Reaching poor people with dental care means unraveling so many other things, including the isolation, difficult living conditions, fear and other burdens of poverty.
Decision makers in Sacramento have 4 months to settle their differences about the state's chemical regulations
In recent years it has become apparent that the poor quality of processed food is driving an epidemic of ill health in the U.S. and disproportionately affecting low-income Americans. As a local food bank official put it, "We have gone from the Cold War of too few calories to the terrorism of too many calories." A consortium of community groups, rooted in Central California's farming community, has become a leader in the search for solutions.
William Heisel interviews Michele Simon, public health attorney and author of Appetite for Profit, who wants people to rethink what they are eating and why. She peers through the food industry marketing to see what big packaged food manufacturers and restaurant giants are really selling.
Picture a honey sunrise glistening across the Pacific. A wave rises up, lifting a golden surfer, hair flapping in the wind like a flag as he negotiates a perfect turn and glides toward the beach. He steps onto the sand and his smile falls. Among the women in bikinis and men playing volleyball is a horrible scene of human suffering: a throng of senior citizens in wheel chairs, their bellies distended from malnutrition, flies landing on their eyelids, which are too sapped of any strength even to blink them away.
John Rich is professor and chair of health management and policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health and director of the university’s Center for Nonviolence & Social Justice. He has been a leader in the field of public health, and his work has focused on serving one of the nation’s most ignored and underserved populations --African-American men in urban settings. Dr. Rich is the author of the 2009 book, "Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men." In 2006, he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
How an enormous wastewater treatment plant wound up near a small town's historic district.
The Internet and social media have a way of upending professional conventions and giving rise to new models. As traditional boundaries blur, some unique collaborations have emerged between cutting-edge journalists and public health practitioners. I’ve been fascinating by some of these projects, which have yielded new insights, ground-breaking stories and new ways of connecting with the public.
One out of four New Yorkers doesn't speak or understand complex sentences in English. But at some point in their lives, every one of them will need to see a doctor. Language barriers can result in misdiagnoses, medication errors, and potentially fatal mistakes that are costly for both patients and providers. For this reason, hospitals in New York are required to provide "meaningful language access" to all patients. But in a city where more than 140 different languages are spoken, this is no easy task.
