May 2022: Healthy Behaviors

Posted on March 26, 2022 by Justin B. Moore

Associate Editor Justin B. Moore highlights new articles in the May/June 2022 issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.

As spring is upon us, bringing warmer temperatures, flowers, and the associated pollen, I would like to bring your attention to a few articles from the recent May/June issue of the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice of potential interest. The first article is from Pomeranz and Mozaffarian, and it describes their efforts to identify and analyze state laws and bills preempting local control over beverage containers to evaluate how the preemption provisions relate to public health policies aimed at reducing sugary beverage consumption. In this compelling study they found that state preemption laws that prohibit local regulation of containers may indeed preempt communities’ ability to enact public health policy strategies aimed at reducing sugary beverage consumption. These findings have important implications for future policy work to limit sugary beverage consumption.

The second article of note comes from Smith and colleagues, which examines trends in opioid prescription patterns from 2008 to 2019 in San Diego County, California. They report that total opioids prescribed increased by 29.7% from 2008 to 2012 and subsequently decreased by 54.4% from 2012 to 2019. The annual decrease in total morphine milligram equivalents from 2012 to 2019 averaged 5.9%. However, the two-year decrease in morphine milligram equivalents from 2017 to 2019 was 35.1%, indicating an accelerated reduction in recent years. These trends in San Diego are an example of coordinated efforts focusing on prescribers, patients, and regulatory oversight can positively impact the ongoing opioid epidemic.

Read the May Issue Now!

Schexnayder and team bring us a compelling mixed-methods evaluation of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis implementation among African American and Hispanic adults receiving medical care in Virginia’s local health departments. They conclude that tailoring of pre-exposure prophylaxis services to communities with the greatest local burden may be needed to optimize the effectiveness of these programs in local health departments. These findings will be especially useful for local health departments serving diverse communities where HIV burden is especially high.

Finally, Wilking, Nink, and Cradock supplied a commentary calling for better access for safe drinking water, and highlight how federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) policy might better account for the cost of safe drinking water in the absence of accessible safe home drinking water. They argue that federal and state SNAP policies could account for the cost of water and leverage the SNAP EBT platform to deliver targeted aid to SNAP households residing in areas lacking access to safe drinking water. Their call to action is well informed, and could be used to shape national and state level legislation necessary to address the important issue of lack of safe drinking water.

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Justin B. Moore: Justin B. Moore, PhD, MS, FACSM is an Associate Professor in the Department of Implementation Science in the Division of Public Health Sciences at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC, USA. He holds joint appointments in the departments of Family & Community Medicine and Epidemiology & Prevention. Dr. Moore also serves as the Director of the Implementation Science Affinity Group within the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Wake Forest University. He conducts community-engaged research focused on the dissemination and implementation of evidence-based strategies for the promotion of healthy behaviors in underserved populations. He also conducts epidemiological research examining the determinants of health behaviors and related comorbidities across the lifespan. He serves as the Associate Editor of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice as an Associate Editor-in-Chief for the Translational Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine. He previously served at the chair of the editorial board of the American Journal of Public Health. Dr. Moore is an active member of the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). He was named a fellow in the ACSM in 2010 and was a founding member of the Physical Activity Section of the APHA. He later served as the chair of the Physical Activity Section and as the Section’s representative on the APHA Governing Council. In 2017, he was named a fellow in the National Cancer Institute supported Mentored Training for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Cancer program. He has served as a visiting scholar at Nanchang University, located in Nanchang, Jiangxi, China, and Wuhan University, in Wuhan, Hubei, China. As a result of his research, he and his colleagues have published more than 170 peer-reviewed articles, and he has received funding as principal investigator for his work from the National Institutes of Health, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the de Beaumont Foundation, among others.