Building Healthy Communities

Tucked between two traffic-choked freeways, the southeast corner of Santa Ana is among the least healthy places to live in California. The neighborhood’s air is dirtied with diesel emissions and other pollutants. Nearby businesses release an unusually large amount of chemicals. The community has more hazardous waste clean-up sites than almost anyplace in the state. And its groundwater is threatened by contaminants leaking from underground storage tanks.

What:
RAM California will be holding a free healthcare expedition in Southern California at the Riverside/Indio Fairgrounds in Coachella Valley.The Flying Doctors and The California Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons are partnering with RAM CA to provide the free health care clinic in Indio.
Patient hours at the clinic are 5:30 a.m. to approximately 6:00 p.m.Patients line up early to receive free health, dental and/or vision care.

When:
April 4 – 7, 2013
Patient hours at the clinic are 5:30 a.m.to approximately 6:00

EW YORK (AP) — A new study offers more compelling evidence that life expectancy for some U.S. women is actually falling, a disturbing trend that experts can’t explain.

The latest research found that women age 75 and younger are dying at higher rates than previous years in nearly half of the nation’s counties — many of them rural and in the South and West. Curiously, for men, life expectancy has held steady or improved in nearly all counties.

The study is the latest to spot this pattern, especially among disadvantaged white women. Some leading theories blame higher smoking rates, obesity and less education, but several experts said they simply don’t know why.

Mold in substandard housing makes breathing hard for kids with asthma. Poorly planned streets and sidewalks make exercising outside, or swapping a drive for a walk, more difficult. Housing and transportation aren’t policy areas obviously related to health, but such decisions directly affect our well-being.

A study released earlier this month suggests that taking a holistic approach to policy, one that considers health in all decisions, may not be as hard as it sounds.

April 19, 2012 (ATLANTA) – Nationwide, women’s lifespans are improving at a much slower pace than men, and in hundreds of counties women are living shorter lives today than they did two decades ago, according to new county-by-county estimates of life expectancy released today by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

The new data also show that life expectancy for black Americans – both men and women – is improving at a faster rate than for white Americans, especially in large urban areas in New York and California.

San Diego County has again earned above-average but not stellar rankings for the health of its residents compared with the rest of California and the nation, a new study shows.

Easy access to fast food joints and comparatively high rates of sexually transmitted disease were problems in San Diego compared with statewide, according to the third annual “County Health Rankings” released Tuesday [April 3, 2012] by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

On the other hand, San Diego performed well compared with both state and national figures in providing adequate outpatient care to avoid preventable hospital stays. Smoking and obesity rates were lower than state and national averages, and while the county’s air pollution statistics ran higher than national benchmarks, San Diego had fewer smoggy days than statewide figures, according to the study.

With innovative programs, county officials encourage fearful parents to vaccinate

Amanda Tarpening doesn’t want the state telling her to vaccinate her child.

And California public health officials don’t want her 17-month-old daughter, who has not been immunized, to fall ill or help spread a vaccine-preventable disease.

It’s a quandary that has physicians frustrated and parents such as Tarpening citing their First Amendment rights.

As a growing number of Californians exempt their children from required immunizations, public health departments statewide are launching campaigns to try to persuade them to vaccinate, and legislators are trying to make it harder for them to get exemptions.

Statewide, the number of fully vaccinated children has been falling steadily since 2004, when 92.9 percent of students entering kindergarten had all required immunizations, according to the California Department of Public Health. Only 90.7 percent — or 11,470 fewer kids — were fully vaccinated in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available.

“The trend results in a greater number of Californians being vulnerable to preventable illnesses,” said Dr. Gilberto Chavez, the state’s Center for Infectious Disease deputy director. “The risk of outbreaks and widespread illness in our communities increases as the number of families opting not to vaccine their children increases.”