Health

8th Annual Multicultural Healthcare Awards

AMERICAN LEGACY MAGAZINE’S EIGHTH ANNUAL MULTICULTURAL HEALTHCARE AWARDS

B. Waine Kong, JD, PhD, Executive Vice President, The Heart Institute of the Caribbean

Debra A. Toney, PhD., RN – President, National Black Nurses Association and Owner, TLC Health Care Services

New York, NY (BlackNews.com) – American Legacy Magazine–premier magazine of African-American history and culture–and Bayer® Aspirin partner for the fourth year to salute extraordinary individuals at the Eighth Annual American Legacy Multicultural Healthcare Awards to be held on Thursday, June 19, 2008 and sponsored by the Bayer Aspirin brand. "It is with great pride that American Legacy and Bayer® continue this partnership in honoring individuals that have taken a personal role in helping eliminate health disparities for minorities," says founder and publisher Rodney J. Reynolds. This year’s healthcare award recipients are:

* B. Waine Kong, J.D. Ph.D – Executive Vice President of the Heart Institute of the Caribbean, Kingston, Jamaica

* Debra A. Toney, Ph.D., R.N. – President, National Black Nurses Association and Owner TLC Health Care Services

On the morning of the awards reception, American Legacy Magazine and Bayer®, will host the Fourth Annual Healthcare Forum panel discussion on The State of Black Health at the Swayduck Auditorium at the New School University, beginning at 8:00 a.m. Our elite panelists include:

* B. Waine Kong, J.D. Ph.D – Executive Vice President of the Heart Institute of the Caribbean, Kingston, Jamaica

* Debra A. Toney, Ph.D., R.N. – President, National Black Nurses Association and Owner TLC Health Care Services

* Harriet A. Washington, Editor, American Legacy Healthcare Advantage and Author of the award winning Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

* Khadijah Matin (Moderator) Associate Director, Organizational Learning, Lutheran Medical Center, New York City

The honorees will receive their awards during a special ceremony at the reception.

WHO: American Legacy Magazine and Bayer® Aspirin

WHAT: Multicultural Healthcare Forum and Awards Reception

WHEN: June 19, 2008

WHERE:
Healthcare Forum – 8:00 a.m.
The New School
Swayduck Auditorium
65 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

Awards Reception – 6:00 p.m.
Forbes Galleries
60 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

American Legacy Magazine is distributed nationwide to over 2.05 million readers through black churches, educational and cultural institutions. Also available on newsstands and through paid subscriptions, American Legacy is a joint venture between RJR Communications Inc. and the American Heritage, a division of Forbes. Other brands include American Legacy Woman; American Legacy Healthcare Advantage; American Legacy, Jr.; and American Legacy TV. For more information on American Legacy Magazine, log onto www.americanlegacymag.com

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WEIGHT-LOSS ATTEMPTS FAILED?

WEIGHT-LOSS ATTEMPTS FAILED? 4 TIPS TO GET BACK ON TRACK

By Makeisha Lee, Health and Nutritional Advisor

Have you struggled to lose weight in time for summer-fun, beaches and vacations? Has your attempts left you feeling worse than you did before you started? If so, don’t despair; many people get discouraged after falling off the wagon.

Don’t give up! Use these 4 simple tips to help you to climb back on the wagon:

1) Start a new list of the reasons why you want to lose weight. Regardless if you still have your old list, you still should put it in writing. Doing this one thing can make you 10 times more committed to overcoming the bulge. Always remember this: The bigger the “WHY”, the easier the “HOW”!

2) Be accepting of your failed attempts and move on. You know the old saying, “Ain’t no sense in crying over spoiled milk!” In other words don’t waist anymore precious time dwelling on the fact you didn’t succeed. Just consider yourself one step closer to success. Think about this: According to experts, most people that try to begin a new lifestyle make 3-8 attempts before succeeding.

3) Consider why your attempt failed. Did you fall back into old behaviors, like eating junk food late at night…? Did you start new habits? Did you find yourself in a tempting situation? Recalling these to mind and making a note of what happened will help you to focus on ways to keep it from happening again.

4) Connect with a support group or a buddy system. If you initially attempted to lose weight on your own, then try one these options. Support groups typically have tons of people that have similar goals and they even have experienced what you are going through. Your buddy can help get you through the tough days.

The saying is true that, “two are better than one!”

In order for you to be a weight loss success there are many pitfalls that set you up to fail, so be on the watch for fad diets, gimmicks and miracle cures. Get informed and utilize these 4 simple tricks to keep you focused. No matter how long it takes, only YOU have the power to make it happen!

Makeisha Lee is a health and nutrition consultant. For more information about cleansing and detoxifying your body, contact her at 614-595-1425 or znck04@yahoo.com or learn more at www.CleanseFormula.com

She is also the author of "Why Black People Can’t Lose Weight" available at www.WhyBlackPeopleCantLoseWeight.com and in bookstores nationwide.

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Sexual Teens

We’re here. We’re sexual. GET USED TO IT.

By Barbara Miner

AS BEFITTING AN ARTICLE about schools, here’s a pop quiz taken from the sex education website Teenwire.org: In 1937,
studies claimed that nine out of 10 children caught masturbating were: a) severely punished; b) told they would go insane or blind; c) threatened with having their penises cut off or their vaginas sewn closed; or d) all of the above.

The answer? d) all of the above.

Now, before you start laughing at the absurdity of life in the 1930s, consider this contemporary statement from the “guardyourself” website of the abstinence-only organization Women’s Clinic of Kansas City/Life Guard, which has received almost a million dollars in federal funds for sex education: “Being able to have sex does not make you any different from a rat in a warehouse. They have sex too. Is that what you want to compare yourself with?”

For the last decade, schools around the country have been badgered and bribed into pumping these sorts of ideas into students’ heads through abstinence-only programs—that is, those relatively few schools that teach sex education in the first place. Beginning under former-president Bill Clinton and escalating under President George W. Bush, more than $1.5 billion in federal and state money has been poured into abstinence-only
education. These programs, by law, have as their “exclusive purpose” teaching about the benefits of abstaining from sexual activity; prohibit schools from talking about contraceptives and condoms; and define healthy sexuality as “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage.”

Over the past year, this surging abstinence-only education movement has finally shown signs of retreat. Numerous studies have proven it to be ineffective, even harmful, and a growing list of states have turned down federal money when it comes with abstinence strings attached. But as abstinence fades, the increasingly pressing question is this: What will rise in its place? Sex education in public schools has never been a resource priority and has rarely been described as forward thinking. So will the half-hearted sex education that preceded abstinence return in coming years? Will there be anything at all? Or are this country’s policymakers prepared to embrace a comprehensive sex education that goes beyond fear tactics and acknowledges that sexuality is a normal part of life, even for teenagers?

Schools’ failure to help students understand and embrace their sexuality has particular consequence for kids of color, who represent vast majorities in many public schools around the country. Sex and race have always formed a volatile brew in America. Racist stereotypes of hypersexual men and women compete with restrictive mores, coming from both inside and outside of communities of color, to circumscribe sexual expression. Too many young people are left to sort through this maelstrom with little or no guidance, and too many don’t find their way. Blacks and Latinos account for 83 percent of teen HIV infections. Similar disparities exist with nearly every other type of sexually transmitted infection—Black girls are more than four times as likely to get gonorrhea as their peers, and syphilis is skyrocketing among Black teenage boys and slowly climbing among Latino boys. Late last year, federal health monitors announced that teen pregnancy went up in 2006 for the first time in 15 years. The largest spikes were found among Black and Native American girls.

“In essence, our country has viewed youth as hormonally driven accidents waiting to happen, so we give them sex ed that censors information,” frets James Wagoner, head of the Washington, D.C. group Advocates for Youth. “We adults tell them not to have sex until they’re married, and never mind that none of us ever followed that advice.”

Whatever adults are prepared to do, a growing number of teenagers and sex educators are taking matters into their own hands, logging on to the Internet and rabble-rousing in their classrooms to elbow out space for a more honest conversation about sex. They’re fed up with adults’ 1930s sensibilities about their sex lives, and they’ve gone in search of their own resources.
                                               •••
Maya Patitucci, 19, remembers her sex ed classes at Curie Metro High School in Chicago mostly because they were incredibly boring. “The videos they showed us, they were like from the 1970s, with stereotypical roles and bad music,” she said. “And so you’d go to sleep during the videos. Everyone knows that during health class, that’s the time you sleep.” And yet she considers herself one of the lucky ones. While the textbook focused on abstinence until marriage, “we had a good teacher,” she says. “He was conscious enough to go beyond abstinence.”

When she was a senior at Curie, Patitucci realized just how bad sex ed was in the Chicago Public Schools, which, with about a half-million students, is the third largest district in the country. As part of a leadership program, she and a group of students researched teen pregnancy and sex ed across the city. “We did a survey of physical-ed teachers and found out that they taught whatever they liked,” she explains. At the same time, the need for comprehensive information was undeniable: statistics showed that 50 percent of the city’s high school students were sexually active and that 6,000 babies were born to teen parents in Chicago in 2003.

Patitucci and other students at Curie—where 81 percent of the students are from low-income families, 62 percent are Latino, 22 percent are Black and 6 percent are Asian/Pacific Islander—first focused on their own school and organized until it bought more up-to-date videos and adopted an improved sex ed syllabus. After that, working with the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health based in Chicago’s Loop, they started a citywide campaign demanding that comprehensive sex ed be required in the district’s middle and high school grades.

“We believed that the entire school system needed to make a commitment to providing lifesaving information to Chicago schools,” Patitucci says, “so we took our cause to the top.”

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Global Warming Warning

Scientific Academies Urge Action on Global Warming

In environmental news, the scientific academies of thirteen countries, including the United States, are urging intensified global action to combat global warming. In a joint statement posted by the US National Academy of Sciences, the academies say nations should move beyond last year’s pledge by the Group of Eight to consider halving carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2050.

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WFP Extends Haiti Food Aid

WFP Extends Haiti Food Aid

In Haiti, the World Food Program has announced it’s extending school feeding programs through the summer to deal with an ongoing crisis. WFP Haiti Country Director Mamadou Mbaye said the expansion of food was just a start for desperate need.

WFP Haiti Country Director Mamadou Mbaye: “We intend to increase those kind of—that program up to 450,000 children. If we have the resources, we will expand it progressively to cover new areas, which might cover also the northwest of the country.”

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