Planning to Hit the Road for the Holidays?

The Injury Prevention team at Denver Health wants to make sure you have a safe and healthy holiday season and if you’re planning on traveling to visit your loved ones during this time, we have some safety tips for you! Traveling by road between late November and mid-January is one of the most common forms of travel, but also one of the deadliest.

We can all help prevent suicide. September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, a time when communities can come together and share their stories and resources to help spread awareness about suicide in the hope of preventing another individual from taking their life. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide was responsible for 49,476 deaths in 2022, which is about one death every 11 minutes. The number of people who think about or attempt suicide is even higher.

Thanksgiving may have already passed, but the holiday season is just getting underway – with Hanukkah this week, and Christmas, Kwanzaa and New Year's right around the corner. Staying healthy, especially with eating and nutrition, can be a concern for some people during this time. Increased holiday dinners and social events can pose opportunities to deviate away from your typical diet, often for days and weeks. Traveling and having visitors over during this time can also lead to a change in your typical exercise routine.

National Home Safety Awareness Month, part of National Safety Month, is celebrated in June when people focus on how they can keep their homes safe and free from danger and keep their families injury-free.

Omicron, Delta, COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 are household names. As frequent as they appear in conversation, there is widely distributed misinformation regarding COVID-19 variants. Denver Health is committed to providing our community with accurate and timely information regarding COVID-19, its variants, how they compare and how you can protect yourself and those you love.

The past year was a year of profound loss. Taken from so many of us were lives and livelihoods, loves and loved ones. Even facts and universal truths seemed stripped away by a roller coaster pandemic and repeated cycles of social action and reaction. Among the overlooked statistics from this lost year was the terrible toll wrought by drug overdose deaths, which increased by 64 percent in Denver in just one year, adding to our personal and local misery, echoed in similar trends across Colorado and the nation.

For weeks now, a big topic of conversation surrounding the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has been the variants of the original virus that causes COVID-19 – specifically:

• What are variants?
• What do variants mean if we've been fully vaccinated?
• What do variants mean for wearing masks?

Here is everything that is important to know right now about variants.

August is National Immunization Awareness Month and a good time to talk about vaccines and why they are so important not just now but throughout history. Vaccines are something most of us don't think about regularly and often take for granted. Since Edward Jenner created the first vaccine in 1796 they have become of vital importance to our health care system. Widespread use of the smallpox vaccine helped wipe out the disease in 1980.  Other diseases, such as polio and diphtheria, have been eliminated in many parts of the world because of vaccinations.
 

(Updated) Vaccinations are available to everyone age 5 and over. Denver Health will continue to vaccinate patients according to the latest state guidelines. Learn how to make an appointment for a vaccine at Denver Health.