Photo: Luca Castellazzi via Flickr
One angle journalists can take to tackle huge issue like climate change and public health is to take a focused look at how life might be changing for low-income people in a specific city.
This is what NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro did earlier this spring in her report on how climate change is affecting residents’ health in Miami. Continue reading
Photo: NIH Image Gallery via Flickr
In a recent commentary in JAMA Neurology, Elisa de Paula França Resende, M.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues write about how social determinants of health affect demographic patterns of dementia in the United States. Noting that with an aging population, the prevalence of dementia will increase substantially, Resende and her co-authors write that of the social determinants affecting dementia risk, health and socioeconomics act more strongly than do race or cultural identifiers. I will add here that being female also is involved in dementia risk, as women are at greater risk for it than men. Continue reading
Photo: Sharyn Morrow via Flickr
What are people leaving out in the conversation about the opioid crisis?
Joshua Barocas, who teaches Boston University’s School of Medicine, said the answer is embedded in the question. “Opioids themselves aren’t the crisis,” he said. “Overdoses are the crisis.” Continue reading
Rebecca Dineen
Rebecca Dineen, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Maternal and Child Health at the Baltimore City Health Department, will be the awards luncheon speaker for Health Journalism 2019 in Baltimore on Saturday, May 4.
Dineen joined the Baltimore City Health Department in 2008 and leads the B’more for Healthy Babies campaign, which promotes proper infant sleeping practices to reduce the risk of sleep-related deaths in children under age one. The campaign offers parents and other caregivers best practices to promote safe sleep and breastfeeding. It also works to reduce teen pregnancy. Continue reading
Photo: Pia Christensen/AHCJJoseph Sakran
As journalists, we focus on the increasingly common phenomenon of mass shootings. They are appalling, they are terrifying and we don’t fully understand them.
But gun violence is far more common, far more widespread, and far more insidious than those high-profile events – both murder and suicide. And we aren’t doing enough to think about and address firearms deaths as a public health problem, rather than a law enforcement problem, panelists told a Health Journalism 2019 panel in Baltimore on Friday. Continue reading
Photo: Pia Christensen/AHCJOtis Brawley kicked off Health Journalism 2019 with a nearly standing-room-only audience.
Otis Brawley has given a lot of thought lately to the socioeconomic factors that serve as predictors of health disparities among disadvantaged Americans.
Brawley, a Bloomberg distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University, told a crowded room at Health Journalism 2019 in Baltimore on Thursday that a community’s resources – or lack thereof – contributes mightily to the health outcomes of its residents.
That holds true, regardless of race, Brawley explained to attendees at the record-breaking health journalism conference. About 800 people are attending the Baltimore conference, the 20th annual training confab AHCJ has held. Continue reading