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Reporting on health taboos in Asian immigrant communities

When I began reporting on health taboos in Asian communities in New York, I didn't know I would be facing such tough challenges.

 

In the kingdom of fats and sugar

With limited access to affordable fruits, vegetables and other healthy foods, Mexicans living in New York are frequenting fast food restaurants instead of farmers' markets. The result is a spike in obesity and diabetes among this immigrant group.

This story was originally published in Spanish. Below is the English translation.

Part 3: In a sedentary country

A new life, but with diabetes

"It's the alcohol hangover," Gerardo Cuapio thought five years ago when he woke up thirsty and with blurred vision. National Health Journalism Fellow Pedro Frisneda tells the story of a man who was on the verge of death without knowing he had Type 2 diabetes. It's a cautionary tale for what happens to many Latin American immigrants who move to the United States, adopting a new lifestyle and diet that can contribute to developing the disease. "The Big Apple is confronting one of the worst diabetes epidemics in the nation and health authorities have declared it an emergency," with Hispanics suffering disproportionately.

This story was originally published in Spanish. Below is the English translation.

Part 2: In the kingdom of fats and sugar

Part 3: In a sedentary country

Wakefield's Wake, Part 5: Treat advocacy groups with a healthy dose of skepticism

One of the main groups involved in Andrew Wakefield’s vaccines-cause-autism scare was called JABS.

The letters stood for Justice Awareness and Basic Support. It billed itself as the “support group for vaccine-damaged children.” A jab, in British parlance, is the same as a shot in the US. And the group was focused on jabs from vaccines as the cause of autism and other disorders.

Surprising common sense from website Cracked.com: "5 common medical procedures that secretly aren't worth it"

Yesterday, the humor website Cracked.com published a list of 5 common medical procedures that, in its opinion, aren’t worth it. They are CT scans, physical examinations, circumcisions, Cesarean sections and antibiotics. OK, antibiotics are not really procedures, but you get the point. Of course, the author uses exaggeration to bolster his case but there is a lot of truth in the article. Let’s take them one by one.

Prenatal Programming: How Mothers' Health Affects Their Babies

Dr. Michael C. Lu's paradigm shift in medicine is called a "life course perspective": the idea that health is not isolated to stages of life, but that those stages are interconnected. It is the philosophical underpinning behind his devotion to prenatal care. Indeed, there are some surprising connections between mothers' lifestyles and nutrition during pregnancy and lifelong health effects on their children.

Our Fire

As soon as I got the happy news that I'd received a California Health Journalism Fellowship, I did what any self-respecting writer who is faced with an ambitious, challenging, slightly terrifying project would do:

I hid in my office.

Or, to be exact, in my living room. Or, to be more exact, what used to be a living room, and is now a spreading archipelago of paper, computer cables, CD ROMS and files. Shades drawn and cellphone silenced, I immediately set about gathering a pile of books that I want to read over the next few months.

Francine R. Kaufman

Francine Kaufman became vice president of global affairs for Medtronic Diabetes in January 2009, after 30 years at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, where she was head of the Center for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, and 11 years as a professor of pediatrics at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. At Childrens Hospital, where she continues a clinical practice, Dr. Kaufman also directed the Comprehensive Childhood Diabetes Center.

John A. Rich

John Rich is professor and chair of health management and policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health and director of the university’s Center for Nonviolence & Social Justice. He has been a leader in the field of public health, and his work has focused on serving one of the nation’s most ignored and underserved populations --African-American men in urban settings. Dr. Rich is the author of the 2009 book, "Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men." In 2006, he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

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