San Diego State University and the University of California at San Diego are hooking up to eliminate the disparity in cancer deaths between different minority and ethnic groups and to determine which types of outreach, education, training and prevention methods are most appropriate across populations. The funding for the project is provided through a five-year $15 million grant from the National Cancer Institute ( NCI ) of the National Institutes of Health and education and community outreach programs in the San Diego region, reports Media-Newswire.com. “Because we have such diversity here in San Diego, the issue of cancer disparity is acute,” said Partnership co-principal investigator Stanley Maloy, Ph.D., dean of San Diego State’s College of Sciences. “This new collaboration between SDSU and UC San Diego is a true partnership that will make inroads in this important area of cancer research and directly benefit the health of San Diegans.” The partnership is the only such program in California. John Carethers, professor of medicine and chief of the division of gastroenterology at UC-San Diego, said that the project aims to “develop a stronger national cancer program aimed at understanding the reasons behind the significant cancer disparities and the impact on minority populations. “This award helps address sometimes neglected cancer research that is specific to minority populations, particularly here in the San Diego area.” More American White women develop breast cancer, but African-American women are 15 percent more likely to die from the disease, statistics show. African Americans have the highest rates for colorectal cancer of any racial group in the United States and have higher rates of prostate cancer and present at younger ages than other groups. While breast cancer is diagnosed about 40 percent less often in Hispanic women than in non-Hispanic women, it is more frequently diagnosed at a later stage in Hispanics. Cancer treatment for minority populations, particularly those in poor communities, generally lags behind non-minority groups.

Star Receiver Ordered to Avoid Baby Mama. Star Cardinals wideout Larry Fitzgerald has been ordered to avoid any contact with the mother of his 11-month-old son after he allegedly beat her down and yanked her hair out, TMZ.com reports. Angela Nazario told police that she brought the couple’s son to visit Larry at his Phoenix home last October and an argument ensued. In legal papers filed in an Arizona court, Nazario claims that Fitzgerald attempted to “diffuse the situation” by raising his fist and challenging her to a play fight. Nazario responded by swinging at him and “may have hit his face,” she acknowledges in the documents. Fitzgerald turned from playful to enraged and pushed Nazario down to her knees, she alleges. He “grabbed me by my hair with both hands on the back of my head very, very hard and tossed me across the room,” she charges. “Later, when she tried to leave with her son, Nazario says Fitzgerald ‘grabbed the back of my neck and slammed me down on the marble floor … [I] was disoriented for awhile and could not get up. I remember he mumbled something about ‘that’s what happens when you try taking my son away from me,’” TMZ.com reports. “As she got in the car to leave she realized she had lost ‘chunks’ of hair.”

Black Athletes Exploited? On average, Black and White students arrive on campus with much different academic backgrounds and graduate at much different rates, according to a study by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Athletes’ experiences reflect those differences, and those differences affect the statistics for athletes as a whole, the study found. African-Americans are far better represented on the playing field than in the classroom, it shows. Only about 1.8 percent of White students were scholarship athletes, compared with 6.4 percent of Black students. Some schools’ athlete-student demographic differences were huge. For example, about a third of the Black students in Colorado’s 2002 freshman class were scholarship athletes, according to the Journal-Constitution. Read the rest of the findings here.