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Have you or a family member been hit by the flu? Is this year's flu worse than in previous years? Share your experiences in the comments.

Tomorrow and Wednesday I'll be taking part in the 14th annual Greater Greensboro Society of Medicine mini-internships. In this program, interns are paired up with primary-care physicians (1 day) and surgeons (1 day) and get to follow them ... well, basically everywhere, with very few exceptions. The idea is to give lay people in the community (my fellow interns include business people and clergy, among others) a first-hand look at how health care works from the doctor's perspective.

If there's anything in particular you're curious about, leave a note or question in the comments and I'll see if I can get an answer or description for you.

Sometime recently when I wasn't paying attention, the ability to add tags to blog posts was added to our blog publishing system (Movable Type, for the geeks among you). Tags are a kind of data that describe data (the technical term is metadata), and they are among the things that search engines such as Google focus on when they do their work.

I've gone back through the past several weeks' posts here and tagged them. You can see the tags at the end of each post. If you think there's a tag that a post needs to have and doesn't, please e-mail or leave a comment and I'll add it. Thanks!

An American Heart Association study released today says sedentary women can benefit from even small amounts of exercise in ways that go beyond purely physical health.

Can you spare, say, 20 minutes a day for your health?

Business Week has an interesting article up about how insurers are starting to send patients overseas for certain medical procedures. Even after paying the patient's travel costs and other incidentals, the insurer can still come out ahead having the procedure done someplace other than in the U.S. So you could be getting your bypass done in Bangkok.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case about the District of Columbia's decades-old laws banning new registration of handguns, outlawing concealed weapons and requiring that guns kept at home be unloaded and either disassembled or unlocked. It is the most important gun-rights case to reach the high court in decades.

The medical community considers gun violence to be a legal, a political and a public health issue. The New England Journal of Medicine has published three relevant articles online: an examination of the issue from a public health perspective, an analysis of the legal and constitutional issues and an editorial urging the high court to consider public-health as well as legal issues as it weighs the constitutionality of the District's laws.

What do you think the court should do, and why? To what extent do you think the public-health angle should be a part of the discussion?

Linked without comment, here is The Health Care Blog's analysis of Sen. Barack Obama's health-care plan.

After my story Saturday on how Greensboro Day staffers saved eighth-grader Chris Dalldorf's life with a portable defibrillator, I got several e-mails, including some containing information I thought merited wider distribution.

Dr. Michael Simmons, who was quoted in the story, wrote to stress the need to have portable defibrillators in all schools. Potentially fatal heart problems are no respecter of age, and some genetically-based heart problems have surfaced in otherwise healthy kids even younger than Chris (who turns 15 in April). The Guilford County Schools have devices in all high schools and middle schools, but relatively few elementary schools have them at this point. One angle from Greensboro Day that I didn't have room to include in my print story was that faculty/staff there bought devices with money forfeited from people's health-care reimbursement accounts -- money that was paid in but never pulled back out to pay health expenses. Linda Sudnik, the school nurse, urges people to think creatively about how these purchases might be paid for, and she's speaking from experience on that.

Joe Mullins e-mailed to point out that Jon Schner, the school director of sports medicine who was instrumental in reviving Chris, is a certified athletic trainer who is licensed by the state of North Carolina. He thinks it's a good idea to have at least one such licensed professional on the staffs of all secondary schools, although North Carolina does not currently require that.

Finally, I heard today from Shellie Wenhold, who used to live in Greensboro with her family before moving to Georgia in 2004. In October 2004, her son Jonathan, who had attended Jesse Wharton Elementary here, went into sudden cardiac arrest at his school in Georgia. The school did not have a defibrillator, and paramedics arrived with one roughly 10 to 12 minutes after Jonathan's collapse -- too late to prevent brain damage from loss of oxygen. Jonathan died after eight days in the hospital.

Ms. Wenhold wanted to make people aware of two organizations whose work falls into this area.

The Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndromes Foundation seeks to prevent sudden death due to heart abnormalities and to support families who have lost a member to this disorder.

Parent Heart Watch is a national network of families who either have lost a child to sudden cardiac arrest or who have children at known risk for it. It keeps databases of children who have died because of sudden cardiac arrest and of children who suffered it but were saved.

Ms. Wenhold has been active in this area since losing her son. She and others even helped obtain a portable defibrillator for Jonathan's former school, Jesse Wharton.

If there's a lesson to be taken away from her sad story and what happened to Chris Dalldorf, it's that we need portable defibrillators in more places and we need more people trained in how to use them. (Schner and Sudnik demonstrated it for me -- it looks so easy even a klutz like me could do it.) Training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation also remains crucial. Schner estimates that only 4 to 6 percent of North Carolinians are trained in CPR. If I or one of my children went into sudden cardiac arrest, I'd prefer the odds be much, much higher.

UPDATE: Today (April 1) the New England Journal of Medicine publishes both a paper and an editorial about the potential benefits of having a portable defibrillator at home. Research showed no statistically significant benefit, and the editorial notes, "As usual, marketing of such devices is charging far ahead of science." The study and editorial did not address the potential benefits of having such devices in public places.

UPDATE: Welcome to all the visitors from Instapundit. Please make yourselves at home.

April is Public Health Month, and Guilford County's Department of Public Health, the state's first, has a whole slew of activities lined up to mark the month. You can see the list here.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services now has (the singular verb is correct; it's one agency) two Web sites up that are aimed at helping consumers compare hospitals on the basis of cost and quality.

The Hospital Compare Web Site lets consumers check on a hospital's accreditation, get information on how patients rated their experience as well as how much Medicare paid for certain procedures. (Medicare payments often serve as a basis for what private insurers will pay.)

You also can see data from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems. Making the data available is aimed at providing a meaningful, objective basis for comparing hospitals and, through this level of transparency, create incentives for hospitals to improve care.

The Health Care Blog has more information and background here. Note some of the caveats raised in the comments to this post.