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Obamacare may increase entrepreneurship; Maryland violates HBCU students constitutional rights; HPV vaccines only cover strains in White women

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Judge Catherine Blake (46480)
Judge Catherine Blake

California

Sedona Staffing and the Sedona Group agreed to pay $920,000 and implement preventive measures to settle a variety of discrimination charges filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The settlement resolves six EEOC discrimination charges filed between 2007 and 2009 alleging that the staffing firm engaged in a pattern and practice of classifying and failing to refer job applicants in San Diego based on their race, color, sex, national origin, age or disability. Without admitting liability, Sedona agreed to enter into a five-year conciliation agreement with the EEOC and alleged victims, thereby avoiding litigation.

District of Columbia

A study is reporting that Obamacare will spark an 11 percent increase in entrepreneurship. The Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University reported that the Affordable Care Act will create 1.5 million self-employed people in the United States because the law ends what health and economic analysts call “job lock.” This occurs when workers remain on their jobs even though the work might not fit their skills, because they are fearful of losing their individual health insurance or health insurance benefits for their families.

“However, under the Affordable Care Act, access to high-quality, subsidized health-insurance coverage will no longer be exclusively tied to employment,” The Center on Health Insurance Reforms, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute wrote in a research paper titled “The Affordable Care Act: Improving Incentives for Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment,” which was published in May. The study reported that increases in self employment under Obamacare will vary across states as a function of pre-Affordable Care Act market reforms already in place. “We estimate the range from an increase of 248,000 [self-employed individuals] in California to no measurable change in Massachusetts, where extensive healthcare reforms were enacted in 2006,” the study found.

Shawnta Friday-Shroud (46478)

Florida

Florida A&M University’s School of Business and Industry (SBI) ignites a battle of decades to raise $1 million between alumni and friends for SBI’s 40th year celebration. SBI Dean Shawnta Friday-Shroud began the fundraiser initiative in May and has raised $75,000. Keeping true to the competitive nature of SBI, the challenge divides each decade from the 1970s to the 2000s to raise a minimum of $250,000. “We get funding from the university, but sometimes it isn’t enough,” Friday-Stroud said. “We want to raise the money for ourselves. The $1 million is an investment into our school. You can never truly put a price tag on education. However, you can donate to your educational institution so that others may have the opportunity to be as successful as you.” The money would never be spent, only the interest from the endowment will be used to fund worldwide competitions, technology upgrades and additional hiring of faculty.

Judge Catherine Blake (46480)

Maryland

A federal judge’s ruling that Maryland violated the constitutional rights of the students at its historically Black colleges and universities by perpetuating segregation will have a significant impact both within and beyond the state’s borders, experts said. Federal District Judge Catherine Blake ruled Oct. 7 that the state, by allowing traditionally White institutions to duplicate programs already offered by historically Black colleges and universities, had created de facto segregation in its higher education system. Clifton Conrad, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and an expert in the area of segregation in higher education, said program duplication is a major indicator of the dualism that still exists in higher education despite the passage of landmark cases such as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education and the 1992 U.S. v. Fordice, which attempted to mitigate the problem. The lack of unique programs at HBCUs has a segregating effect since it decreases the school’s attractiveness to students of all races, said Lezli Baskerville, president and CEO of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO), mirroring Blake’s conclusions.

Missouri

Jannette Berkley-Patton, a University of Missouri-Kansas City psychology professor, wanted to spread the word on ways to prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity, so she took it to the pulpit. It’s an approach that has also worked for the Rev. Eric Williams, pastor at Calvary Temple Baptist Church. For more than two decades, he has been preaching HIV prevention along with the Gospel on Sunday mornings. This fall, Berkley-Patton and Williams won a three-year, $850,000 federal research grant to go into more churches, helping more people and digging deeper into changing cultural norms when it comes to healthy living, wellness and fitness in Black urban communities. The initiative, KC Faith, “is creating strategies to address African American health disparities, whereby African American communities suffer rates of certain diseases much higher than those of the general population,” Berkley-Patton said.

Cathrine Hoyo (46477)

North Carolina

When Duke University School of Medicine professor Cathrine Hoyo set out to figure out why, with comparable screening practices, the rates of cervical cancer and mortality are higher among African American women than White women, she found a disparity in the subtypes of HPV each group gets infected with. In findings presented at the International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, the most common strains in White women were 16, 18, 56, 39, and 66, whereas 33, 35, 58, and 68 were most prevalent in African American women. The HPV vaccine only covers 16 and 18, which occurred half as often in African Americans in the study’s sample of 572 women. A new vaccine covering nine strains is in the works, but it still won’t help African American women equally. “We may want to rethink how we develop these vaccines, given that African Americans tend to be underrepresented in clinical trials,” said Hoyo.

Henry Louis Gates (46479)

Ohio

Henry Louis Gates’ visit to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center will be part of his “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” series on PBS. Gates interviewed Nikki Taylor, University of Cincinnati associate professor of history, at the Freedom Center. Gates asked Taylor about enslaved African American Margaret Garner for “The Age of Slavery (1800-1860),” the second part of Gates’ six-week series. PBS also shot the Cincinnati skyline from Covington’s Riverside Drive, says Donna Williams, publicist for New York’s WNET-TV. “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” chronicles African American history “from the origins of slavery on the African continent through five centuries of remarkable historic events right up to today, when America has a Black president, yet remains a nation deeply divided by race,” PBS says. The series premiered last week, and runs through Nov. 26.

National

Obamacare, officially known as the Affordable Health Care Act, has gone live, but due to technical problems with the website, many have not yet been able to sign up. Meanwhile, one website, AffordableHealthInsurance.org, has stepped up to help individuals and families find the affordable health insurance plans that they are looking for. Users can actually learn about how health insurance works, and what such terms as “deductible” and “HMO” actually mean. The site was designed for users who know little about health insurance, and would like to fully understand what they are signing up for. The site also features a state-by-state healthcare profile, helping users identify what programs are being offered by the state they live in. Additionally, the site  features a blog for the general public, and another blog for minorities. Both report on the latest happenings in the health and healthcare industries. For more details, visit www.AffordableHealthInsurance.org

Compiled By Juliana Norwood.

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