A related webcast and fact sheets on maternal and child health and family planning are also available.

It can be argued that health care providers who neglect to report illegal immigrants under their care will violate the law and be considered criminals. The bill provides physicians with no guidance as to what constitutes “reasonable grounds” to suspect that somebody is in the country illegally, leaving the particulars of such scrutiny to anyone’s imagination (although the fact that Arizona shares a border with Mexico rather than a European country suggests that whites will not be “reasonable” suspects).

Dr. Restrepo and colleagues also published a letter in the Arizona Republic earlier:

As physicians, we are concerned about the immigration bill signed by Gov. Jan Brewer. We care for many patients who may appear foreign based on superficial impressions. It is unclear whether health-care professionals like ourselves will infringe on the law if we don’t report patients or their families to the police or immigration authorities based on a vague suspicion of illegality. . . . Senate Bill 1070 tacitly prescribes a break with one of the oldest traditions of medicine: Physicians shall protect patients regardless of nationality or race [emph. added].

In a statement released on May 18, the National Physicians Alliance and CIR/SEIU-Healthcare condemn the law as “an affront to human rights and a devastating step backwards for the health and well being of the entire nation,” and warn that it will “create new obstacles to obtaining needed health care.”

More on Arizona SB 1070:

• Some 50,000 protesters gather in Phoenix on May 29 to demonstrate against the law
• Immigrant groups and workers’ organizations (Hispanic and not) urge a boycott of Arizona
• The Sound Strike, a group of musicians and performers headed by Zach de la Rocha, boycotts AZ

Does Arizona’s law go too far? Do you think it is likely to affect the practice of medicine in the state? Do doctors have a role to play in this debate? Join the discussion by leaving a comment!

Source: Wikipedia

This is the first in a series of posts for the American Public Health Association’s National Public Health Week.

Most of us associate biodiversity with images of tropical rain forests and coral reefs. While these ecological hot-spots are an important source of medications and global ecosystem services, biodiversity also plays a key role in neighborhoods across the US through regulating the spread of diseases such as Lyme disease. But how is that possible, you might ask, and what can you do about it?

Lyme disease  affects hundreds of thousands of people across the US, with a greater concentration in the northeast. Recent decades have seen an explosion of urban sprawl across the northeast leading to decreased species diversity along with people living in close proximity to fragmented habitats.  But how are these related?

The connection is explained succinctly in Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity:

“The Blacklegged Tick (Ixodes scapularis) is the vector of Lyme disease, as well as of several other pathogens in the eastern U.S., and the primary reservoir for Lyme disease in this region is a common rodent, the White-Footed Mouse (Peromyscus leucopus)…Mice live in many different habitats, from pristine old-growth forest to degraded woodlots, garden sheds, and even kitchens. Several studies have demonstrated that populations of White-Footed Mice become very concentrated in small forest fragments, probably due to the absence of other vertebrate species that prey upon, or compete with them (forest fragmentation…affects predators over prey disproportionately). As a consequence, tick populations in small forest fragments have many White-Footed Mice, but few other mammalian hosts on which to feed, resulting in a high proportion of the ticks being infected and able to infect people. In contrast, in more extensively forested areas, the combination of fewer White-Footed Mice and more abundant, alternative, reservoir-incompetent hosts (an incompetent reservoir for Lyme does not pass on the Lyme bacteria to ticks that bite them, or does so poorly) results in a lower proportion of the tick population being infected.”

This phenomenon is known as the Dilution Effect: As species richness declines there is a subsequent decrease in the “dilution” of host-species making Lyme disease easier to spread. As the authors note, the dilution effect is not unique to Lyme, the same mechanism also operates in Hantavirus and West Nile Virus and possibly many others. As sprawl-based development patterns spread to more areas of the planet, we can only expect to see an increase in the number of dilution effect diseases unleashed upon populations worldwide.

So how can you increase biodiversity in your community and thereby help protect the health of your family and neighbors?

Get involved with your local conservation commission and bring these dangers to their attention. Find ways to support local parks and nature preserves. Also, if you have a yard or garden, try to plant local species that help support wildlife.  Most importantly: Education! If you are in college or school, talk to your professors about integrating awareness of biodiversity into curriculum.  Thanks to the UN and various donors, Sustaining Life is available at a very affordable price and can serve as a great textbook without placing a great financial burden on students. In addition, local schools can serve as great sources of biodiversity through gardens and planting of local species on grounds. Often these locals are less expensive to maintain, requiring less water and fertilizer.

These are just some ideas…we’d love to hear from GP readers with their experiences and success stories.

In the face of this expanding pool of people in need, US government funding seems to be staying stable. For example, at the same time that the Obama administration has announced plans to expand HIV treatment to at least 4 million by 2013, they have also signaled no increases in funding budgets through fiscal 2011. Defending the administrations commitment to fight the global pandemic, Eric Goosby, the President’s AIDS czar, stated that “our commitment to universal coverage hasn’t wavered.”

For more on the global fight on AIDS and particularly the fight in Uganda, check out the Wall Street Journal’s January 30th article and slideshow.

Human trafficking is a subject that elicits strong visceral reactions when it chances into the spotlight. For good reason. Stomach-churning stories of children sold into forced labor, of young girls and boys entrapped into lives of rape and violence that the word “prostitution” doesn’t quite cover, and of adult men and women smuggled across borders to become indentured servants — they are found on the uncomfortable, dark underside of the global flow in trade, money, and labor, that underpins modern economics and society itself. They resonate as a nightmare version of the more familiar logic of supply and demand, legality and illegality. They constitute infuriating human rights abuses, and violate any number of laws and treaties — and because they happen to people whose very existence is undocumented, whose bodies are uncounted and whose faces and voices are hidden, they go on and are not discussed in polite company. It is the twenty-first century, and the trade in human beings accounts for the world’s third largest illegal market¹. It is probably small news that the United States is a big consumer. It is news to most people that the US is also a source of victims.

Human trafficking is defined as the crime of using force, coercion, or fraud to procure or detain another person for involuntary servitude or for commercial sex work². It often involves travel across borders, but doesn’t have to. The best available estimates pin the number of people trafficked across national borders for sexual or labor exploitation at 800,000 each year — and the number of people brought into the US for these purposes for 15,000 to 18,000 per year^3,4. Immigrants and refugees are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, and being an internally displaced person (IDP) has been shown to be an additional risk factor for becoming a victim of trafficking^2,5.

Some numbers from the Human Trafficking Reporting System set up by the US Department of Justice in 2007⁶:
- 83% of 1,200+ human trafficking incidents reported in the US involved sex trafficking
- Two-thirds of all victims were under age 24, and 27% of all victims were children and teens under age 17.
- Over 90% of victims in all reported trafficking incidents, and 99% of victims in sex exploitation cases, were female.
- Hispanic immigrants made up 37% of sex trafficking victims and 56% of labor trafficking victims in the US in 2007-2008
- More than half of all victims, and 63% of sex trafficking victims, were US citizens.

What does all this have to do with human rights or global health? Are you kidding?

No art or movie clips this time. Just incredibly depressing statistics and some imagination. Medical- and public-health-side interpretations coming next time.

In upcoming installments:
Part II: Guest post from AMSA Global’s Health and Human Rights coordinator.
Part III: Trafficking and the medical provider: What you need to know, what you can do to help.
Part IV: Guest post from the field.

Sources / Further Reading:
[1] Orhant M. Trafficking In Persons. Population Reference Bureau. 2002. Link.
[2] Logan TK, Walker R, and Hunt G. Understanding Human Trafficking in the United States. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse. 2009. 10(1): 3-30.
[3] U.S. Department of State. Trafficking in Persons Report. 2006. Link.
[4] Polaris Project. Human Trafficking Statistics. 2009. Link.
[5] Feller E. UNHCR’s role in IDP protection: Opportunities and challenges- Forced Migration Review. 2006. Link.
[6] U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Programs. More than 1,200 alleged incidents of human trafficking reported in the U.S. Press release. 15 Jan. 2009. Link.

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In our previous themed series, Jennifer Weinberg writes about health care, HIV, and teledermatology in Botswana, where she spent the summer of 2009. Check out “Blogging from Botswana”, parts I, II, III, and IV, from this summer.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) , 99% of deaths during childbirth occur in low-income countries. For example, the chance of maternal death in high income countries is 1 in 7300, where as in low income countries it is 1 in 73. As young people, this is especially important and relevant because most of the young women who are dying could very well be our friends, schoolmates and classmates had they lived in a different country (particularly if they had been fortunate enough to live in a high income country as we do). The leading cause of death in young women aged 15-19 in low-income countries is from childbirth complications.

Leading causes of maternal mortality worldwide:

Within the US, maternal mortality rates are hardly cause for complacency.  The world’s foremost economic power (pending post-recession change in paradigm), we rank 28th in infant mortality, and 41st in maternal mortality:

Based on 2005 estimates, the U.N. analysis suggests that one in 4,800 women in the United States carry a lifetime risk of death from pregnancy. By contrast, among the 10 top-ranked industrialised countries, fewer than one in 16,400 are facing a similar situation.  The reason? According to experts, in many European countries and Japan in the industrialised world, women are guaranteed good-quality health and family planning services that minimise their lifetime risk.  Many independent experts and sympathetic legislators hold the current U.S. public health policy responsible for its dismal record because some 47 million U.S. citizens have no access to health insurance, most of them African Americans and other minorities. [IPS News]

Steep disparities in maternal health are linked to ethnicity and socioeconomic status, with African-American women being 4 times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, a point that is alternately called our “national shame”, and goes ignored.

More reading: How do socioeconomic factors affect disparities in mortality? by Deborah Maine, in the Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association, provides some nice historical context on maternal mortality in the US.

While you ponder those questions, I bring you what could be one of the last updates before S-OIV H1N1 becomes terminally uncool.  As of Monday, April 4, the World Health Organization registered 1,085 laboratory-confirmed cases in 21 countries.¹ Mexico has begun to step down its safety measures, with restaurants and other venues for public activity set to re-open on Wednesday, and U.S. public health officials will be allowing schools to remain open in spite of the continuing spread of the virus, as most new cases appear to be mild.  In the business of assuaging fears, it has been confirmed by the WHO that eating pork is safe (so long as you cook it to 70°C/160°F first), and in the business of fanning fears of a different kind, U.S. conservatives are wasting no time in casting President Obama’s “overreaction” to the crisis as big-government encroachment.

For the fun flu facts reading selection this time,  I introduce another global health resource: the University of Pittsburgh’s Supercourse online series on epidemiology and global health.  Click on the Swine Influenza A link (or on the image below), pick your language of choice (including Spanish, Russian, Farsi, Vietnamese, and Hebrew), and click “Start” for a refresher on hemagglutinins, neuraminidases, and case definitions.

For a cool overview of influenza virus genetics, check out this article by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Scientists first isolated flu viruses from pigs in 1930, and their genetic sequence suggests that they descend from the Spanish flu of 1918. Once pigs picked up the flu from humans, that so-called classic strain was the only one found in pigs for decades. But in the 1970s a swine flu strain emerged in Europe that had some genes from a bird flu strain. A different pig-bird mix arose in the United States.

In the late 1990s, American scientists discovered a triple reassortant that mixed genes from classic swine flu with genes from bird viruses and human viruses. All three viruses — the triple reassortant, and the American and European pig-bird blends — contributed genes to the latest strain.

And for possibly the best selection of flu-tracking maps you’re likely to find, this one is brought to you by Google and Rhiza Labs:

¹ For the epidemiologically-minded, with a lab-confirmed death toll of 26, this makes for a Case Fatality Ratio of 2.4% and falling with every new case of lab-confirmed disease in the absence of further deaths.  For comparison, your annual, garden-variety flu has a CFR of less than 0.1% in the general population, with a bimodal distribution of mortality (mostly limited to the very young and the very old).  Past flu pandemics have had CFRs in the 0.1%-2.5% range, while the dreaded H5N1 avian flu virus tracked in Asia in recent years showed a CFR of 14%-60% by various estimates (Li et al., J Epidemiol Community Health. 2008 Jun;62(6):555-9 ).  One previously reported CFR for zoonotically-acquired swine influenza was 14% (Myers et al., Clin Infect Dis. 2007 Apr 15;44(8):1084-8 ).  As you may suspect, flu CFRs are notoriously difficult to calculate, due to the wide incidence and under-reporting of mild cases.

Dear AMSA,

This last March, a few of our Representatives and Senators stood up to decrease the educational debt burden for future physicians by introducing a bill that would reinstate a pathway to defer loan repayment until after residency for the majority of medical residents.

This May, Congress is writing a huge piece of legislation that will reform our health care system – and impact our chosen career field for decades to come.

Your Senators and Representative need to hear from you that the cost of medical education must be addressed in this legislation.

Click here to send an email to your Congressperson.

Sound pretty good to be able to defer your loans during residency if you’re having trouble paying them? Well, don’t get used to it – as your school’s financial offices should have told you, last summer, the passage of the College Cost Reduction Act terminated this pathway for loan deferment.

As AMSA members, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to make medicine a feasible field for students from all walks of life – we need to remove the burden of intimidating student debt from the equation. Congress needs to hear from you that reinstating the economic hardship deferral pathway is a good thing, and that including comprehensive measures to decrease the cost of medical education in this month’s health reform legislation will be even better.

Thanks – let’s see this through!

– Mary Carol

Click here to send an email to your Congressperson.

Do your part to include medical school debt in the upcoming health care reform.

Reporting live from Manhattan…

We aren’t quite running down the streets with masks on our faces panicking yet (which, it’s not clear how good of an investment they are anyway; see Susan’s comment on masks on the previous flu post), but we did close four schools, as the number of confirmed cases in New York City rises to 51, the first US swine flu death is confirmed in a toddler in Texas, and the World Health Organization raises the pandemic alert level to Phase 5. The net worldwide case count is uncertain due to re-testing of previously identified cases in Mexico.

City health agencies are concerned about the effects of recent downsizing due to the recession on their ability to function at top form:

At a news conference on Monday, Dr. Richard E. Besser, the acting director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the public health system was in “a tough situation.”

“We hear about tens of thousands of state public health workers who are going to be losing their jobs because of state budgets,” he said. “It is very important that we look at that resource because this outbreak was identified because of a lot of work going on around preparedness.”

But according to John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, now may be a reasonably good time to catch the bug.

For further reading while you’re holed up in your room ordering delivery and avoiding crowds:

• Link to the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene swine flu info page. Hospitals and clinics are working with the DOH to keep up surveillance and testing of possible cases, and precaution measures are being used for cases of influenza-like-illness.
• Link to the New York Times swine flu tracking map (this one nicely reports suspected cases as a separate category).
• The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, Penguin, 546pp — available here on Amazon, and a good read / horror story depending on your current P.O.V. and paranoia tendencies. It has a great chapter about the beginning of both microbiology and American medical education as we know them. This is the book that first got me interested in public health history.

Dear AMSA,  

The Senate just returned from recess on Monday and square on the agenda is a big Health Care Reform bill that has yet to be fully written.  One of the more important aspects of this reform process is over the inclusion of a “public health insurance option”.  This is what it says, a plan run by the federal government (much like Medicare), that people have the option of buying much as they would buy a private insurance plan.   

This public plan would, as our Legislators are describing it, exist alongside the private plans like Aetna and Blue Cross/Blue Shield.  The legislation is on the Congressional drawing board right now and the public plan option is the contentious issue - many opponents are saying it should be on the Congressional chopping block.  AMSA supports the creation of a single, country-wide risk pool of patients, funded from one budget, but right now, we’re not going to have any say at all unless we weigh in as this Nation’s future physician workforce with our support of the public insurance option at a minimum.We need your help to let your Senators know that you want your future patients to have the choice of a public health insurance option. Join AMSA members across the country today, Thursday April 23, to contact both of your Senators.

- Mary Carol

Will the public health insurance option take us a step closer to single payer? Perhaps so. But, the first thing congress and people at large must agree upon is the underlying principle that health is a human right. Without agreeing on this unshakeable foundation, health will still remain a commodity. 

Japan, a global economic powerhouse and the Asian leader as far as GDP per capita goes, announced a new plan to tackle some of its old problems, namely deflation. One lost decade appears to have been enough for Japan, and its government is now throwing quite a bit of money around to quell the threat of another downward spiral. This is not breath-taking news as most other developed countries have deployed similar measures. But what I have found interesting is what is present in the proposed stimulus, and most importantly, what is not.

When glancing through the litany of items, it reads nearly like a direct transcription of an Obama, Sarkozy, or Brown public address. For the medical erudite onlooker, he/she may optimistically note that there is even some money earmarked for health care spending present within the plan. However, I think the global health perspective is lost in Japan’s plan, and I think many other national stimulus packages (including the US) have knowingly or unknowingly eschewed global health as well.

Plenty of academics, pundits, and philanthropists have implored the developed countries to offer a fraction of their stimulus packages to the poorest nations in the form of aid. Yet, those calls have either fallen on deaf ears or led to any appropriations being buried deep within the stimulus package labyrinths. Although the latter may be true, I suspect not. Even small aid gestures are usually flaunted without humility, so I do not believe the rich world governments would cast their heart-felt efforts to less prominent publicity roles. So, at least for the moment, I am going to assume the handouts have been left off the table and posit that this is not in anyone’s best interest.

Briefly, developing nations will have less financial flexibility and credit worthiness to engage in similar maneuvering as Japan, the US, etc. In our current global financial calamity, this puts these nations not only between a rock and a hard place (just as most other countries, regardless of income) but also staring up at an incoming meteorite. The subsequent dominoes spell trouble for international development, geopolitics, resource procurement (even basic necessities like food), and health care systems. For many of these countries, their respective governments shoulder much of the weight when it comes to paying for and providing medical care to its citizens. If credit is frozen and money scarce, then a Ministry of Health budget can be paralyzed just the same as any other government expenditure. Intuitively, this is not good for the nations and their people (especially considering disproportionate disease burdens), but it is bad for the rest of the world too.

We have known for some time that the global population is tightly linked (and our financial mess affirms it). This bond is impetus for humanitarian endeavors and a belief in international harmony. Additionally, it means that disease, and its direct and indirect effects, does not need a passport to move about the world. If we neglect global health, then we all lose. Therefore, I think devoting some of the stimulus money from Japan, the US, and the rest is a worthwhile idea. It would be money well spent, provide for a more prosperous future, and acknowledge that we in the West are really embracing “change.”

For those that are unmoved by my internationalist perspective, they might find solace in the thought that these aid offerings could have significant economic spillover effects as well. And I am not merely referring to the good health and productivity arguments; rather, I find it plausible that money sent abroad to unfreeze credit, encourage lending, and bolster consumption in poor countries could benefit the wealthier as well. Poor countries often play vital roles in the global supply chain (and one weak link…well, you know how it goes) and they are also packed with potential consumers (much of the wealthier countries have flagged their exports and feasted on imports, and now they all scream imbalance and time for correction). So, even if you do not fancy money channeled toward poor country health care systems, you should offer your upright thumb to stimulus package aid anyway. It is in your best interest, believe it or not.

Today, April 2, as part of the final budget wrap-up, we need to take a stand on domestic issues - please take just 2 minutes to call the White House and your Representative to advocate for domestic harm reduction programs.Call your Representative and the White House to ask our Nation’s leaders to support Syringe Exchange Programs and End the Federal Funding Ban!1. Urge Your Representative to Support the Community AIDS and HepatitisPrevention Act, H.R.179, introduced by Representative Serranoand2. Urge President Obama to keep his campaign promises to end the ban on Federal Funding from his Fiscal Year 2010 budgetWe made huge strides last year when Congress lifted the ban against Washington DC using its local tax dollars to support syringe exchange.Unfortunately, since 1988, there has been a Congressional ban on the use of federal funds for Syringe Exchange Programs nationwide. By allowing federal dollars to fund Syringe Exchange Programs, the Community AIDS and Hepatitis Prevention (CAHP) Act of 2009 will save thousands of lives and help reduce high-risk behavior. As future physicians and public health advocates, we must pass the Community AIDS and Hepatitis Prevention Act, H.R.179. Again, Take Action here. In solidarity, Mary Carol, your Jack Rutledge Legislative Director, and Merrian Brooks, the AMSA AIDS Advocacy Network Steering Committee   

CALL NOW! Thanks!  

…Returning diplomacy and development to their rightful place cannot be achieved through words alone:  It takes money to drive civilian foreign policy—and if it keeps us safer, as I believe it will, then that is money well spent.    

Full funding of the President’s international affairs budget is a vital step toward greater civilian capacity, and I urge my colleagues to support it. That’s why, along with Senators Lugar, Leahy, Voinovich, Durbin, Kaufman, Menendez, Dodd, Feinstein, Brown, Sanders, Lieberman, Casey, and Corker, I ask for approval of this amendment to restore $4 billion worth of funding to the President’s FY 2010 international affairs budget request for the Function 150 Account.  The offset here will come from the Function 920 Account…

Surveying the wide range of commitments and aspirations this budget addresses, it is clear that our challenge is immense. And yet, even as we confront a crisis here at home, we cannot afford to delay the task of restoring our leadership, returning to our best traditions of civilian outreach, and restoring our influence and authority.  We cannot afford to come up short on our promises to allies, to vulnerable populations, and to the world.    We cannot try to be a world leader on the cheap.  If we fail to do our part to solve the world’s problems, those problems will eventually find us here at home. 

From pandemics to climate change to failed states, this century’s security challenges demand that a new level of commitment to diplomacy and development.  With this relatively small investment, we are making significant strides toward restoring America’s leadership role in the world. It will make the world safer, and it will make us safer.  And so I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting the President’s budget request. 

To read the full statement from Senator John Kerry on the Kerry-Lugar Amendment to Restore Full Funding to President Obama’s International Affairs Budget, click here. 

Health professional supervision of torture is one of the gravest affronts to medical ethics and is illegal under both domestic and international anti-torture law. Danner’s disclosure of the ICRC report on detainee treatment in CIA custody is shocking but not suprising. For years evidence has been mounting through news articles, government investigations, and even the statements of Bush Administration officials that health professionals were centrally complicit in the breaking of bodies and minds at the black sites, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere.

All of this was in the bad old days of WMDs, flag-waving, and Blackwater. . . right?  Not so fast, writes Sara Greenberg.

Something about this really gets under my skin.

As student doctors, we are given so much.  We are given amazing knowledge, the product of an entire history of human civilization and learning about the human body and mind; the time and experience of our mentors; and the unbounded kindness of our patients, who allow us to touch them and to learn from them, even at the risk of harming them by our inexperience or error.  We are given all these things in trust, to use in the remainder of our professional lives to heal and to help.  A medical professional who knowingly uses his or her knowledge to help violate another person’s body and autonomy has broken that trust, and broken it for all of us: past and present and future.

As evidence of medical participation in war crimes continues to accumulate, American medical professionals need to do some serious soul-searching.  I believe this applies to all of us — including those who have never seen the inside of a black site, voted for the Democrats every time, or are still in training — because somehow, our medical system obviously had produced a significant number of physicians who had no problem assisting in torture.  What kind of professional climate was it, that made that possible?  We need to make sure that the next generation of physicians, psychologists, and allied health professionals, are absolutely 100% positively sure, that it is not okay to do this.  We need to talk about it clearly and transparently, so that we may begin to rehabilitate some of that trust.

I leave all you fellow future physicians with this excerpt from a 2006 editorial from Time by Andrew Sullivan:

After a while, you get numb reading these stories. They read like accounts of a South American dictatorship, not an American presidency. But we learn one thing: once you allow the torture of prisoners for any reason, as this President did, the cancer spreads. In the end it spreads to healers as well, and turns them into accomplices to harm.

The Bill Richardson who announced a repeal of the death penalty in New Mexico on Wednesday was not the same Bill Richardson who usually shows up for face time with the news media.

The Richardson who usually hosts the media goes out of his way to convince you of the rightness of his decision. He is confident, bigger than life and even becomes jocular at times; he is a master of the room.

The Richardson who sat before a phalanx of news media Wednesday was anything but. At moments he appeared still to be working out the issue in his head and doubt occasionally crept in to darken his face.

Are there people who deserve the death penalty? Is it right for the state to execute a killer? What about the flaws in the system? And what of the United States’ general approval of the death penalty when compared to most Western democracies?

As a human rights advocate, I do not condone violence, even upon those that by virtue of their crimes, deserve some punishment. However, this is a thorny issue, especially to the family and friends of the victims. Who will explain to them their loss will not be avenged? That the perpetrators deserve the right to live, when they grossly violated the life and dignity of others? Gov. Richardson was sensitive about this.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DDACK-kJwY]

Though some law enforcement agents do not approve of the decision, Gov. Richardson does rightly argue minorities are over-represented in the prison population and on death row, and said the U.S. is out of step with most Western democracies, including those in the European Union, that ban capital punishment.

What do you think?

• Children of immigrants in the US are eligible for health coverage under current state laws and policies.  However, many parents are unaware of this and are fearful of seeking medical care for their children.  Furthermore, under previous policies, children and pregnant women who had been in the US for less than 5 years were excluded from these programs.  The recent reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is an important step forward, extending coverage to over 4 million children of working immigrants and doing away with the 5-year waiting period.
• However, much work remains to be done in promoting the health rights of all immigrants and new American residents.  Some of the themes behind the persistent disparities in health care for Hispanics and immigrants in the US are lack of health insurance; lack of access to health services; shortage of health services and information in Spanish; and discrimination and fear of the system.
• The NCLR poses the following criteria for judging new health care reform legislation: inclusivity of all of the nation’s residents; equity in employer-based coverage requirements and quality of care; affordability; access; and respect for Latinos and other immigrants.

Link to Miami Herald article on the reauthorization of SCHIP.

Link to the NCLR’s Wave of Hope campaign page.

Coming in a future post:  what you can do to make your clinic/hospital more immigrant-friendly.