UA In the News — May 25

UA Honors Students work in Marion
WVUA (Tuscaloosa) – May 24
A group of University of Alabama Honors students are finishing up a three-week project in Perry County. It’s all part of the ninth annual Black Belt Experience, and the Honor College’s 57 Mile Partnership with Perry County. The students worked together on 14 projects including cleaning up the grounds of the courthouse in Marion.
 
Tuberculosis And Rural Healthcare In America
On Point (National Public Radio broadcast) – May 24
Alabama’s tuberculosis epidemic and what it shows us about rural healthcare in America. Guests: Helen Ouyang, author of recent Harper’s Magazine piece headlined “Where Healthcare Won’t Go: A Tuberculosis Crisis In The Black Belt.” Physician and assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. (@DrHelenOuyang). Shane Lee, town doctor in Marion, Alabama. He founded the Marion Clinic in 1990 and discovered the community’s first severe case of tuberculosis. John Wheat, professor of community and rural medicine and internal medicine at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Noam Levey, national healthcare reporter for the Los Angeles Times. (@NoamLevey)
 
Should the FDA prohibit filtered cigarettes?
CNN – May 24
Light cigarettes falsely ease smokers’ fear of lung cancer, say researchers from the Ohio State University. . . .  Dr. Alan Blum, director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society and a professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Alabama School of Medicine, believes the new study is a non-starter. “There’s nothing new in this article that I haven’t personally been saying for 40 years: that the filter is a fraud,” Blum said. “If they’ve gotten more evidence, pathologic evidence after all these years, that’s great.” Still, he thinks that calling for more regulations and more studies won’t help anyone. As he sees it, many organizations — including medical associations, universities, media outlets, sports clubs and art societies — have benefited in some way or another from “tobacco industry largesse.”

Racists Really Aren’t Happy with the New ‘Star Trek’ Series
ATTN – May 25
Reactions like this are typical, according to experts: it represents opposition to change. Dr. Kristen Warner, associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama and author of “The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting,” said these reactions fall into a long line of broken perception. “Because media has since its inception primarily and predominantly focused on white men and women, anything that disrupts that expectation—especially beloved TV shows and films that originated and centered on them—is suspect, and is ultimately devalued, because it doesn’t feel representative of what it once was,” Warner told ATTN:. “I think that the fear of a diverse cast… is based in a concern,” Warner said, “that the power of those racial and ethnic differences will add a weight that makes their beloved films and TV shows heavy and not ‘fun’ or ‘entertaining’ because it is imagined that the show will now become about race or about gender or about sexuality, when that’s not necessarily so.”