Short of government action, residents living in substandard housing are banding together or stepping forward on their own to turn up the heat on unresponsive landlords. Some are seeking legal assistance to force repairs, with some cases escalating to lengthy civil lawsuits.
In California's Sonoma County, an alarming number of tenants live in housing so run down that it poses a risk to their health and safety. For Karla Orozco's family, the hazards included mold, rats and cockroaches, a broken heater, and sewage backups.
The effect of squalid housing on people’s health is difficult to determine in California's Sonoma County, since there is no study, stockpile of data or government agency that tracks illness in connection with living environments.
Dr. Seema Yasmin’s reported this story as a National Health Journalism Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center for Health Journalism.
Washington state health officials say they’ll start telling families who’ve lost babies to a devastating birth-defects cluster about genetic studies aimed at decoding possible causes.
Washington is among 33 states that don’t have active birth-defects surveillance systems to track problems. It took an astute nurse to raise warnings about a cluster of rare and fatal defects in Central Washington.
The Food and Drug Administration will review a long-delayed petition calling for the voluntary addition of folic acid to corn masa to prevent neural-tube defects such as those seen in Washington’s cluster.
More than 40 mothers have lost babies to a rare and deadly birth defect in three counties in central Washington state since 2010, but the cause remains unknown. Why haven’t health officials and lawmakers done more to find answers?
Detroit has the highest rate of asthma among young children in America’s 18 largest cities, a problem that experts link to urban ills that could affect their health and learning for the rest of their lives.
California's landscape is dotted with huge cattle, dairy and poultry farms from the northern part of the Central Valley all the way to the border areas of San Diego County. Less obvious are the health impacts of such large-scale farms on low-income and communities of color.
