Health News Notes

CDC report stresses need for more HIV/AIDS funding for minority communities

Even though they represent only 13 percent of the United States population, African American men and women accounted for more than half of newly diagnosed cases of HIV infection from 2001 to 2005, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The report, published in the March 9 edition of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, found that African American men are nearly seven times more likely to be diagnosed with HIV than white men. Blacks account for nearly half of Americans living with the disease, 40 percent of AIDS deaths and 61 percent of all new diagnoses of people aged 13-24.

In Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia around 3 percent of blacks are living with AIDS, a rate higher than Senegal’s and on a par with Cameroon in central Africa, according to Robert Janssen, director of the division of HIV/AIDS prevention at CDC.

“Although this new report by the CDC is an informative tool for us to understand the growing impact of HIV/AIDS on minority communities, the real issue here is inadequate funding to combat this alarming trend,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “The CDC report underscores what all of us in the HIV/AIDS community already know, that the lives of too many Americans are being lost due to the misplaced priorities of the Bush administration.”

The president’s fiscal year 2008 budget request released on February 5 contained mostly level funding over 2007 levels for the Ryan White CARE Act, yet included an increase of $28 million to anti-gay abstinence until marriage programs.

“It has been almost two years since the CDC reported that 46 percent of African American men who have sex with men in five major cities are HIV positive,” Solmonese continued. “Throwing more money at unproven abstinence programs while HIV/AIDS rates among black gay and bisexual men grow is unacceptable.”

Reuters contributed to this report.



Cambridge Health Alliance researchers receive grant to study depression treatments for minorities

The Cambridge Health Alliance’s Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research (CMMHR) recently received a two-year, $599,999 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study the quality of depression treatment for ethnic and racial minorities.

Under the leadership of CMMHR director and Harvard University professor of psychiatry Margarita Alegría, Ph.D., the center will use grant funds to conduct a study focusing on issues of quality of care, patient-centeredness and economic costs relevant for depression treatment for minorities.

The study will compare the quality of depression treatment that ethnic and racial minorities receive as compared to the level of care received by non-Latino whites. It will also explore whether geographic factors play a role in explaining receipt of quality depression treatment, and whether these effects vary by ethnicity or race.

The report also plans to examine how depression treatment can be more specifically designed to respond to the particular needs of ethnic and racial minority patients, and address the economic and social costs of depression in minority populations.



Children’s Hospital Boston receives $300,000 grant to bring school-based mental health services

Children’s Hospital Boston has been selected to participate in a new national program to reduce emotional and behavioral health problems among local children in need, particularly those from low-income immigrant and refugee families.

The new program, entitled “Caring Across Communities: Addressing Mental Health Needs of Diverse Children and Youth,” will provide Children’s Hospital Boston up to $300,000 to support mental health programs and services at the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School on Columbia Road in Dorchester over the next three years.

In Boston, the new Caring Across Communities project will focus on providing services to children from the city’s growing Somali community. The project is one of 15 selected by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation from a nationwide pool of applicants.

The project’s goal is to identify ways to improve mental health care for Somali youth by working to better understand their unique needs. The project will focus on three components of prevention and intervention — educating parents about mental illness and its stigma and treatment, training teachers to identify mental illness in a culturally sensitive way and providing evidence-based treatment to youth in need.

“This project grew out of the need to address two basic problems—the first was an increase in clinic referrals of Somali youth who were having significant adjustment problems in school, said Heidi Ellis, the program’s director and a psychologist at Children’s Hospital Boston. “The second was the realization that I, as a Western clinician, really didn’t understand how best to help these families — and in all of Massachusetts, there were no Somali therapists.”

The project plans to serve more than 700 people, including children and their families. Although emphasis will be placed on addressing the mental health needs of immigrant and refugee children, services provided through this and other Caring Across Communities projects will be available to all children at a given school.



Boston Medical Center receives American Heart Association achievement award

Boston Medical Center (BMC) recently received the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines–Coronary Artery Disease (GWTG-CAD) Annual Performance Achievement Award. The award recognizes BMC’s success for 12 consecutive months in implementing a higher standard of cardiac care that improves treatment of patients hospitalized with coronary artery disease.

According to the National Institutes of Health, coronary artery disease occurs when the arteries that supply blood to the heart muscle become hardened and narrowed due to buildup of a material called plaque on their inner walls, a condition called atherosclerosis. As the buildup gets bigger, the insides of the arteries get narrower, allowing less blood to flow through them. Because blood carries much-needed oxygen, this means heart muscle is not able to receive the amount of oxygen it needs, which can result in chest pain or heart attack.

To receive the award, BMC consistently complied for 12 months with the requirements in the GWTG–CAD program. Under the GWTG–CAD program, patients are started on aggressive risk reduction therapies such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, aspirin, ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers in the hospital and receive smoking cessation and weight management counseling and referrals for cardiac rehabilitation before they are discharged. Hospitals that receive the award have demonstrated that during 12 consecutive months at least 85 percent of its eligible coronary patients (without contraindications) are discharged following the American Heart Association’s recommended treatments.

Projections have shown that implementation of cardiovascular disease secondary prevention guidelines nationwide, as promoted in the GWTG–CAD program, could result in saving more than 80,000 lives each year.

According to the American Heart Association, more than 450,000 people suffer recurrent heart attacks each year. Statistics also show that within one year of an attack, 25 percent of men and 38 percent of women will die. Within six years after a heart attack, about 22 percent of men and 46 percent of women will be disabled with heart failure.