Health & place
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Single room accommodation (SRA) housing is among the only forms of accessible housing to marginalized women who use illicit drugs in many urban settings. However, SRA housing environments may create specific health and drug risks for women. Little research has examined the gendered mechanisms contributing to housing vulnerability for women who use drugs and the subsequent ways they aim to mitigate harm. ⋯ Post-eviction, women faced pronounced vulnerability to harm which reinforced their social and spatial marginality within a drug scene. Collectively, women's experiences within SRAs highlight how the hybrid forms of disciplinary mechanisms used within these housing environments significantly impacted women's experiences of harm. Greater attention to the impacts of housing and building policies on women who use drugs is needed to better address the morbidity and mortality of this population.
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Neighborhood-level socioeconomic disadvantage and lower individual-level socioeconomic status are associated with poorer sleep health in adults. However, few studies have examined the association between neighborhood-level disadvantage and sleep in adolescents, a population at high-risk for sleep disturbances. ⋯ Findings suggest that subjective and objective neighborhood characteristics may affect the sleep health of older adolescents, with certain demographic subgroups being particularly vulnerable.
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We examined associations between state-level measures of structural racism and infant mortality among black and white populations across the US. Overall and race-specific infant mortality rates in each state were calculated from national linked birth and infant death records from 2010 to 2013. Structural racism in each state was characterized by racial inequity (ratio of black to white population estimates) in educational attainment, median household income, employment, imprisonment, and juvenile custody. ⋯ Decreasing racial inequity in education was associated with an almost 10% reduction in the black infant mortality rate (RR=0.92, 95% CI=0.85, 0.99). None of the structural racism measures were significantly associated with infant mortality among whites. Structural racism may contribute to the persisting racial inequity in infant mortality.
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Racial health disparities continue to be a serious problem in the United States and have been linked to contextual factors, including racial segregation. In some cases, including breast cancer survival, racial disparities appear to be worsening. ⋯ We then examine spatial patterns of these indices and the association between these new measures and breast cancer survival among Black/African American women in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin metropolitan area. These new measures can be used to examine relationships between mortgage discrimination and patterns of disease throughout the United States.
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In Uganda, hypertension and diabetes have only recently been included in the health policy agenda. As they become treatable disorders, they take on more distinct contours in people's minds. ⋯ The response to the AIDS epidemic in Uganda provides an important context for, and contrast with, the emergence of hypertension and diabetes as social phenomena. Ethnographic fieldwork shows the interplay between experience of these conditions and the political economy of treatability.