public health

When we go to the market, we are comfortable buying fruits and vegetables that we know have been grown on a farm, packaged and shipped to the store. Would we feel as comfortable if we knew that rather than being raised on a ranch the meat for our grill was “grown” in a lab?

That day may be coming.

What is cultivated meat?

Cultivated meat is created from cells extracted from living animals. The cells are nourished and grown inside industrial tanks until they are ready to be harvested and prepared for sale.

It’s a ‘human-rights’ crisis, said Dr. Ninez Ponce, chair of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health's Department of Health Policy and Management and director of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health's UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Recent mass shootings in Chesapeake and Charlottesville, Virginia, and in Colorado Springs, Colorado, are the latest incidents in what has become a tragic upswing in gun violence.

Dr. Steven P. Wallace was an accomplished researcher, a dedicated teacher, and an inspirational leader in field of minority aging research. He was committed to educating the next generation of thinkers and activists, a champion of diversity and inclusion efforts, and a tireless promoter of equity in biomedicine and public health. Dr. Wallace was a professor in the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA for 31 years.

The Food and Drug Administration has taken a first step towards allowing the sale of cultivated "no kill" meat in the U.S, giving a safety nod to Upside Foods, a San Francisco based start-up. The company produces meat grown from animal cells, without slaughtering the animal.

"The world is experiencing a food revolution and the FDA is committed to supporting innovation in the food supply," wrote FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and director the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Susan Mayne.

Mia Giordano spent most of last summer traveling from Antigua, Guatemala to reproductive health clinics within a day’s travel of the city.

“Some days were very long. We would leave at 5:00 a.m. and didn’t return until 5:00, 6:00 or even 7:00 p.m.!” said the UCLA graduate student of her work as a monitoring and evaluation intern for WINGS Guatemala. A nonprofit organization headquartered in Antigua, WINGS provides free reproductive health services to mostly rural, underserved populations in the country.

A study published today by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, led by Dr. Ninez Ponce, the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health’s Fred W. and Pamela K. Wasserman professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management, shows that the economic effects of COVID-19 increased the risk for poor mental health among California adults.

The world’s most influential researchers include 39 UCLA scholars - and five of them are faculty at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

UCLA scientists are embarking on a comprehensive, five-year study to understand the health consequences of what is, to this day, the nation’s largest natural gas blowout. From 2015-16, an estimated 109,000 metric tons of methane was released into the air from the Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Canyon underground gas storage facility in the San Fernando Valley.

On Nov. 1, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health awarded roughly $21 million to UCLA to conduct a wide-ranging assessment of the disaster.

For people living with HIV, sticking to a prescribed medication regimen is a critical part of staying healthy. However, having to deal with the side effects caused by those medications —nausea and dizziness among them — can lead people to skip doses.

Now, a UCLA-led study of 130 people with HIV suggests that a tiny piece of technology could play a big role in encouraging people to take their medicine on time.