Lacandie Gipson struggled to breathe. The 33-year-old woman with multiple health conditions was in respiratory distress and awaiting an ambulance. About 20 minutes after the emergency call, it arrived. The Cuthbert home where Gipson lived was less than a mile from Southwest Georgia Regional Medical Center, but the ambulance couldn’t take her to the one-story…
More than half of all Georgia public school students are now required to wear masks in class, the Associated Press reported recently. One physician organization would like to see mask requirements extended to more schools – and to other settings. In a new GHN Commentary, the president of the Georgia State Medical Association points out…
By Dr. Ericka Russell-Petty We, the doctors of the Georgia State Medical Association, want to express our alarm and concern over the current surge of the Covid-19 pandemic. The data over the course of the pandemic have documented that African Americans are disproportionately impacted by Covid-19, have excess negative health consequences, more hospitalizations, and are more likely to…
The term “social determinants of health’’ refers to conditions under which people live and work that can affect their health risks and outcomes. These non-medical factors, positive and negative, can include safe housing and transportation; discrimination and violence; education; access to nutritious foods and physical activity; and pollution in air and water. Negative conditions can…
This article first appeared in STAT, which gave Georgia Health News permission to republish it. Photos are by Bethany Mollenkof for STAT. By Olivia Goldhill In every corner of Latasha Taylor’s home are plants she knows nothing about. After years spent shirking her mother’s calls to join her in the yard at sunrise, Taylor now…
Blacks and Latinos in Georgia have significantly lower COVID-19 vaccination rates than whites, a newly released Kaiser Health News analysis shows. Thirty percent of whites in Georgia have had at least one shot, yet they trail another group — Asians, who are at 44 percent. The data were provided to KHN by the CDC in…
By Katja Ridderbusch When Randall Hampton got his first dose of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine in mid-January, he asked the nurse to give him the booster shot right away. “But they wouldn’t do it,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “They wanted me to come back three weeks later.” (As eager as he was, the wait is…
Story updated Southern states have higher rates of unreported COVID-related deaths than other regions of the country, according to a new study. The study, led by Andrew Stokes, a professor of global health at Boston University School of Public Health, analyzed deaths in 787 U.S. counties that had more than 20 COVID fatalities from Feb….
The Trump administration last year laid out an ambitious plan to reduce new HIV infections. Among 48 U.S. counties targeted for special federal help on HIV were four populous counties in metro Atlanta: Cobb, Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett. It wasn’t surprising that those four counties were picked. Georgia has the highest rate of new HIV infections…
Communities of color have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. And that’s not a surprising development, says a new GHN Commentary. Dr. Harry J. Heiman and Rodney Lyn, of the Georgia State University School of Public Health, point to the high prevalence of chronic disease and other health conditions in racial and ethnic minority communities as…