As coronavirus spreads across the United States, so are reports of violence and discrimination against people of Asian descent. Reports of verbal and even physical attacks against Asian Americans in grocery stores, parking lots, and subways are on the rise, and officials predict it will get worse as the coronavirus continues its march across the country.
Researchers have long documented health disparities among people of different racial and ethnic groups. What is less known is how being a target of racism affects a person’s health. This can involve experiencing chronic stress stemming from being treated differently, being exposed to environmental hazards disproportionately located in racial or ethnic minority communities, or being denied access to quality medical care, housing, employment or other resources.
A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that daily discipline rates in middle schools change throughout the school year and escalate more rapidly for Black students than for White students. Discipline rates are typically collected and evaluated with end-of-year metrics that offer a static view.
The AAPI Data Project at UC Riverside and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research (CHPR) released a comprehensive report today revealing economic hardships, negative health outcomes and a rise in hate incidents experienced by Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders during the COVID-19 pandemic.
WHILE WORKING AT THE BLACK AIDS INSTITUTE in Downtown Los Angeles, Rebekah Israel Cross heard from people who expressed a lack of interest in pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention despite being at greater risk of contracting HIV. Their reasoning, Cross explains, is PrEP would do nothing to address violence in their community and day-to-day lives or to eliminate systemic sources of oppression that hinder health and well-being.
The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health is partnering with Howard University and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences to proactively engage historically marginalized and disadvantaged populations, and provide crucial information and resources during public health crises.
UCLA is launching the Initiative to Study Hate, an ambitious social impact project that brings together a broad consortium of scholars to understand and ultimately mitigate hate in its multiple forms.
Supported by a $3 million gift from an anonymous donor, researchers will undertake 23 projects this year. The three-year pilot spans topics that examine the neurobiology of hate, the impact of social media hate speech on kids, the dehumanization of unhoused individuals, racial discrimination in health care settings and more.
New research from UCLA studies how stress, racism and discrimination impact biology.
AS THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS pandemic took hold early this year, it sparked another type of contagion — one that, Fielding School experts note, is not at all novel in the context of public health emergencies.
SO FAR, THE YEAR 2020 has seen two major historic events — the public health crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the massive nationwide protests against structural racism following the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and inaction in response to the shooting death, captured on video, of Ahmaud Arbery by two white residents.