EthnicMajority

(Reuters) U.S. children and teenagers are seeing far more soda advertising than before, with blacks and Hispanics the major targets, as marketers have expanded online, according to a study released on Monday.

The report from the Yale University Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity also said many fruit and energy drinks, which are popular with teenagers, have as much added sugar and as many calories as regular soda.

"Our children are being assaulted by these drinks that are high in sugar and low in nutrition," said Yale's Kelly Brownell, co-author of the report. "The companies are marketing them in highly aggressive ways."

Children's and teens' exposure to full-calorie soda ads on television doubled from 2008 to 2010, fueled by increases from Coca-Cola Co and Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc, the report found.

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(Third Age) Osteoarthritis, the most common type of arthritis that affects multiple joints, is becoming more common among African Americans, according to new research published in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a peer-reviewed journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR).

This study was conducted by part of the Johnston County Osteoarthritis Project, Dr. Amanda Nelson from the University of North Carolina at the Chapel Hill-UNC Rheumatology/Thurston Arthritis Research Center and colleagues.

African Americans have a higher prevalence of multiple, large-joint osteoarthritis (OA), which may not be recognized based on the current definition of "generalized OA."

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(Los Angeles Times) Minority children might be at greater risk for car crash-related injuries because fewer wear seat belts, a study finds.

The study, presented Saturday at the American Academy of Pediatrics' national conference in Boston, looked at statistics on 37,375 children younger than 16 collected from the National Trauma Database from 2002 to 2006. Among those children, less than half — 45.7% — were in restraints. The lowest use of seat belts was found among black, Hispanic and Native American children.

Researchers found that 12.6% of children who were injured required emergency surgery, and that the use of seat belts was linked with less severe injuries and a lower risk of needing an emergency operation.

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(Examiner.com) Los Angeles has a large Hispanic population. On October 10, UCLA reported the results of a study evaluating healthcare disparities between Latinos and non-Latino whites, mostly from a policy standpoint. They also examined the same disparities from the perspective of the patient, in terms of access, use and the quality of healthcare. The research, published in the current edition of the journal Health Affairs, was a collaboration between UCLA and the City University of New York. It found that primary care physicians who treat Latinos are less likely than physicians treating primarily white patients to believe they can provide high-quality care. Among the reasons: inadequate time with patients, patients’ lack of ability to afford care, patients not adhering to recommended treatments, and difficulties in communicating. The researchers used data from the 2008 Community Tracking Physician Survey, a nationally representative sample of U.S. physicians that included demographic information and patient characteristics.

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(FoxNews) Few media stories on cancer venture into issues of death, dying and end-of-life care—and outlets directed at African Americans are particularly unlikely to do so, a new study suggests.

Historically, African Americans with advanced cancer have been more likely than whites to opt for aggressive treatment, and less likely to want hospice care.

The goal of hospice care is to improve quality of life for terminally ill people, treating their pain and other physical and psychological symptoms. There's also evidence that hospice care, which is usually provided at home, does not speed death—and in some cases, may help people live longer than aggressive cancer treatment would.

But doctors often don't bring up options for end-of-life care—even those caring for people with advanced cancer, said Jessica M. Fishman, the lead researcher on the new study.

Since people often get medical information from the media, Fishman and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia looked at whether there might be racial differences in how the media cover cancer care.

And they found that while few mainstream media stories talked about the downsides of aggressive cancer treatment, or about hospice care at all, African-American media were even less likely to do so.

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(UPI) Hispanic-Americans live in counties that frequently violate air pollution standards, a report by U.S. non-profit groups found.

The report from the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for American Progress and the National Wildlife Federation, released with the National Hispanic Medical Association, said Hispanics are among those facing the greatest risk from efforts to block the Environmental Protection Agency updates for ozone, mercury and other air pollutants.

The report highlighted air pollution in states that are home to more than 75 percent of Hispanic-Americans — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.

The report was released days after President Barack Obama pulled back the EPA's stronger standard for ozone and shortly before a series of votes planned for the House of Representatives to block additional safeguards to protect public health from power plants, cement kilns and other industrial plants, the groups said.

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(PRNewswire) Racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to develop cancer and die from it than the general U.S. population. However, as the next generation of cancer medicines are being evaluated, only 17 percent of clinical trial participants are, in fact, minorities.(1)

Today, Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) announced findings from a prospectively designed observational study that resulted in new ways to increase minority participation in clinical trials. The study, released at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual "Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved" meeting in Washington, D.C., assessed the impact of ethnicity on the second-line treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

As part of Lilly's goal to improve health outcomes for all patients, the company is working to increase enrollment of diverse populations in clinical trials, and making trials more accessible in minority communities.

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(Huffington Post) September is National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month, and organizations such as the National Council of La Raza, the Leadership for Healthy Communities and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation are taking a closer look at the challenges Latino children in particular face.

According to the National Council of La Raza, there are more than 16 million Latino children under the age of 18 living in the United States. The number of Latino children has increased by 30 percent since 2000 and doubled since 1990, making them one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population. And as of May 2010, 38.2 percent of Hispanic children ages 2 to 19 were overweight or obese, compared with 31.7 percent of all children, according to the Leadership for Healthy Communities.

The National Council of La Raza reports that one out of two Latino children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes. "That is the statistic that should be our wake-up call,” said Jennifer Ng'andu, deputy director of the council's health policy project, where she oversees efforts to improve the health status and outcomes of Latinos through national policy change.

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(Chicago Tribune) Being obese and having a larger waist may be linked with a higher risk of dying for African American women, a study finds.

Body mass index and waist circumference were examined in 33,916 women who were part of the ongoing Black Women's Health Study and had never smoked and didn't have cardiovascular disease or cancer at the beginning of the study.

In 13 years of follow-up, researchers found that for women who had a BMI of 20 or higher, every five-unit rise in BMI was linked with an 18% increase in the risk of death during the study period. A BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered normal weight, while 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight, and 30 and above is considered obese. For overweight women the risk of death from cardiovascular disease was two times higher, and for obese women it was three times higher compared with normal-weight women.

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(Huffington Post) Finally, real attention — in the form of $130 million — is being paid to the crisis faced by black and Latino men, who are on the bottom in terms of education and health, and on the top in terms of unemployment and the likelihood of incarceration. This new initiative, spearheaded by Mayor Bloomberg in New York City, will focus on job training, mentoring, fatherhood classes and academic test scores. But will this money be well spent? Not unless it also addresses the primary reasons why there is a crisis in the first place.

For more than four decades, research, including my own, has revealed that a concrete set of factors prevents young black and Latino men from thriving in and out of school, and ultimately as adults. Addressing these factors should be at the core of any initiative that aims to help them succeed. What does the research say?

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