If San Antonio ends up prohibiting smoking in indoor workplaces, its restaurants and bars are not likely to lose patrons to the few and geographically separated establishments outside the city limits that do allow smoking, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Health Promotion Research at The UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, the team behind SaludToday. The analysis identified and mapped the 165 licensed-to-serve alcohol establishments in 30 incorporated towns outside San Antonio, but within Bexar County. The vast majority (117) of those establishments already are smoke-free. The remaining 48 that do allow smoking are fairly geographically separated from each other and, even if weighed as a whole, don’t have the capacity to sustain an influx of smoking customers if ...
For World No Tobacco Day, Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez reflected on the effects of smoking and the opportunities to quit smoking, especially among Latinos. Dr. Ramirez, director of SaludToday and the Institute for Health Promotion Research at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio. noted that for every one person that dies from a tobacco-related cause, there are 20 more people who are suffering with at least one serious illness from smoking, such as certain cancers, heart attacks, strokes, cataracts and skin wrinkling. Smoking is the No. 1 cancer killer of Hispanics nationally. Here is a little bit from Dr. Ramirez' op-ed article in LatinaLista:
If you smoke, just imagine some of the benefits you'd immediately achieve by quitting.
You'd have more money to spend. You'd have whiter ...
The Smoke-Free San Antonio campaign, which support a 100% smoke-free city to protect the health of our community, is now on Facebook. "Like" the campaign on Facebook today! Learn more about the orgaization ...
Rave reviews are coming in for a visually stunning booklet featuring minority teens' anti-smoking photos from a project for which eight San Antonio high-school students took photos and wrote captions to visually describe tobacco problems in their neighborhoods to policy-makers. "This is a wonderful example of how to invigorate public health messaging and make it 'sing' within one of your priority populations. The involvement of youth in the planning and execution of the project in a meaningful way is something that should be replicated throughout other areas of the State. Congratulations to...all the 'gang' at the UT Health Science Center for working with the San Antonio Tobacco Prevention and Control Coalition to carry it out!" said Gail Sneden, a project director of Applied Research ...
Many decry the fact that only 3 to 5 percent of adults with cancer in the U.S. join clinical trials, but a deeper challenge emerges when you put faces to these numbers. Close to 90 percent of those who do enroll in trials are white, and only 5.6 percent are Latino. Read here about what the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is doing to increase the enrollment of minority and underserved patients in clinical trials. Also read more about the effort by Redes En Acción, the Latino cancer research network led by the Institute for Health Promotion Research at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, the team behind SaludToday, to use patient navigation to boost pediatric cancer clinical trial recruitment in South Texas. Redes, working closely to outreach to and educate the Latino ...
With the nation facing a healthcare crisis, Latinos and racial/ethnic minorities are paying a high price for health care disparities: diminished health and, quite literally, lives lost, the New York Times-Union reports. Hispanic women, for example, have the highest rates of new cases of cervical cancer and the second highest death rate from cervical cancer. More from the story:
Studies have found that cultural and communications challenges lead to treatment delays, receipt of wrong benefits or services, misdiagnoses and medical errors.
People who have limited English proficiency are more likely to use expensive emergency room services for primary care since they may seek care only in emergency situations. Inadequate patient-provider communication negatively impacts medication ...
May is National Cancer Research Month, declared by the U.S. Congress in 2007, in recognition of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and its focus on high quality, innovative cancer research. Latinos suffer greater incidence of certain cancers, and worse outcomes in others. Why is basic cancer research so important for all races/ethnicities? Watch the AACR's video here or below to find out: To learn more, visit the AACR's Web site, which features information on getting involved, including contributing to the AACR Foundation for the Prevention and Cure of Cancer and e-mailing ...
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 ...
