The Paul G. Rogers Society for Global Health Research is accepting nominations for global health ambassadors. The ambassadors are US leaders in global health research who are committed to advocacy for global health research.

Nominations must be submitted by September 15, 2008. For details, see the call for nominations.

State- and city-level data on birth outcomes is now available from 2008 The Right Start for America’s Newborns in the KIDS COUNT Data Center. The entire data set is available for download as a delimited file.

Results from the 2007 Latino Health Survey conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center are available in a new report, Hispanics and Health Care in the United States: Access, Information and Knowledge.

The September issue of the American Journal of Public Health includes an article on the NIH Centers for Population Health and Health Disparities, “the first federal initiative to support transdisciplinary multilevel research on the determinants of health disparities.”

Citation: Warnecke, R. B., Oh, A., Breen, N., Gehlert, S., Paskett, E., Tucker, K. L., et al. (2008). Approaching Health Disparities From a Population Perspective: The National Institutes of Health Centers for Population Health and Health Disparities. American Journal of Public Health, 98(9), 1608-1615. (Abstract available online; Penn State users check The CAT for print or online full text)

Many normal-weight individuals have risk factors normally associated with obesity, and many overweight people do not have these risk factors, showing that we are still a long way from understanding the relationship between weight and health, according to analysis of NHANES data. (Baltimore Sun)

Citation: Wildman, R. P., Muntner, P., Reynolds, K., McGinn, A. P., Rajpathak, S., Wylie-Rosett, J., et al. (2008). The Obese Without Cardiometabolic Risk Factor Clustering and the Normal Weight With Cardiometabolic Risk Factor Clustering: Prevalence and Correlates of 2 Phenotypes Among the US Population (NHANES 1999-2004). Archives of Internal Medicine, 168(15), 1617-1624. (Available free online)

HRS has released the 2007 Disability Vignette Study.

PRI researchers may request the above data from the Data Archivist.

PRI’s NHANES holdings are now current through May 2008. All updates and new files have been downloaded. PRI Researchers using this data are encouraged to look at SodaPop, PRI’s Data Archive for updated holdings.

A new report from the Commonwealth Fund finds that performance indicators for child health care systems vary widely across states, with Iowa and Vermont emerging at the top. The report, U.S. Variations in Child Health System Performance: A State Scorecard, is available for download from the Commonwealth Fund’s Web site, along with an interactive map.

For a brief period, anyone who searched POPLINE using the search term “abortion” would get 0 results. Inquiries by concerned librarians revealed that POPLINE administrators at Johns Hopkins had made “abortion” a stop word after USAID, the reproductive health database’s funder, expressed concern about a few articles in the database. “Abortion” was quickly restored as a search term after numerous complaints.

For more, see articles at NPR and the Baltimore Sun.

The PRI Library has received announcement of the C2S Summer Biomarkers Institute, to be held June 9-11 at the Evanston, IL campus of the Northwestern University.