SAN ANTONIO—Memorial High School student Victor Hernandez (at right) points to his photograph of a smoked cigarette butt lodged in the crack of a sidewalk. The photo caption starts: “Cigarettes get between everything.” “People might dream to be a doctor, lawyer – then cigarettes get introduced,” Victor said of the photo’s meaning. “With every cigarette it gets harder and harder to quit, you get closer to death. Your original dream goes away.” Victor is one of eight students from Edgewood Independent School District’s Kennedy and Memorial high schools who recently partook in a “Photovoice Smoke-Free” project, where students took photos and wrote captions to visually describe the problem of tobacco to policy-makers. Researchers from the Institute for Health ...
By 2050, nearly one in every three people will be Latino.
Yet Latinos tend to suffer a heavier burden of certain health problems, such as higher obesity rates and worse breast cancer outcomes, said Dr. Amelie Ramirez, director of SaludToday and the Institute for Health Promotion Research at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio.
Dr. Ramirez recently addressed Latino cancer issues as the 2010 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)-Minorities in Cancer Research Jane Cooke Wright Lecturer.
"The challenge is that, as a group, Latinos have less education, higher poverty rates, less access to healthcare and lower rates of insurance," she said. "They also bring unique cultural customs that we need to understand to improve their access to care and response to treatment. We need to ...
The true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated, according to the President’s Cancer Panel new report, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now. The report, which presents recommendations to mitigate or eliminate key regulatory, political, industrial, and cultural barriers to understanding and reducing environmental and occupational carcinogenic exposures, given the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer. It's statement to President Obama reads: "Environmental exposures that increase the national cancer burden do not represent a new front in the ongoing war on cancer. However, the grievous harm from this group of carcinogens has not been addressed adequately by the National Cancer Program. The American ...
The Smoke-Free San Antonio campaign will have its public unveiling at 9:30 a.m. Friday, May 7, 2010, at the Baptist Medical Center Downtown, 111 Dallas Street, in San Antonio. In a press conference, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and City Council member Justin Rodriguez will give remarks and discuss the process behind creating a smoke-free city. Political pollster Mike Baselice, of Baselice and Associates, also will share poll results of city residents' opinions of a smoke-free ordinance. Attendees are welcome. For details, visit ...
Don’t many people blame video games for kids’ couch-potato ways, which are contributing to high rates of childhood obesity? Zan Gao thinks a video game can be part of the solution. Thanks to Salud America! funding, Gao is pilot-testing how Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), a video game that has players stomp on a dance mat to mimic the steps of an on-screen dancer boogieing to ultra cool music, impacts Latino students’ physical activity, fitness and academic performance in Utah schools. “We chose DDR because it is considered culturally sensitive to urban Latino children, who favor playing video games,” said Gao, an assistant professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Utah. “The kids are very excited about DDR and, most importantly, are active when ...
A health issue derailed Shari Barkin’s promising dance career but also opened a door to a medical career. Zan Gao is using video games to fight childhood obesity. Nancy Butte once survived an earthquake in Guatemala and helped distribute food in the aftermath. Read their stories and more in the latest Salud America! E-newsletter. Also find out the latest in Latino childhood obesity policy, news and updated on Salud America! Salud America! is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation network to pevent obesity among Latino kids. The network is directed by the Institute for Health Promotion Research at The UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, which developed SaludToday. To sign up to receive Salud America! E-newsletters, go ...
Check out this latest news and research in the epidemic of childhood obesity among Latinos: Texas: Girl Scouts involved in research project to promote physical activity
To identify ways to get Latinas ages 11-14 moving more, Girl Scouts in South Texas are using Photovoice, in which community members use images to share their perspectives on issues to spark change. The project is part of a larger study led by The UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, the team behind SaludToday. Arizona: Kids in lower-income families battling obesity
Southern Arizona children are suffering from adult afflictions, and doctors blame it on a troubling surge in childhood obesity. Lifestyle, diet, genetics, and population growth among Hispanics, an at-risk group, all are contributing to the rise. But ...
Some risk factors known to increase the odds of breast cancer in white women have less impact on Hispanic women, a new study shows, HealthDay reports. For instance, for postmenopausal women in the study, "recent hormone use and younger age at menarche did not appear to play as big a role in Hispanics." For younger women, family history and taller height, which normally slightly increase breast cancer risk, did not appear to be as strongly linked with breast cancer among Hispanics as among whites, according to the study published online April 26 in Cancer. Established risk factors accounted for up to 75 percent of breast cancers in younger white women, but just 36 percent in similar-aged Hispanic women. In older women, it was 62 percent in whites and just 7 percent in Hispanics. From ...
New study findings show an increased risk for cancer among Latino populations, but unique demographic characteristics suggest the problem may be worse than currently known. "As we see the Latino population age, we are going to see the current disparity in knowledge and outcomes become an explosion," said Amelie G. Ramirez, Dr.P.H., director of the Institute for Health Promotion Research at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, the team behind SaludToday. Ramirez received the fifth annual AACR-Minorities in Cancer Research Jane Cooke Wright Lectureship at the 101st AACR Annual Meeting 2010 and delivered a lecture, "Networks in Acción for Latino Cancer Research," on April 18. Currently, the rate of breast cancer among Latinas is lower than that in the general ...