The University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute in cooperation with King’s alma mater Morehouse College in Atlanta will kick off the first of the webcasts at 10 a.m. EDT on Friday, April 4, when experts from UF and Morehouse, along with institutions in China, India, Kenya and South Africa, discuss and share in real-time King’s meaning for the 21st century, said James Oliverio, director of UF’s Digital Worlds Institute. The other three programs are also scheduled at 10 a.m. on successive Fridays in April, and all can be viewed on the Internet at www.worldhouse.morehouse.edu.

In his “World House” speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, King said “modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think. Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.”

The UF-Morehouse international conversation will use technology to bridge that divide, Oliverio said. “We’re going to have a cultural exchange, a scholarly dialogue and a motivational call to action for the students of today to carry forward the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who proceeded with the nonviolent resistance movement of Mahatma Gandhi in India and influenced Nelson Mandela in South Africa,” he said. “Using technology to literally connect places across the globe simultaneously, we will create a shared virtual space around the world on the network and have performances and workshops over that global platform.”

The outreach developed from a collaboration between UF and Morehouse College, the recipient of about 10,000 pieces of Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal writings in 2006. Terry Mills, a former UF dean who moved to Morehouse last year to become the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, said the idea came in discussions he had with Oliverio about how the two institutions might use the acquisition in educational programming.

The innovativeness of the technology at Digital Worlds Institute, which Mills called the “Imac Theater of Videoconferencing” for its ability to allow multiple partners around the globe to engage in an interactive, unified virtual space, made UF the natural choice to help produce the program, he said. “There are also geographic and historical reasons for the connection, notably Gainesville’s close proximity to St. Augustine where Dr. King had led freedom marches as well as its location near the site of the Rosewood massacre,” Mills said.

The purpose of the global discussions is not only to remind the world of King’s legacy but to keep his vision alive, as his message continues to have relevance today, Oliverio said.

“This is a memorial to Dr. King, not just in the sense of looking backward to some academic papers in a museum, but honoring his life’s work in the hopes that students of today at Morehouse, UF and the other participating institutions will reassess their involvement with their own societies in the same way that Dr. King took a stand against oppression of African Americans in the United States,” he said. “Even at the beginning of the 21st century human kind is still butchering each other in tribal conflicts over economic materialism and resources.”

Although King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is well-known among college students, many are not familiar with the “World House” concept mentioned in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech and his writings where he discusses the need to fight racism, war and poverty, he said.

The topic of the April 4 90-minute session is King’s challenge to citizens in “transcending tribe, race, class, nation and religion to embrace the vision of World House.” Speaker presentations as well as performances by artists, dancers and musicians are planned from each participating location, which, besides UF and Morehouse, are the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India; Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya; and the U.S. Embassy in Johannesburg, South Africa. UF presenters from the Digital Worlds Institute’s Research, Education and Visualization Environment in 101 Norman Hall include Stephanie Evans, an African American studies and women’s studies professor, and drummer Mohamed DaCosta, a lecturer in UF’s College of Fine Arts School of Theatre and Dance. The 60-minute April 11 session will feature UF social anthropologist Faye Harrison and poet Sharon Burney of UF’s African American Studies Program.

“Many people who are involved in the labor movement see African-American workers, other minorities and women as being the key to any hopes of unions recovering some of their organizational strength,” said Robert Zieger, a UF history professor. His new book “For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865” was published this fall by University Press of Kentucky.

With the shift from an industrial to a service-based economy, growing numbers of jobs are emerging in places such as hospitals, nursing homes and entertainment complexes, with minorities taking many of these positions, Zieger said. “If unions don’t organize these workers, they’re not going to be able to sustain a very viable and extensive labor movement,” he said.

As organized labor continues its decline by representing an increasingly smaller segment of the American work force, a bright spot has been the Service Employees International Union, which counts janitors, hospital and nursing home workers and home care staffers among its members, Zieger said. “They are the fastest growing union in the country, with about a million and a half members, and they have had a number of outstanding successes in recent years,” he said.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union, which represents police officers, building inspectors, grounds workers, maintenance workers and administrative and clerical workers and others in the nonfederal public sector, also has a large membership, much of it consisting of women and people of color, he said.

“It’s important to recognize that even in a state like Florida, which we don’t normally think of as being a union-friendly state, there are 400,000 union members, and they, along with their families, represent an important potential political voting bloc,” he said.

In the 2000 presidential election, a coalition of organized labor and blacks worked together to target the minority vote, Zieger said. The formation of this black-labor coalition is an important historical development that has received little attention, he said.

“If a Democratic president is elected in 2008, that, along with legislation now pending before Congress that would make the process of union recognition easier, could generate a rebirth of organized labor,” he said. “If it does, it is likely to feature minority workers.”

Until the 1930s, organized labor’s record on race, particularly that of the American Federation of Labor and the railroad unions, was poor, Zieger said. Many unions explicitly barred blacks from membership and even those that did not actively discourage them from joining maintained collective bargaining agreements with employers that excluded blacks, he said.

An exception was the integrated United Mine Workers, the largest union in the first half of the 20th century, which had black officers, even in the South, he said.

In the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, actively recruited blacks to work in the rapidly growing auto, steel, textile, meatpacking and rubber tire industries that marked the rise of industrial unionism, Zieger said. “CIO leaders realized that blacks had come to play an important part in these mass-production industries and that if you wanted to organize these industries, you had to organize black workers,” he said.

Even so, blacks tended to occupy less-skilled positions in the factories and often felt that even those unions dedicated to the principles of racial egalitarianism, such as the United Auto Workers Union, weren’t sufficiently responsive to black workers, Zieger said.

“There were tensions going through the post-World War II period and these continue in some ways even today,” he said. “But I think if you look at the current AFL-CIO, which is the primary labor organization in the country, with headquarters in Washington, it seeks to be very responsive to black workers.”

Paul Ortiz, a community studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wrote “Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920,” said Zieger’s book is a crowning achievement. “Professor Zieger’s ‘For Jobs and Freedom’ is the premiere historical synthesis on the complex relationships between African Americans and labor unions from the 19th century to the present,” he said. “It will be the standard text in this field for years to come.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Restrictions to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States are having the perverse effect of encouraging those who are already here to stay by any means necessary, a new University of Florida study finds.

The culprit is tightened post 9-ll security, which has prompted immigrants to skip visits to their homelands because of the risk of not being allowed back into the U.S., said UF anthropology professor Maxine L. Margolis.

“These draconian measures do not deter undocumented immigrants from trying to enter the country so much as discourage those who are already here from returning home,” said Margolis, whose research is scheduled to be published in the January issue of the journal Human Organization. “The restrictions are doing exactly the opposite of what they intend to do by locking these people in place.”

The research is based on interviews with Brazilian immigrants and applies to other nationalities as well, Margolis said. “Whether they are Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans or any other group with a large undocumented population, they are experiencing the same problems,” she said.

Unlike in the past, when most illegal immigrants made a single, permanent move to the United States, in the last few decades they have tended to move back and forth between their home and host countries for a variety of economic and social reasons, Margolis said. Many foreigners come here temporarily for jobs paying anywhere from four to 10 times as much money as they would earn in their native countries in order to support their families, but they may return home briefly to see a sick relative or to attend a family wedding or funeral, she said.

It has become increasingly difficult, however, for immigrants to leave the United States and return since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the government tightened restrictions for tourist visas, increased deportation of undocumented foreigners, strengthened border patrols and made it harder for immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and other legal documents, she said.

Many of these people have children, investments, jobs and apartments in this country and don’t want to risk being unable to return, Margolis said. Even with valid passports and visas, they can be denied re-entry if they previously overstayed the limit on their visa, she said.

One Brazilian immigrant, who owned a floor tile company in New York and had lived in the state for several years with his wife and American-born daughter, flew to Brazil when he learned his elderly father was seriously ill, Margolis said. On his return, he was stopped at JFK International Airport and was deported to Brazil for having previously overstayed his tourist visa, she said.

Some undocumented immigrants have found creative ways to get around the regulations and avoid detection, often at considerable expense, she said.

One Brazilian woman living in North Carolina who was desperate to visit her family returned to the U.S. through the Caribbean islands where she boarded a cruise ship bound for Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, Margolis said. Correctly assuming authorities were unlikely to search for illegal immigrants aboard cruise ships, she got through with her Brazilian passport and flew back to the states, she said.

Margolis’ study also revealed immigrants developing schemes to circumvent the requirements for driver’s licenses. Typically, Brazilian immigrants in the Northeast load up in minivans and drive to states such as Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina, which do not require a green card or valid Social Security card for a license, but some have traveled as far as the West Coast, she said.

So far none of the proposed federal, state or local immigration bills has included a provision that would allow immigrants to travel home to visit family and friends and be assured re-entry into the United States, she said.

Conrad Kottak, a University of Michigan anthropology professor, said Margolis “provides a valuable case study of how one group of transnational migrants — Brazilians in the United States — have been affected by changes in American border policies since the 9/11 attacks. Many of her findings no doubt apply as well to other new immigrant communities.”

The Sunshine State produces half the fresh tomatoes eaten in the United States. The task requires more than 30,000 farm workers, growers and packers — all of whom will be required to undergo training in food safety practices developed by the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and the Florida Tomato Exchange, in cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

The effort has gained strong support from state Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, who today announced $253,000 in USDA Specialty Crops Block Grant funding toward the training.

The program could begin as early as this month. Similar programs will extend to leafy greens, berries and melons next year.

“People are worried about how safe their food is to eat, and this really is a case where education is a big step toward improving prevention,” said Keith Schneider, the IFAS food safety researcher who will lead the statewide effort to train tomato workers in the best ways to safely handle produce.

In a Sept. 7 report on foodborne illnesses in restaurants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that four widespread cases of raw-tomato-spread Salmonella infection between 2005 and 2006 led to more than 450 illnesses in 21 states.

Schneider said these kinds of reports aren’t signs of new and unheralded outbreaks, but rather examples of an improved ability to finger foodborne pathogens as the culprits.

“Our food is safer than ever,” he said. “But part of that safety — and a bigger part of improving that safety — is being able to detect when these pathogens are a problem, thinking about how to solve that problem and then taking that to the growers and packagers.”

“There are elements as simple as the fact that tomatoes need to go through something like a chlorine bath after being picked,” he said. “But there are a lot of details ranging from worker conditions to how fast the product is shipped — they all need to be taken care of if that salad or taco you’re going to get at a local restaurant is safe to eat.”

The statewide mandate comes from the tomato industry working with state and federal regulators.

“This is a step forward that this state’s tomato industry saw it needed to take, and so essentially took it upon itself to make food safety a priority,” said Martha Roberts, the former Florida deputy commissioner of agriculture, now special assistant to the director of the Florida Experiment Station, IFAS.

Many tomato growers already follow safe food-handling practices, she said.
“But there are still some that can use our help — this isn’t necessarily going to be a simple task to reach everyone now covered by these requirements,” she said.

Roberts added that new tools will need to be developed, such as training materials for the large number of Spanish-speaking workers.

Additionally, the CDC reports state that “current knowledge of mechanisms of tomato contamination and methods of eradication of Salmonella in tomatoes is incomplete,” thus making “tomato safety research a priority.”

The tools and expertise developed by IFAS for tomato training will be applied to other produce next year when similar education will be instituted on a volunteer basis for the leafy greens, berry and melon industries.

“It seems like every other day you see something in the news about food contamination. If it’s not tomatoes, it’s spinach…or peanut butter, or dog food. I think most people ask themselves ‘will this ever stop?’” Schneider said. “The truth is that there our food supply is safer than it’s ever been, but there will always be issues with food safety — it’s all of our jobs to keep trying to make it better.”

In the study of Hispanics enrolled in Medicare-managed care programs, Spanish-speaking patients reported more negative experiences with care than did English-speaking Hispanic patients. However, Spanish speakers in Florida were more satisfied with their health-care experiences than their peers in California and the New York/New Jersey region — a finding that could be attributed to the “Miami effect.” The results appear in the October issue of the journal Health Services Research.

“Eighty-six percent of the Spanish-speaking survey respondents from Florida live in the Miami area, the U.S. city with the highest proportion of Hispanic residents,” said lead investigator Robert Weech-Maldonado, an associate professor in the department of health services research, management and policy at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. “Spanish is one of the primary languages in Miami and there is an excellent network of Spanish-speaking health providers.”

The study is the first to examine health-care experiences of Hispanics — a population vulnerable to health disparities — by regional and language differences.

The Medicare-managed care program, known as Medicare Advantage, was designed to give beneficiaries the option of enrolling in a variety of private plans, including health maintenance organizations, or HMOs, and preferred provider organizations, or PPOs. Patients’ out-of-pocket costs associated with the Medicare Advantage plans are relatively lower than those associated with traditional Medicare. Although most Medicare recipients use the traditional fee-for-service program, about 5 million Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in the managed care program in 2004, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than 50 percent of enrollees were Hispanic.

UF researchers analyzed data from the Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Providers and Systems Medicare managed care survey, conducted in 2002. The survey focused on five aspects of care: timeliness of care, provider communication, office staff helpfulness, getting needed care and health plan customer service. Of the more than 125,000 Medicare-managed care recipients who completed the survey, 7 percent, or 8,463, identified themselves as Hispanic. The survey was available in English and Spanish.

Hispanic English speakers reported more negative experiences than whites for all aspects of care except provider communication. Hispanic Spanish speakers had more negative experiences than whites with timeliness of care, office staff helpfulness and provider communication, suggesting language barriers in the clinical setting.

However, the researchers were surprised to find that Hispanic Spanish speakers reported more positive experiences with getting needed care than their English-speaking counterparts.

“This was an unexpected result; we haven’t found this in other studies,” Weech-Maldonado said. “We speculate that Spanish-speaking Hispanics, who may be less acculturated, could be more tolerant of the managed care practices because they are less familiar with the U.S. health-care system.”

Overall, the UF study demonstrates that differences in Hispanics’ health-care experiences exist and there is room for improvement, especially given the regional differences, Weech-Maldonado said.

“Our study suggests that managed care companies should implement quality improvement programs to reduce disparities in patient experiences with care, and one area they can target is interpreter services,” he said, adding that the Hispanic Spanish speakers in the survey were more likely than English speakers to rate their health as fair or poor. “Managed care health plans cover a well-diversified population, so it is important for them to look at disparities in care.”

The UF study provides important information for legislators and policymakers, said Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo, director of the Columbia University Center of the Health of Urban Minorities and co-founder of Latinos for National Health Insurance.

“This study will serve as a wake-up call to those minority organizations that have been strong advocates of these Medicare Advantage plans,” Carrasquillo said. “The analysis by Dr. Weech-Maldonado and colleagues shows that even with the extra payments these Medicare Advantage plans receive, large disparities between Latinos and non-Hispanic whites exist. On many measures, the extra money these plans are getting is not providing added value to Latinos in many parts of the country.”

A UF study described in the current issue of the Journal of Women’s Health revealed that when treated with either of two commonly prescribed medication strategies, Hispanic women achieved greater blood pressure control and were half as likely as white women to suffer adverse outcomes such as heart attack, stroke or death from any cause. The findings provide new data on a population of ethnic women who have been all but absent from such research.

“The study is unique in that we enrolled a substantial number of women and a substantial number of Hispanic patients from a variety of different Hispanic regions. As a result, we have data that enabled us to really fully evaluate the treatment of hypertension in this ethnically diverse group,” said Rhonda Cooper-DeHoff, a research assistant professor of medicine and associate director of the clinical research program in cardiovascular medicine at UF’s College of Medicine.

UF researchers studied 22,500 patients enrolled in the landmark International Verapamil SR-Trandolapril study, known as INVEST, and tracked a subgroup of 5,017 Hispanic and 4,710 non-Hispanic white women who were randomly assigned to a drug strategy containing either a sustained release form of the calcium antagonist verapamil or the beta-blocker atenolol.

The INVEST study enrolled more Hispanic patients than any other hypertension trial to date, Cooper-DeHoff said, and included Hispanic participants from the mainland United States, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, Panama and El Salvador.

After 24 months of follow-up, researchers found that both treatment strategies worked — and worked better in the Hispanic women.

Blood pressure control, defined at less than 140/90 mmHg, was achieved in 75 percent of Hispanic women and 68 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

And despite having a higher prevalence of diabetes at baseline, only 5.7 percent of Hispanic women suffered from adverse cardiovascular outcomes, compared with 12.3 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

Cooper-DeHoff attributed the low incidence of adverse outcomes to the fact that Hispanic women enrolled in the study were younger. If follow-up had continued over a longer period of time, adverse outcomes in the Hispanic women may have increased, she said.

However, these women remained at a lower risk for these outcomes even after statisticians adjusted for age and other factors. Still, she warned that problems associated with diabetes are likely to show up in these patients down the road.

“Diabetes in and of itself imparts significant future adverse cardiovascular outcomes,” she said. “These women should be well-monitored under the care of a physician so that they can prevent future cardiovascular morbidity and mortality related to hypertension and diabetes. Importantly, because the Hispanic population is the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the United States, Hispanics — especially women — should be included in future cardiovascular research in order to further our understanding of these high-risk diseases in Hispanic patients.”

High blood pressure is becoming more prevalent in women across all ethnic groups, Cooper-DeHoff said. And although it is thought to actually be less common in Hispanic women, fewer Hispanics have been included in hypertension studies.

“The INVEST findings are important because they demonstrate that this treatment for Hispanic women really pays off,” said Dr. Thomas G. Pickering, director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center. “They’ve got something really interesting with this study, and it wasn’t something that could have been expected.”

Pilgrimages, retreats and conventions are fast becoming one of the most reliable and desirable forms of income for the travel industry, said Harrison Pinckney IV. He did the study for his master’s thesis in UF’s department of tourism, recreation and sports management. Participants usually bring along their families and stretch their visits over three to four days, making a mini-vacation out of the affair by shopping, visiting museums and eating out, Pinckney said. He is now working on a doctoral degree in recreation, parks and tourism at Texas A&M University.

“There may be 80,000 people in town, but they’re not the kind to show up at bars and drive home drunk,” he said. “Because they have their kids with them they might go to a family restaurant or catch a movie afterwards.”

Another advantage of these religious gatherings is they are less likely to be canceled because many churches’ bylaws require congregations to hold annual conventions, Pinckney said. “After 9-11 there was a decline in attendance at professional conferences, but the numbers stayed steady for church conferences and in some cases even increased,” he said.

Although greater attendance at large church-oriented events is part of a broad social trend, Pinckney focused on black churches in his study. Historically, the church has assumed great importance to blacks because it was one of the few places in society that welcomed them, particularly before desegregation, when black-owned businesses were rare, he said.

“More than just a church, it became whatever the African-American community wanted it to be — a civic center, an after-school program and then a summer camp, even a homeless shelter,” he said.

Pinckney distributed questionnaires at seven Church of God by Faith congregations in Florida and Georgia during 2004. A total of 102 participants returned the surveys at the end of the church service or gave them to their pastors the following week.

Eighty-two percent reported having traveled to at least one Church of God by Faith national event. Sixty-one percent said they attended the four-day national convention for its entire length, while 26 percent said they were there for three days. The remaining 13 percent of churchgoers reported going for two days, with no one reporting a shorter visit.

While at the conventions, churchgoers reported sampling a variety of outside events such as sightseeing, shopping, visiting family or friends, and attending local performances or sporting events. The most popular activity was shopping– 30 percent reported heading for retail outlets –followed by visiting family and friends, 21 percent. Attending sports events was least popular, attracting only 5 percent.

Like major sporting events, church-oriented special events have been a financial boon to cities, with some attracting more than 80,000 visitors at a time and generating as much as $18 million for the local economy, Pinckney said. MegaFest, a religious event in Atlanta, draws about 150,000 a year, he said.

Lori Pennington-Gray, director for UF’s Center for Tourism Research and Development and a professor in UF’s tourism, recreation and sports management department who supervised Pinckney’s research, said the travel industry is recognizing the importance of such events by assembling more meeting planners specializing in this type of market, she said.

Because church-oriented special events operate on such a grand scale, they must usually be planned at least a couple of years in advance, Pennington-Gray said. “That makes them less vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy than segments of the leisure market where people’s discretionary income is affected if the economy takes a downturn,” she said.

DeWayne Woodring, executive director of the Religious Conference Management Association headquartered in Indianapolis, said a survey conducted by his organization shows that the number of religious meetings grew 195 percent in the past 10 years.

“Meetings are becoming more and more important because within this increasingly complex and global society, people feel a need to meet with others with whom they share a common faith, bond or purpose,” he said.

Educators have long believed that a “critical mass” of like students is vital to making minority students feel at home on college campuses – but this study, appearing in the February issue of the journal Research in Higher Education, may be the first to find statistical evidence to confirm that belief.

“These data suggest that if colleges are really serious about reaching out to minority groups, they need to think in terms of clusters, not individuals,” said professor Linda Serra Hagedorn, chairwoman of UF’s Department of Educational Administration and Policy. “If you’re the only Latino or African-American on your college campus, you can certainly succeed academically – but if you’re surrounded by people who share your cultural background, your chances of success improve.”

Hagedorn is the lead investigator and director of the Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students (or TRUCCS) project, a multiyear, comprehensive study of the educational outcomes of 5,000 community college students at the nine community college campuses in the Los Angeles area. Investigators queried the students on their backgrounds, attitudes and experiences, and compared that data to the students’ transcript records.

When they looked at students who self-identified as Hispanic, the researchers found that students at largely Hispanic community colleges had better educational outcomes than students at colleges where Hispanic students were rare. The differences were small but statistically significant. Age, involvement in campus activities and even ability to speak English were less predictive of Hispanic students’ success.

Researchers have long suspected that the size of a school’s minority population plays a key role in the academic experience of minority students. The education field has even borrowed a term from nuclear physics – “critical mass” – to describe the point at which minority students become plentiful enough to change the campus climate and give a school a more welcoming feel.

The study produced some surprising findings. For instance, while students at colleges with large Hispanic colleges were more likely to stay in school and succeed academically, they were also less likely to enroll in remedial English or math classes.

In schools where Spanish speakers are few, teachers may be more likely to refer students to remedial classes, Hagedorn said. And a large community of bilingual students may help struggling English speakers learn the language without formal intervention.

The researchers also found that first-generation immigrants – students born in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries – tended to do better in school than students born in the U.S. to immigrant parents.

“One might expect students who grew up in the U.S. to perform better because they understand the social climate better,” Hagedorn said. “But in fact, many immigrant students were in very good schools in Mexico before they moved here – while many students who were born in the U.S. live in impoverished urban communities with substandard school systems.”

Alberto Cabrera, a University of Maryland education professor, co-authored an earlier large-scale study which found that parental involvement was one of the best indicators of academic success among Latino students. Cabrera said Hagedorn’s study sheds new light on his findings.

“Latino students often rely on their families for social support in school because they do not feel represented among the faculty or students,” Cabrera said. “In light of Linda Hagedorn’s findings, I would hypothesize that a critical mass of Latino students can create a support system that mimics the effect of support from one’s family.”

The study reinforces the benefits of the community college system. Hagedorn notes that among the colleges in the study, every institution with a large Hispanic population was located in a largely Hispanic neighborhood – providing additional social support for students.

“They’re called ‘community’ colleges for a reason,” Hagedorn said. “They’re supposed to serve the community in which they reside, and create a comfortable learning environment for students in that community.”

“Parents need to be able to talk to a counselor about their child’s progress,” said Professor Harry Daniels, chairman of the counselor education department at UF’s College of Education and a co-author of the study. “They need a place in the school system where they feel safe, where they feel their child’s needs are understood.

“These things may seem small, but they have a huge effect on academic success.”

Daniels and co-author Sondra Smith-Adcock, an associate professor of counselor education at UF, led a team that surveyed school services administrators in school districts across Florida on the counseling provided to Hispanic students. The researchers published their results in this month’s issue of the journal Professional School Counseling.

Fifty-nine percent of the administrators said their Hispanic students were at risk of not receiving needed counseling. Eighty-four percent said their district needed more Spanish-speaking bilingual counselors to address the personal needs of students, and 80 percent agreed that their district needed more Spanish-speaking counselors to guide students in making career decisions.

The results, researchers say, were worrisome but not surprising. Studies in the mid-1990s showed that while Hispanics made up one-eighth of Florida’s student population at the time, only 2 percent of school counselors were Hispanic. In the past decade, Smith-Adcock said, every single county has seen its Hispanic population increase by at least 30 percent – but there is no evidence of a similar increase in the number of Hispanic counselors.
“When school administrators think of the needs of Hispanic students, they tend to think in terms of language acquisition for new immigrants,” Smith-Adcock said. “There’s a whole stratum of services that is being missed.”

Hispanic students who face mental health issues may find it difficult to trust or open up to non-Hispanic counselors, and often need someone who speaks their first language, Smith-Adcock said.

However, mental health counseling is just one responsibility for counselors, Smith-Adcock said. They also help students define their career goals and navigate the increasingly complex academic world in a way that will help them achieve their goals. These services are particularly difficult to provide students who are new arrivals to the country, or whose parents are first-generation immigrants with limited English skills.

“Simply choosing electives is a new experience for many people in the Latino community,” said Jennifer Gonzales Young, a district-level bilingual counselor for Hillsborough County Public Schools. “In many Spanish-speaking countries, students take a prescribed schedule of courses, and don’t get to choose their classes. Some parents are overwhelmed by the system, and if it isn’t explained to them properly, their children can miss some important opportunities.”

Similar problems can arise when students apply to college, apply for financial aid or try to interpret the results of standardized tests, Young said.

Hillsborough County has one of the fastest-growing Hispanic populations in the state. Young said there are an estimated 51,000 Hispanic children in Hillsborough County’s school system, and more than 36,000 speak Spanish as their first language. Until recently, Young was one of only a few Hispanic counselors serving that population.

“There seems to be a shortage of bilingual counselors everywhere in the state, and Hillsborough is just one example,” UF’s Daniels said. “At the elementary level, for instance, the ideal ratio is one counselor per 300 students. I don’t know of a single place in Florida that comes close to that ratio for Spanish-speaking students.”

UF is attempting to relieve the shortage. The College of Education recently completed a three-year, grant-funded program that brought 17 bilingual Hillsborough County teachers to UF to study for the educational specialist degree in counselor education. All of those teachers were Spanish-speaking and most were either of Hispanic origin or had prior experience living in a Spanish-speaking country.

Daniels said the project, titled “Consejeros: Levantando El Pueblo” (or “Counselors Lifting the Community”) was more than simply a degree program. Students followed a culturally relevant course of study designed to give equal focus to the three major influences in the life of Hispanic families: the school, the family and the community.

Based on the success of that project, Daniels and Smith-Adcock are considering the creation of a permanent distance education program that would allow bilingual teachers to study for a counselor education degree in the county where they work.

“Many bilingual teachers are already serving as a contact point between the school system and the families of their Hispanic students,” he said. “By becoming full-time counselors, they can fill that role more effectively, for more people.”

“A man and a woman of different races in the movies have a greater statistical probability of dying than of getting married or dating seriously,” said Nadia Ramoutar, who did the research for her doctoral dissertation in mass communications at UF and is now a communications professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine.

White women have not appeared in an interracial relationship in a top-selling film since “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, she said. American Indian women have not been portrayed this way since “Dances with Wolves” in 1995, and the last time an American Indian man was part of such a union was in “The Trial of Billy Jack” in 1974.

The findings are important, Ramoutar said, because popular films do more than entertain: They are a powerful means of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

“The results of this study sadly show that racial and ethnic segregation in romantic relationships is heavily practiced in Hollywood blockbuster films and has become more common rather than less common in the past four decades,” Ramoutar said.

The study analyzed interracial relationships in blockbuster Hollywood films between 1967 and 2005, beginning with the landmark social commentary “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Ramoutar selected the 15 top-grossing box office hits of each year for her sample. Of these, she found 36 films with interracial couples.

Forty-two percent of the women in such partnerships were victims of violence. “Lying on the table like a piece of sushi” is how police described Cheryl, the drug-addicted, sexually deviant female character in “Rising Sun” responsible for three men’s deaths who dies herself.

The scripts use certain interracial combinations more than others and avoid some entirely, the study found. No Arabic or eastern Indian appears in any film, for example.

The most common racial coupling was a white male with an Asian female, who was often portrayed as a “model minority,” in that she was smarter, more compliant and less sexually aggressive than women of other races, Ramoutar said.

But while Asians were the most common women of color, representing nearly one-quarter of interracial romances, Asian men were practically invisible, Ramoutar said. The only major Asian male in such a relationship in nearly four decades was Jackie Chan’s character in the 2001 movie “Rush Hour 2,” she said.

And a Hispanic woman playing a CIA double agent who briefly falls in love with Chan’s character marks the first time a Hispanic female appears in an interracial relationship at all during those years, said Ramoutar.

Hispanic men also were marginalized, cast in only three movies, Ramoutar said. The women they were paired with, including Michele Pfeiffer’s character Elvira in “Scarface,” were drug addicts with no purpose in life but getting high, she said.

“Despite the large number of women actively employed in the American workplace, the most commonly portrayed occupation of all the women in these films is that they have no identifiable occupation,” Ramoutar said. The second most popular occupation was working as a spy, followed by a tie between prostitute and entertainer, she said.

While white women in interracial relationships came across as either morally corrupt or socially inept or as victims of physical or sexual abuse, women of color who become involved with white men were often presented as erotic, exotic and possessing exceptional talents, she said.

“(Chinese-American) Alex in ‘Charlie’s Angels’ is a sky-diving, computer-hacking, black belt martial artist who can defeat a room full of men – her only misgiving is that she is a bad cook,” she said. “And Charlotte Lewis’ character in ‘The Golden Child’ can leap over tall walls or from high buildings, usually just wearing Eddie Murphy’s shirt and her underwear.”

The majority of black women on the big screen were pale skinned like Halle Berry, with dark-skinned actresses rarely cast except as villainesses or femme fatales, she said.

Terry Francis, a film studies professor at Yale University, praised Ramoutar’s choice of a topic. “It might be the quintessential American narrative,” she said.

Anemia, a reduction in the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood that can cause fatigue, weakness and dizziness, is common in old age. But its signs are often subtle, and doctors need to be sure they carefully consider it as they evaluate older patients, say study authors, writing recently in The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences.

“Considering anemia should be part of an overall patient’s risk assessment even if the person is without symptoms or apparent clinical disease,” said Marco Pahor, director of the University of Florida’s Institute on Aging and a study’s co-investigator.

The study revealed that even a mild case of anemia increases an elderly person’s risk, indicating that treatment recommendations may need to be adjusted for older patients, Pahor said. Researchers found an association between late-life anemia and heart conditions, cancer, infectious diseases and diabetes.

The World Health Organization defines anemia as a concentration of the oxygen-ferrying molecule hemoglobin that is below 12 grams per deciliter in women, and below 13 grams per deciliter in men.

“Those older patients having mild anemia have not been considered at higher risk, but our data show that even those patients with low or even close to normal range do have higher risk for death and hospitalization and they should be considered for more in-depth screening for other conditions,” Pahor said.

To more fully understand its detrimental health effects, the researchers studied the relationship of anemia to hospitalization and death in 3,607 people aged 71 years or older who participated in the National Institute on Aging-sponsored Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly. About 13 percent of people 70 or older are anemic, and those percentages increase with age. Most cases occur in association with underlying diseases such as stomach ulcers, chronic infections, cancer, chronic kidney ailments and congestive heart failure or due to malnutrition or iron deficiency. However, up to a third of the time, anemia is not attributable to these factors, so people with pre-existing conditions that could have caused it were excluded from the study.

In the study, 451 participants were anemic. They were more likely to be older black men and women with a lower body mass index. During the four-year follow-up period, 37 percent of those with anemia died, compared with 22 percent of the other study participants. In addition, two-thirds of anemic participants were hospitalized at some point in the study period; only half of those without anemia were.

“We hope this study will promote clinical awareness of anemia as a risk factor for other conditions,” Pahor said. “It is a risk factor for mortality, hospitalization, loss of independence, lower muscle strength and increased inflammation. We would like to do further studies to find out whether, if you could correct anemia, could you prevent these events?”

The first step toward correcting anemia is to, when possible, identify and then treat the underlying disease causing it, Pahor said. Treatment also may involve giving iron when iron levels are low, vitamin supplements to replace folate and vitamin B12 in people with poor eating habits, erythropoietin to increase red blood cell production in people with kidney problems and antibiotics to treat infections.

Dr. Paulo Henrique M. Chaves, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University’s Center on Aging and Health, said the paper provides insight into anemia as a strong prognostic factor for major health complications.

“A little bit of anemia is often perceived as a benign finding in older adults,” Chaves said. “However, results from this study by Penninx, Pahor and colleagues – as well as consistent and recently published findings that link mild anemia and even low-normal hemoglobin levels to a status of increased frailty and greater functional decline in older adults – suggest otherwise, at least in terms of prognostic significance.

“What remains to be established now is whether pharmacological correction of mild anemia in older adults may help slow the disablement process, preventing the onset and progression of frailty and disability, improving quality of life and prolonging survival,” he added. “Randomized clinical trials will be necessary to address these important questions.”

The multicenter team spearheading the current study was a partnership with industry and the federal government. It included researchers from the National Institute on Aging, UF’s Institute on Aging, the Netherlands and Ortho Biotech Products in Bridgewater, N.J., which manufactures Procrit, a hormone that stimulates red blood cell production. Pahor has served as a consultant for the company.

The research was conducted in Mexico, but many of these pesticides, although they go by a different name, have the same ingredients and are used in the United States, potentially giving Americans the same risks, said Elizabeth Guillette, a UF anthropology professor who led the research.

The connection from mother to child was found among Sonoran Mayan girls whose mothers were exposed to chemical spraying. They did not develop the ability to produce milk, unlike their counterparts who lived a more organic lifestyle, she said.

“The results underscore the importance of women protecting themselves from manufactured chemicals beginning at birth because they stay in the body,” said Guillette, whose research is published in the March issue of Environmental Health Perspectives.

The study found changes in breast development when comparing pre-adolescent girls whose mothers grew up in an agricultural valley where heavy doses of pesticides were sprayed with those who were raised in surrounding foothills where none were used. Some of the girls in the agricultural valley had no mammary tissue or a minimal amount.

Although several studies have examined the effects of pesticides on when puberty begins, none have looked at how exposure influences the development of mammary gland tissue, she said. To investigate the question, Guillette found two population samples about 50 miles apart in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora’s Yaqui Valley that were almost identical except for their exposure to pesticides.

The Sonoran Mayan people of the valley split philosophically over the use of pesticides and other modern agricultural techniques during the country’s Green Revolution of the early 1950s, when large-scale pesticide-based agriculture came into practice. Valley residents embraced pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural chemicals, including spraying in homes, while the other group, which moved to the foothills, avoided them entirely.

“These groups were the same in every respect, culturally, genetically and socio- economically, except for their use of pesticides,” Guillette said. “They had the same diet, the same child-rearing practices and the same school system.”

Although the farmers in the valley and the ranchers in the foothills had cousins and other extended family members living in the other community, they never intermarried because of their strong differences over pesticides, she said.

Guillette began her research in 1966, comparing the physical coordination and mental development in preschool children from the two communities. In an earlier published study, she found that valley children were less adept at catching a ball, reflecting poor eye-hand coordination, and showed dramatic differences in their ability to draw a person.

Her more recent study focused on breast development in girls between the ages of 8 and 10 and involved 30 girls from the valley and 20 girls who lived in the foothills. Guillette and local nurses measured total breast diameter and mammary diameter.

While breast size was much larger in the girls in the valley, they had much less mammary tissue, and sometimes none at all, than the girls in the foothills, Guillette said.

Mammary tissue could not be palpated in about 19 percent of the girls from valley towns who showed signs of breast development. In contrast, none of the girls from the foothills who had reached this stage lacked mammary tissue.

“With the foothill girls, there was a direct correlation between breast size and mammary development, whereas with the pesticide-exposed girls there was none,” Guillette said. “In fact, we saw girls who were fairly well developed with absolutely no mammary glands.”

Because the Yaqui Valley was in its fifth year of a drought at the time of the study, with most farmers moving into ranching and stopping pesticide use, the results point to earlier exposure, probably transferred from the mother before birth, she said.

Various pesticides, mainly organophosphates and organochlorines, were used extensively to farm the Yaqui Valley near the time of the girls’ birth, between 1992 and 1994, and many of these compounds are known to cross a pregnant woman’s placenta to the developing child, Guillette said. A study of newborn children from the valley that was done close to the time these children were conceived found elevated pesticide levels, she said.

“Many of these pesticides are popular in the United States, both for agriculture and for home use and lawn care,” she said. “We know the age for breast development in girls is occurring earlier and there is the potential that pesticides may be playing a similar role in the United States as found in Mexico.”

“There were a lot of preconceived ideas about which type of communicator would be better,” said Dolores Albarracin, who with Marta R. Durantini authored the study published in the March Psychological Bulletin. “Generally the idea that comes from community psychology is that community members are better.”

People who want to prevent HIV or need advice after a diagnosis often feel more comfortable talking with someone of their race and gender, Albarracin said. Patients often consult their friends, family, clergy, classmates, people who frequent the same bar or who live in their neighborhood. However, talking with peers may not always lead to the best advice, despite the growing popularity of peer health education since the 1970s.

“We actually found that community members are less effective than experts, which is completely contrary to previous philosophies,” she said. “This has a lot of implications because many of the programs these days are based on the idea that community members are better, so funds are given to community-based organizations, thinking they are going to be better.”

The study involved a comprehensive statistical analysis from 166 HIV prevention interventions, and included published and unpublished works. Interventions consist of programs sponsored by experts and peer leaders, visits to medical professionals and programs led by peers.

“Our study was a large review,” Albarracin said. “We collected everything that had been done, throughout the duration of the AIDS epidemic all over the world, from 1985 to 2005, and we ended up with a really extensive database of results of interventions by community members and experts.”

The study analyzed results of intervention in all population groups, including men, women and children, and all risk groups such as injection drug users and people with multiple sex partners.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends peer consultation for HIV prevention, but Albarracin said her findings suggest that a better connection is necessary between community-based organizations and state agencies to make sure programs have both types of sources and that peers are better trained.

A redirection of funds from peer-based prevention groups to expert-led groups could help encourage a wider diversity of experts, which Albarracin said is needed.

“We found that the best experts for prevention among African-American women are African-American and female,” she said. “If you look at physicians, nurses, psychologists and many other health professionals, many of them are white. So to find those experts with racial and gender matching isn’t always easy.”

The study revealed that female and minority experts are necessary to create effective campaigns for women and ethnic minorities. Because of a shortage of health-care professionals in these demographics, policy makers must consider the development of training programs to make the available agents more effective.

A long-term goal is to encourage greater diversity in the health professions among ethnic minorities, which Albarracin said could be achieved through affirmative action programs.

Through broad research on the effectiveness of HIV interventions, Albarracin said it will become apparent which tactics work and which ones don’t.

“Dr. Albarracin’s research syntheses are some of the most systematic and complete of any that have yet been published,” said Blair Johnson, a professor of social psychology at the University of Connecticut. “In the scholarly community, they are certain to stimulate renewed interest in the social psychological mechanisms underlying successful HIV prevention efforts for practically any population at risk for HIV. In the public health and policy community, they offer the hope of better interventions, with the result that fewer people will contract (or transmit) HIV.”

The findings, to be published in the April issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association, call attention to the need to screen these men early — beginning at age 45 instead of 50 — and to offer them ongoing prostate cancer education, UF researchers report.

Prostate cancer remains the second-most-commonly diagnosed cancer and the second-most-common cause of cancer deaths in American men over age 45. Even so, prostate cancer mortality rates in the United States have been steadily declining during the past 10 years, thanks to serum prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, blood tests and improved treatments.

But the researchers found a different situation for inner-city men in Jacksonville, Fla.

“It all came about when we noticed that several patients we screened in Jacksonville were presenting with more advanced disease than what we had seen in similarly sized settings — namely Houston and Winston-Salem,” said Dr. Charles Rosser, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of urology at the University of Florida - Jacksonville. “Patients who presented in Houston and Winston-Salem had already been screened so thoroughly that they presented with a lot earlier disease than what we saw here. We wanted to know why Jacksonville’s numbers were so much higher.”

Although several variables may be involved, Rosser thinks the cause is a lack of prostate cancer screening and ongoing education in inner-city Jacksonville.

“Other communities our size have had fairly large screening initiatives – first directed to the general community and then directed to minorities in the inner city,” he said. “Here in Jacksonville we didn’t have anything like that until 2003, when UF College of Medicine–Jacksonville urologists, in partnership with the Duval County Health Department, began offering free screenings at UF’s affiliated hospital, Shands Jacksonville.”

Using the data from these screenings, the seven-member research team set out to assess the detection rate of prostate cancer and disease stage at diagnosis. Researchers collected and analyzed clinical and pathological data from the biopsies of 368 men — 52 percent white, 42 percent black, 5 percent Hispanic and 1 percent Asian. Because of the small numbers, Hispanics and Asians were excluded for study purposes.

Researchers then reviewed clinic and hospital records for several key outcomes, including cancer incidence, tumor stage (if and how far the cancer has spread) and tumor grade (how far the cells have changed from normal to abnormal on a 1-to-5 scale, with grade 1 being the least aggressive).

Still, the researchers were surprised to find these men were four times as likely to have advanced cancer, Rosser said.

“The chance of usually presenting with advanced disease is maybe 5 percent nationwide,” he said. “Our study sample showed 16 percent for blacks and 3.8 percent for whites — a statistically significant finding.”

When patients don’t begin treatment until cancer is advanced, the cure rate drops dramatically.

“Once the cancer has spread beyond the prostate, we’re not looking to cure the disease — we’re just looking to slow its growth,” Rosser said. “Our findings strongly suggest that, despite two decades of increasing emphasis on prostate cancer screening and detection in the United States, such programs may not be reaching or having the desired effect on underserved inner-city populations, especially blacks.”

Annual screenings should include the PSA blood test and an exam, with biopsy and further examination recommended for a PSA level above 4.0, Rosser said.

UF’s research is valuable and confirms what others have published, said Dr. Isaac Powell, professor of urology at Wayne State University and Karmanos Cancer Institute, who has been studying prostate cancer in Detroit for 16 years. “Not only do black men have a higher incidence of the disease but their death rate is two to three times higher than white men,” he said. “Our data suggest the disease may be growing faster among blacks than whites, so we’re studying genetics, diet, prostatitis and health-seeking behavior to try to explain these differences.”

Education is key for these men, according to Rosser.

“Of course, we need to stress the importance of annual screenings, but we also need to let them know why they’re being screened and explain that, as black men, statistically they’re at higher risk for the disease,” he said. “Education must go hand in hand with screening.”

The study identifies a disparity in prostate cancer screening and detection among men of differing social strata that is especially worrisome at a time when the underserved — especially blacks — stand to benefit most from such programs, Rosser said.

“We need to rectify this disparity by establishing in underserved inner-city communities across the United States large-scale and innovative screening programs to educate men about prostate cancer, screen them for the disease and assist them in obtaining follow-up care,” he said.

In her new book, “Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African Americans,” University of Florida law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown takes an unflinching look at how race, crime, fame and gender affect public attitudes toward people involved in public scandals. The book includes a foreword by New York University law professor Derrick Bell, a founding figure in the field of Critical Race Theory.

“This book was inspired by the O.J. Simpson case,” said Russell-Brown, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations at UF’s Levin College of Law. “I was intrigued by the black community’s support for O.J., when he had in many ways separated himself from the community.”

Opinions about the Simpson verdict remain seriously divided along racial lines, with a majority of blacks believing he was set up and a majority of whites convinced he got away with murder. In that and other racially charged criminal cases, each side is mystified by the other side’s decision-making process.

Russell-Brown examined 30 cases involving what she labels “black protectionism.” She also held focus groups with blacks and finds there is a simple explanation for the black-white divide in these cases.

“When white people hear that a black celebrity is accused of a crime, they ask one question: Did he do it?” Russell-Brown said. “For African-Americans, there’s a longer list of questions. Did he do it? If he did, was he set up? Is he the only person who has committed this offense? And is he being treated the same as whites who have done the same thing?”

Those questions are rooted in American history, which is rife with examples of entrapment and false prosecution of blacks, Russell-Brown said.

She notes specific historical examples of black celebrities who faced criminal charges that, even if true, seem in retrospect to be the result of selective prosecution. For example, after boxing great Jack Johnson defeated a white man to win the heavyweight title in 1910, he was convicted of transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Similarly, U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, who represented Harlem in Congress, spent months defending himself against a $3,000 tax evasion lawsuit.

Whether or not those people were guilty, Russell-Brown said, it is clear today that they were charged because they were outspoken, powerful and black. It’s a lesson black people remember when they hear that a rich or famous black man is charged with a crime, she said.

“Russell-Brown’s book takes a fresh perspective on the concept of linked fate, the idea that African-Americans are alternately embarrassed, protective about, or inspired by the acts of famous or infamous members of their race, by using focus groups and critical race theory to analyze this confounding phenomenon,” said Randolph Stone, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago.

Blacks aren’t the only people who engage in protectionism, Russell-Brown notes. White people extend a similar protectionism to police officers facing charges of brutality. She cites the example of the beating of Rodney King, which was caught on video tape, and the killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man who was shot by New York police who had falsely concluded he was a serial rapist.

“In these cases, white people noted that the police have a tough job, that they have to make split-second decisions, or, in the King case, that we really don’t know what happened before the tape was turned on,” Russell-Brown said.

Russell-Brown said she is concerned about the black community’s failure to extend protection to black defendants of average means, who deserve the presumption of innocence.

“The larger community gains when every member is valued and afforded the same protections, regardless of their fame or fortune,” Russell-Brown said.