By Genevieve Bookwalter
School nurses once provided critical preventative care for students, noticing when kids were bullied, or suffered from chronic hunger or child abuse. Now, with the ranks of school nurses thinning, the focus is on critical care.
By Callie Shanafelt
Foreclosed homes can create a blight problem in some neighborhoods in Oakland. But the city agency charged with managing blight may be making the problem worse by leveling sanctions against new homeowners who are trying to fix up once-abandoned properties.
By Rebecca Wolfson
It started in 2001, and mostly affected the very young and the very old. Peoples’ hair would fall out, their skin would break out in rashes and their eyes would turn red after showers.
“That was how people were hurt on the outside,” said Horacio Amezquita, manager of the San Jerardo Cooperative. “On the inside, we don’t know.”
Amezquita, a former farm worker, lives at the cooperative, which houses about 250 low-income people. Many of the residents work on nearby farms that use nitrogen-based fertilizers to help crops grow.
By Jessica Chang
Low-income seniors who struggle to afford housing and medicine sometimes try to save money by drastically cutting their food budget. The Senior Brown Bag Program, run by Merced’s food bank, helps elders with a bi-monthly supply of food.
Just north of Sacramento, Yuba County is home to crushing poverty, homelessness and hunger. It also has some of the poorest health outcomes in the state, ranking 52nd out of 58 counties in the state’s 2011 County Health Status Profiles; it ranks the worst in deaths from lung cancer. So it might be surprising that in the tiny village of Linda, just outside the county seat of Marysville, Harmony Health Medical Clinic offers something rare even for much larger cities. On a street shared with 14 liquor stores, the community clinic provides integrated healthcare that spans physical, mental, and reproductive health, along with extensive social services
A Long Beach center helps women get a handle on heart health – for a onetime fee of $55.
Mutual Housing of Sacramento acquires, renovates and rebuilds housing projects that are deemed unsafe for residents. The result is more safe, affordable housing for low-income tenants.
By Tim Moran
A select group of students is documenting and analyzing the health of Central Valley residents, a region that’s been called the Appalachia of the West.
California faces a devastating future because too many students are not graduating or are in remediation classes at college, especially children of color and lower income students. Too many kids are disengaged and don’t care if they drop out, stay in school or just get by.
Despite its laid back image, California has long been a state of extremes, in its weather, its culture and its politics. Now a new report shows how the state is divided among rich and poor, educated and not, the healthy and those prone to illness. The “Portrait of California,” in fact, shows how all of these factors are woven together to produce a patchwork of neighborhoods, counties and regions with disparities that are the equivalent of a century of human development.