PPE includes pads, gloves, masks, and shields. These products have applications in the manufacturing, chemicals, construction, oil and gas, food, and pharmaceuticals industries. The choice of PPE depends on the kind of risk the wearer is exposed to and the intensity and duration of exposure.

Passengers have to undergo strict security screening procedures before boarding an aircraft. Passenger screening commonly includes pat-down searches, metal detectors, and full-body scanners. As air passenger traffic has grown, large airports find it difficult to process passengers through security checkpoints without impacting operational efficiency. As a result, advanced passenger screening systems (based on backscatter X-ray and millimeter wave technologies) are being used at airports worldwide, in addition to existing hand-held and walk-through metal detectors.

In the absence of validated national benchmarks, or norms, this document stresses the need for each community paramedicine program to define its system-specific health status benchmarks and performance indicators and to use a variety of community health and public health interventions to improve the community's health status. The document also addresses reducing the burden of illness, chronic disease, and injury as a community-wide public health problem, not strictly as a patient care issue. Opportunities to review community paramedicine programs are beneficial because they allow for the assessment of the status of EMS activities and move systems forward in developing inclusive and comprehensive systems of care. Many EMS programs conduct their own internal or external reviews, and it is hoped that this document will serve as another tool used by these programs to assess the current status of community paramedicine programs and to provide guidance on future system enhancements. The assessment tool also provides a common framework by which data can be collected from multiple community paramedicine programs and aggregated to develop a snapshot of common successes and challenges. While the tool should be useful across both urban and rural programs it is specifically designed to address rural settings where community health/public health resources are often very limited. By encouraging emerging rural community paramedicine programs to use this evaluation framework as a planning tool, it should be possible to create stronger partnerships and linkages with scarce rural resources.

In 2009, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act granted FDA, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), authority to regulate tobacco products such as cigarettes. The act requires that tobacco manufacturers submit information to be reviewed by FDA in order to market new tobacco products and established tobacco user fees to fund FDA's tobacco-related activities. The act represents the first time that FDA has had the authority to regulate tobacco products. Manufacturers have raised concerns about the progress of CTP, the FDA center established by the act to implement its provisions. GAO was asked to examine CTP's review of new tobacco product submissions, responses to meeting requests, and use of funds. This report examines (1) the status of CTP's reviews of new tobacco product submissions; (2) how CTP responded to manufacturers' and other entities' meeting requests, and the length of time CTP took to hold the meetings; and (3) the extent to which FDA has spent its tobacco user fee funds. GAO analyzed data regarding submissions received by FDA as of January 7, 2013; reviewed data on meeting requests, spending plans, and amounts obligated; and interviewed CTP and tobacco industry officials.

The communities of Hartford, Connecticut, and Syracuse, New York, implemented year-long campaigns to test whether NHTSAs high-visibility enforcement (HVE) model could be applied to reduce two specific forms of distracted driving driving while talking on a hand-held cell phone or texting. The HVE model applies strong laws, vigorous targeted law enforcement, extensive media that emphasizes the enforcement, and evaluation. Both sites conducted 4 waves of enforcement between April 2010 and April 2011. NHTSA developed and bought TV and radio spots featuring the tag line Phone in One Hand, Ticket in the Other. Both sites generated ample earned media. Police wrote 100 to 200 citations per 10,000 population for each wave in each site. Driver surveys showed an increase in awareness that cell phone laws were being enforced and recognition of the new slogan. Observed hand-held driver cell phone use dropped from 6.6% to 2.9% in Hartford, and from 3.7% to 2.5% in Syracuse. Connecticuts control area also showed a decrease in use (from 6.6% to 5.6%) but not to the same extent as Hartford. New Yorks control area had similar decreases (5% to 3%), perhaps a result of separate enforcement campaigns running simultaneously in the control site. The results show that high-visibility enforcement campaigns can reduce the number of people who use hand-held cell phones while driving.