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Health

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  • mental health
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  • Obamacare

HBCUs and Black Doctors Address COVID-19

By Leroi Brashears | February 19, 2021

As the deadly Spanish Influenza killed 675,000 Americans between 1917 and 1920, that era’s Black healthcare practitioners took the initiative to help African-Americans avoid and recover from that flu because they saw that the public health system would not or could not do so. 

Now, as America steps up its 2021 COVID19 vaccination phase, Black doctors and their HBCU (historically Black college and university) colleagues are again filling a void born of the same variants of systemic and structural racism their great grandparents experienced a little over 100 years ago. One example of the parallel is that in 1918, according to a study published in Public Health Reports, Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell, the Black medical director of Philadelphia’s 75-bed Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital, established a 40-bed emergency annex at St. Peter Claver, a Black parochial school when his hospital beds were quickly exhausted by the Spanish Flu.   Mossell got no funding for this from Philadelphia’s Board of Health, although the city had opened many emergency clinics for sick whites.   

In early 2020, in response to the current COVID19 pandemic, Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, president and chief executive officer of Meharry Medical College, and other HBCU leaders sought and received $25 million in diagnostic and testing equipment from Thermo Fisher Scientific, which they initially used for COVID19 testing for  students and faculty on their campuses, testing that was slow coming from other sources for these students and the communities they came from. “We’ll be having discussions on how to do this for the wider community,” Hildreth said.  “We see an opportunity for the wider community to be enhanced.  We’ve asked the Ways and Means committee of Congress for $5 million to allow medical schools to set up a consortium for a national testing approach.”

Hildreth also envisions a role for HBCU’s in making vaccinations more efficient for communities of color. “The solution is we must take the vaccinations to their communities, to meet the people where they are,” Hildreth said.   “With the right training and coordination schools, churches and other community organizations could develop model field hospitals for testing and vaccinations, and once we have an easy to transport vaccine, we can use a mobile approach—medical vans that will extend the reach of vaccines and testing.” 

Other Black doctors share Hildreth’s view that Black people and other people of color suffered a big spike in infections and deaths early in 2020 because they were never surveyed or tested properly early on.  Health officials, they asserted,, simply surveyed and tested areas and locations where Black folks do not congregate so they got missed, and studies support their conclusion

In December 2020, a study of public health departments was published in the Journal of the NPS Center for Homeland Defense and Security in conjunction with NCCU (North Carolina Central University), an HCBU in Durham, North Carolina. 

This study outlined troubling details about the readiness of public health departments across the country in terms of dealing with a pandemic like COVID19. 

The study showed that state and local public health departments were steadily cut in size and scope as state legislatures cut state and local taxes.

COVID-19 forces changes in strategies for anti-violence groups

Braving COVID-19 and The Cold

Annie Parker

Guilty of mental illness

Aerial view of disposal facility located on Lake Michigan’s shore near 95th Street

What's next for the Army Corps' lakefront dump?

Perspectives: The Powers That Be

South Side’s maternal health desert poses added risks for Black women during pandemic

By Curtis Black | July 29, 2020

The planned closing of Mercy Hospital underscores the dramatic loss of maternity services in Chicago over the past year — reflecting the failure of local government agencies to adequately fund critical services in vulnerable communities, advocates say.

Government and Politics

Chicago City Council quietly begins push to decriminalize psychedelics

By Josh McGhee | October 24, 2019

Ald. Brian Hopkins sponsored a resolution calling for the city to deprioritize arrests and investigations of adults using the drugs and for the public health department to study the plants as alternative treatment options.

Health

Infective endocarditis, a side effect of the injection drug crisis is on the rise in Illinois, posing financial and ethical concerns

By Lu Zhao | October 16, 2019

Amid the high cost of hospitalizing an increasing number of young people suffering from the infection, doctors express reluctance to treat patients likely to resume drug use that will put them at greater risk in the future.

Perspectives: The Powers That Be

It’s time to reopen Chicago’s closed mental health clinics

By Curtis Black | May 9, 2019

As officials revisit one of Rahm Emanuel’s most controversial policies, providers have different ideas for how to restore care to the many patients who have fallen through the cracks.

Perspectives

Food deserts persist in Chicago despite more supermarkets

By Marynia Kolak, Daniel Block and Myles Wolf | October 3, 2018

Most new grocery stores were built in areas with plentiful access in recent years, and those added to high-need areas were not enough to mitigate the effects of longstanding disinvestment and segregation, according to a new study.

Perspectives

The fight to end the HIV epidemic must happen in black neighborhoods

By Darnell N. Motley | February 7, 2018

Access to testing, treatment, and research needs to be improved among African-Americans, who are disproportionately impacted by new HIV diagnoses.

Perspectives

Opioid crisis ‘whitewashed’ to ignore rising black death rate

By Kathie Kane-Willis and Stephanie Schmitz Bechteler | January 22, 2018

African Americans in Illinois and other states are disproportionately dying from opioid overdoses. That contradicts the prevailing racial narratives on handling the drug epidemic punitively.

Perspectives: The Powers That Be

Illinois Republicans try to lay low on repealing Obamacare

By Curtis Black | June 22, 2017

With the GOP threatening health care coverage, especially for Medicaid recipients, activists are demanding answers from local lawmakers who are quietly supporting the bills.

Perspectives: The Powers That Be

Emanuel’s plan could leave city retirees without health insurance

By Curtis Black | December 21, 2016

A City of Chicago health care subsidy for retirees is being phased out at the same time as President-elect Donald Trump seeks to repeal Obamacare.

Housing

Proposed HUD ban lights up debate about smoking

By Jonah Newman | November 18, 2015

Experts and residents are divided on the benefits and fairness of a national smoking ban in public housing units.

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Founded on the heels of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, The Chicago Reporter confronts racial and economic inequality, using the power of investigative journalism. Our mission is national but grounded in Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in the nation and a bellwether for urban policies.

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