homelessness
cmonforton | November 11, 2014This Veterans’ Day, it will be a cold night in most parts of the country, and especially cold for the homeless. On any given night in the US, more than 578,000 children and adults are homeless, including 31 percent who were not in shelters. Homelessness among military veterans is troubling. Nationally, 11 percent of homeless adults are veterans. These figures and many others appear in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2014 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress (AHAR). It was released last month.
AHAR provides estimates of homeless veterans in each state, such as 108…
lborkowski | April 16, 2014The list of 2014 Pulitzer Prize winners announced earlier this week includes several journalists whose award-winning work addresses public health issues.
The Boston Globe Staff won the Breaking News prize for “exhaustive and empathetic coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and the ensuing manhunt that enveloped the city, using photography and a range of digital tools to capture the full impact of the tragedy.” Among the many articles in the Globe’s extensive coverage of the April 15, 2013 attack and its aftermath are pieces on the first responders, hospital workers, and therapists who…
lborkowski | December 11, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Andrea Elliott in the New York Times: Invisible Child: Dasani's Homeless Life
Matthieu Aikins in Wired: The Surge: "In 1988 there were 350,000 cases of polio worldwide. Last year there were 223. But getting all the way to zero will mean spending billions of dollars, penetrating the most remote regions of the globe, and facing down Taliban militants to get to the last unprotected children on Earth."
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: MRSA in UK Turkeys Raises Questions of Communication, Transparency and Risk
Elizabeth Weise in USA Today: Diseases on the move…
kkrisberg | November 15, 2013While homelessness among U.S. veterans is on the decline, significant housing challenges remain, according to a new report from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition.
Released this week just a day after Veterans Day, the report finds that in 2011, more than a quarter of the nation’s 20 million veteran households experienced a housing cost burden (defined as spending more than 30 percent of income on housing costs and utilities) and more than 1.5 million veterans were severely cost burdened (spending more than half of their incomes on housing costs and utilities). Within those numbers,…
lborkowski | October 25, 2013Ian Frazier's in-depth New Yorker article on homelessness in New York seems especially timely, coming after a government shutdown that demonstrated how quickly low-income workers can fall into homelessness if their paychecks suddenly stop. (The shutdown also demonstrated some things about Congress, but I won't get into that here.) Here in DC, contract employees who serve food and clean offices in federal buildings were abruptly out of work. John Anderson, a line cook at a Smithsonian Museum, told the Washington Post's Jim Tankersley he had to work out a deal with his landlord because he…
mikethemadbiologist | October 31, 2010Yes, we have left no sense of decency. From Indiana, we find this story about parents of disabled children who can't receive state aid for their disabled children:
Indiana's budget crunch has become so severe that some state workers have suggested leaving severely disabled people at homeless shelters if they can't be cared for at home, parents and advocates said.
They said workers at Indiana's Bureau of Developmental Disabilities Services have told parents that's one option they have when families can no longer care for children at home and haven't received Medicaid waivers that pay for…
mikethemadbiologist | August 3, 2010Last week, I wrote about the effects of poverty on educational performance, and, in particular, science education. I received many responses, both in comments and by email. One reason I wrote this is that our current wave of educational 'reform' seems utterly focused on teacher managerial issues. I'm willing to cede that part of the poverty effect could--and I emphasize could--be due to some poor schools serving as warehouses for horrible teachers. Yet the amount of variation in test scores that is correlated with poverty is so overwhelming: I really didn't think it would be that high,…
mikethemadbiologist | October 8, 2009In the midst of all of the discussion about improving healthcare, one issue that has been neglected is the role of poverty in poor healthcare outcomes. One group that is hit particularly hard is the homeless. The Toronto Invasive Bacterial Diseases Network reports that the homeless are thirty times more likely to be diagnosed with pneumonia caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae than the population at large:
We identified 69 cases of invasive pneumococcal disease and 27 cases of laboratory confirmed pneumococcal pneumonia in an estimated population of 5050 homeless adults. The incidence of…
grrlscientist | April 23, 2009tags: The Soloist, homelessness, mental illness, movie trailer, film, true story, streaming video
Wow, now this is a movie that I must see! I heard an interview with the author of the book on which this film was based, LATimes reporter, Steve Lopez. He meets a mentally ill homeless man playing Beethoven on a violin with only two strings, and, recognizing his talent, writes a story about him. Lopez's readers send him musical instruments to give to this homeless man, who was a musical prodigy as a child. The resulting friendship transforms both men's lives in this inspirational true story [3:…
grrlscientist | April 12, 2009tags: book review, memoir, homelessness, unemployment, Cadillac Man, Thomas Wagner
The homeless are everywhere in New York City. I run across them every day while riding public transit, while walking around the city and while using wireless in the public libraries. After a few conversations with homeless people, I've learned that most of them avoid shelters because of the risk of violent crime there. So where do they sleep? Where do they go to get a shower and clean clothes? Are all homeless people either crazy or crackheads? How did these people end up living on the streets in the first…
terrasig | March 8, 2009I used to keep a separate blog for items of local interest but I can't even keep up with one. So, you'll occasionally have to bear with me posting about issues of import from the area in and around Terra Sigillata World Headquarters.
But here's a local bit of info for our NC Triangle readers that should also remind the rest of you around the world to see what you can do in your own communities, especially during the global economic downturn.
This came across a tag in my Facebook from my far-better half, PharmGirl. I said, "Wow, this is great - where did you get it? Did you write it?" The…
grrlscientist | November 28, 2008tags: Hunger in America, food banks, food pantries, soup kitchens, food stamps, poverty
Image: Orphaned.
One thing that the Thanksgiving Holidays has made clear: America, the land of plenty where holiday overeating is celebrated as a social good, is suffering from a food availability crisis. The Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture describes a range of food security categories, ranging from "food secure," which includes high food security and marginal food security, and "food insecure," which includes low food security and very low food security.…