The landscape of the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego is challenging for people who want to stay healthy and prevent disease. City Heights is 100 acres short of usable park space by San Diego guidelines, according to a 2012 KPBS report, and unhealthy choices are everywhere within its borders.
The prison reform law that shifted responsibility for non-violent felons from the state to the county is also affecting the management of more serious, violent offenders.
Babies living in California’s rural counties were less likely to be hospitalized in the first year of life than their urban counterparts, according to a recent study published in the journal Pediatrics.
Federal health care reforms are trying to cut costs and improve quality—two objectives that are often at odds. Policy makers hope that strategies like changing how providers are can balance cost and quality. But studies suggest that current programs like pay-for-performance aren’t silver bullets for rising costs.
For two years, Jessica Lopez, 17, went to campaign meetings after school and on weekends, attended city council hearings late into the night, and did her homework after that. As a youth leader in the Oakland organization Urban Peace Movement (UPM), Jessica was among the community members who helped push for a landmark good jobs agreement in Oakland’s Army Base redevelopment plan—the largest development project Oakland has seen in decades.
The vast majority of registered voters in rural California say obesity is a serious problem nationally and in their communities, and many say they wish business, government, community groups and individuals were doing more to fight the problem, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
What started as a community garden in the Chinatown neighborhood of Salinas has blossomed into the Salinas-Marina Community Food Project. Three community gardens provide fresh food, life skills and a sense of community for the homeless, recovering addicts, unemployed and local residents.
Not long ago, California was the land of the young. Migration from other states, immigration from other countries and the Baby Boom came together to send the state’s population of children soaring. Those children, and the young adults they became, personified a culture that seemed nothing short of obsessed with youth. That’s all changing. California’s population is aging rapidly, so quickly that the state now faces what was once unthinkable: a shortage of children.
Everybody carries the potential for diseases in their genes, but that potential doesn’t always result in illnesses. What flips the genetic switch to create disease in some people and not in others? And even more critically, why is it that those who have ongoing exposure to stress—living in a violent neighborhood or below the poverty level, for example—are more prone to such diseases? Answers may be found in dark matter.
This week Matt Perry, who has been covering aging issues for Healthy Cal for more than a year, begins a twice-monthly column on aging with dignity. Matt’s columns will explore the public policy and private innovations that make an independent life more accessible to older adults — and issues that stand in the way of seniors living the way they’d like. His first piece takes a personal look at his mother’s recent battle with Alzheimers, and what it taught him about the potential — and lost opportunities — of our aging generation.