Even as the demand for health care continues to increase, the number of qualified Hispanic nurses lags behind, according to a recent study of the nursing industry in the Los Angeles area.

The findings not only highlight problems in healthcare, they shed light on the issue of unequal access to higher education for minority populations. Hispanics represent only 13 percent of Los Angeles nurses, according to the study conducted by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute. Headquartered at the University of Southern California, the Institute is a nonprofit, research-based organization focused on issues involving Hispanic communities.

Interviews for the study helped identify multiple barriers Hispanics face that lead to difficulty passing licensing exams and often delay of graduation. Seventy-four percent of respondents noted the lack of time to study due to family obligations as a barrier to becoming a nurse. Respondents also noted difficulty getting admitted to nursing schools (61.8 percent), lack of financial support (51.3 percent), and lack of academic preparation (39.5 percent).

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Popularity: 34% [?]

An estimated 25 percent of Hispanics in the United States don’t have a regular health care provider to treat their medical needs.

And these people tend to be the newest documented and undocumented immigrants and those without health insurance, a new survey found.

The survey, conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is important because it paints a picture of health care among Hispanics in the United States, according to William Vega, a family medicine professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hispanics make up the largest minority group in the United States, comprising 45 million people and growing, Vega noted during a teleconference Tuesday.

“The gradient of time in the country and being born in the country or outside the country has a lot to do with how people perceive and experience the health care system, and especially the deficits of that system,” Vega said.

One key finding of the survey was how many Hispanics lack a “medical home” — a regular provider to supply medical care.

“If you compare these numbers to those from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Latinos are more than twice as likely to lack a usual health care provider,” Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center, said during the teleconference.

And that could pose problems because rates of diabetes are high among Hispanics. But nearly one-third of the survey respondents said they know little about the disease or how to prevent or manage it.

Hispanic men are less likely to have a usual health care provider than women, 37 percent to 17 percent, respectively, Livingston noted. And younger Hispanics are less likely to have a usual provider than older ones. Education levels also play a role, with one-third of high school dropouts lacking a usual provider, compared with 19 percent who have some college, she said.

“We found a number of characteristics of health care access that are particular to Latinos,” Livingston added. “Especially important is assimilation.”

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Popularity: 47% [?]

By LINDSEY TANNER AP

CHICAGO (AP) — Many immigrant children get even less vigorous exercise than their U.S.-born counterparts, the largest study of its kind suggests. Plenty of earlier evidence shows that U.S. children are pretty inactive. The new study of nearly 70,000 children simply found even lower levels of activity among immigrants.

Almost 18 percent of foreign-born children with immigrant parents got no vigorous exercise on any days of the week, and 56 percent didn’t participate in organized sports.

By contrast, 11 percent of U.S.-born children with American parents got no vigorous exercise, and 41 percent didn’t participate in sports.

Given the obesity epidemic and immigrants accounting for about 13 percent of the U.S. population, the authors said it is important to know whether there are ethnic differences in physical activity and sedentary behaviors. They were led by Dr. Gopal Singh, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau.

Here’s how the researchers explain their results: Immigrant families surveyed were on the whole poorer than nonimmigrants and lived in less safe neighborhoods. That means they likely had less time for exercise and sports, and worse access to places to engage in those activities.

But also, many immigrant parents place a high emphasis on reading, language lessons, studying and other inactive pursuits.

Interestingly, earlier research found that immigrants tend to be less overweight and obese than people born and raised in the United States. That difference tends to wear off with longer exposure to U.S. culture including junk food and television.

The new study also found that immigrant children generally watched less TV than American-born kids, although it did not look at obesity levels.

“Many of our American norms are not healthy,” said Dr. Sarah Armstrong, a Duke University childhood obesity expert. “Could we just teach them our good habits, and not our bad?”

Armstrong said it was the largest study by far to look at the topic.

The study appears in Monday’s Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It is based on 2003-04 telephone interviews with parents of children aged 6 to 17, including white, black, Hispanic and Asian immigrants.

Singh said the results among Hispanics were particularly striking: nearly 23 percent of children in families where both parents were born in Spanish-speaking countries got no vigorous physical activity. Also, two-thirds of them didn’t participate in organized sports.

Moreover, among Hispanics, U.S.-born children with foreign-born parents were less active than kids whose parents were both born in the United States. By contrast, among blacks and Asians, U.S.-born children with U.S.-born parents were less active than kids with at least one foreign-born parent.

Dr. Mita Sanghavi Goel of Northwestern University said the results in Hispanics are troubling because of high rates of obesity and diabetes — both related to inactivity — among Hispanics, the nation’s largest immigrant group.

“That just highlights how important it is to intervene early and set healthy lifestyle patterns early on,” Goel said.

Rates for other immigrants who got no vigorous activity were 13 percent for blacks, almost 10 percent for whites and 7 percent for Asians. For no participation in sports, the rates were 49 percent for blacks, 38 percent for Asians and 32 percent for whites.

The authors said more research is needed to verify results in Asians because relatively few Asians were studied.

Among all immigrant groups combined, 65 percent got regular physical activity, versus 75 percent of U.S.-born children whose parents were both born in America.

Regular physical activity was defined as getting at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise such as running, swimming and basketball at least three days weekly. That was the minimum amount the government recommended when families were surveyed.

Newer government advice recommends an hour of moderate-to-vigorous exercise most days. Just last month, a study found that fewer than a third of U.S. 15-year-olds got even that minimum amount.

The authors acknowledged that parents may not always know exactly how much activity their children get, a potential limitation of the new study.

Popularity: 32% [?]

By E. EDUARDO CASTILLO AP

Mexican agriculture officials said Thursday that U.S. colleagues hunting for the source of a salmonella outbreak are rushing to a conclusion about finding the strain at a Mexican pepper farm.

The salmonella sample that one U.S. official called “a smoking gun” was taken from a water tank that had not been used for more than two months to irrigate crops, said the director of Mexico’s Farm Food Quality Service, Enrique Sanchez.

Sanchez told a news conference on Thursday that the tank held rain water and suggested that roaming cattle or other factors could have recently contaminated the tank with the same strain of salmonella that has sickened 1,300 people in the United States since June.

On Wednesday, Dr. David Acheson, the food safety chief for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, described the finding of the salmonella strain at a farm in the northern state of Nuevo Leon as a key breakthrough in the case.

“We have a smoking gun, it appears,” said Dr. Lonnie King, who directs the center for food-borne illnesses at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Sanchez said the U.S. officials “totally lacked scientific evidence” to make such statements and said they had broken a confidentiality agreement by announcing findings before their investigation is complete.

“We’re eating this same produce in Mexico and we haven’t had any problems,” Sanchez said.

He suggested the FDA officials confused the source of the samples because the tainted water was found on a farm in the Tamaulipas state municipality of Hidalgo — not in Nuevo Leon as the FDA reported.

The FDA issued a statement later Thursday saying it was “surprised and disappointed” the Mexican response.

“We are confident of our findings,” the statement said. “FDA’s analytical methods are publicly available.”

Miguel Angel Toscano of Mexico’s Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks said Mexican investigators also took samples from the soil, water and vegetables the FDA had tested and found salmonella in some of the samples taken in Tamaulipas. But he said more tests need to be done to determine the strain.

Previously, the FDA had traced a contaminated jalapeno pepper to another farm in Tamaulipas. Both farms shipped through a packing facility in Nuevo Leon, raising the possibility that contamination could have occurred there.

The FDA has advised consumers to avoid raw serrano and jalapeno peppers from Mexico and any foods that contain them.

Sanchez said Mexico produces 2.4 million tons of peppers per year but exports only 12,000 tons are exported fresh to the United States. Another 267,000 tons of canned or bottled peppers are sent to the U.S. each year, he said.

He said pepper exports have not stopped, but U.S. authorities have been taking samples from shipments at the border and holding them up for up to a week until waiting for results.

Sanchez said officials have not yet determined the scale of the warning’s impact on Mexico’s pepper industry.

Popularity: 40% [?]

When it comes to Latinos and cancer, Ysabel Duron wants to take away the miedo.

It’s that miedo, or fear, that the veteran San Francisco television broadcaster - and a cancer survivor herself - believes is one of the many reasons her community remains in the dark about a disease that will claim the lives of one in five Latinos.

So Duron organized the National Latino Cancer Summit, a conference that starts today in San Francisco, bringing together oncology experts and health care workers from across the country with one main goal: bridge the gap between the Latino community and the experts who are on the cutting edge of cancer research and treatment.

“We are focused on bringing together those researchers with community members who are working in the trenches,” said Duron, who was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma 10 years ago. “It [the information] gets out there on television, but who really hears it and how much do they hear, and how do they understand it?”

Statistically, the incidence of cancer is higher among whites and blacks compared with Latinos.

But Latinos’ survival rates are lower, because their cancers are often diagnosed at an advanced stage, said Dr. Elmer Huerta, president of the American Cancer Society, and the first Latino to hold that position.

About 40 percent of the U.S. Latino population is foreign-born, according to the 2006 American Community Survey. Many of them lack health insurance, Huerta said, or don’t speak English and don’t understand the American medical system, so they wait to see a doctor.

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Popularity: 49% [?]