Scientists at the UA Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health have introduced Kidenga, a free smartphone app for Android and iOS that allows users to report mosquito activity and symptoms of illness and helps to detect outbreaks.

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Yoshira Ornelas Van Horne, a doctoral student at the UA Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, led an environmental toxicology training and household exposure sampling campaign with community health representatives from the Navajo Department of Health. Ornelas Van Horne is part of a cross-disciplinary team of researchers from the UA who are investigating short-term exposure in Navajo communities after the Gold King Mine toxic spill in 2015.

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Arizona Public Media | Learning to ride a bicycle should be a rite of passage for every child. The town of Ajo in western Pima County received a special delivery of 48 bicycles in September, part of a project to promote public health. Martha Monroy, a lecturer at the UA Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, is principal investigator of the Ajo community cycling center project. The bikes are part of a chronic disease prevention program and a 10-year relationship between Pima County’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Program and the UA College of Public Health.

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Psychology Today | Our pets might give us unconditional love, but they can also give us a host of things we really don’t want. These include Lyme disease, leptospirosis, giardia, ring worms and salmonella. Indeed, some researchers have even claimed that we might get cancer from our pets. Thus pet lovers will find a study led by David Garcia, assistant professor of health promotion sciences at the UA Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, reassuring. Using a data set of over 120,000 women, the researchers found there was no relationship between owning pets and developing nine types of cancer. But they did find some very surprising links between pet ownership and health in adult women.

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Nicolette Teufel-Shone, professor of family and child health at the UA Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, received the Native Research Network award for Excellence in Training for her commitment and mentorship to Native American Investigators within the Center for American Indian Resilience. Dr. Teufel-Shone has worked with Native American communities in the Southwest for more than 25 years, supporting community capacity to address chronic disease prevention and to leverage local assets to build sustainable approaches to health equity.

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