CDC's Guiding Principles to Promote an Equity-Centered Approach to Public Health Communication.

A public health practitioner's mission is to protect and promote the health of all people in all communities. Components of being successful in that mission include understanding who is at risk of negative outcomes, identifying effective actions to promote and protect health, and communicating information accordingly. Information must be scientifically rigorous, provide appropriate contextualizing information, and refer to and visually represent people through words and images in respectful ways. Public health communication objectives include that the audience accepts, understands, and acts on the information to protect and promote health. This article describes the impetus for, development of, and public health applications and implications of principles to guide communication efforts. CDC's Health Equity Guiding Principles for Inclusive Communication is a web-based resource published in August 2021 that offers - but does not mandate - guidance and recommendations for public health practice. The resource can help public health practitioners and their partners consider social inequities and diversity, think more inclusively about the people they serve, and adapt to the cultural, linguistic, environmental, and historical situation of each population or audience of focus. Users are encouraged to have conversations about the Guiding Principles as they plan and develop communication products and strategies in collaboration with communities and partners and build a shared vocabulary consistent with how communities and groups of focus see and understand themselves, because words matter. As the public health field renews its focus on shifting the paradigm toward equity, a language and narrative shift is a vital intervention.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's maternal health response to 2009 H1N1 influenza.

We describe the efforts of the Maternal Health Team, which was formed to address the needs of pregnant and breastfeeding women during the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) 2009 pandemic influenza A (2009 H1N1) emergency response. We examined the team's activities, constructed a timeline of key pandemic events, and analyzed the Maternal Health 2009 H1N1 inquiry database. During the pandemic response, 9 guidance documents that addressed the needs of pregnant and breastfeeding women and their providers were developed by the Maternal Health Team. The Team received 4661 maternal health-related inquiries that came primarily from the public (75.5%) and were vaccine related (69.3%). Peak inquiry volume coincided with peak hospitalizations (October-November 2009). The Maternal Health 2009 H1N1 inquiry database proved useful to identify information needs of the public and health care providers during the pandemic.