Snow isn’t as soft as it looks – and Alaska health professionals say no matter how much we enjoy the outdoors; kids especially need to protect their brains. Is your family hitting the slopes, a sledding hill, pond or snowmachine trails this winter? Alaska health professionals have one heartfelt request for you: Remember your helmet, and your kids’ helmets, too. Too many Alaskans will hit their heads while playing outdoors this winter, including children and teenagers. Most of the time, ...

With cold weather encouraging people to stay inside near a warm fire, now is a good time to think about how the proper maintenance of our woodstoves can protect our safety and health, as well as the longevity of the stove. It’s important to keep tabs on what you are burning and how it burns. For instance, a black, soot-filled window on your woodstove can be an indication that maintenance is needed, or burning practices need to be changed. A ...

During the COVID-19 quarantine, people are spending even more time in their homes than usual. Make sure your home stays healthy as well! The most important tips to stay healthy from COVID-19 and other illnesses are to practice routine hand-washing and household cleaning. It is also important to keep the air inside your home healthy while using cleaning products, especially for those with respiratory conditions that affect lungs or breathing such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Many cleaning ...

The town of Newtok, Alaska, named for the vast delta grasses and the sound they make in wind, clearly hears another sound: the river. Newtok, Yup’ik for “rustling of the grass,” is located within the 19 million-acre Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, a spongy lowland dotted with rivers, sloughs, streams and lakes. Water is everywhere. When it was established in the 1940s, Newtok was well inland, located near a sweeping bend of the Ninglick River. However, over the last 40 ...

Community. Culture. Connections. In Kwethluk, Alaska, a larger-than-life painting celebrates all this and more. The colorful mural is the result of a nationwide project called Water is Life and is one of many pieces of art that have sprung up in Tribal community centers and on water storage tanks in communities in Alaska and Montana. The murals are a celebration of the importance of water in Alaska Native and American Indian traditions and history. But it is not the only ...

In 2017, there were 102 overdose deaths involving opioids throughout the state of Alaska—a rate of 13.9 per 100,000 persons. Prescription opioids (such as hydrocodone, oxycodone and morphine) are prescribed by doctors to treat moderate to severe pain. However, they have serious risks and side effects, including dependency, addiction, overdose and accidental poisoning. In order to assist in the prevention of substance misuse and accidental poisoning, Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium now provides free medicine disposal products through the iknowmine ...