Analyze

“Since asthma surveillance data were not available at the census tract level for most of Louisiana, we estimated asthma burden using the inpatient discharge data available through LDH.”  (4)

“Case counts are not provided for CTs with a 2018 population of less than 800 to safeguard privacy.” (4)

“To minimize the need for suppression, inpatient discharge data was aggregated for the three most recent years available (2017–2019) and average annual crude rates were calculated for cases where asthma (ICD-10 code J45) was the primary diagnosis, as well as where asthma was any diagnosis.” (4)

“Spearman’s Rank Correlation was utilized to analyze the correlation between various social and environmental vulnerability factors, COVID-19 incidence, and the measures of asthma risk by CT.” (4)

“This was performed by first ranking the values in each dataset using RANK.AVG function in MS Excel 2016, followed by applying the PEARSON function to compare two datasets. Significance was set at alpha less than 0.05 (α < 0.05), with degrees of freedom (df) equal to two less than the total number of data points represented in both datasets” (4)

The research team works for the Section of Environmental Epidemiology and Toxicology, Office of Public Health, Louisiana Department of Health in Baton Rouge. Team members included Arundhati Bakshi; Shanon Soileau; Collete Stewart; Kate Friedman; Collete Maser; Alexis Williams; Kathleen Aubin; and Alicia Van Doren. 

Research for this documented was organized and implemented by the Louisiana Department of Health’s (LDH) Bureau of Family Health and Trepwise, a strategy consulting firm. More than 700 experts and community members participated.

Eexpert individuals and organizations referred to in this document include: Dr. Shawn Ginwright, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Coalition for Compassionate Schools (CCS), the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, and Dr. Denese Shervington, MD, MPH, an expert in public health and psychiatry at the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies. Dr. Shervington is focused on historical, intergenerational, interpersonal, and community trauma and healing practices.

The process of drawing the WHL State plan also included “Community Conversations,” an effort to engaged communities in drafting the plan (organized and facilitated by the Power Coalition of Equity and Justice from January 2023 to November 2023). During these conversations, participants expressed concerns about extractive research projects and lack of followup, as well as a desire for greater access to local and state government. When asked about the origins of trauma in their communities, participants “overwhelmingly cited the persistence of extreme concentrated poverty and pollution in neglected areas” (58).

In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.  

An ethnographic moment that stands out to me is when a yearly visitor to the Grand Staircaise Escalante region emphasized the importance of preserving the area under monument status. In a rare moment of recognizing the energy use/demands of even those who are preservation/wilderness proponents, he said "look, I know we have to get our energy from somewhere and maybe for now it's going to be fossil fuels, but please, not here. This place is sacred." Although everyday energy use and the use of petroleum to make such outdoor recreation products as kayaks is occasionally brought into view instead of displaced, these comments are often divorsed from thinking about how people in this area get energy, where the materials extracted from this area go, and what other forms of energy production might replace this extraction. Rather than arguing for a transition of how energy is produced, there seems to be a sense of inevitabilty of extraction but a desire for such industrial processes to be carried out somewhere else.