- HIV/AIDS-poverty link strongest in the South, By Steve Sternberg and Jack Gillum, July 10, 2011, USA Today: “Nearly all U.S. counties stricken with both high rates of HIV infection and poverty are located in Southern states, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from 43 states. The study, which drew on data made available from Emory University’s AIDSVu project, offers the clearest picture yet of the close kinship of low income and HIV/AIDS. ‘This tells a story about heavily impacted regions across the South,’ says Patrick Sullivan, leader of the team at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health that produced AIDSVu, the first effort to use state-of-the-art methods to map HIV infection rates by county. ‘Seeing the data on a map helps you see things in a different way,’ Sullivan says. The analysis highlights a vast geographic shift in the HIV epidemic in the USA in the three decades since the first cases of a deadly new disease were reported in gay men by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981…”
- Lack of education fuels HIV epidemic in South, By Steve Sternberg and Jack Gillum, July 10, 2011, USA Today: “Until his death in March, bluesman ‘Big’ Jack Johnson of Clarksdale, Miss., crisscrossed the troubled terrain of the Mississippi Delta, singing of broken homes and broken hearts. His songs touched on all the timeless blues themes of poverty, abuse, abandonment and longing. Johnson also took on a newer heartache – HIV/AIDS – that is sweeping through the Delta and much of the rest of the South. And he confronted it head-on…”
Tag: Disease
State Obesity Rates
- Income may have impact on waistline, By Danielle Cintron, July 8, 2011, Fargo-Moorhead Forum: “Could the poverty line be affecting the U.S.’s waistline? Those with less education or who make less money continue to have the highest overall obesity rates, according to a study released Thursday by Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. ‘One particular factor is poverty,’ said Jeff Levi, executive director of TFAH. ‘Lower income is associated with higher rates of obesity…'”
- Southerners, poor have highest rates of obesity, By Nanci Hellmich, July 8, 2011, USA Today: “People may still be tightening their belts because of the economy, but too many continue to let them out because of weight gain. The percentage of obese adults increased in 16 states over past year and didn’t decline in any state, a report says. In addition, the number of adults who say they don’t do any physical activity increased in 14 states this past year. ‘The bad news is the obesity rates are really high,’ says Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust for America’s Health, a non-profit group that prepared the report along with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. ‘But if you are looking for a silver lining it’s that only 16 states showed an increase this last year, and in the past, more states had increases,’ he says…”
Poverty and Poor Health
Researchers link deaths to social ills, By Nicholas Bakalar, July 4, 2011, New York Times: “Poverty is often cited as contributing to poor health. Now, in an unusual approach, researchers have calculated how many people poverty kills and presented their findings, along with an argument that social factors can cause death the same way that behavior like smoking cigarettes does. In an article published online for the June 16 issue of The American Journal of Public Health, scientists calculated the number of deaths attributable to each of six social factors, including low income…”