Blog

We've long known that there's something cyclical about poverty, chronic drug abuse and other life-defeating circumstances. We in Kern County hear descriptors like "Appalachia of the West" and shrug, often chalking up the conditions that create cultures of pervasive hopelessness to laziness or ignorance or Darwinian selection. The widespread perception about these ills, particularly common in the poverty-wracked Kern County communities of the Kern River Valley, Oildale and Taft, is that...

An invisible disease has been killing middle-aged white people throughout the southern San Joaquin Valley at higher rates than ever before. The disease can’t be detected by a blood test or remedied with a prescription. It’s been referred to as one of the country’s greatest unaddressed public health crises and a rising “epidemic of white death.” The disease is toxic stress, a result of childhood trauma and other environmental stressors like poverty, food insecurity and basic living needs not...

  Between 60 percent and 62 percent of Kern County adults surveyed have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience traumatic enough to affect their lives years later. That's according to the report, "A Hidden Crisis: Findings on...