A Federal Publication for World Immunization Week

April 24, 2020

The current COVID-19 pandemic crisis has cast a light on the importance of vaccines. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tens of thousands of Americans get sick from diseases that could be prevented by vaccines each year. The CDC recommends vaccines for children, teens, and adults based on different factors like age, health conditions, lifestyle, jobs, and travel. The agency warns that outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases can and do still occur. For example, measles still exists in many parts of the world. In recent years, unvaccinated Americans who traveled to those parts of the world became sick and spread measles in their communities. Vaccinations protect not only you, but your family, friends, and neighbors. The more educated we are on vaccines, the more we can help ourselves and those around us stay safe and healthy. This year Word Immunization Week will be celebrated April 24–30. According to the CDC, this week is “a time dedicated to promoting the use of vaccines to protect people of all ages against disease.” If you’re looking to learn more, read on for a helpful tool.

The information on vaccines in the Immunization Toolkit, available for purchase at the GPO Bookstore, is based on national recommendations, peer-reviewed medical literature, and clinical practice guidelines. Physicians, nurses, pharmacists, hospital residents and more in the medical field will find the Immunization Tool Kit helpful in their practices. Or, if you’re just someone interested in learning more about vaccines, you can learn a lot from this toolkit!

The kit includes a bright, color-coded childhood/adolescent immunization schedule and recommended intervals between doses, a tool that parents and teachers will find incredibly helpful to keep their kids’ vaccinations on track and their children healthy. You can even put this schedule on your fridge! For medical professionals, the toolkit also includes a table that lists all components in each vaccine as well as a description of that vaccine’s manufacturing process. The toolkit describes the most up-to-date instructions on how to administer vaccines for children of various ages and provides illustrations for where on the body each vaccine should be administered, as well as how to prepare patients for vaccines. Healthcare professionals will benefit from information in the toolkit about the screening checklist for contraindications to vaccines.

We hope you take the time this World Immunization Week to use resources available to you to learn why vaccines are so critical to keeping our communities safe and healthy.

The GPO Online Bookstore – Easy Access to Federal Publications

HOW DO I OBTAIN THIS RESOURCE?

Sign up to receive promotional bulletin emails from the US Government Online Bookstore.

Shop Online Anytime: You can buy a vast majority of eBooks or print publications —with FREE Standard Shipping worldwide— from the U.S. Government Online Bookstore at https://bookstore.gpo.gov.

Visit our Retail Store: To buy or order a copy of any print editions from this collection at GPO’s retail bookstore at 710 North Capitol Street NW, Washington, DC 20401, open Monday–Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., except Federal holidays, Call (202) 512-0132 for information or to arrange in-store pick-up(s).

Order by Phone or Email: Call our Customer Contact Center Monday through Friday, 8 am to 4:30 pm Eastern (except US Federal holidays). From US and Canada, call toll-free 1.866.512.1800. DC or International customers call +1.202.512.1800.  Email orders to ContactCenter@gpo.gov

Visit a Federal depository library: Search for U.S. Government publications in a nearby Federal depository library. You can find the records for most titles in GPO’s Catalog of U.S. Government Publications.

Find more than a million official Federal Government publications from all three branches at www.govinfo.gov.

About the author: Blogger contributor Cat Goergen is the PR Specialist in GPO’s Public Relations office.

Leave a Comment » | Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Family, health, Health care | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Trudy Hawkins

Coronavirus Pandemic: Reliable Government Information Resources

March 19, 2020

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Coronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV).

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a new strain that was discovered in 2019 and has not been previously identified in humans. The virus that causes COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus that was first identified during an investigation into an outbreak in Wuhan, China and has since spread all over the world.

Common signs of infection include respiratory symptoms, fever, cough, shortness of breath, and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases, infection can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, kidney failure, and even death.

There is such an inundation of information all over the internet when it comes to COVID-19, but how do you know what information you can trust and which resources are reliable? That’s where Federal agencies can help.

Below is a collection of reliable resources you can trust. Information ranging from COVID-19 symptoms to look for to proper handwashing techniques is available.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers a comprehensive website with information such as:

  • How to protect yourself
  • What to do if you think you are sick
  • Symptoms
  • Disinfecting your home
  • Cases in the U.S. by state
  • Travel resources
  • And much more

They also offer this Factsheet: COVID-19 and You, and well as ‘Cases in the United States,’ which includes statistics on cases, deaths, information by state, and more. The site is updated regularly at noon, Monday – Friday.

Since one of the main ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is thorough hand-washing, the CDC also presents the handwashing tutorial, Handwashing: Clean Hands Save Lives.

Thankfully, there is no shortage of information available from the U.S. Government.

Rely on govinfo.gov for the latest legislation and Presidential documents concerning COVID-19.

Here are some additional reliable resources.

If you work in one of the 1,119 Federal depository libraries across the Nation, patrons are in search of information on the Coronavirus. Here are some resources that can help that are available through the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP).

GPO is happy to help share these dependable resources as part of our mission of Keeping America Informed. Stay informed, and stay safe.

The GPO Online Bookstore – Easy Access to Federal Publications

HOW DO I OBTAIN THESE RESOURCES?

For the these resources, click on the links above in this blog post.

Sign up to receive promotional bulletin emails from the US Government Online Bookstore.

Shop Online Anytime: You can buy a vast majority of eBooks or print publications —with FREE Standard Shipping worldwide— from the U.S. Government Online Bookstore at https://bookstore.gpo.gov.

Visit our Retail Store: To buy or order a copy of any print editions from this collection at GPO’s retail bookstore at 710 North Capitol Street NW, Washington, DC 20401, open Monday–Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., except Federal holidays, Call (202) 512-0132 for information or to arrange in-store pick-up(s).

Order by Phone or Email: Call our Customer Contact Center Monday through Friday, 8 am to 4:30 pm Eastern (except US Federal holidays). From US and Canada, call toll-free 1.866.512.1800. DC or International customers call +1.202.512.1800.  Email orders to ContactCenter@gpo.gov

Visit a Federal depository library: Search for U.S. Government publications in a nearby Federal depository library. You can find the records for most titles in GPO’s Catalog of U.S. Government Publications.

Find more than a million official Federal Government publications from all three branches at www.govinfo.gov.

About the authors: Jaime Hays is an Outreach Librarian and Kelly Seifert is the Strategic Communications Coordinator for GPO’s Library Services & Content Management division.

 

4 Comments | Centers for Disease Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Consumers, Department of Health & Human Services, health, Health care | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Trudy Hawkins

Society through a Comic Lens

February 7, 2012

By Guest Blogger, Marianne Mason, Federal Information Librarian, Research and Library Instruction at The University of Iowa Libraries

Comic books are not really books and often not comic, but are serialized graphics-based stories expressed through political and cultural rhetoric.  Think Maus, a story of the Holocaust.  Think Peanuts’ ethics and theology.

O.K., not all comic books or graphic novels are Pulitzer Prize winners or speak to a deep sense of ethics.  The pure entertainment value of storytelling through sequential art can be worthy on its own merits.  However, the comics can inform, persuade, and encourage new behaviors in readers.  This is the purpose of comic books authored by U.S. government agencies.

Used as social program marketing tools for decades, the government-authored comic book format has been used to promote program benefits (Social Security Administration) and to educate (Consumer Product Safety Commission) using superhero/anti-hero models like Sprocket Man (reviewed in our April 9, 2010, blog post “Just for Fun: Sprocket Man!” ) and El Gato to capture the attention of the targeted audience and cross educational boundaries.

The Army made instruction manuals measurably more appealing to combat personnel in PS Magazine by incorporating sexual innuendo in both dialog and character illustration such as in this Preventive Maintenance manual shown below:

In October 2011 the University of Iowa hosted a scholarly symposium entitled “Comics, Creativity, and Culture: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives”, a by-invitation-only event for scholars, artists and creators of the art and literature of comic books.  The Symposium spawned a semester-long series of complementary university sponsored events ranging from art exhibits, radio broadcasts, discussions, and interactive workshops for educators and K-12 students.  The University of Iowa Libraries contributed to the celebration by creating a Comic Book Café based on the Japanese “Manga Café” model.  Several specialized library collections, including Government Information, pooled their best examples for the café.

As the U.S. Government Information Librarian, I found that this event gave me an opportunity to draw attention to the characteristics and range of government authored comic books.  Creating a government comics research guide  gave me an opportunity to do a thorough survey of the collection,  access the content of the print collection and provide links to digitized collections from the broader government information community, including this latest online booklet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “Preparedness 101: A Zombie Pandemic”.

In addition, the research guide provides database access to many Congressional hearings and reports in the UI collection from the 1950’s linking juvenile delinquency to explicit violence in comic books.

Whether quirky or more profound, all reflect changing societal norms that drive public policy initiatives.

On October 4th an “egg timer” book talk called “Thought Balloons: Talking about Comics”, was held in the Café for creators and readers of comics to share insights and stories about connections to comic book literature.  One reader commented that when she and her boyfriend merged their comic book collections, she knew their love was here to stay!

Note regarding Images:

Images in order of mention: Sprocket Man, The 9 Lives of El Gato, PS Magazine, Comic Book Café, Zombie Pandemic (“broader gov. community”), Comic books and juvenile delinquency.  Serial Set 11815-1 (S. Rpt. 62, 84 Cong., 1st Session) 1955, Thought Balloons. Source: University of Iowa Libraries.

About our Guest Blogger:

Marianne Mason has worked with Government and legal resources in several law libraries and universities and at University of Iowa Libraries since 2001 as the regional librarian for the State of Iowa.  Her idea of a fine vacation involves clear water, forests, and the absence of machinery/technology noise.  She knows how to knit socks, two-at-a-time, toe up.

More resources about Government-created comics:

16 Comments | Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Congress, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), Senate, Social Security Administration (SSA), U.S. Army | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michele Bartram, U.S. Government Online Bookstore

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