Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Sandra Crouse Quinn.
Eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health is not a new challenge for health education. This commentary highlights the contributions of articles emerging from the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) summit on health disparities and calls for new partners with which SOPHE can collaborate to move forward a transdisciplinary approach to research.
SOPHE leaders continue to challenge us to be true to the call for an "open society." SOPHE has supported the Healthy People 2010 goal of eliminating health disparities through its Strategic Plan. SOPHE held an Inaugural Health Education Research Disparities Summit, Health Disparities and Social Inequities: Framing a Transdisciplinary Research Agenda in Health Education, August 8 and 9, 2005. This article explains the process used at the Summit where more than 80 researchers, academicians, practitioners, and students from across the country convened to ask fundamental questions about health disparity associated with race and ethnicity and how a health education research agenda could help in eliminating these disparities. From this Summit, about a dozen questions and/or recommendations have been developed to frame our future discussions about health disparities. Through its Research Agenda Committee, SOPHE has developed a process of translation and dissemination, including community participation, review, dialogue, and action.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
After more than 15 years of foreign assistance to support HIV/AIDS prevention in Sub-Saharan Africa, HIV rates in the sub-continent remain high with only a few examples of reduced HIV incidence. This case study used the frame of "shared sovereignty" between nation-states and official development assistance agencies to analyze 13 years of technical assistance for HIV/AIDS programs in Tanzania from 1987 to 2000. The study draws on 21 key informant interviews and a systematic review of key program documents from the National AIDS Control Programme (NACP) and 14 other international agencies. Applying Jamison et al.'s (Lancet 351 (1998) 514) shared sovereignty framework, the analysis focused on fulfilled shared functions in moving Tanzania's NACP from dependence to independence. The analysis revealed an uneven and inconsistent level of technical assistance to the NACP with a rotation of multilateral and bilateral donors over the period of study. The Tanzanian government was often ambivalent toward agencies providing assistance towards its HIV/AIDS programs and toward its own NACP. Results are discussed in terms of implications for future strategic planning to mitigate the effects of HIV/AIDS. Determining roles, shared accountability and responsibility in a shared sovereignty framework remain a challenge in the governance of HIV/AIDS programs in Tanzania.
In 2001, the nation experienced its first bioterrorism attack, in the form of anthrax sent through the U.S. Postal Service, and public health professionals were challenged to communicate with a critical audience, U.S. postal workers. Postal workers, the first cohort to receive public health messages during a bioterrorist crisis, offer a crucial viewpoint that can be used in the development of best practices in crisis and emergency risk communication. This article reports results of qualitative interviews and focus groups with 65 postal workers employed at three facilities: Trenton, New Jersey; New York City; and Washington, DC. The social context and changing messages were among the factors that damaged trust between postal workers and public health professionals. Lessons learned from this attack contribute to the growing body of knowledge available to guide communications experts and public health professionals charged with crisis and emergency risk communication with the public.
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Increasingly, researchers grapple with meaningful efforts to involve communities in research, recognizing that communities are distinct from individuals. We also struggle to ensure that individual participants in research are fully protected. Community advisory boards (CABs) offer an opportunity to adopt a relationships paradigm that enables researchers to anticipate and address the context in which communities understand risks and benefits, and individuals give consent. CABs provide a mechanism for community consultation that contributes to protecting communities and fostering meaningful research. Furthermore, CABs can help us to re-create informed consent as a process. It is critical that we conduct research to understand the role of CABs in the informed consent process.
HIV/AIDS coverage in five African American newspapers (Amsterdam [New York] News, Oakland [California] Post, Washington [District of Columbia] Afro American, Atlanta Inquirer, and Chicago Citizen) was analyzed from 1991 to 1996. During this period, HIV/AIDS became the leading cause of death of young adult African Americans. This study found that coverage of the disease was most prominent in the New York, Oakland, and Washington, D.C., African American newspapers. Although most of the 201 articles analyzed framed the story primarily as a health issue, a large proportion also exhibited a critical attitude toward the government and the "AIDS establishment" about their commitment to saving the lives of minorities. Articles often conveyed the message that fighting HIV/AIDS first requires substantial action regarding the larger contextual issues-economic, political, and social-that cause health inequities. Alternative theories of cause and treatment, such as the possibility that AIDS was created as an extermination plot against African Americans, or that the drug Kemron, endorsed by the Nation of Islam, was the most promising treatment for HIV, generally were discussed as legitimate even though much evidence exists to refute these theories. These frames reflect distrust and rational concerns rooted in the historical context of American race relations, including the legacy of the Tuskegee study. Increased understanding of the frames presented in the African American press may contribute to the ability of researchers, health practitioners, and health journalists to constructively respond to the concerns of the African American community.