Reducing Health Disparities Topic of Dean’s Symposium This Thursday
ABC's Timothy Johnson to Moderate
When former president Bill Clinton signed the Health Care Fairness Act last November, he designated more than $150 million to create a National Center for Research on Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health.
The signing was landmark, acknowledging at the highest levels of government the need to research health disparities. But what needs to be done next is a topic for discussion at the next Future of Public Health Millennial Symposium Series, "Reducing U.S. Health Disparities: The Role of Healthy People 2010, New Genetic Technologies, Health Care, and Social Policy" on Thursday, February 8 in the Snyder Auditorium from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m.
The
symposium, sponsored by Dean Barry Bloom, should prove lively, with panelists
directly debating each other. Timothy Johnson, medical editor at ABC News
and an HSPH alumnus, will moderate and ask for audience comments.
The panelists will include Harold Freeman, president and CEO, North General Hospital; Nancy Adler, professor of medical psychology, University of California at San Francisco; Thomas Boyce, professor of epidemiology and child development, University of California at Berkeley.
Public health professionals have documented health disparities among Americans for several years. These disparities emerge along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines.
One example, cited Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, assistant professor in the Department of Health and Social Behavior, who helped to organize the symposium, is that the death rate of African-American babies under the age of one is double that of white babies.
"We know about these disparities," said Acevedo-Garcia. "The question now is what can we do about them."
She said the panelists will discuss current federal government policies, the role of the health care system, genetic technologies, and social policies such as the quality of housing that affect health.
"I think we take for granted because we live in an affluent country
that some of these issues have been taken care of, but they still exist,"
said Acevedo-Garcia.
| Upcoming
Dean's Symposia
Thursday,
March 15 Speakers: Gerald Keusch, director, Fogarty International Center, NIH; Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, HU; J. Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer, Celera Genomics Thursday,
May 3 Wednesday,
May 9 Speakers: David Botstein, chairman, Department of Genetics, Stanford University; Terry Speed, Department of Statistics and Program in Biostatistics, University of CA, Berkeley |
