Growing up isn’t easy for anyone. But for someone with an intellectual or developmental disability, it can feel impossible.
Once considered an infection nearly eradicated, congenital syphilis rates have risen dramatically in California. Community health workers fan out across communities to find and treat patients who are often homeless or battling addiction.
The number of congenital syphilis cases has ballooned to rates not seen in two decades. Public health workers say the increase coincides with a decline in funding for public health and a drop in the rate of women accessing prenatal care.
Thousands could be threatened, experts say, because the same groups most impacted by abortion bans — rural, low-income, and women of color — also experience higher rates of domestic violence.
Many in the resource-strapped sickle cell community find they are unable to access fertility treatments.
"The community engagement process pushed me out of my reporting comfort zone, and not only led to new sources but strengthened the relationships I had with previous sources," writes Fresno Bee reporter Mackenzie Mays.
In an era when good data about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community remains elusive, reporter Matthew Bajko unearths currently available sources.
Before the California Healthy Youth Act went into effect last year, Fresno Unified was one of a few school districts that didn’t teach comprehensive sex education and pushback against such lessons remains.
Officials in San Francisco and Sacramento are aiming to make answering questions about sexual orientation and gender identity routine as they begin to collect this data in multiple settings and on government forms.
This article is the second of three looking at LGBT data collection and was written as part of a California Health Journalism Fellowship project with the University of Southern California-Annenberg Center for Health Care Journalism.
