Apply for Éxito! Latino Cancer Research Training Institute and Internships



The 2012 Éxito! Latino Cancer Research Leadership Training application is now available for download! Éxito! conducts a five-day summer institute and offers internships to encourage minority master’s-level students and master’s trained health professionals to pursue a doctoral degree and a career in Latino cancer health disparities research. The 2012 summer institute is June 7-12, 2012, in San Antonio, Texas. Éxito! participants also are eligible to receive one of six paid internships (see details in application). How exactly can the program benefit you? Ask Mariana Arevalo, a graduate of the 2011 Éxito! program: "Éxito! was a boost of confidence and a tremendous encouragement for me to apply to doctoral programs. Now more than ever, I’m confident that Latino researchers ...

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Online Hispanics Have a Hard Time Finding Health Info In Spanish



How do Hispanics use the Internet to get informed on health issues? A MediaPost Blog called Engage:Hispanics sought to answer this question and found that, despite a strong demand for health content online among Hispanics, there is very little of it available in Spanish: According to comScore, Hispanic usage of health care websites is growing twice as fast as the general market. In September 2011, a total of 17.2 million Hispanics visited a health-related website; this represents 52% of all online Hispanics and an annual growth rate of 31%. Compare this to the general market, where 66% of online users visited a health site in September 2010, up 15% from the previous year. The fact that most Hispanics are young helps explain why they are less likely than the general market to visit ...

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More Seniors Getting Pneumonia Shots, But Hispanics Lag Behind



The overall proportion of Americans age 65 and older who have ever been vaccinated against pneumonia, a leading killer of seniors, increased from 53% to 60% between 2000 and 2008, according to new figures from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). However, Hispanic, lower-income, and inner-city seniors were less likely to be vaccinated: Just 37% of Hispanic seniors reported ever being vaccinated against pneumonia, vs. 65% of white seniors and 45-46% of Asian and blacks seniors. Almost two thirds (65%) of high-income seniors reported ever being vaccinated against pneumonia compared with less than half (46%) of poor seniors. Only 52% of seniors who live in a large inner-city area, where residents tend to be low-income and minority, reported ever being vaccinated, ...

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News: Latino Health Research, Stories & More



Find the latest in Latino health—from fighting Latina breast cancer to helping Latinos pursue doctoral degrees—in the new E-newsletter from the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) at The UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, the team behind SaludToday. The E-newsletter has these stories: Story and Video: Giving Latinas a Chance vs. Breast Cancer (Pg 1) Story: How a Typewriter Helped a Latina Launch a Career in Health Promotion (Pg 2) Story and Video: Depression after Cancer Keeps Latinas from Follow-Up Care (Pg 3) Story: Apply by 3/1/12 for Éxito Program to Get Help Pursuing a Doctoral Degree (Pg 5) Story: San Antonio Schools Get Salad Bars (Pg 6) Story and Video: Latino Man Works to Interrupt Street Violence (Pg 8 ) The E-newsletter is jam-packed ...

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Latinos, ‘Take the Reins’ of Your Health With New Spanish-Language Guides



If you have been diagnosed with high cholesterol, for example, you probably know that keeping cholesterol at a healthy level can help you lower your chances of a heart attack or stroke. But how much do you know about your treatment options, including what side effects medications may cause and how to determine the best option for you? If you don’t get the best possible information about all your treatment choices, you might not make an informed decision on which treatment is most appropriate for you. All of this couldn’t be truer for Hispanics who have to navigate a complex healthcare system in another language. This is where a new campaign, “Toma las riendas” (“Take the reins”), comes in. The Toma las riendas campaign, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare ...

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Do You Know a Latino Community Health Leader?



Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series that will highlight the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s work in Latino communities across the country. By SaludToday Guest Blogger: Sallie George Do you know someone doing exceptional work to improve health or access to health care in his or her community? Or someone who has solved or who has made good progress toward solving a daunting community health problem? If so, nominate your local health hero for a 2012 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Community Health Leaders award. As the nation’s largest health philanthropy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) selects 10 of these individuals each year to receive the Community Health Leaders award, which includes national recognition, opportunities to network and ...

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IHPR Researcher Promotes Cancer Education in South Texas



In the late 1980s, Dora Alicia Gonzalez helped do one of the first assessments of socioeconomics and health care locations in her native Brownsville, Texas. She even helped write a 300-page report—page by page—on a typewriter. Gonzalez said the experience, even despite its arduous typing task, sparked her interest in public health and improving the lives of the underserved. Over the last 20 years she has helped meet the needs of uninsured residents as part of a primary health care agency, and also fostered community-based partnerships and developed and implemented cancer education training sessions along the Texas-Mexico border for the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Today, Gonzalez builds community health as a program coordinator at the Institute for Health Promotion Research ...

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Government Launches ‘healthfinder.gov en espanol’



To help address health among Spanish-speaking Americans, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) has launched an easy-to-read Spanish-language website with vital health info and disease prevention tools based on scientific and medical research. The website, healthfinder.gov en espanol, is an online health information resource designed for Spanish-speaking communities. Offering 46 different health topics from acupuncture to vaccinations, the site provides tools and information for people to be healthy and stay healthy. Hispanics are the largest U.S. minority. Hispanics also lead the nation in childhood poverty—painting a grim picture when it comes to Hispanics and health. Tools on the new site ...

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Study: Latinas Get More Unneeded Breast Cancer Surgery



Latinas and older, poorer women all are more likely to have lymph nodes under the armpit removed unnecessarily during breast cancer surgery, according to a new study, Reuters reports. That's despite 2005 guidelines recommending a gentler surgery that spares most of the lymph nodes, avoiding side effects like pain, swelling and numbness down the line. Based on a California cancer registry, researchers found that more than a third of about 18,000 women who had undergone mastectomy for early-stage breast cancer had had their lymph nodes removed as well. Yet all of these women had node-negative tumors, meaning the cancer had not spread beyond the ...

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