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Immunizations, emergency preparations for hurricanes, and restaurant inspections are among local public-health services being cut back or eliminated amid budget constraints.

Some 55% of the nation’s county and city health departments reduced or eliminated at least one program between July 2010 and June 2011, and the public-health workforce continued to shrink, according to a new survey by the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

There was plenty of love for New York City this week from delegates at a high-level United Nations meeting on chronic diseases. But it wasn’t all about the city’s restaurants or Broadway shows.

The problem of antibiotic resistance tends to reach public consciousness in a scattershot manner — when ground turkey is recalled because it’s tainted with salmonella that can’t be treated by common drugs, for example. But it’s hard to get a comprehensive picture of the extent to which certain infections have become impervious to treatment.

Tainted Fruit: Cantaloupe from Jensen Farms in Colorado has been linked to an outbreak of listeriosis that has sickened 12 people and killed two of them, the WSJ reports. The FDA is warning consumers not to eat the cantaloupes, which were recalled by the farm on Wednesday. Jensen Farms says tests have turned up listeria bacteria on a cantaloupe but says that it’s not yet known whether it’s the same strain as is implicated in the outbreak.

Last September, an HHS advisory committee recommended that all newborns be screened for critical congenital heart disease — a leading cause of death in infants younger than one year of age. The head of HHS, Kathleen Sebelius, hasn’t yet adopted the recommendation, requesting input on how to actually implement screening.

Salmonella is the chief baddie of the food pathogen world, accounting for 35% of foodborne disease hospitalizations in the U.S. and 28% of related deaths each year.

And now a particularly nasty, antibiotic-resistant type of the bacteria, Salmonella Heidelberg, has infected 77 people, killing one in California, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ground turkey is being investigated as the source, the CDC says.

Takeover Talks?: Valeant Pharmaceuticals has approached Meda AB in the last two weeks about a takeover, though the status of the talks is unclear, as is the amount Valeant might be willing to pay for the Swedish drug maker, the WSJ reports, citing people familiar with the matter. Assuming a premium of 30%, Meda could be sold for $4.4 billion, the paper says. Ontario-based Valeant previously made an unsuccessful hostile bid for Cephalon.

One of the only upsides of unemployment, you’d think, would be the free time that you’d have to do things that can be tough to squeeze into a normal work day — like going to the gym, or gardening, or just walking around the grocery store.

Two new surveys give a snapshot of how bad the drug-shortage problem has become.

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices has called the recent rash of shortages “unprecedented.” Today, the American Hospital Association and American Society of Health-System Pharmacists reported what their members are saying. (The WSJ wrote about this issue earlier this year.)