City of Angels 2018-19

After my last blog post, I became increasingly interested in the recent rapid urbanization and the large shifts in population from rural/suburban to urban areas. The drastically different lifestyle that comes with such a change has led to heightened levels of obesity, stroke, stress, cancer, and other noncommunicable diseases among Los Angeles County and the global population. While this may seem obvious, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are responsible for 60% of deaths globally with this number expected to grow an additional 17% over the next ten years. Tobacco, alcohol, nutrition, and physical activity are clearly responsible for the majority of these deaths. With this in mind, increased health promotion strategies are crucial and needed to create political, economic, and environmental conditions to prevent NCDs. Now, I'd like to take a look at how Angelenos historically have romanticized some communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis, in a way that almost makes them desirab...

On Friday, a white supremacist terrorized two New Zealand mosques, killing at least 50 people.   He claimed to be inspired by American mass shootings and the presence of Donald Trump as our president and a symbol of “white identity”; his manifesto claims that one of his motives was to further divide Americans on the issues of gun control and the Second Amendment.   Today, a shooting on a Dutch tram killed three people and injured five others (police are unsure whether this was terrorism or a family dispute).   In terms of incidents that have struck closer to home, 12 people were shot at a nightclub in Thousand Oaks in November; the 2015 San Bernardino shooting left 14 dead (both not including the perpetrators).   And according to the LA Times Homicide Report, 603 people have been killed in LA County in the past 12 months.   As we’re all well aware of due to the topicality of this issue, the “will they, won’t they” of gun control is ho...

Since it's Women's History month, and also since I wasn't in class last week, I've decided to focus this blogpost on women's relationship with public health systems and policies in Los Angeles. In order to create equitable healthcare, it is crucial to understand and address the differences in experience that women have when it comes to accessing and receiving healthcare. Issues such as poverty, lack of quality education and violence all disproportionately affect women, especially women of color, immigrant women, women with disabilities, and so on.   Some things I'm thinking about: How do issues we've talked about in class, such as homelessness, food insecurity, gentrification, policing and violence connect with women's mental and physical health? How can we create and practice public health policies that are trauma-informed and inclusive? In writing this blogpost I was thinking a lot about the #MeToo movement in terms of a public health iss...

Throughout this semester we have talked about stigmas surrounding various diseases, illnesses, and infections and how they can affect how some may see the people affected.  We have also talked about health care in Los Angeles and its discrepancies with the level of care different economic classes receive.  I wanted to focus on the possibilities of treatment for people who have drug addictions and the price of treatment as well. Over the past few years, Los Angeles has become a hub for drug treatment centers with about a thousand centers surrounding the greater Los Angeles area. However many of these treatment and detox centers do not have proper licensing or a licensed staff which can hurt many people with drug addictions searching for treatment.  Out of those one thousand treatment centers most are detox centers which only scrape the surface of curing a person's addiction because detoxing is only the first step. There are also many sober living plac...

Throughout the semester, we’ve discussed the different stigmas or associations attached to different diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, and tuberculosis. While we have discussed sexually transmitted infections (STIs) as a part of other discussions, for this roundup, I wanted to focus specifically on the stigmas surrounding STIs, how they differ from other diseases, and how protection differs from other sex-related protective measures. How have you heard STIs talked about in everyday conversation? Are there stereotypes or judgments attached to discussions about them? As we’ve read in AIDS & Its Metaphors , STIs like syphilis had strong associations because of their sexual nature, and HIV/AIDS further compounded these stereotypes because of its association with gay men and African countries. In City of God (and to some extent the Countryman letters), the authors discuss the outright shaming of people with HIV, especially gay men. How is HIV similar or different than other ...

During the Middle Ages, the mentally ill were believed to be possessed or in need of religion. Negative attitudes towards mental illness persisted into the 18th century in the United States, which led to the stigmatization of mental disease, and unhygienic (and often degrading) confinement of mentally ill individuals. In 1840, Dorothea Dix lobbied for better living conditions for the mentally ill after witnessing the dangerous conditions in which patients lived. Over the course of the next 40 years, she was able to convince the government to build 32 psychiatric hospitals. This caused institutionalized care to increase, as it was the most effective way to treat the mentally ill. However, just because the number of patients increased didn’t mean the funding increased, so, unfortunately, a lot of the state hospitals were underfunded and understaffed. A lot of criticism followed due to the poor living conditions. In 1963, the closure of psychiatric hospitals was arranged by the Communit...

In our discussions about the history of HIV-AIDS in Los Angeles, we’ve touched on the significance of political protest and activism within that period– when we posted images related to AIDS in LA on Slack, several of the pictures showed demonstrators demanding justice for AIDS patients and greater communal action against the disease.     I wanted to focus this roundup on the forces they were fighting against– in what systemic ways, and by whom, was AIDS ignored and stigmatized in American culture? In the 1980s, mainstream politicians refused to take the AIDS crisis seriously, most famously President Ronald Reagan’s administration. Was the government’s response inadequate, or reflective of bias, as protestors suggested? What events, statements, or policies were the protestors likely demonstrating against, and what were the major organizations leading HIV-AIDS advocacy at the time? We've also discussed the stereotypes and stigmas employed in popular discussion of HIV-A...