Public health educational intervention in a family medicine residency.

Emerging infections and bioterrorism pose increasing threats to the health of our communities. To protect patients, frontline providers like family physicians must learn and use core public health skills such as disease detection, surveillance, and response activities. This paper describes a unique approach to teaching these core public health skills by incorporating residents into ongoing disease surveillance and reporting activities in coordination with the local health department.

Osteoporosis: point-of-care testing.

Objective: To review the literature concerning the utility of point-of-care (POC) testing devices for the diagnosis and management of osteoporosis.

Data Sources: Articles were identified from a MEDLINE search (1993-June 2003). Additional references were obtained from cross-referencing the bibliographies of selected articles.