Tagged With "Cities Take Issue With Unsettling Smoke"
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2019 Los Angeles Women's Needs Assessment [downtownwomenscenter.org]
By Downtown Women's Center, February 2020 A report on women experiencing homelessness The 2019 Los Angeles Women’s Needs Assessment is a community-based research project developed in partnership with unsheltered and sheltered women in the City of Los Angeles. Expanding on the legacy of six past projects documenting the demographics, needs, and conditions of homeless and low-income women in downtown Los Angeles, this project includes women from a broader geographic swath of the city. [ Please...
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CA pediatrician develops, tests, gets state OK for whole-child assessment tool that includes ACEs
Over the last dozen years or so, many pediatricians, astounded by the ramifications of the science of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on the children they care for, began integrating this science into their practices. The most common approach has been to ask parents about ACEs using a questionnaire, and to use this information to counsel parents and identify resources for the family. Different practices have been using different questionnaires: Some ask parents for their ACE scores...
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CA pediatrician develops, tests, gets state OK for whole-child assessment tool that includes ACEs
[Editor's note: This blog was first posted in April 2017. Dr. Marie-Mitchell updated the assessment by modifying a few of the questions, so we are republishing with the new assessment, one in Spanish and one in English.] Over the last dozen years or so, many pediatricians, astounded by the ramifications of the science of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on the children they care for, began integrating this science into their practices. The most common approach has been to ask parents...
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Alternative IHEBA with ACEs for California (and Other) Pediatricians
If you are a pediatrician serving Medicaid managed care patients in California, then you are required to use the Staying Healthy Assessment or an alternative IHEBA (Individual Health Education Behavioral Assessment) at all well-child visits. The bad news is that getting approval to use an alternative IHEBA is a tedious process. The good news is that as of October 27, 2016 the Whole Child Assessment (WCA) is available for use in English and Spanish. Most importantly, the WCA has been...
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California Air Quality: Should You Wear a Face Mask for Wildfire Smoke [nytimes.com]
By Sarah Mervosh, The New York Times, October 28, 2019 With wildfires raging up and down the state of California on Monday, smoke filled the air in many places, ash fell from the sky, and residents were once again left to wonder whether the very air they were breathing was safe. The largest, the Kincade fire in Sonoma County north of San Francisco, nearly doubled in size in 24 hours and was just 5 percent contained on Monday, prompting volunteers downwind in the Bay Area to scramble to hand...
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Updated Community Health Assessment now available [Humboldtgov.org]
The Community Health Assessment (CHA), a comprehensive overview of the health of the Humboldt County community, was presented at the Board of Supervisors meeting this afternoon. The Humboldt County Department of Health & Human Services (DHHS) Public Health report looks at traditional public health measures of illness, mortality, nutrition and physical activity in the community. The CHA also includes data about income, housing status, community safety and access to care, as underlying...
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Vaping More Common among Youth with Lower School Connectedness
Using E-Cigarettes At Least Seven Times in Lifetime, by Level of School Connectedness, 2013-2015 California youth with low levels of connectedness to their schools have higher rates of e-cigarette use than their more connected peers. Reporting in 2013-2015, 18% of students with low levels of school connectedness in grades 7, 9, 11, and non-traditional programs had used e-cigarettes at least seven times—almost three times the estimate for youth with high levels of school connectedness (6%). A...
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Webinar Slides and Recording: Transformational Resilience for Climate Change Traumas and Toxic Stresses with Bob Doppelt
Recorded live October 28, 2019. Find the slides attached below. The webinar recording: You will learn: how climate change creates personal, family, and community traumas and toxic stresses; how those traumatic stressors trigger feedbacks that expand and aggravate ACEs and many other person, social, community, and societal maladies; why current approaches are woefully inadequate to address what is already occurring and rapidly steaming toward us and why prevention is the only realistic...
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Why We Need to Treat Wildfires as a Public Health Issue in California [lakeconews.com]
By Faith Kearns and Max Moritz, Lake County News, October 16, 2019 Deadly fires across California over the past several years have shown how wildfire has become a serious public health and safety issue. Health effects from fires close to or in populated areas range from smoke exposure to drinking water contaminated by chemicals like benzene to limited options for the medically vulnerable. These kinds of threats are becoming major, statewide concerns. Many people still think of wildfires as...
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Wildfires, Climate Change, and Public Health [California Climate Action Team - Public Health Workgroup Meeting]
Please join CCHEP for the next California Climate Action Team - Public Health Workgroup (CAT-PHWG) meeting on Monday, June 10, 2019 from 1:00 to 3:30PM PT . The meeting will feature presentations and discussion on Wildfires, Climate Change, and Public Health , including an overview of health impacts of wildfires and wildfire smoke, and guidance for public health professionals and partners. Agenda and meeting details forthcoming and will be posted here >> We encourage in-person...
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SoCo Rises - Empowering People to Rewrite Equality
Even before the smoke cleared, people were talking about rebuilding Sonoma County. “What does it look like?” “Who will make the decisions?” “How can we all become stronger together?” These are the questions nagging at nearly two dozen Sonoma County residents from Santa Rosa and beyond who wanted to do more than wait for an answer. They wanted to be part of the answer and more importantly, enable and empower the community to be a part of the answer, too. “Post-fire, so much discussion was...
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Supporting Your Child Through the Wildfire Disaster: 6 Tips From a Child Psychologist
Wellness Blog by Kirsten Kuzirian Supporting Your Child Through the Wildfire Disaster: 6 Tips From a Child Psychologist October 10, 2017 / Kirsten Kuzirian In the last 48 hours, our California communities have been thrown into survival mode as they race to protect the people, animals, and structures they cherish. As families leave their homes for safe shelter or stay monitoring media updates with bags packed, parents are wondering how this will impact their children. Napa and Folsom Child...
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Survivors’ guilt: The North Bay fires spared homes, but owners wonder ‘why mine?’
SANTA ROSA The Gibson and Vella families have been best friends for decades, raising their children together in the Coffey Park neighborhood, carpooling to soccer games, vacationing together and attending their children's weddings. Today, one family has a home. The other doesn't. As the smoke is clearing from Santa Rosa, Napa and the other communities in Wine Country, the reality of what was lost is coming into focus. And the ones who lost nothing are grappling with why they were spared.
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The Love In The Air Is Thicker Than The Smoke
As a native Californian I knew it was important to be prepared for a natural disaster, however in my mind, I was preparing for an earthquake. Never in a million years did I envision a fire storm, let alone multiple fire storms raging across the state and across my community all at the same time! Before the Northern California fire storm our family felt well prepared for an earthquake, we had our camping gear, nonperishable goods, medications, and more staged in an easy to access location in...
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Farmworkers Face Daunting Health Risks In California's Wildfires [californiahealthline.org]
By Anna Maria Barry-Jester, California Healthline, October 28, 2019 Farm laborers in yellow safety vests walked through neatly arranged rows of grapes Friday, harvesting the last of the deep purple bundles that hung from the vines, even as the sky behind them was dark with soot. Over the hill just behind them, firetrucks and first responders raced back and forth from a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection staging area, working to contain a wildfire raging through the rugged...
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Federal grant plants the seeds for a healthier Solano County [Daily Republic, Fairfield- Suisun]
Solano County is becoming a healthier place to live, learn, work and play thanks to the work of many in our community and a federal grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These federal funds have planted seeds throughout the county and in more than 35 other communities around the nation. The lessons we are learning and the unique projects we have started are expected to improve our nation’s health for years to come. For Solano County, being part of this type of...
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First health-related cost of ACEs study shows $113 billion price tag for California; just one ACE costs $28 billion
Researchers who have been looking for a way to quantify the health toll of ACEs in dollar terms, now have an example in a newly-released study of California. ACEs exacted a toll costing an estimated $113 billion annually, according to the study in the journal PLOS One that was commissioned by the Center for Youth Wellness. ACEs-associated cardiovascular disease was the condition that lead author Ted Miller dubbed “the giant in the room.” It accounted for $29.6 billion in spending, more than...
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Keeping Kids Out of Cells [sfchronicle.com]
By Jill Tucker and Joaquin Palomino, San Francisco Chronicle, December 29, 2019 The two-story brick building on a quiet street in Queens doesn’t stand out from the million-dollar homes scattered throughout the neighborhood. There are no signs on the former Catholic convent, nothing to indicate that inside are five New York City teens who committed felony assault, grand larceny, gun possession or another serious crime. Placed here by a judge’s order, each is spending an average of seven...
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LA County women are getting healthier, study finds, but poverty and homelessness rise [DailyNews.com]
More of Los Angeles County’s women now have medical insurance, are employed, don’t smoke and are less likely to die of breast cancer or heart disease, according to a report released Wednesday. But an increased number also live in poverty, are homeless and have difficulty accessing health care. The concluding message behind the data compiled in a triennial report by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is that while many gains have been made for women in the last several years,...
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New Study Shows Communities Can Reduce the Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences [Mathematic Policy Research]
[ Ed. note: Following is a media release published yesterday by Mathematica Policy Research. This follows on the heals of the report, "Self-Healing Communities" that Laura Porter, Dr. Robert Anda and WHO wrote for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Both reports and executive summaries are attached to this blog post. Both reports are significant, because they show that community ACEs initiatives -- with "modest investments and limited staff" -- are solving some of our most intractable...
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‘None of us will ever be the same’: Survivors of 2017 Tubbs Fire face long-term trauma [Sacramento Bee]
BY PANCHALAY CHALERMKRAIVUTH pchalermkraivuth@sacbee.com August 3, 2019 Robert “Priest” Morgan hasn’t slept without a cocktail of pills since the night he says God kicked him in the head to wake him up – the night he opened the front door of his Santa Rosa mobile home to see a fire engine, a few people running up and down Sahara Street and screaming. “The sky looked like the Fourth of July,” he said. “The entire park except for my street was an inferno.” It wasn’t Independence Day – it was...
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One City Heights School is Doing the Nearly Impossible: Closing the Achievement Gap [voiceofsandiego.com]
By Will Huntsberry, Voice of San Diego, March 2, 2020 In San Diego, as with the rest of the country, poverty tracks closely with test scores. The social science is clear: Poorer children are not less bright. They lack the same opportunities as their more affluent peers to gain cognitive skills from the moment they are born. The most pressing question in education has always been whether schools can supercharge the learning process enough to compensate for these class inequities. At Edison...
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Overview of the 2016 Project on Behavioral Health Services For Children and Youth in California [dhcs.ca.gov]
The California Behavioral Health Planning Council (Council) is under federal and state mandate to advocate on behalf of adults with severe mental illness and children with severe emotional disturbance and their families. The Council is also statutorily required to advise the Legislature on behavioral health issues, policies and priorities in California. The Council advocates for an accountable system of seamless, responsive services that are strength-based, consumer and family member driven,...
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Positive Childhood Experiences offset ACEs: Q & A with Dr. Robert Sege about HOPE
Tufts University medical professor Dr. Robert Sege directs the Center for Community-Engaged Medicine and is nationally known for his research on effective health systems approaches that address social determinants of health. He is also the principal investigator for the HOPE framework (Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences).The HOPE framework is based on research that shows how positive childhood experiences can mitigate the effects of adverse childhood experiences. Sege and colleagues...
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Resources to Support Wildfires Response & Recovery in Northern and Southern California
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) Disaster Information Management Research Center (DIMRC) has compiled resources to assist with response and recovery from the latest California wildfires. Information guides on disaster topics and the Disaster Lit® database provide access to curated, reliable information from vetted Federal, state, and local governments and organizations. Key National Resources NLM Fires and Wildfires Information Guide Content syndication —embed the content of this page...
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Cities Take Issue With Unsettling Smoke [thesungazette.com]
By Reggie Ellis, The Sun-Gazette, October 23, 2019 After decades of declines in underage tobacco use, flavored vape juice is fueling a resurgence in teen smoking; forces cities to consider bans as school districts struggle to deal with vaping epidemic. When Sara Morton became an educator 20 years ago, underage cigarette use was at an all-time low. Kids who had grown up watching well-funded anti-smoking commercials on television seemed to have gotten the message. During her first few years as...
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California Wildfires Have Disrupted School For A Quarter Of A Million Students [NPR.org]
Photo: In Santa Rosa, a playground stands across the street from where recent wildfires reduced homes to rubble. Nick Giblin/AP The wildfires in Northern California cut across a wide swath of the state — including dozens of school districts, hundreds of schools and hundreds of thousands of students. At one point, classes were canceled for 260,000 students in 600 schools . And while schools are slowly coming back on line, there remain many that may not resume classes for days or even weeks.
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How parents and teachers can calm kids’ Getty fire anxiety (latimes.com)
Across the state, families have fled fires in the dark of night amid howling winds; thousands have huddled in evacuation centers, their cars packed with valuables. It smells like smoke, and ash drifts through the air. School days are canceled, routines disrupted and children are suffering mentally — even if they’re not physically at risk from a fire, mental health counselors and parents said. School healthcare workers said the increase in destructive annual wildfires comes at a time when...
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In San Diego, Lessons on Rebuilding From a Neighborhood Once Ravaged by Fire (nytimes.com)
When the scent of smoke from wildfires in the nearby hills began wafting through the San Diego air once again last week, residents in Scripps Ranch immediately thought back to 2003, when hundreds of homes burned to the ground. Now, every time a fire gets within 100 miles — as it did again this week — residents ready a box with important documents, bottles of medication and copies of treasured photographs. They once again found themselves glued to the news, watching with the knowing sorrow...
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Re: 4CA Policymaker Education Day is Back!
I can't make the meeting on May 1 but the attached chapter has information starting in p211 that shows the profound effect that skillful asking about ACEs has on subsequent medical care. The implications for the MediCal budget are in the multi-billion dollar range.
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Re: OPEN for Public Comment: Prop 56 - Trauma Screenings
It is not clear to me what the $29. is for and who will be billed by whom. Having done this with 440,000 adults over a multi-year period, I would like to suggest that the State create a truly comprehensive medical history questionnaire posted on the Internet and that includes the ACE Questions. This would be free and people would list their names after disconnecting, ensuring their privacy. The output printed at home would consist of an iteration of all Yes answers, organized by body system.
Calendar Event
Storytelling as empowerment
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Re: Storytelling as empowerment
when i click on the link for tickets, the next page says it ended. help? Love, Peace & Blessings, lorraine * "Only everybody-all-at-once can change the current chaos." - Adi Da* http://www.da-peace.org/ more about Adi Da: http://www.adidam.in On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 6:12 PM ACEsConnection < communitymanager@acesconnection.com> wrote:
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Bringing hope and healing to all of us through all of us.
It is happening. The grand experiment of full school distance learning is on for teachers and families of California. Educators have been asked to source some sort of magic to heal the disease of a broken educational system as it crumbles under the pressures of inconsistent and insufficient funding, tremendous variance in school community capacity for distance learning, and countless organizational structures being taxed to their limits. The pandemic continues, job losses increase, and fires...
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An extraordinary summer of crises for California's farmworkers [nationalgeographic.com]
By Alejandra Borunda, National Geographic, September 1, 2020 Rosa Villegas woke up at two in the morning on a late August Monday to make her way to the lettuce fields in California’s south Salinas Valley, where she was scheduled to start bagging heads of romaine at 4 a.m. The sky overhead wasn’t its usual dark, star-dotted self as she walked to her car. Instead, it glowed a sickly red, colored by the fires burning on the flanks of the Santa Lucia mountains, just a few miles west. “It was...
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CTIPP invites everyone to participate in calls on pressing national issues, starting this Wednesday on climate
The monthly Zoom virtual gathering sponsored by national organization “ Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) ” will complete this year’s series by tackling some of the most pressing issues this country is facing. With a focus the role of trauma-informed approaches to help manage solutions to these challenges, the CTIPP-CAN (Community Advocacy Network) meetings for the remainder of the year will address climate this Wednesday followed by policing in October, peer...
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Even when the smoke clears, schools find student trauma can linger (Lake County Record Bee)
By Carolyn Jones, September 29, 2020, Lake County Record Bee. Schools can serve as a hub for an entire community after a disaster, experts say For some students, the fire is only the beginning. The nightmares, the grief and an all-consuming dread can persist for months or even years. That’s what teachers and school employees have observed among students in California’s fire-ravaged areas, especially Sonoma and Butte counties, where deadly wildfires have struck repeatedly in recent years.
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The Long-Lasting Mental Health Effects of Wildfires [outsideonline.com]
By Jane C. Hu, Outside Online, December 3, 2020 When Aimee Gray woke up on a Sunday morning in October 2017, she decided she was finally going to get a new pair of shoes. She’d worn holes in her favorite Skechers, so when she and her husband headed into town for groceries, she stopped in the shoe store and treated herself to two new pairs. As they drove back to the home they rented on Bennett Ridge Road, in the hills southeast of Santa Rosa, California, her husband remarked on the strange,...
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Wildfire Smoke Is Poisoning California's Kids. Some Pay a Higher Price. [nytimes.com]
By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times, December 2020 The fires sweeping across millions of acres in California aren’t just incinerating trees and houses. They’re also filling the lungs of California’s children with smoke, with potentially grave effects over the course of their lives. The effects are not evenly felt. While California as a whole has seen a steady uptick in smoke days in recent years, counties in the state’s Central Valley, which is already cursed with some of the most...
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California Child Wellbeing Coalition e-Guide
The California Department of Public Health, Injury and Prevention Branch (CDPH/IVPB) and the California Department of Social Service, Office of Child Abuse Prevention’s (CDSS/OCAP), Essentials for Childhood (EfC) Initiative are excited to share a newly developed document titled “California Child Wellbeing Coalition e-Guide.” This e-Guide was developed for all those who are serving Californians and interested in collaborating or connecting with local coalitions, boards, and other organized...
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Unseen scars of childhood truama [knowablemagazine.org]
Twenty years of research have established the connection between adverse childhood experiences and long-term health. Now researchers are looking for ways to measure the biology behind the correlation and try to reverse it.
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Research from San Bernardino pediatric population
Sharing our recent publication of data on ACEs and immune cell gene expression
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To heal a community, let its members be the agents of change
Recently, the United States reached a sobering milestone. The COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 500,000 people, surpassing the number of US soldiers who died in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. The pandemic has closed schools, turned urban areas into ghost towns, and caused massive job loss, long food lines, more homelessness, and isolation for many shuttered indoors in response to orders by public health officials. And 2020 also witnessed numerous instances of...
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Juneteenth: Commemoration of Racial Trauma and African American Resilience
The Juneteenth flag created by Ben Haith, founder of the National Juneteenth Celebration Foundation (NJCF) in 1997. (Source: Chicago.gov ) Juneteenth refers to the June 19 th date commemorating emancipation in the United States that is marked by annual celebration of African American freedom and achievement . On June 16 th of this week Congress voted to establish Juneteenth as a federal holiday to commemorate emancipation - the first new official federal holiday approved by Congress since...
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Climate change anxiety: How to stop spiraling and make a difference [mashable.com]
By Rebecca Ruiz, Mashable, July 11, 2021 The monarch butterfly, known for its distinctive orange color, is now on the verge of extinction. Numbering in the millions in the 1980s, the monarch population has been in steep decline thanks to habitat loss, pesticide use , and climate change . So, in fall 2020, when I spied several monarch caterpillars feasting on a neighbor's milkweed plant, I excitedly pointed them out to my young daughters. We soon noticed the caterpillars inching their way...