Resumo em Inglês:

For the first decade of the new millennium, "Healthy People 2010" will be the official designation of the health promotion and disease prevention policy of the United States of America. The policy's work plan carries on the vision of Health for All that is promoted by the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization and whose attainment will be the responsibility of each and every person on earth. Healthy People in Healthy Communities, as the approach to Healthy People 2010 will be called, will have two general objectives for the United States as a whole. One is to increase the years of healthy life, incorporating the concept of quality of life into that of healthy life expectancy. The second objective is to eliminate health disparities. Twenty-eight priority areas and more than 400 goals will be consolidated through community initiatives and close communication among the public, health authorities, and community leaders. The experience of the United States is particularly interesting because it is participatory, as shown by the creation and consolidation of alliances between numerous sectors, bipartisan political support, use of scientific tests to support decisions, and efforts to strengthen data collection processes. The broad acceptance and adoption of the objectives of Healthy People by practically all fifty states reaffirms the initiative's validity in various socioeconomic and cultural contexts. Healthy People 2010 will be launched publicly during a conference that will be held in Washington, D.C., from 24 to 28 January 2000, with support from the Healthy People Consortium and the Partnerships for Networked Consumer Health Information.

Resumo em Inglês:

The increase in the resistance to antimicrobials has become a serious public health concern. Responding jointly to this problem, the Pan American Health Organization and the Pan American Association of Infectious Diseases, supported by the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare of Venezuela, organized the Pan American Conference on Antimicrobial Resistance, which was held in Caraballeda, Venezuela, from 2 to 4 November 1998. In this work the principal recommendations coming out of that conference are summarized for each subject addressed there: educating health professionals on the appropriate use of antibiotics, developing a Pan American network to monitor resistance, quality control and ways to achieve laboratory results that are consistent and comparable, and the appropriate and inappropriate use of antibiotics, both in hospitals and in the community.

Resumo em Inglês:

We look at the epidemiology of the most common infectious diseases that in 1998 affected the countries of Central America most seriously damaged by Hurricane Mitch: Belice, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Incidence and mortality figures and fatality rates for cholera, dengue, malaria, and leptospirosis, before and after the hurricane, come from data provided by each country's ministry of health.