Psychotherapist Traci Ruble believes that everybody — even folks with close-knit friends and family — gets lonely. It can happen anytime, and it doesn’t only happen when you’re alone. You might have felt it at a party with friends; or on a crowded subway watching strangers on their phones; or while you’re spending time with your partner.
But Ruble thinks she’s found a simple way to make us feel less isolated and more connected.
It starts by doing the exact opposite of what your parents likely told you never to do: talking to a stranger.
In 50 cities around the world, volunteers unfold chairs, sprawl out blankets and create a welcoming space in public spaces. Their goal isn’t to give advice and therapize the strangers who sit down. They’re there to simply listen.
Ruble calls her movement Sidewalk Talk — and there’s a reason to believe it’s working.
Loneliness is a societal problem that doesn’t get as much mainstream attention as, say, health care reform. But multiple studies show that feeling lonely on a regular basis may be more harmful to the human body than obesity or smoking cigarettes.
“Belonging is as important to our survival and well-being as breathing. It’s a connection you can’t always get from a text message,” Ruble told City Lab. “As humans, we need eye contact, touch and personal interaction. It’s important not to forget how vital this is.”
Experts have concluded that it’s a pervasive feeling: In a study published in 2018, nearly half of the 20,000 surveyed individuals reported sometimes or always feeling lonely.
Barbara Meyers is one of the many volunteers working with Ruble to help. Every Thursday, she goes to Tenderloin, California, to make human connections with the people who show up. Two years and a myriad of conversations later, Meyers is the nonprofit’s longest volunteer. She’s passionate about supporting folks with mental health issues and saw Sidewalk Talk as an opportunity to spring into action.
“I like it because I think it’s a gift to offer yourself as a listener and to be, I guess, authentically connecting with another human being,” she told the Alternative UK.
She goes to Tenderloin to meet people from marginalized communities — communities where stigmas against mental health are sometimes stronger and communities are often underserved.
“I know that … they don’t have the access to a lot of the mental health system, and if there’s somebody that actually listens to them, that’s a little piece of something that can be helpful to them,” she said. “I know they aren’t getting what they need elsewhere.”
After the Sandy Hook shooting, Ruble searched for ways to connect strangers and bring awareness about mental health. She and her colleague Lily Sloane decided to bring conversations to community centers.
“I wanted to create an empathy movement that extended beyond the walls of my office,” Ruble told City Lab.
In 2015, they gathered volunteers and launched the first day of talks in 12 locations throughout San Francisco, California.
The idea quickly spread, and four years later, the nonprofit has hosted over 12,000 talks in 12 countries.
Each city is structured with a city leader and volunteers. While the volunteers don’t need experience in therapy or trained listening, they all go through a training course. The city leaders are trained mental health professionals who can connect individuals to low or no-cost mental health support.
“I have a fundamental belief that we are all responsible for each other’s mental health,” Ruble told Washington Post. “But this is not therapy on the streets; this is taking one of its biggest tools and bringing it out to the masses. I’m trying to keep the message simple: It’s about listening and belonging. I’m talking about what makes us healthy, and relationships make us healthy.”
More: Can Democrats and Republicans Understand Each Other? It Starts with Getting off Twitter
Tag: public health
Free Public Sunscreen Dispensers Could Save Lives — Meet the People Behind Them
Even on a cloudy day, Deb Girard lathers on sunscreen.
“I try to be a good role model,” says Girard, the executive director of IMPACT Melanoma, a nonprofit that works to increase education and reduce skin cancer.
Melanoma rates have continued to rise over the past 30 years. Cities, nonprofits and health organizations are looking for strategies to reduce that statistic.
One way is through sunscreen dispensers.
Whether it’s heading to a baseball game or walking on a public beach, free sunscreen is now available for passersby in places like the Braves stadium in Atlanta and West Palm Beach, Florida. These small, touch-free dispensers work just like the automatic hand-sanitizer dispensers that you might find in restaurants, schools and grocery stores.
The goal of these dispensers is to make sunscreen accessible, cue visual reminders to reapply and as a result, lower rates of melanoma, says Girard.
Melanoma rates are rising faster than that of any other cancer: every hour one person dies from the disease in the U.S. alone, and it’s the most common form of cancer for people between the ages of 15 and 29. It amounts to $3.3 billion in health care costs annually.
“As compared to needing treatment for skin cancer and melanoma, [dispensers] are not expensive things,” Girard says.
Melanoma is largely preventable, and the way to do that is by using sunscreen every day.
Ross Donaldson says his family has more sunscreen than the average family. “But we never seem to have it where we needed it and when we needed it.”
So he developed his own sunscreen dispenser called Sunstation USA.
If hand sanitizer dispensers are everywhere, sunscreen dispensers can be too, says Donaldson, Sunstation’s CEO. He says it felt like a simple solution that could help reduce sun cancer. “There’s a lot of research dedicated towards public sunscreen intervention programs and the results are really promising,” he says.
Melanoma rates have decreased in 23 states. In the Northeast, which is one area that has seen a decrease, sunscreen dispensers and programming, like the ones IMPACT Melanoma provides, are linked to those lowering numbers.
IMPACT Melanoma launched a program called #PracticeSafeSkin to help provide cities access to sunscreen.
“It’s challenging and somewhat exciting to work with cities and towns who are realizing that this is something they can give to their communities,” Girard says. “And that doesn’t cost a lot of money.”
In 2016, IMPACT Melanoma partnered with Brightguard, a sunscreen dispenser manufacturer, to place 10 dispensers in highly trafficked, sunny areas of Boston, where IMPACT Melanoma is based.
Since then, IMPACT Melanoma has placed about 4,000 dispensers across the country, and the nonprofit partners with public and private sponsors to provide sunscreen and education. And it’s continuing to expand its reach: in 2018, the nonprofit received two state grants in Vermont and Maine to launch a two-year project that will bring programming and 100 dispensers to each state.
Girard says these two-year projects will help the nonprofit understand how the dispensers are changing people’s perception about sunscreen.
“When we go into new communities and new hubs, we do some surveying to try to understand what awareness there is about sunscreen use and about how people in the community are using sunscreen,” Girard says. “And then our goal is, after a couple of years, to go back and survey again.”
Each dispenser and each program is slightly different, but they all have the same goal: touch-free sunscreen.
Brightguard, for example, equips each battery-powered dispenser with a 1000-milliliter bag of SPF 30 sunscreen. This supplies about 250 people with sunscreen, according to Brightguard’s website. And the sunscreen is free of parabens as well as oxybenzone, which has been linked to coral reef bleaching and hormone disruption.
One challenge has been the maintenance of the dispensers. Since most of them are in public places, it can be difficult to designate a person in charge of refilling, cleaning and maintaining them.
“With a successful program, we want somebody [maintaining] them regularly,” Girard says. “So we are working with organizations and municipalities to come up with maintenance plans.”
As cities and companies refine their approach, IMPACT Melanoma and other programs plan to expand access.
“What we’re trying to figure out is how to make it so that doing good sun protection and having good sun behavior comes naturally,” Girard says.
More: This City Is Reducing Cancer Risk, One Laundromat at a Time
There’s Always Something to Do in Brownsville
“There’s nothing to do in Brownsville.” It was a constant refrain when Eva Garcia was growing up in the midsize Texas city, situated just across the border from Mexico. After college, most of her friends moved away to Austin or other cities perceived as more dynamic and interesting. But Garcia stayed, got a job in city government, and is now part of an initiative to transform her community and neighboring cities. “I want to make Brownsville a place where people want to stay,” she says.
As an employee of the city’s department of planning and development, Garcia is taking an active role in doing just that, helping to organize programs and funding for a network of 17 miles of new multiuse trails in and around Brownsville. She’s also been lobbying to attract new businesses to open alongside these new biking, hiking and paddling trails. She recently attended the Kauffman Foundation’s inaugural ESHIP Summit to connect with other people working to build thriving small business communities and get new ideas for how to improve her own.
The goals of Brownsville’s recent outdoorsy development are nothing less than ambitious: Boost the local economy, improve health outcomes, rescue precious natural resources and encourage the growth of a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem. Those are big problems to solve, and Brownsville is trying to tackle them all at once. But the city is aiming to prove that all at once is the best way to take on big issues.
“There’s never enough money to do what you want,” Garcia says. “We’re leveraging resources to attack multiple problems.” For Garcia, the ESHIP Summit was a chance to better understand and imagine the end goal of the development happening in Brownsville. “What I’ve learned is the characteristics of highly functioning systems,” she says, “and how collaboration is essential.”
Turning around an entire community’s idea of itself isn’t exactly easy. Brownsville is behind the curve in developing as a tourist destination, Garcia says. “Right now the challenge seems to be changing the perception of what’s successful, or what could be successful.” Some people believe that in a relatively poor community, building nature trails is a waste of taxpayer money that could be better spent improving public transportation or other services.
But Garcia sees the potential to make her community much stronger — and healthier too. The progress happening today is a steep departure from her experience growing up in Brownsville, which as recently as 2012 was the poorest city in America, with a median income of less than $30,000 a year. The majority of residents are Hispanic, and a CDC study found that the rates of obesity and diabetes were among the highest in the country. Almost 40 percent of residents lack health insurance, according to the most recent census data available. Growing up, Garcia says she had no idea that the health disparities and poverty levels were so severe.
After graduating from the University of Texas at Brownsville (now the University of Texas Rio Grande) with a degree in environmental science, Garcia got an internship with the city and started to learn more about her own community. “I felt like my eyes were opened,” she says. “I started becoming aware of what the issues really were here, and why there were challenges to development.” The city had already started to work on some initiatives to reduce poverty and improve health outcomes, and Garcia decided she wanted to be involved.
Today, Garcia’s department is partnering with Rails to Trails Conservancy to connect 10 local communities with new pathways. The UT School of Public Health in Brownsville has provided grant funding to help promote the new trails and healthy living in general. And the city is taking advantage of a local utility program to dredge and restore tributaries of the Rio Grande that have filled with sediment, organizing new trails around these resacas. The university’s architecture program is designing birding blinds (small shelters that help observers watch birds without startling them) to line the new trails. “Everyone has a role to play,” Garcia says.
That includes entrepreneurs, who are key to making the “active tourism” initiative a success. The city is looking for ways to incentivize small businesses to take advantage of the new walking and biking pathways. “You cannot be active without the [proper] gear,” Garcia says. “Even to go fishing, you need poles and lines, and people to take you out on boats to show you where things are.”
More businesses are needed, she says, to showcase the city’s assets — new companies like outdoor tour operators or kayak and paddleboard rental shops will help market the community as a fun, dynamic place.
“There are constantly things to do now,” Garcia says.
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This content was produced in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which works in entrepreneurship and education to create opportunities and connect people to the tools they need to achieve success, change their futures and give back to their communities. In June 2017, the foundation hosted its inaugural ESHIP Sumit, convening 435 leaders fighting to help break down barriers for entrepreneurs across the country.
Can Citizen Science Save Us From Environmental Disasters?
During the rush-hour commute on Tokyo’s trains, it’s easy to spot riders gaming on their phones, sorting sweets in Candy Crush or mustering armies in Clash of Clans. But Kevin Hemphill, a geeky ex-pat, played a different game on his iPad, flipping through images of forests and meadows in Pennsylvania that had been cleared. Tapping the screen, he marked the location of ponds and transmitted the data to a nonprofit halfway across the globe.
Through the web-based FrackFinder, a project of the nonprofit SkyTruth, Hemphill, nostalgic for his childhood home in the Rust Belt of Ohio, pored over the images of the Keystone State. He was looking for evidence of hydraulic fracturing. Better known “fracking,” it’s the process of blasting chemicals, sand and water into underground rock layers to dislodge natural gas — a controversial method of energy extraction that’s brought jobs to the region while potentially putting locals’ health at risk. In a uniquely digital “citizen science” effort, Hemphill and hundreds of volunteers around the world have plotted Pennsylvania’s energy infrastructure, creating a detailed map that can be shared with activists, regulators and academics.
Biologists have long relied on group expeditions to study wildlife populations, but FrackFinder brings the process online, giving anyone with a keyboard the chance to participate. As users click through FrackFinder, SkyTruth’s team hopes the abstract science of environmental exploitation becomes tangible. Their pictures, shot from aircraft and 400-mile high satellites, clearly depict the damage that can be hard to visualize, and even harder to reverse.
“We can look at not just one township or county or state. We’re able to look at changes across entire regions over decades. That’s almost like having access to a time machine,” says David Manthos, SkyTruth’s program coordinator. “It’s the region-wide perspective we offer that you just can’t get from one place on the ground.”
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Geologist John Amos founded the nonpartisan Skytruth, which collects satellite images of potential eco-hazards, in 2001, moving it to tiny Shepherdstown, W.V., two years later. A former consultant for a natural resources exploration firm, Amos put similar tracking tools into the hands of conservationists, as a way to atone for his past “disservice to the planet.” But for nearly a decade, SkyTruth remained a one-man shop. Few donors could see how SkyTruth’s aerial imagery might help the environmental movement. That all changed in April 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. BP and the Coast Guard estimated 1,000 barrels of oil were gushing out each day, but after studying photos of a vast, shimmering pool of oil on the ocean’s surface, he and oceanographer Dr. Ian MacDonald calculated the spill was more than 20 times worse than officials claimed. After publishing a critical blog post, the federal government quickly revised its numbers upward.
Now a 12-person staff, SkyTruth has used their planetary perspective to create the first repository of mountaintop-removal mining sites in Appalachia; to film flaring over North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields by equipping a high-altitude hydrogen balloon with a camera; and to track unregulated commercial fishing in the world’s most remote waters. After wrapping up in Ohio, FrackFinder will launch in its third state, West Virginia, early this year. Analyses of other states will likely follow.
How is this data used? FrackFinder’s crowdsourced analysis confirmed the exact location of 1,400 active wells and 7,835 wastewater ponds, allowing a team of public health researchers at Johns Hopkins to verify a list of drilling permits provided by the state. Guided by that knowledge, paired with extensive medical records, the university epidemiologists proved that asthmatics were 1.5 to 4 times more likely to have an attack near the drilling, and mothers were 40 percent more likely to give birth prematurely near the most active sites. The researchers weren’t able to pinpoint why locals sickened — maybe sleeplessness from noisy, earth-shaking vibrations, stress from dropping home values or the chemicals themselves — but SkyTruth’s data helped them prove a point.
Surprisingly, crowdsourcing the information is actually harder for SkyTruth than sifting through the images themselves. But the team continues to invest in citizen science because they know the value of the public’s involvement. “It actually puts an image of what’s going on in the world in front of citizens, so they can see for themselves,” Manthos explains. “What kinds of regions are being developed? Is it all forest, rural land or a little of the suburbs? We’re exposing people, up close and personal, to these images. That’s a formative process, and they can draw their own conclusions.”
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Hemphill, for example, says he used to support fracking as a reasonable way to bring much-needed economic growth to Northern Appalachia’s struggling towns. His support persisted, even as he analyzed nearly 5,000 images of Pennsylvania’s scarred terrain. “Wow, they’re really tearing up the earth,” he thought, almost disinterestedly. But because of his exposure to the issue through FrackFinder, he began paying more attention to relevant news stories, reading, for instance, that some homeowners could set the contaminated water in their kitchen sink on fire. Eventually, he turned against the unconventional drilling method for good.
The process influenced Hemphill in another way, too, by reaffirming his faith in technology’s possibilities beyond our social media addictions and diversionary entertainment. “People are on the internet a lot. What do you have to show for so many hours of your life?” he asks. “Especially for millennials, where does it go from here? It’s not a guaranteed thing that we all will just watch Netflix forever. The internet needs to go beyond that now.”
Hemphill imagines closing our Tetris-stacking apps, halting the Instagram scroll and doing something meaningful online. With just a few clicks, he still believes, the Earth can be improved.
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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Can New Tools End the AIDS Epidemic by 2020?
In 1995, Perry Halkitis watched as New York City’s AIDS crisis unfolded around him and quit his job to focus full-time on the plague killing thousands of gay men. Professionally, it probably wasn’t an advantageous move, but he never doubted that it was the right thing to do. Halkitis, who, at age 18, came out to his Greek immigrant parents in 1981, is now a professor of public health, applied psychology and medicine at New York University. Two years ago, he completed a book about HIV+ gay men who survived that era, and he’s now working on a book about the experience of coming out across generations. Speaking to NationSwell in his Greenwich Village office, Halkitis recalled the experience of witnessing two devastating decades of the AIDS epidemic and his hope of finding a cure.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I do work in gay men’s health, part of which is HIV. I emphasize that because too often people think about gay men’s health work as being synonymous with HIV. The thing that is most exciting me is that there are biomedical interventions that have been developed over the course of the last decade that provide another way to fight the epidemic. Now what do I mean that? We have something called PrEP now, which is administering an antiviral once a day to people who are HIV- that prevents them from becoming infected. It’s miraculous. We also know very clearly that HIV+ people — now living longer, fuller lives — who adhere to their treatment have viral suppression and are un-infectious. That is remarkable to me that these biomedical advances enable people to deter both acquiring and spreading the infection. We haven’t fully realized the power of these tools, and there are some challenges with them. But in the absence of a cure, it is the best thing we have.
Are these tools powerful enough that we can talk about ending the epidemic?
There are conversations about ending the epidemic. In New York, two years ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo put forward a mandate to end AIDS by 2020. By that, he meant making infections go from 3,000 to 750 a year by use of these tools. So, do I think these tools are, in and of themselves, enough to bring an end to AIDS? They can get us near the end. We know perfectly well that people don’t finish their antibiotics and that people don’t exercise regularly. Being dependent completely on administering medicine on a regular basis is challenging reality. So I’m going to say that we’re going to do a really good job at deterring new infections.
What motivates you to do this work?
My decision, about 25 years ago, to enter this field was purely directed by the loss I experienced in my life. I was trained as an applied statistician working at a testing company, and at night, I was an activist. I was in New York City; AIDS was all around me. I witnessed friends dying. I decided to merge the two: to take my skills as a researcher and combine them with my passion as an activist. I find my motivation in the memory of the people who I’ve lost. I find my motivation in making sure that a new generation is free of this disease. And I find my motivation in training my students who are going to continue the good work once I’ve finished. I want gay men to be healthy, and I’m going to do everything in my power to see that.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Don’t expect it to get easier over time. It’s going to get harder and more complicated. The more I learn and the more writing and research I do, the less I think I actually know. Which is good: it opens up more questions. I would have told myself in 1995 to be prepared for any possibility that might happen in this epidemic. I would tell myself to keep hope. I don’t think I had a lot of hope in 1995 that there was going to be an end to this epidemic. I was going to fight the battle for as long as I needed. And I would have told myself to be better about writing about my day-to-day life, which I haven’t done. It would have been an interesting story.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
My book “The AIDS Generation,” where I documented the lives of 15 men who were long-term survivors. It could be the period at the end of the sentence of my career, if I did nothing else. (Surprise, I’m doing more.) I’m incredibly proud of that book, because it got a lot of attention in the popular press, and it inspired a conversation. Sean, one of the guys in the book, reminds me all of the time: “You started all of this.” I don’t really know if that’s true, but I like to think that I contributed to the beginning of the dialogue about long-term survivors.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Homepage photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
Why Youthful Indiscretions Shouldn’t Result in Jail Sentences, How to Save Babies Born with Opioid Addictions and More
A Prosecutor’s Vision For A Better Justice System, TED
Adam Foss, a prosecutor with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston, recently asked a group of TED participants how many had ever drank underage, tried an illegal drug, shoplifted or gotten into a physical fight. While viewed by most as youthful indiscretions, these same offenses often land black and brown youth in criminal court, viewed as being dangerous to society. Which is why Foss is using prosecutorial discretion to dismiss minor cases that aren’t worthy of a criminal record.
Tiny Opioid Patients Need Help Easing Into Life, Kaiser Health News and NPR
In this country, addiction to heroin and prescription painkillers like hydrocodone, oxycodone or morphine continues to rise, even afflicting new moms. During pregnancy, these mothers must decide between getting clean and risking a miscarriage or delivering a baby that’s likely to experience drug withdrawal. With about 21,000 infants suffering from withdrawal each year, doctors in Rhode Island, nurses in Connecticut, researchers in Pennsylvania and public health officials in Ohio are all working on solutions to help these new families.
Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through, New York Times
Just because the government releases endless pages of data to the public doesn’t mean it’s easy to turn those statistics into something that you can actually comprehend and use. DataUSA, an open source brainchild coming from the M.I.T. Media Lab, organizes and visualizes the information, presenting it in charts, graphs and written synopses. Thanks to this project, instead of just hearing a statistic of how many people in Flint, Mich., live in poverty, for example, you can see it visually represented on a map.
The Mobile Health Clinic That’s Been Helping the Poor for 40 Years
In 1976, Dr. Augusto Ortiz and his wife Martha looked to a donated school bus as a means to achieve their dream of providing free medical care to the poor of Tucson, Ariz.
Today, The University of Arizona Mobile Health Program (MHP) visits communities in a big, shiny trailer stocked with all the amenities of a regular health clinic — including an EKG — but the spirit behind it remains the same 40 years later.
The MHP makes regular rounds of communities in southern Arizona, serving about 2,400 uninsured and under-insured people, plus those that don’t have regular access to health facilities. Additionally, since 2003, the MHP has run group prenatal care appointments for expectant mothers, serving many who would never have received the important care otherwise and resulting in the delivery of more than 200 healthy babies.
Still, for all the poor that have been helped by the MHP, the impact on doctors-in-training may even be greater. The clinic is staffed with medical residents and students in public health, pre-med and pre-dental programs at the University of Arizona. Tammie Bassford, head of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University, tells Linda Valdez of AZ Central, “It has a profound impact on students.”
Bassford recalls one time when MHP staffers asked a patient if she needed any help with anything besides her health. She told them that she lacked a pot big enough to cook beans for everyone in her family. The MHP was happy to provide her with one.
Dr. Ortiz died at age 90 in 2007, but his wife Martha, now 90, is still involved in fundraising for the mobile health clinic that they founded. She believes in helping the poor for purposes of altruism, but also for the practical reason of preventing the spread of disease. “If somebody is standing next to you in the grocery line and coughing, it’s possible they have tuberculosis, and don’t know because they can’t get to a doctor,” she tells Valdez.
MORE: How A Big Blue Bus is Saving Needy Children Nationwide
Showers and Toilet on Wheels Give Homeless a Clean Slate
Silas Borden has spent the last five years living on the streets of San Francisco. He’s used to making the best with what he has, so when he stumbled upon a bus offering free showers and toilet, he couldn’t resist. “Living on the streets, no matter how clean you try to stay, you’re going to be grimy,” said Borden as he prepared for his first shower in over a week, “and I want to wash it off.”
Borden is one of the first beneficiaries of a pilot program from the nonprofit Lava Mae, which has retrofitted an old city bus into a souped-up sanitation service on wheels. The bus, which is equipped with two showers and a toilet that run off city water, travels the streets of San Francisco and aims to provide 300 to 500 showers a week.
Doniece Sandoval, the brains behind the operation, was inspired after reading about the lack of options available to the more than 3,000 homeless living on her city’s streets. “There are only seven drop-in centers in the entire city, and that translates to 16-20 shower stalls,” says Sandoval, who plans to add three more buses to her fleet because of the success of these test runs.
Read more about Lava Mae
This Stamp-Sized Medical Lab Could Bring Hospital Services to Our Poorest
Your smartphones and laptops aren’t the only gadgets getting smaller and sleeker as progress marches on—behold, the postage-stamp-sized medical lab.
That’s right, Harvard-affiliated biotech startup Diagnostics for All has a tool in the works that looks like a computer chip but can diagnose diseases using just a drop of blood, reports Forbes. Once it’s ready for public use, the tool will be perfectly suited for populations who live in regions lacking hospitals and electricity. What’s more, the “lab on a chip” is so inexpensive to make and use that its cost shouldn’t exceed 10 cents in developing countries.
To start, DFA is targeting the liver, with tests that allow HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis patients—whose regular medications can damage the filtering organ—to determine whether their drugs are breaking down liver cells. Slightly further down the road are tests to flag milk spoilage and pregnant cows, which it will test in an East African dairy collective, and another to spot aflatoxin, a poisonous mold that afflicts corn and other crops.
Strange as it is that everything in our lives seems to be shrinking, sometimes—as DFA evidences—that can be a very good thing.
What’s The Best Way to Convince Parents to Vaccinate Their Kids?
Fewer parents are following the recommended vaccination schedule for their kids, and as a result, outbreaks of measles, mumps, and whooping cough are on the rise in America.
In order to protect people who are too young or too sick to receive vaccinations, 90 percent of a community must be vaccinated. But when these like-minded anti-vaccine parents cluster in certain areas of the country, it’s a recipe for disaster, and preventable outbreaks result.
In 2011, 15 states saw their vaccination rates slip below the 90 percent threshold, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And last year brought the worst measles outbreak in America since the 1990s — with hundreds of cases across the country, including 58 cases in a non-vaccinating community in New York, with each costing an average of $10,000 to treat.
What has caused parents’ refusal to vaccinate their kids? The authors of a recent Academy of American Sciences report say, “Over the past two decades, a combination of fraudulent scientific studies, irresponsible reporting, and well-meaning but misinformed citizen activists has led to a steady increase in the proportion of parents who have concerns about the recommended childhood vaccine schedule. While overall vaccine uptake rates in the United States remain high, these concerns have resulted in a significant expansion in the number of parents who are delaying, and in extreme cases even refusing, vaccines for their children.”
So what can public health officials do to educate parents on the importance of vaccinating their kids?
A study published this year in Pediatrics (the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics) suggests that trying to scare parents into vaccinating by using pictures of kids suffering from measles, stories about kids almost dying, or literature about the lack of evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism are not effective. (These findings are contrary to other public health campaigns in which disturbing images have been successful.) In fact, the pictures of sick kids and dramatic stories actually increased misperceptions about the MMR vaccine.
The authors of the study conclude that more research should be done to find an effective way to convince parents that vaccines are safe and necessary, including relying on trusted people to deliver information about vaccines. “Given that parents rate their children’s doctor as their most trusted source of vaccine safety information,” they write, “future research should explore whether pediatricians would be an especially persuasive source.”
MORE: Can Comic Books Help Spread Public Safety Messages?