Environmental Justice at the National Museum of Mexican Art

From the June 26 2011 blog item at Science is Everyone’s Story

…The National Museum of Mexican Art, which I visited in May, has some powerful pieces related to environmental justice.

The final room in the museum begins with an installation about César Chávez, who organized a boycott to oppose toxic pesticides on grapes in the 1980s.

In the gift shop, I saw a reproduction of “Sun Mad.” This controversial painting shows Ester Hernandez‘s anger about the chemicals workers face in the grape industry.

Sun Mad (photo from the Smithsonian American Art Museum)

 

In the painting “Blue Collar,” Oscar Moya depicts a worker in a safety mask and gloves surrounded by an ominous red glow. It isn’t clear that the piece is related to chemical safety, but the atmosphere suggests it.

Salvador Vega’s “Mother Earth” reminded me of Salvador Dali’s depiction of the Spanish civil war – but the subject is our planet.

A reviewer from The Onion describes this exhibit as depressing. It did not have that effect on me. When I see art like this, it motivates me to think about social change. People shouldn’t be afraid to go to work because of concerns about chemical safety.

Related articles

• Air pollution: An environmental justice issue for Hispanics (texasvox.org)
• No Justice, No Peace! (powerlineblog.com)

AHRQ Offers Interactive Tool To Analyze National and State Health Care Data

From the AHRQ (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) press release

Mining for specific data on health care quality and disparities in the U.S.?  It’s an easy process with AHRQ’s NHQRDRnet online query system, which features data from the 2010 National Healthcare Quality Report and the National Healthcare Disparities Report.  At the State and national level, you’ll find quality-of-care data on clinical conditions ranging from asthma and diabetes to heart disease and cancer.  You can review data by specific age groups as well as by race, ethnicity, income, and education.  Using NHQRDRnet’s search tool, you can locate data tables based on selected words, chapters, or type of table.  Select to access AHRQ’s NHQRDRnet system.

Related Link

• Improving Data Collection to Reduce Health Disparities (Healthcare.gov)

 

[How to] Explore Your Treatment Options

 

The US Agency for Healthcare Research and Qualtiy (AHRQ) publishes a wealth of information for consumers and patients on staying healthy, choosing medical care, understanding diseases and conditions, and comparing medical treatments.

For example, Explore Your Treatment Options gives sound advice on

• Why one should explore treatment options
• Tips on how to start the conversation about treatment options with doctors
• Rating health priorities through a  check list type tool. The questions ask you to rate ease of every day activities, concerns about treatment side effects, and basic questions about treatment time, cost, and effort. Results may be printed to share with your doctor.
• Links to Treatment Guides (cancer, diabetes, heart conditions, and more)

Prenatal exposure to some pesticides can lead to lower IQs

From a May 20 Blog Upstream item by Elizabeth Grossman

New York City’s low-income neighborhoods and California’s Salinas Valley, where 80 percent of the United States’ lettuce is grown, could hardly be more different. But scientists have discovered that children growing up in these communities — one characterized by the rattle of subway trains, the other by acres of produce and vast sunny skies — share a pre-natal exposure to pesticides that appears to be affecting their ability to learn and succeed in school.

Three studies undertaken independently, but published simultaneously last month, show that prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides — sprayed on crops in the Salinas Valley and used in Harlem and the South Bronx to control cockroaches and other insects — can lower children’s IQ by an average of as much as 7 points. While this may not sound like a lot, it is more than enough to affect a child’s reading and math skills and cause behavioral problems with potentially long-lasting impacts, according to the studies.

“This is not trivial,” said Virginia Rauh, one of the study authors, speaking from Columbia University, where she is deputy director of the university’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health and professor of population and family health. What is particularly significant, she said, is that these studies involved so many children from such different communities, yet produced consistent evidence of the pesticides’ effects on cognitive skills and short-term memory

Related articles

• Today In The News: Prenatal Pesticide Exposure Linked to Lower IQ (euzicasa.wordpress.com)
• Prenatal pesticide exposure linked to lower IQ in kids (ctv.ca)
• Prenatal pesticide exposure tied to lower IQ in children (eurekalert.org)