“If you include both men and women, only four counties in [West Virginia] have a life expectancy rate above the national average,” [Perry] Bryant said. “If you look only at women, no county in the state is above the national average.”

In an audio report available at West Virginia Public Broadcasting we learn about one case of childhood obesity:

The rise in diabetes is tied to a rise in obesity. Dr. Paul Little, medical director of Tug River Medical Center in McDowell County, has one eight-year-old patient who already weighs 160 pounds.

“He goes to McDonalds every single day,” Little said. “And we try to educate parents that’s not good. And they say, he cries, he carries on. So we say, let the kid cry and carry on. You need to start to do this and this, because here he is, eight years old, and he’s already obese.”

Little said the boy is just following his father’s example.

"Mobilizing Local Health Knowledge through the Internet - Challenges and Progress from ClevelandHealth.info." will be presented by Johnbuck Creamer, MD, BSN.

Date: Friday, September 12, 2008.

Time: 3-4 p.m.

Location:
Case Western Reserver University School of Medicine
2109 Adelbert Avenue.
T503
(the School of Medicine is #50 on this map.)

Please RSVP your attendance to Sabina Hossain at hossain.sabina@case.edu or by phone at (216) 778-8474.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Now the Health Blog is reporting that a Chicago hospital is ready to deport an illegal immigrant who suffered a brain hemorrhage last month.

The Chicago Tribune has the full story. The issue at hand is summed up nicely by James Geraghty.

"It's important to make sure that hospitals aren't permitted to dump patients on an international level when they can't do it on a local level."

The practice of hospitals dumping patients has been in the news recently with the settlement of a suit where a Hollywood hospital dumped a paraplegic man on skid row.

New research seems to punch holes in commonly held beliefs about health coverage in Ohio: from the size of the state's uninsured population to the way employers have handled coverage.

A survey released Wednesday by The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati suggests the often-used statistic for the state's uninsured - 1.3 million children and adults - is too low. The foundation's Ohio Health Issues Poll says there are 1.4 million uninsured adults - about 16 percent of the adult population.

The actual number of uninsured is important as safety net hospitals pull back on who they provide charity care to.

While more uninsured people are being 'discovered' safety net hospitals are changing their practices and marketing strategies.

The Wall Street Journal writes:

A new appointment-setting system at a safety net hospital in Little Rock, Ark., has “privately insured patients waiting the least amount of time for an appointment and uninsured patients waiting the longest,” the report says, without naming the hospital.

And CQ Politics writes:

In some cases, community health centers marketed their primary care services more aggressively to attract privately insured patients. Among their marketing pitches were that they coordinated care more carefully and offered more advanced health information technology than private doctors’ offices.

You can read the abstract of the study on safety net hospitals at Health Affairs.

EXTRA: On Saturday, August 16th from 11 am to 3 pm the 12th Annual Body & Soul Health Forum will be held at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and hosted by the Minority Health Alliance. Free parking, museum admission, and free health screenings are available. For more information contact Angela Bailey at 216-444-0776 or Kimberly Sanders at 216-231-7700 ext 1089.

Behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy. African American women have higher abortion rates than their white peers because they have much higher rates of unintended pregnancy - three times higher than those of white women. In other words, there is no need to resort to far-flung conspiracy theories to explain the higher abortion rate among black women.

But there's more to the story. Across the board, African Americans often have worse sexual- and reproductive-health outcomes than people from other racial groups. For example, we experience much higher rates of sexually transmitted infections. These disparate rates reflect broader health disparities that can be seen in high rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease or cancer.

The root causes are manifold: a long history of discrimination; lack of access to high-quality, affordable health care; too few educational and professional opportunities; unequal access to safe, clean neighborhoods; and, for some African Americans, a lingering mistrust of the medical community.

EXTRA: In a terrific blog entry, Rural Doctoring talks about a hair on the back of her neck.

The study looked at access to full service supermarkets and the sale of lottery tickets compared to intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR). The researchers broke this data down into high and low risk areas based on, "an aggregate score for low birth weight, premature births, infant deaths, poverty and other economic indicators." Race and ethnicity did not factor into risk factor.

In their findings the researchers report little difference in "corner stores" in the low and high risk areas.

To determine the volume of lottery ticket sales a Freedom of Information Act request was filed with the New York State Lottery.

We were struck by the lively business in lottery sales; 15 of the 18 corner stores in both the high- and low-risk areas sold lottery tickets. The mean yearly lottery ticket sales per store in the high-risk census was $249,904, compared with $167,501 in the low-risk census tracts. We examined this issue in greater detail and found that the small corner and convenience stores sold 68% of all lottery tickets in the city of Syracuse. [T]he median household income was inversely proportionate to the per capita lottery purchases, and these figures were significantly different between each stratum.

The researchers then looked at access to a full service supermarket and IUGR:

[C]ontrolling for race and Medicaid, the infants of mothers who resided in a non-supermarket census tract were three and one-third times as likely to have full-term unexplained IUGR, compared with infants of mothers living in a supermarket census tract. The second important finding in this analysis is that by including supermarket as a variable, race and Medicaid were no longer statistically significant. Living in proximity to a full service supermarket may thus explain much of the racial and poverty disparities in fetal growth.

And although not statistically significant, when they looked at the sale of lottery tickets and IUGR the researchers found that in the areas where residents spent on average $500 per year on lottery tickets unexplained IUGR was double that of those residents who spent $135 a year on lottery.

Lane et al. Health and Place, Volume 14, issue 3 (September, 2008), p. 415-423

EXTRA: If you missed last night's Dr. Anonymous show you can catch it in the archives.

HIV drug resistance found in China's poorest
More than 17 percent of HIV patients being treated for their infection in China developed resistance to available drugs by 2006 and 2007, according to a new nationwide survey.

Hospitals Charged With Using Homeless to Defraud Medicare
One of those stories you have to read to believe.

Ontario doctor uses lotteries to pare down patient list
Doctors in Canada are playing the lottery

The following video provides an excellent overview of the project and its participants.

The Photovoice Exhibition will go on the road later this month. It will be featured at the Slavic Village Festival (E 65th and Fleet Avenue) on August 23, 2008 from 11 am to 10 pm.

For other podcast managers you can add the following link to your podcast feeds:

http://blog.case.edu/ccrhd/podcasts/rsscrhdpodcast.xml

Be sure to check out some of our other multimedia presentations by clicking on the Audio / Video link in sidemenu on the left.

Child health in India, China key to attaining world health goals
Despite stunning economic growth in China and India, child mortality rates remain high amid widening health disparities in the world's two most populous countries, a UN report said Tuesday.

Beckley conference on minority health disparity
The Fourth Minority Health Disparities in Rural Appalachia Conference is scheduled to take place Aug. 7 and 8 in Beckley.

School Districts launch diabetes program for Native American Youth
One in three Americans will develop diabetes in their lifetime, and the rate is even higher among American Indians.

Growing Epidemic in Gay and Bisexual Men in the United States
"The new estimates confirm that a vast majority of new infections in the U.S. occur in gay and bisexual men, and that Blacks are significantly more heavily impacted than other racial/ethnic categories. However, the data fail to clearly link the two, perpetuating a longstanding, damaging polarization," explained Walt Senterfitt, CHAMP board co-chair and an epidemiologist living with HIV who served as a Visiting Scientist at CDC's Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. "We need CDC to clearly show the HIV incidence numbers in gay men and other MSM of color."

A picture's worth a thousand pills.

That's what 20 Clevelanders, armed with cameras and a couple of photography lessons, have discovered.

Immigrants Facing Deportation by U.S. Hospitals
What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported — not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial.

Care for poor grows heavier for downtown Detroit hospitals
When it comes to the national problem of caring for the rising numbers of uninsured, Detroit is the canary in the coal mine.

Dilemma of declining revenues and patient care
Health providers want to provide quality care and improve patient satisfaction. Really, they do. It's just that pesky problem of declining reimbursements getting in the way of meeting those two key business objectives.

Eight years ago, Mr. Jiménez, 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Fla., suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian. A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million.

What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported — not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and “forcibly returned him to his home country,” as one hospital administrator described it.

EXTRA: If you're a researcher or academic and you travel abroad be aware that your laptop (and data) can be confiscated indefinitely.