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Posts tagged as “Centers For Disease Control”

Through the Pain, 25 Year-Old Eric Williams and Others Speak Out During National Sickle Cell Awareness Month

By goodblacknews on September 23, 2015
Sickle Cell Disease sufferers from around Southern California banded together Wednesday to bring awareness for September’s National Sickle Cell Awareness Month, like Eric Williams, a 25-year-old who suffers from the genetic disease. (photo via nbclosangeles.com)

Nearly 100,000 Americans live with sickle cell disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and every September many of those who suffer from the ailment as well as their families and supporters, participate in National Sickle Cell Awareness Month.

Symptoms include widespread pain, fatigue, organ failure and a shortened life span. A person with sickle cell will usually live to the age of 50.  The diease affects one in 500 African Americans, but can also affect Hispanics.

“You get slow throbs and it builds and then feels like someone is punching you, then stabbing you, then a building is coming down on you,” said Eric Williams, a 25-year-old living with the genetic disease.

As a child, Williams said he had more access to pediatricians who specialized in the disease.  As an adult, it’s considerably harder for him to find specialists in Los Angeles County, where he lives, that treat adults.

Dr. Susan Claster is one hematologist in Orange County who does treat adults, but has trouble handling a huge flux of patients by herself.  “I can’t see everybody, and we need to find others who are interested in seeing these patients,” Claster said. “That really frustrates me.”

California and eight other states recently received grant funding to expand treatment for sickle cell patients.

Williams, set to attend nursing school, said he won’t let the disease slow him down, and hopes to inspire others.  “I would like to inspire them by having them see you can go to college and get a job and be part of mainstream society – you just have to figure out your way to do it,” Williams said.

To learn more about Sickle Cell Disease, go to: http://sicklecelldisease.org/index.cfm?page=news&id=94

original article by Angie Crouch and Heather Navarro via nbclosangeles.com; additions by Lori Lakin Hutcherson

A New Image of Black Fatherhood [PHOTOS]

By goodblacknews on November 20, 2014
Giovanni and 9-month-old Ethan chill on their Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn stoop.  (Photo by Marcus Franklin) 
By Marcus Franklin
This photo essay is part of Life Cycles of Inequity: A Colorlines Series on Black Men. In this installment, we explore and challenge the notion that black families face a crisis of fatherhood. The installment includes a dispatch from Baltimore, in which four dads challenge the easy assumption that all children of unwed mothers have absent fathers. 
In June of 2013 I started photographing black men and their children and created The Fatherhood Project, the online home for photos that capture them in ordinary moments. A single dad helping his daughter with math homework during a break at work. A dad teaching his daughter how to walk as they wait to see a doctor. A father and son chilling on a stoop.
Why photograph black men and their children? What’s extraordinary about these subjects?
For starters, black men taking care of our children is, on some level, revolutionary—and a form of resistance to the legacies of laws and other tools used to hinder our ability to parent. During the trans-Atlantic slave trade, for example, fathers were routinely separated from their children as family members were sold. And currently, disproportionately and consistently high incarceration and unemployment rates for black men have made it difficult, if not impossible for many to parent. There’s also the disproportionately high rate of homicide among black men, whether by people in their own communities or at the hands of the state. My own father was murdered by a cop a couple of weeks before my 15th birthday.
As New York Times writer Brent Staples asked in a tweet this past Fathers’ Day: “Imagine yourself jailed on a low-level Rockefeller-era drug charge. Now a felon: denied a job, housing and the vote. How would you ‘Father’”?

NFL’s McCourty Twins Raise Awareness and Funds via "Tackle Sickle Cell" Campaign (VIDEO)

By goodblacknews on October 6, 2014

Center for Disease Control Reports Black Teen Birth Rate at an All-Time Low

By goodblacknews on August 22, 2014


New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dismantles some long held myths about teen sexuality. The birthrate for teens in the United States hit an all-time low in 2013.
The government agency reports 277,749 babies were born in 2013 to mothers who were under the age of 20. That is the lowest number recorded since the CDC began collecting birthrate data in 1940.  Between 1991 and 2012, the rate for Non-hispanic Black teens saw the largest decline of 63%, and birthrates were down in all 50 states.
According to the CDC, this is the result of “a number of behavioral changes, including decreased sexual activity, increases in the use of contraception at first sex and at most recent sex, and the adoption and increased use of hormonal contraception, injectables, and intrauterine devices.”
 

Among Black teenagers, birth rates fell less than 20% from 2007 to 2012 in the District of Columbia and Michigan, while rates in 13 states fell at least 35%.
In 2012, non-Hispanic black and Hispanic teen birth rates were still more than two times higher than the rate for non-Hispanic white teens, but despite widely held beliefs about black women’s reproduction, Black teens do not, in fact, have the highest birth rate in the country. So the next time anyone tries to point the finger at Black women celebrities for encouraging teen sex, like Bill O’Reilly did in April, their handwringing can be easily refuted with CDC data.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock, CDC
Source: CDC
article via forharriet.com