The COVID-19 pandemic has become a global public health crisis and poses unprecedented challenges to the national health and lives of our residents. The Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics held a seminar series on the epidemiology of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, the state of Maryland and the world. The seminar series featured presentations delivered by frontline public health experts, community members and epidemiologists.

In their recent article in Public Health Reports, Heather Platter, Katya Kaplow, and Cynthia Baur report findings and implications from their Community Health Literacy Assessment (CHLA) conducted in Maryland from January to August of 2018.

Center director Dr. Cynthia Baur co-moderated a panel on health misinformation as part of the Public Health at Maryland series.

The highlights of the Horowitz Center's activities during Health Literacy Month in 2020.

Center Director Dr. Cynthia Baur participated in a panel hosted by the UMD School of Public Policy for the BIG10 network on safe voting.

The Center for Health Literacy is asking African American and Hispanic adults to test a smartphone health app for personalized health information.

The app can help find information to prevent or manage common health conditions.

Here's how to participate:

• OWN an ANDROID phone
• Willing to download the app
• Use the app at least 15 minutes a week
• Attend 1 virtual orientation session

Participants will get:

Community Health Workers or CHWs help people with their everyday health questions and concerns, and last fall, five students at UMD’s iSchool (College of Information Studies) Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction program learned how CHWs hope to use technology to help their clients with health literacy and other health barriers. They interviewed CHWs in southern Maryland and found that CHWs encounter multiple workflow problems.

A public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic has only made the digital divide more visible, though the researchers' analysis was done long before the pandemic. Working adults and children haven't been able to easily shift to a virtual environment during the pandemic, as they don't have the laptops, smartphones, networked printers, broadband and wifi connections to make the shift.

Before coming to the Center for Health Literacy, Érick Tássio worked as a dentist in Paraíba, Brazil. The visiting doctoral student decided to work at the Center for its dedicated mission on advancing health literacy and its contributions to oral health research. “I selected the Center because it allowed me to share knowledge and gain experience with well-known researchers in the health literacy field as Dr. Alice Horowitz and Dr. Cynthia Baur,” he said.

Dr. Catherine Maybury, a 2018 Rudd Health Literacy Fellow and a research assistant in the Horowitz Center for Health Literacy, successfully defended her dissertation on March 24, 2020.