women's health
lborkowski | November 2, 2015The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has long been a key source of funding for medical research, but it wasn’t until 1986 that the agency formally established a policy of including women in clinical research. For decades, women received drugs and therapies that had been tested only on men, even though the same diseases can affect men and women differently, and women may metabolize drugs differently than men do.
In 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act put into law the requirement for women’s inclusion in NIH-funded clinical research. In 2010, the Institute of Medicine reported, “women’s health…
kkrisberg | October 14, 2015At the Minneapolis Star Tribune, reporter Jeffrey Meitrodt authored an outstanding four-part series on one of the nation’s deadliest occupations: farm work. In “Tragic Harvest,” Meitrodt chronicles the impact of lax farmworker safety rules and the rise in worker fatalities in Minnesota. He begins his series with the story of farmworker Richard Rosetter:
Richard Rosetter stood inside his 28-foot grain bin and smashed a shovel into the thick layer of ice that covered his corn.
He was in a foul mood. His wife and a neighbor were pestering him, upset that he was working by himself, with no…
kkrisberg | September 24, 2015In the U.S., the gap in life expectancy by income is getting wider. To be even clearer: Life expectancy for people with higher incomes has gone up over time, while life expectancy for people earning lower incomes has actually declined.
In “The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy by Income: Implications for Federal Programs and Policy Responses,” which the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released last week, authors analyzed life expectancy patterns among Americans born in 1930 and compared them with projections among a group of Americans born in 1960. They found that top-…
kkrisberg | September 2, 2015It’s perhaps not surprising that single parents face a higher risk of living in poverty. However, a new study finds that such risk is much higher for single mothers than for single fathers, even when they both have similar jobs and education levels and work the same number of hours.
Recently published in an edition of Gender Issues, the study found that single mothers make significantly less than single fathers. In addition, single mothers seem to be financially penalized for each additional child they have, while income for single fathers remains the same or even increases with each…
lborkowski | August 31, 2015The Colorado Family Planning Initiative is a public-health success story. With funds from an anonymous foundation, Title X family planning clinics serving low-income women were able to offer IUDs and other highly effective forms of contraception for free. Rates of teen pregnancy and abortion both plummeted. When the foundation funding came to an end as scheduled, though, the state's legislature refused to pick up the tab for this demonstrably successful program.
Now, reports Katie Kerwin McCrimmon of Health News Colorado, a group of foundations (11 are listed so far) has pledged funds to…
kkrisberg | August 28, 2015Sociologist Jennifer Laird was researching unemployment among Mexican immigrants when she came upon some interesting numbers on black workers in the public sector and employment effects of the Great Recession. It piqued her interest and so she decided to keep digging.
She found that while public sector employment had long served as a source of stable employment among black Americans, often enabling mobility into the middle class, downsizing during the Great Recession disproportionately hurt black workers and resulted in greater racial disparities in the public sector. Specifically, Laird, a…
kkrisberg | August 25, 2015Reporter Anna Merlan at Jezebel chronicles the stories of women truck drivers who experienced severe sexual harassment and rape after enrolling in a training program. Her story begins with Tracy (who asked Merlan not to use her last name), who attended a driving school that contracts with Cedar Rapids Steel Transport Van Expedited (CRST), which is among the largest trucking companies in the country. During her training, Tracy was matched with a seasoned trucker who was supposed to help her safely accrue the training hours she needed before she could drive a truck on her own. Merlan reports:…
kkrisberg | August 13, 2015A Republican-led plan to ban unions at the Internal Revenue Service could leave agency workers without union representation and make all federal unions susceptible to similar tactics, according to Joe Davidson writing in the Washington Post.
Davidson reports that the plan, which was released earlier this month, was included in a bipartisan report on accusations of political interference at the IRS, though no evidence was presented that union members took part in political favoritism. The anti-union proposal, put forth by Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, came just days before…
lborkowski | July 20, 2015Back in 2009, the Colorado Family Planning Initiative started providing free IUDs and other contraceptive implants to low-income women getting care at state Title X family planning clinics. As I described previously, funds from an anonymous foundation supported the purchase of the devices, as well as training for providers and staff and technical assistance – and Colorado teens’ use of these highly effective contraceptives jumped dramatically. The results, Sabrina Tavernise reports in the New York Times, have been startling: “The birthrate among teenagers across the state plunged by 40…
kkrisberg | July 10, 2015Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, American women are saving hundreds of dollars on birth control, according to the first study to document the impact of health reform on prescription contraception spending.
To conduct the study, which was published this month in Health Affairs, researchers analyzed claims data from a large national insurer between January 2008 and June 2013, eventually examining data linked to more than 790,800 women. They found that the average out-of-pocket expense decreased for nearly all prescription contraceptive methods on the market. In particular, the average out-of-…
lborkowski | July 1, 2015The Republican-led House Appropriations Committee's FY 2016 Labor, Health and Human Services funding bill contains a single sentence that could dramatically set back public health: "None of the funds appropriated in this Act 4 may be used to carry out title X of the PHS Act."
Title X is a federal grant program that funds a network of 4,400 centers that provide high-quality, cost-effective family-planning services for approximately five million clients each year. These centers also offer breast and cervical cancer screening and pregnancy testing, and they provide both men and women with HIV…
lborkowski | June 4, 2015Fifty years ago, on June 7, 1965, the Supreme Court issued the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which struck down a Connecticut law that criminalized the encouragement or use of contraception. Estelle Griswold, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, and Dr. C. Lee Buxton, the organization’s medical director, had been arrested and fined $100 each for providing contraceptive advice to married persons. In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled in their favor, finding that Connecticut’s law prohibiting contraception violated the right to marital privacy. In 1972, in…
kkrisberg | June 2, 2015Family-friendly policies in the workplace are a good thing, but as Claire Cain Miller writes in The New York Times, there’s also a risk that such policies end up hurting the very workers they’re intended to help.
Miller starts off her piece with international examples of family-friendly policies, such as a law in Chile that requires employers provide child care for working mothers and a policy in Spain that gives the parents of young children the option of working part time. The unintended results of each example? All women — whether they have children or not — get paid less and face fewer…
kkrisberg | May 26, 2015After 18 years as a professional house cleaner in the suburbs of Chicago, Magdalena Zylinska says she feels very lucky. Unlike many of her fellow domestic workers, she hasn’t sustained any serious injuries.
Zylinska, 43, cleans residences in the metropolitan Chicago area five days a week. An independent contractor, she cleans two to three houses each day. Fortunately, she doesn’t do the job alone — she always works with at least one other person, so they can help each other with much of the lifting and other types of repetitive physical labor that can often lead to preventable injuries and…
kkrisberg | May 13, 2015In a perfect example of how the Affordable Care Act is broadening access to relatively low-cost and potentially life-saving interventions, a new study finds that the health reform law likely led more than 1 million young women to seek out the human papillomavirus vaccine and protect themselves against cervical cancer.
In a study published this month in Health Affairs, researchers studied the impact of two ACA provisions: one requiring insurance providers to extend dependent coverage through age 26 and another that required insurers to offer a range of preventive services, such as…
lborkowski | May 11, 2015The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has released a new Status of Women in the States report that show how women’s health has improved, or not, on a variety of different measures. It’s no surprise that they found disparities both between states and between racial and ethnic groups.
A news release notes both good news and bad. Women’s mortality rates from heart disease, lung cancer, and breast cancer have declined since 2004, but black women are more than twice as likely to die from heart disease than the group with the lowest rate (Asian/Pacific Islander women). Fewer than half of US…
lborkowski | April 27, 2015The 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner for Public Service went to South Carolina’s Post and Courier for the chillingly effective series “Till Death Do Us Part,” about the state’s inadequate response to domestic violence. Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes, and Natalie Caula Hauff conducted an in-depth investigation and followed the stories of women killed by men in South Carolina. They concluded, “Awash in guns, saddled with ineffective laws and lacking enough shelters for the battered, South Carolina is a state where the deck is stacked against women trapped in the cycle of abuse.”
In…
lborkowski | March 30, 2015In 2006, UPS driver Peggy Young became pregnant and asked for lighter-duty work that would comply with her doctor’s advice to limit lifting (to packages weighing 20 pounds or less during the first 20 weeks of her pregnancy, and 10 pounds or less during the remainder). UPS denied her request. Young was placed on leave without pay and lost her medical coverage, so she sued UPS. She didn’t win at the federal district or appeals court level, but the Supreme Court last week made a decision that gives Peggy Young a shot at winning – and might help other pregnant workers.
The Court didn’t actually…
kkrisberg | February 13, 2015When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first vaccine to protect against cancers caused by certain strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, public health advocates cheered its arrival and life-saving potential. Unfortunately, the new vaccine quickly became embroiled in a debate over whether immunizing young girls against HPV, a sexually transmitted disease, would lead to risky sexual behavior. A new study, however, finds that the vaccine is not associated with an uptick in STDs — an indicator that HPV immunization does not promote unsafe sex.
To conduct the study, which…
lborkowski | February 11, 2015Last week, Vox’s German Lopez highlighted a recent study that demonstrates how improving access to the most effective contraceptives can slash the rates of unintended pregnancies and abortions among teens. After the Colorado Family Planning Initiative (CFPI) started providing free IUDs and implants to low-income women at family planning clinics, the teen birth rate and abortion rate dropped sharply. Lopez notes that the teen birth rate has been declining nationwide, but Colorado’s has dropped more quickly: “Between 2008 and 2012, the state went from the 29th lowest teen birth rate in the…