The 10th Annual "Break the Cycle" Student Projects

IntroductionThis year we had 11 students participating, with one who had been an undergraduate student a few years ago and now returned as a graduate student and another, who was a student a few years ago and now returned as a mentor for the 2nd time. Also, for the first time we have a student from Africa. We have had students from Latin America and one from Europe, and we have also a first from Tennessee. We also have included a paper from a former student who had been awarded funds to take his project to the next level and we have the benefit of his work in this collection. One of our students from this year will be publishing her paper in another journal - so we have a total of11 student papers in this monograph. For organizational purposes we have grouped the projects by topic area.Community characteristicsChalwe Chanda, BScEH of the Environmental Health Unit, Department of Public Health, The University of Zambia - School of Medicine, Lusaka, Zambia was concerned about the high mortality rate among children under the age of 5 years in the Chipata compound of Lusaka City in Zambia, which is a low income community, with low cost housing. He found that the children were exposed to highly unsanitary conditions with contamination of groundwater and sources of drinking water, resulting in diarrheal illnesses, malnutrition and a high mortality. His mentor was Nosiku Sipilanyambe Munyinda BSc NRM, MSc Env Eng, Lecturer and Researcher, Environmental Health Unit, Department of Public Health, School of Medicine, University of Zambia.This student project out of Africa helps to put into perspective the threats to child health and development in Africa and in the developing world. The UN Millennium Development Goals were designed around the global issues that relate to the health and well-being of the world's populations. A review of the goals will demonstrate the significance of this student's project in bringing into focus the larger issues of children's environmental health disparities: the realities of extreme poverty, of hunger and food insecurity; access to clean drinking water; the environmental threats of insect borne malaria and of other infectious diseases, notably the acute diarrheal infections as well as the insidious threat of HIV/AIDS; and the impact all of these on infant and child mortality as well as the critical importance of maternal health, education and gender equality (see table 1) (1). In other words, this student paper is forcing us to look up from our limited focus on environmental health disparities in the USA and other post-industrial countries and see what we can do to have a greater impact on changing the world for the better.Shruthi Satyamurthy, DDS, MBA/MHA, from the Institute of Health Administration, J Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University looked at how the legacy of racial segregation in the Southeast United States has resulted in substantial variation in neighborhood racial concentration in Georgia. She found significant negative correlation between the concentration of black residents in an individual's neighborhood with both that individual's visits to a health care facility and satisfaction with access to health care, even after controlling for individual characteristics. She recommended that not-for-profit organizations and policymakers should pursue neighborhood- or community-level projects to most effectively overcome health care access disparities. Her mentor was Daniel Montanera, PhD, in the Institute of Health Administration, J Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. This student project identifies one the remnants of the racism and relics of slavery that characterized the southern United States through the Civil War of the 19th century and the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th Century. In the Healthy People 2020 publication one of the stated factors in the social determinants of health is 'residential segregation' which invokes the issues of discrimination - another social determinant of health (2) and clearly a significant contributing factor to health disparities, in this context, through limited access to quality health care. …