The Baltimore City Health Department has launched a texting app to inform people when there's a cluster of overdoses in their neighborhood due to bad batches of drugs.

To sign up for alerts, text "JOIN" to 952-BB-ALERT.

Read the entire story.

With the help of student computer programmers, Baltimore health officials have launched a text-messaging service to warn residents when deadly batches of drugs are in their neighborhood.

“People are using fentanyl without realizing it,” said Dr. Leana Wen, Baltimore’s health commissioner. “Fentanyl is getting mixed in with heroin, cocaine, prescription drugs. They’re overdosing and dying without realizing what they’re taking.”

Read the entire story.

This city has opened a new front in its effort to give black newborns the same chance of surviving infancy as white babies: training “doulas” to assist expectant mothers during pregnancy, delivery and afterward. The doula initiative is the latest salvo in the Baltimore City Health Department’s 7-year-old program to combat high infant mortality rates among black newborns.

Read the entire story.

With flimsy justification, and in small type buried in routine documents, the Trump administration has informed 81 local governments and health groups that it will end grants they have received to run teen pregnancy prevention programs, two years before the grants are scheduled to end. The decision is unsettling even by the disquieting standards of this anti-science administration.

The rate at which teenagers have babies in the United States fell by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2015, though it is still higher than in other industrialized countries. A lot of the credit for the decline belongs to health and education officials who have been coming up with new approaches to educate young people about sex and get them to make better decisions. One such effort was the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, created by Congress and implemented by the Obama administration in 2010. It provides five-year grants, in annual distributions, to cities, counties and health organizations to operate and evaluate public health programs aimed at teenagers. Funding for a second round of grants began in 2015, but it will now expire in 2018 instead of 2020.

The department that runs the program, Health and Human Services, made no effort initially to explain its decision, which was tucked into a routine grant letter earlier this summer. The decision came before Congress has even voted on appropriations for the next fiscal year, which begins in October. By cutting the grants short, the department is depriving recipients of about $200 million.

Read the entire story.