Public Health Institute

Join PHI’s Pacific ADA Center on Thursday, December 12 at noon PT to discuss how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects your rights to effective communication. Learn about the ADA and your civil rights as a person with a disability. Registration for this session will close December 11 at 3pm PT.

Today at 12pm PT—join PHI's Tracking California to explore three of their powerful GIS-based tools—the Data Explorer, the Traffic Tool, and the Pesticide Mapping Tool—designed to help Californians navigate complex environmental health data at the state and local levels. This webinar will explore how practitioners and advocates can leverage these tools to track environmental hazards and related health outcomes, helping to equip participants with skills to make data-driven decisions.

Caregivers play a critical role in the lives of persons with chronic, serious, and advanced illnesses, often supporting their care recipient with a variety of tasks. They take on not only the burden of additional physical tasks and time commitments to support them, but also the oftentimes emotional burden of caring for someone they love and the uncertainty that comes with illness. A new workbook, created by PHI’s AC Care Alliance, is designed to help caregivers organize caregiving tasks and take care of themselves, featuring worksheets with examples and easy-to-follow instructions: https://lnkd.in/gj6-r4Rc

We're Hiring | Webinar TODAY: How Native Leaders & Multi-Sector Partners Are Investing in Health & Self-Determination | PHI’s Dr. Barbara Cohn Featured in New Film on DDT's Health Impacts | Using Enviro Data Tools to Advance Health & Equity | Resource: Workbook for Caregivers Supporting People with Serious, Chronic & Advanced Illnesses -- all that and more, in our latest updates:

The rise in chronic health problems can be partially linked to technological advancements and convenient access to a wide range of products and services that we have today. Standford FSI News recently highlighted the work of PHI's Building H and the 2024 Building H Index, which rates and ranks the health impact of popular products from companies like Netflix, Uber and Apple on how they affect essential health behaviors.

A history of racialized permitting has left residents in "Cancer Alley"--an 85-mile stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans--sandwiched between more than 150 petrochemical plants. In St. John's Parish, Louisiana, 20 out of 24 plants are located in majority Black districts. Now, local activists are fighting new industrial development heading to predominately Black neighborhoods.

Pulse oximeters—medical devices that measure blood oxygen levels—have been found to overestimate the blood oxygen levels of patients with darker skin tones. After calls from health experts and community members, some medical device companies are now partnering with community health clinics, working to improve the devices and ensure more equitable health care. “I should have had a better device by now,” said Theodore J. Iwashyna, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Johns Hopkins who has researched the effect of the devices on darker-skinned patients since 2020. “How many more of my patients need to die before we fix this?”

Dr. Barbara Cohn, director of PHI’s Child Health and Development Studies, is featured in a new documentary delving into the health and environmental impacts of DDT—a toxic chemical commonly used as a pesticide beginning in the 1940s and later banned in the U.S. due to rising evidence of its health threats to wildlife and humans. 'Out of Plain Sight' follows LA Times environmental journalist and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Roseanna Xia, who in 2020 broke the story that as many as half a million barrels of DDT had been quietly dumped into the ocean decades ago, just off the coast of Los Angeles. In the film, Dr. Cohn underscores the alarming reality that chemicals like DDT will stay in our environment for the long-term, posing health threats to humans and wildlife for generations. In New York City? 'Out of Plain Sight' is premiering in person on Saturday, Nov. 16th at 6 pm at DOC NYC, the largest documentary film festival in the nation. The film is scheduled to show again on Monday, Nov. 18, at 9 pm at the Village East Cinemas by Angelika. A question-and-answer session with the filmmakers will follow each in-person screening. You can also watch virtually on-demand from Nov. 17 to Dec. 1. Watch the trailer, get tickets and learn more about how PHI's Child Health and Development Studies is uncovering the multi-generational health risks of DDT and other environmental threats: https://lnkd.in/gPtsVjDb

A legacy of racist policies and disinvestment in Black communities—exasperated during COVID—has resulted in widening racial health disparities. According to a 2023 JAMA study, during the past two decades, there have been 1.63 million excess deaths among Black Americans relative to their white counterparts—representing a loss of more than 80 million years of life. Community leaders, health experts and advocates point to the need for institutional policy shifts and community-led public health interventions to reverse this trend and advance health equity. https://lnkd.in/g287aq5g

Experts estimate that over 4 million adults aged 55 or older who have some amount of cognitive impairment are living alone--which can mean that they have limited access to social support systems to assist with daily tasks such as eating, bathing, taking medications or managing money. Compared with other older adults living independently, they are also more likely to be women, are disproportionately Black or Latino, and have lower levels of wealth and homeownership. Yet fewer than 1 in 5 qualify for Medicaid and other publicly funded programs that provide support services in the home. "In a health care system that assumes older adults have family caregivers to help them, 'we realized this population is destined to fall through the cracks,'" said Elena Portacolone, associate professor at University of California-San Francisco.