procedure. This study shows that prior evidence based on gonorrhea rates overlooked the frequent under-reporting of gonorrhea by race and ethnicity, and presents new evidence on the effects of PI laws using more current data on the prevalence of gonorrhea and data that are novel to this literature (i.e., chlamydia rates and data disaggregated by year of age).
This paper reports on field observations of foot patrol officers involved in a recent experiment in Philadelphia, which were designed to capture officers' perceptions of, and experiences with the foot patrol function.
This letter to the editor of Clinical Infectious Diseases explores the "10 x ′20 initiative" — a global commitment to develop 10 new antimicrobials by 2020. The authors question the development costs, the current clinical trial system, and the neglection of current antimicrobials. They also examine issue of quality versus quantity and conclude that "... we need to set priorities to achieve a balance between antibiotic conservation and new drug development, focusing on policies that will best serve public health.
