Research Results

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.

In this article for the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (now JAMA Pediatrics), the author discusses two articles, by McCabe, et al. and Meier et al., but also raises two questions about the issues of opioid abuse and adolescents. He asks, "What is the role of parents and what is the role of the prescriber, and others, in educating parents about the potential hazards of opioids, the relative need for them, how to safeguard them at home, and the need to dispose of unused medications immediately?"

This study explored the association between the legal infrastructure of local public health, as expressed in the exercise of local fiscal and legislative authority, and local population health outcomes.

In this article, the authors report on the efforts of more than 200 foot patrol officers during the summer of 2009 in Philadelphia. The results suggest that targeted foot patrols in violent crime hotspots can significantly reduce violent crime levels as long as a threshold level of violence exists initially. The authors suggest that intensive foot patrol efforts in violent hotspots may achieve deterrence at a microspatial level, primarily by increasing the certainty of disruption, apprehension, and arrest.

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 paper 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.

Opioid overdoses are an important public health concern. Concerns about police involvement at overdose events may decrease calls to 911 for emergency medical care thereby increasing the chances than an overdose becomesfatal. To address this concern, Washington State passed a law that provides immunity from drug possession charges and facilitates the availability of take-home-naloxone (the opioid overdose antidote) to bystanders in 2010.

This policy brief discusses an on-going inter-disciplinary study to measure whether laws that reshape local electricity demand can achieve significant health benefits in New York City. A collaborative effort of legal, economic, and public health researchers, the study will answer three crucial questions that should inform New York’s energy planning decisions: 

In the face of a growing global burden of resistance to existing antibiotics, a combination of scientific and economic challenges has posed significant barriers to the development of novel antibacterials over the past few decades. Yet the bottlenecks at each stage of the pharmaceutical value chain—from discovery to post-marketing—present opportunities to reengineer an innovation pipeline that has fallen short.