A study published in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine says half of the nation’s children will be on food stamps at some period in their lives and that 90 percent of African-American children will utilize the program.

From HuffingtonPost.com

The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Your neighbor may be using some of these programs but it’s not the kind of thing people want to talk about,” Rank said.

The analysis was released Monday in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The authors say it’s a medical issue pediatricians need to be aware of because children on food stamps are at risk for malnutrition and other ills linked with poverty.

“This is a real danger sign that we as a society need to do a lot more to protect children,” Rank said.

Ninety percent is a remarkable number. I’m sure the report will be analyzed and debated.

Is the story of 10 black women missing and our being found dead just a coincidence or the work of a serial killer?  And why haven’t you heard about this story on the 11pm news?

From Bossip.com

Ten women have been found slain or have been declared missing in Rocky Mount, N.C., in recent years. But the rest of the country hasn’t heard about…… a possible serial killer stalking the young women in this Southern town of 60,000. The latest victim, Elizabeth Jane Smallwood, was identified on Oct. 12. Why have the Rocky Mount homicides been largely ignored?

“When you think about the famous missing person cases over the last few years it’s Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, and Laci Peterson,” notes Sam Sommers, associate professor of psychology at Tufts University. All these women had a few things in common—they were white, educated, and came from middle-class families. The victims in Rocky Mount—which residents describe as a “typical Southern town,” and is about 40 percent white and more than 50 percent black—were different. They were all African-American, many were poor, and some had criminal histories including drug abuse and prostitution.

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The Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) pulled no punches when he met with a group of education officials.

John Wilson said in order for HBCUs to survive and compete for African-American students, the institutions have to stop whining about what they do not have and instead come up with innovative ways to raise money and recruit students.

From 2TheAdvocate.com

HBCUs must stop feeling sorry for themselves, he said, and switch their focus from playing violins to trumpets.

“We play the violin too much,” Wilson said. “We think people owe us something.”

Many HBCUs are facing financial difficulty due to declining enrollment and increasing costs. The recession has also tightened the wallets of businesses and charities that typically donate and support HBCUs.

Wilson also called out HBCU alumni who “will go to Homecoming” but refuse to give back to their alma mater.

A lot of that is a failure of the colleges to treat their students and alumni well, he said.

“If they (students) have built up an attitude with the financial aid office, which had an attitude with them, they’re going to leave here with an attitude and they’re not going to write a check,” Wilson said. “They’re going to come back for Homecoming, but they’re not going to open their checkbooks.”

Wilson is a graduate of Morehouse College.

The alarming news earlier this week that as many as 90,000 people could die from the swine flu this year has even more ominous implications for Blacks and Hispanics, a new Chicago study shows. By looking at 1,500 confirmed cases of the H1N1 virus reported to the Chicago Department of Public Health from late April through late July, researchers found that Blacks and Hispanics were four times more likely than their White counterparts to wind up in the hospital. But the wide disparity likely has very little to do with genetics, experts say. The fact that Blacks and Hispanics suffer disproportionately from diabetes, asthma is more likely the reason for the gap, they say. “We don’t have anything definitive to say one group is more affected than another,” said Dr. Daniel Jernigan of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study relied on a relatively small sample group. Of the 1,500 lab-confirmed swine flu cases, Blacks were hospitalized at a rate of nine per 100,000, Hispanics at eight per 100,000. For Whites, the rate was two per 100,000, according to the study. The Chicago study isn’t the first time race has been mentioned in context with the swine fle. In early August, health officials in Boston found that three-fourths of residents hospitalized with the virus were Black or Hispanic. “It’s very disturbing,” Barbara Ferrer of the Boston Public Health Commission, told The Associated Press. “But intuitively it’s understandable, because we have tremendous inequities in most areas of health,” said Ferrer, the agency’s executive director.

One in 100 Black men and women develop heart disease before age 50, a rate 20 times higher than in Whites, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. That study, which followed more than 5,000 18- to 30-year-olds over a two-decade period, found that all but one of the 27 study participants who developed heart failure was black. “In the past, heart failure was thought to be a disease of older people,” said Dr. Kelly McCants, a heart failure and transplant specialist at Jewish Hospital. “But often, we see it in young Black males … and a lot of it is preventable.” While doctors aren’t sure why such startling disparities exist, they point to such likely culprits as elevated rates of high blood pressure – often triggered by poverty, which can lead to unhealthy diets and less access to quality health care. The study is one of the latest examining racial differences in heart failure, which affects 5 million Americans.

Are Blacks More Likely to Get Addicted to Smoking

There’s some bad news for Black folks who like to puff. A surprising new study suggests that darker-skinned people have a stronger propensity for becoming addicted to tobacco. Read more.

 Major League Baseball, which has been under fire in recent years for its failure to recruit U.S. Blacks, is beginning to see a surge in African-American players, according to a new survey. Seven years ago, the pool of African-American ballers amounted to 8.2 percent of the league. Last year, they accounted for more than 10 percent of Major League ballplayers. Also up is the percentage of Black pitchers, up 2 points for 5 percent; and the number of Black infielders, up from 7 percent to 9 percent. “I feel encouraged. It’s not a huge leap, but it’s a step forward,” said Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson, the first African American signed to the big leagues. “I think we have to feel encouraged, not only feel encouraged but feel inspired by progress so that we can not only sustain what we have, but work harder to see that we get that number up in future reports.” For the first time during the dozen years that Richard Lapchick has been publishing his annual report, baseball received an “A” for race hiring. The survey, released Wednesday, noted that 10 teams had minority managers at the beginning of the season -five were African American, four Latino and one Asian-American – and five minority GMs: three African Americans and two Latinos. When it comes to gender, the sport got a “B” an improvement over last year’s “C+.”  The progress, Lapchick said, is substantial. “They’re still behind the NBA but they’ve gained ground consistently over the last three or four years. They’re a very close second to the NBA,” he said. “They’ve really been the industry leader in working with minority vendors. That has built up a well of good will for baseball in the African-American community that really didn’t exist 15 years ago.”

Blacks Don’t Trust Doctors or Clinical Trials
Black parents are more likely to distrust both physicians and medical researchers than White parents, according to a new report. MedPage Today reports that that distrust often leads to Black parents excluding their children’s participation in clinical trials. Of the parents who accompanied children to a primary care clinic, the study found that more then two-thirds of African-Americans distrusted the medical establishment, compared with one in two White parents, Kumaravel Rajakumar, M.D., of the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues reported in the February issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. There was a correlation between education and distrust. While 74 percent of Black parents who had less than a high school education were wary of doctors and researchers, only 44 percent of those who were college graduates shared that feeling  the researchers found. But education wasn’t the only factor. Even after controlling for education, Black skin remained an independent predictor of distrust. African-Americans distrust is justified, given the long tradition of segregated care and such infamous historic episodes as the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which treatment was withheld from Black patients. “If we want minority communities to participate in our work, we must first fix the racial and ethnic imbalance that continues to tilt our ivory towers,” Somnath Saha, M.D., M.P.H., of the Portland VA Medical Center in Portland, Ore., concluded in a recent editorial.

 Nationally, the United States is a religious nation, but nobody does church like Black folks, a new study shows. “African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole, including level of affiliation with a religion, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and religion’s importance in life,” says the report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.  Read the rest here.

Kidney Disease Often Unreported in Blacks Kidney disease, which is four times higher among Black Americans than White Americans, often goes undetected until the latest stages, according to new research. In a study that included more than 3,400 Black Americans who were interviewed and given physical examinations, about one in five were found to have chronic kidney disease, but fewer than one in six knew they had the condition. “Much of the problem of patient awareness is due to a lack of awareness of the medical practitioners,” study lead author Dr. Michael F. Flessner said in a National Kidney Foundation news release. “Most physicians were trained in an era in which serum creatinine (a measure of kidney function) was used as an absolute indicator of kidney disease.” Currently, early stages of kidney disease are diagnosed when protein is detected in the urine, and later stages of the disease are diagnosed by reductions in the glomerular filtration rate, a measure of how well the kidneys are filtering out waste products. “It is imperative that new approaches be implemented to increase awareness, diagnosis and treatment — for both the health-care provider and the patient,” the researchers said. Their findings are published in the February issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases.