FSPH at American Public Health Association Annual Meeting and Expo
THE 2019 AMERICAN PUBLIC HEALTH ASSOCIATION (APHA) annual meeting in Philadelphia was attended by Fielding School faculty, students, staff, and alumni, many of whom had their work featured. The meeting’s theme was “Creating the Healthiest Nation: For science. For action. For health.”
For UCLA Fielding School of Public Health PhD student Cynthia Beard, a once-in-a-century pandemic served as a call to action. “As a doctoral student in epidemiology who is most interested in infectious diseases, I was itching to use the skill set I had been building for years to contribute to answering some of the most pressing questions about COVID-19,” Beard says.
Becca Woofter, MPH
PhD Student, Community Health Sciences
RICHARD SINAIKO (MPH ’77) believes his successful career in health care management would have been impossible without his Fielding School education. With that in mind, Richard and Patricia Sinaiko, and Greg (MPH ’01) and Marcie Sinaiko, decided to further elevate FSPH’s health care management program in a way that would allow others to enjoy the same opportunities.
This section includes new grants and contracts awarded in 2018-19. Due to space limitations, only funds of $50,000 or more are listed, by principal investigator.
RICHARD AMBROSE
Fighting Drought With Stormwater
UC Office of the President & University of California, Santa Barbara, $116,020
PRODUCED IN SENEGAL and popular through much of West Africa, the TV series C’est la Vie (That’s Life) takes place in the fictitious Ratanga health clinic and features storylines about the lives of the midwives who staff it. But in addition to following the dating twists and office politics involving the main characters, viewers are exposed to a hefty dose of public health messaging on topics involving maternal and child health, sexuality and reproductive rights, gender violence, and female genital mutilation, to name a few.
WHAT WAS LEARNED
Print-media coverage of U.S. gun control policy in the wake of mass shooting events has resulted in increases in firearm acquisition, particularly in the states with the least restrictive gun laws.
COULD WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION in the paid labor force during early adulthood and middle age bode well for their cognitive health later in life?
RESEARCHERS HAVE LONG DOCUMENTED HEALTH DISPARITIES — defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health” — that negatively affect racial and ethnic minority populations. Much less attention has been paid to the role of racism in fueling these disparities.
IT’S ARGUABLY THE GREATEST PUBLIC HEALTH SUCCESS STORY of the modern era. Vaccination campaigns eradicated the scourge of smallpox from the planet and have nearly eliminated polio, a paralyzing infectious disease that once struck fear in every parent. In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the United States had eliminated measles, culminating a decades-long public health effort to promote childhood immunization against a disease that, prior to the vaccine’s introduction in 1963, annually infected 3 to 4 million U.S.