Health Disparities

For a person accustomed to grim health data, one prediction still tends to be jarring:

The current generation of American children may be the first not to live as long as their parents.

Much of this projection is linked to the increase in health conditions such as obesity.

These medical deficits in the U.S. health system were highlighted Thursday at an Atlanta conference and in national media reports.

Tyler Norris, a senior adviser on Total Health at Kaiser Permanente, cited the life expectancy warning as he spoke to an Atlanta audience about the burden of obesity and diabetes.

Kaiser is one of the sponsors of the upcoming HBO documentary “The Weight of the Nation,’’ in which experts such as the CDC director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, talk about the urgency of addressing the obesity problem. (Here’s a link to the trailer.) full story

Five Georgia community health centers will receive a total of $11 million in grants to expand and improve their services, the federal government announced Tuesday.

The Georgia money is part of $728 million nationally that will go to hundreds of community health centers across the country, under the 2010 health reform law.

A Stone Mountain health center highlighted in a recent Kaiser Health News article for scoring poorly on six care measures will get the largest amount awarded in Georgia. Oakhurst Medical Centers will receive $5 million to construct a larger facility.

Jeffrey Taylor, Oakhurst’s CEO, said the building will be in a more visible location, on Memorial Drive. “People now drive by our [current] facility and head to Grady’s emergency room,’’ Taylor told GHN. “They don’t know we’re there.’’

The new Oakhurst building will serve more people and provide more wellness activities, he said. Taylor said he believes it will help improve the center’s care. Many of the health center’s patients are refugees who have not had regular medical care, including children who have not received vaccinations.

The second-highest grant in Georgia is $4.9 million to the Neighborhood Improvement Project for a new building in south Augusta. full story

As Kaiser Health News journalist Phil Galewitz studied data on the nation’s community health centers, the statistics compelled him to visit Georgia.

The overall national picture, published Wednesday in a KHN and USA Today story, is that hundreds of the nation’s nearly 1,200 federally funded community health centers fall short on major quality-of-care measures, according to the federal data analyzed by the news organizations.

The centers’ performance most often lagged behind national averages on helping diabetics keep their blood sugar under control and on screening women for cervical cancer, the article said.

But the statistics also showed that Georgia was the only state to rank near the bottom on four of the six quality measures reported by community health centers. The four measures are:

· Percentage of children who receive all seven federally recommended vaccines by age 2.

· Percentage of adults, ages 18 to 85, with hypertension who have their blood pressure under control.

· Percentage of low-birthweight babies.

· Percentage of women, ages 24 to 64, with at least one Pap test in the prior three years.

“It was a barometer that something was going on in Georgia,’’ Galewitz said Thursday in Atlanta, where he’s attending the Association of Health Care Journalists conference. full story

An analysis comparing health statistics for Georgia counties shows a wide gap between rural and urban/suburban areas in the state.

The top seven counties in the state in the new health rankings — Fayette, Forsyth, Oconee, Cherokee, Gwinnett, Cobb and Columbia –- are all in large metropolitan areas in the northern or north-central part of the state.

The bottom 10 counties are in rural South or Middle Georgia, according to the rankings, compiled for each state by the University of Wisconsin and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and released last week. Here’s a link to the Georgia breakdown.

Rural experts said this Georgia health disparity isn’t surprising, given those areas’ high poverty rates and medical access problems.

The 2012 rankings provide statistics in four categories: health behavior, clinical care, physical environment, and social and economic factors, which include the percentage of children in poverty, unemployment and education rates.

Southern states in general have higher rates of births to teenage mothers, sexually transmitted infections and children in poverty, the study found.

The lowest-ranked county in Georgia is Talbot, in the west-central part of the state. Beverly Townsend, a public health district director whose area includes Talbot, told GPB News that the county lacks important resources that would improve people’s health.

“Unfortunately, in that small county, for our local health department, we have one nurse,” Townsend said. “And they don’t have a supermarket there anymore. That actually closed.”

Fifty percent of the restaurants in Talbot County serve fast food, which is a new measure in the study. Georgia’s average of fast food places is 50 percent, exceeding a national benchmark of 25 percent. full story

A new study has found HIV rates for black women in Atlanta and five other U.S. cities are higher than previously thought.

The study found that the HIV rate was 0.24 percent for the 2,099 women in its cohort. This is five times higher than the rate estimated for black women by the CDC.

HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, damages a person’s body by destroying specific blood cells that are important to help fight diseases. It is the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, though not everyone with HIV develops the full-scale disease.

The CDC estimates that 1.2 million people in the U.S. are living with HIV.

The study, called the HPTN 064 Women’s HIV Seroincidence Study (ISIS), enrolled women, ages 18 to 44 years, from 10 community sites in six areas where HIV and poverty are common: Atlanta; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Newark, N.J.; and New York City. full story