Minority Children in Triple Jeopardy

Health Affairs recently released a disturbing and disparaging report concerning the health and wellbeing of minority children in America:

Bethesda, MD -- Almost 17 percent of black children and 20.5 percent of Latino children in the United States live in "double jeopardy," meaning that they live in both poor families and poor neighborhoods, according to research released today in the March/April issue of the journal Health Affairs.

In contrast, only 1.4 percent of white children live in double jeopardy. According to researchers, the type of neighborhood one lives in plays a significant role in racial and ethnic health disparities. In addition, poor white children are more likely than poor black or Latino children to live in better neighborhoods.

A typical poor white child lives in a neighborhood where the poverty rate is 13.6 percent, while a typical poor black child lives in a neighborhood where the poverty level is nearly 30 percent.

A typical poor Latino child lives in a neighborhood where the poverty rate is 26 percent. Segregated, disadvantaged neighborhoods affect health in the following ways:

· By limiting economic advancement for minorities because of poor education, limited job opportunities, and a poor return on housing investment.

· By exposing minorities to violent crime, environmental hazards, poor municipal services, and a lack of grocery stores and healthy food options.

· By leading to segregated health care settings with poorer-quality health care.

How is it possible to lead a cogent and healthy life if one cannot leap from the projects and the ghetto that others create based on the color of your skin?

Lack of access to broadband technology for research papers and internet reading is the third jeopardy – and it is also a major problem in the inner city urban core.

With a lack of access to publicly available information, the mind rots, the spirit wilts and illiteracy becomes the standard of the day as self interest and community investment in the propagation of a willing society decays in the streets and rots in the gutters.

We must not only cure the bodies of these minority children in crises, we must also provide open access to healing the mind with verifiable realities of dreams coming true.

Google Health in Cleveland

Google wants to manage your health information starting in Cleveland:

The Cleveland Clinic has more than 100,000 patients and many of those are retirees who spend some of the year elsewhere such as Arizona and Florida. And when they go, their medical records don’t follow says Dr. C. Martin Harris, the clinic’s chief information officer.

The Google personal health record Harris says is a solution to that problem, among others. A person can approve the transfer of information on medical conditions, allergies, medications and laboratory results from the clinic’s computers to a Google personal health record.

Is this Google move into personal health from public search a good omen or a harbinger of bad things to come?

Do people understand what it means to give Google access to their health records?

What other unapproved entities will have access to that information beyond a personal care physician and Google itself?

What restrictions are in place to protect people from having their healthcare hacked and used against them in public or in private blackmail?

Boles Books GIS

We are pleased to share with you the great good news that Boles Books Writing & Publishing and Dramatic Medicine -- our official bookstore partner and our program in Public Health -- sealed a deal this week to provide GIS (Geographic Information Systems) material to Glencoe/McGraw-Hill for use in three new textbooks due out in 2008.

You can read more about the project here and be sure to keep an eye out for the books:

World Geography and Cultures
Glencoe World History
The American Vision