October 31st, 2010 by Berci in Better Health Network, Health Tips, News
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published the newest “Health Communicator’s Social Media Toolkit.” From the CDC:
A guide to using social media to improve reach of health messages, increase access to your content, further participation with audiences, and advance transparency to improve health communication efforts.
The guide is truly fantastic, detailed, and comprehensive.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
October 29th, 2010 by Berci in Better Health Network, Research
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Ed Bennett has been managed a huge and comprehensive list of U.S. hospitals using social media. In the newest update, Hospital accounts on LinkedIn are now also tracked in addition to Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and blogs.
Current stats:
871 hospitals total
- 421 YouTube channels
- 679 Facebook pages
- 648 Twitter accounts
- 417 LinkedIn accounts
- 94 blogs
You can also browse by state. The number of hospitals using each account is below:
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
October 21st, 2010 by Berci in Better Health Network, Health Tips, Research
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More than a year ago I wrote about AccessDNA, which now changed focus and became Inherited Health. Jordanna Joaquina, M.S., C.G.C., Director of Genetics and Co-Founder of Inherited Health, shared what kind of changes they implemented into the site:
— We have created an easy-to-use and secure tool that allows people and their biological relatives to collectively create and update their family health history together.
— We then analyze the family history information to create a personal health guide, which identifies hereditary disease risks and provide actionable guidance about how to lower these risks for each family member.
— We also provide a summary of the family health history that can be printed and shared with doctors and helps avoid repeatedly filling out health history forms at doctors office and improves the accuracy of the information provided because of collaborative family effort.
Click HERE to see an image of a whole health report, with all the details and disease risks.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
October 14th, 2010 by Berci in Better Health Network, Medical Art, Research
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A few months ago, Alexandra Pajak, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, contacted me about an album of music based on the DNA of the HIV virus she was about to release. I feel lucky that the album is just on its way to my CD player right now.
You can buy the album on Amazon (release date is October 26.) Note that some of the proceeds will go to the Emory Vaccine Center, which conducts research for an HIV vaccine. If you wonder how it was made, here’s the explanation:
Sounds of HIV is a musical translation of the genetic code of HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. Every segment of the virus is assigned music pitches that correspond to the segment’s scientific properties. In this way, the sounds reflect the true nature of the virus. When listening from beginning to end, the listener hears the entire genome of HIV.
In English, the nucleotides Adenine, Cytosine, Uracil/Thymine, and Guanine are abbreviated with the letters A, C, T, and G. Since A, C, and G are also musical pitches in the Western melodic scale, these pitches were assigned to the matching nucleotides. To form two perfect fifths (C-G and D-A), “D” was arbitrarily assigned to musically represent Uracil. I assigned the pitches of the A minor scale to the amino acids based on their level of attraction to water.
On Sounds of HIV, depending on the track, only nucleotides and/or amino acids “play” as music. Tracks 1 and 10 are based on the first and last nucleotides of the RNA chain. Tracks 2-9 “play” the proteins and sometimes the nucleotides on top of the proteins.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*