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Los Angeles County residents are living longer than ever — and about than 2.6 years longer than the average American — with a life expectancy of more than 80 years, public health officials announced Tuesday. But economic and racial disparities persist, with some minorities and low-income residents dying younger than wealthier neighbors.
The state’s reported progress in reducing infant mortality is to be cheered, but the fact that infant mortality increased slightly for African-Americans in 2009, and that a smaller percentage of black women received prenatal care that year, should be deeply troubling to public health officials.
Persistent racial and class disparities in access to health care are the principal reasons Maryland’s infant mortality rate — the number of infant deaths per thousand live births has remained disturbingly high over the years. And the tragedy is that most of these deaths are preventable.
Bridget Booske, project director of the County Health Rankings, talks about the community health data forum convened earlier this summer by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Institute of Medicine.
Measuring the overall health of a population at the local level is an elusive and cumbersome task. As a result, there have been few statistical studies historically that hint at how Western North Carolina stacks up. But this year, an unprecedented study compiled health rankings for every county in each state across the country.
In anticipation of the 2011 release of the County Health Rankings, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation wants to hear from you about the steps communities can take to help all individuals lead healthier lives. For the next four weeks, the Community Health Action Forum—an online discussion board—will be open for your suggestions on how communities can use the County Health Rankings as a catalyst to start, expand or renew efforts to address the social, economic, environmental and behavioral factors that affect health.
Camp director Shelley Johnson outlined the dietary minefield that is the vending machine, doing her part to make sure the 30 black and Latino boys before her wouldn't end up on the wrong side of the statistics. The numbers say the youngsters she was addressing as they sat at tables at Lincoln University have a disproportionate chance of developing hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes.Johnson started with a candy bar. "Twenty-two grams of sugar," she said, displaying a test tube brimming with the sweetener.
It was day four of the Project A.H.E.A.D. summer camp, and the lesson was cutting back on fat content and added sugar. The camp, for boys ages 9 to 16, is a two-week nutrition and fitness program aimed at combating gender and ethnicity-based health disparities.
Salt Lake County government spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year encouraging its employees to be fit — awarding cash perks for exercise and weight loss, offering health assessments, even checking out Wii game systems to help staffers get in shape. But is the Healthy Lifestyles program worth its $700,000-plus price tag?
Program leaders will release a study this summer showing Utah’s most populous county has saved big bucks by urging its employees to work out, eat healthy and douse cigarettes. For every dollar spent on wellness programs, the study suggests, more than three are saved on medical claims.
I was jealous of the French because I’d heard that French women can use municipal daycare or even get subsidies for in-home nannies. I said so at a recent dinner conversation in which my friends and I lamented how far behind the United States lags the rest of the world in terms of government support for maternal care.
Curious, after the meal I did a web search to learn more about the situation for mothers and babies around the world. As I read one disturbing statistic after another, my jealousy turned to chagrin.
Last week, I began an examination of the remarkable health of New York City by discussing the two-centuries-old fight against urban disease. The vast urban investment in clean water and street cleaning may explain why New York City became a lot healthier, but it doesn’t explain why life expectancy is now 1.5 years higher in New York than in the nation as a whole.
For the past year, residents of Pima County—like all Americans—have been inundated with talk about our health-care system, its flaws, proposed reforms and its philosophical underpinnings. However, much less has been said about how healthy we are as a community. The absence of such conversations does not involve a lack of information. There are plenty of up-to-date statistics out there, including a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report released in February that provides data for counties across the nation.
