In a study of 63 elementary schools in Chicago, researchers found there were 29 alcohol ads on average in the two-block radius surrounding schools with larger Hispanic populations compared with an average of four ads around schools where less than one-fifth of students were Hispanic. In all, the researchers counted 771 alcohol ads around the 27 schools with more Hispanic students and only 160 ads around the 36 schools with fewer Hispanic students, the researchers recently reported online in the journal Ethnicity & Health.

“This is a concern because we know from past research that exposure to ads is associated with alcohol use and intentions to use alcohol,” said Kelli Komro, an associate professor of epidemiology in the UF College of Medicine and Institute for Child Health Policy and the study’s principal investigator. “We also know from previous research that Hispanic children are at increased risk for alcohol use at young ages.”

The ads around these schools were also more likely to contain cartoon images and animals, which other studies have shown can influence children, Komro said. Some of the ads, which ranged from billboards to signs around stores and bus stops, also seemed to attempt to tie into Hispanic culture by featuring Spanish words and the colors from the Mexican flag. About 70 percent of Chicago’s Hispanic residents are Mexican, the study states.

The schools the researchers studied were all located within the city limits of Chicago and most housed kindergarten through eighth-grade classes. Most of the students in these schools were from racial minorities — about half the children were African-American, while about 25 percent were Hispanic — and came from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

One key difference was that schools with more Hispanic students tended to have fewer African-American students and vice versa.

Overall, students were about seven times more likely to see advertising if they attended a school with at least a 20 percent Hispanic student body.

There are more than 45 million Hispanic people living in the United States, about 10 million more than there were in 2000, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. A report the center released this month shows that the bulk of the population boom stems from more Hispanic children being born here rather than immigration. About 20 percent of public school students across the country are Hispanic, the report shows.

“According to previous studies, Hispanic youth are at higher risk for alcohol use than either white or African-American youth,” said Keryn Pasch, an assistant professor of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas and the study’s lead author. “Exposure to alcohol advertising has been shown to increase alcohol use and intention to use alcohol, and marketers are aggressively capitalizing on the rapidly growing Hispanic population, targeting their marketing efforts at this group. Given these facts, I think it’s critical to determine if alcohol advertising around schools is related to the ethnicity of the students and, if it is, to take steps to reduce the exposure of high-risk groups to this negative influence.”

To combat the problem, communities could band together to demand to have fewer alcohol ads around schools. This occurred in several African-American communities in Chicago where organizers were able to successfully lobby for fewer alcohol ads, Komro said. Also, ordinances that limit advertising around schools could be strengthened to further shield children from alcohol advertising, Komro said.

“Policies could be expanded to a wider range around the schools, especially given what we know about how effective ads are, both alcohol and tobacco ads, in influencing children’s behavior,” Komro said.

But before you write off a nonreligious teen as one not bound for college, take note: Researchers still aren’t sure why “religiosity” and college graduation are connected.

“For most religious communities represented in our study, there is a strong correlation between religiosity and degree attainment,” said Ana Puig, research director and affiliate faculty member in counselor education at UF’s College of Education. “However, correlation does not mean causality.”

Puig and UF counselor education professor Mary Ann Clark joined UF alumnus Sang Min Lee in an analysis of data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study, a massive, federally funded study of student outcomes that began 20 years ago. Lee, who is now a professor at Korea University, was the principal investigator on the project.

The study, which appeared late last year in the journal Counseling and Values, won the Biggs-Pine Award for Writing Excellence this spring from the Association for Spiritual, Ethical and Religious Values in Counseling.

The researchers used data from a survey of 11,551 eighth-grade students in 1988 – a survey that asked a number of lifestyle-related questions, including questions about religious faith – and compared it with information collected from the same students eight years after they graduated from high school.

They found that among most religions or denominations, students who self-identified as “very religious” in eighth grade were far more likely to have, or be on their way to getting, a college degree – when compared with students who said they belonged to a religious faith, but identified as “not religious” or “somewhat religious.”

The effect was most pronounced in the Muslim community, with “very religious” Muslim students nearly four times as likely to attain a degree as “nonreligious” Muslims. All other groups in the study showed a statistically significant increase in degree attainment among “very religious” students.

The effect was negligible or nonexistent in groups with high across-the-board degree attainment, including Jewish students, Episcopalians and students who identified as belonging to the broad group of “Eastern religions.”

When the results were broken down by ethnicity, the researchers found that a high degree of religiosity was related to degree attainment in white, African-American and Hispanic students. Lee noted that religiosity was not a significant factor in degree attainment in the Asian-American population.

The researchers say relationship between religiosity and degree attainment may be due to certain positive behavioral effects related to participation in a religious group. They cite previous studies that link religious participation to reduced delinquent behavior – a factor likely to affect educational outcomes.

They also note that some parents of academically successful children cite religious values as a factor in their success. Clark has been conducting interviews with parents of secondary school students for an unrelated study on gender and school achievement, and she says the topic of religiosity comes up quite often.

“I’ve been surprised at how often parents brought up religion as a factor in their child’s academic performance, even though we weren’t even asking about it,” Clark said. Even so, it is possible that good grades and religious involvement stem from the same root cause, such as a specific parenting style, the researchers said. The researchers also note that the survey suffers the same flaws as any other study using self-reported data, and that the results may reflect a tendency, among high-achieving students, to portray themselves in a positive light.

While the study shows outcomes of students who identify with a religion and still describe themselves as “nonreligious,” it does not reflect the religious outcomes of atheists or agnostics. While the survey allowed students to select “none” as their religion, respondents in that category were too few to be included in the analyses. The same was true for Mormon respondents and those who identified as “other Christian” and for Native American students.

However, the study does offer insights that teachers and counselors can use in improving student performance, Clark said. Because religious differences are often too hot a topic for the classroom, Clark said, educators may feel inclined to steer conversation away from the topic of faith. However, it is important that educators listen to what students are saying, and acknowledge the role religion may play in their school lives.

“Students and parents are saying that religion is an important part of their academic lives, and we need to listen to that,” Clark said.

“Within African-American and Latino families, children follow a cultural tradition that places a high value on respecting, obeying and learning from elders, and in our study they did indeed show more respect for parental authority,” said Julia Graber, a UF psychology professor.

However, when African-American and Latina girls do act up, their mothers consider the arguments more intense than those reported by white mothers who clash with their daughters, said Graber, whose study is published in the February issue of the Journal of Family Psychology.

Hispanic and black mothers, who value strong family connections, a deep sense of family loyalty and the importance of extended family and social support networks, seemed to be much more upset if daughters fell short of cultural, good girl expectations, Graber said. “It may be just the kind of issue that pushes their buttons more, thinking of their daughter as no longer being the good, respectful daughter,” she said.

For all girls, discipline was the only factor that influenced how much conflict they perceived in the relationship. The stricter and harsher mothers were, the less conflict their daughters reported, Graber said. However, as girls get older, stricter discipline may lead to greater conflict if girls try to disagree, she said.

The study differs from other research on mother-daughter conflict in that instead of looking at adolescence, it examines girls in middle to late childhood, at an average age of 8½, Graber said. The teenage years are naturally turbulent times for families, but understanding what happens immediately preceding them sets the stage for a smoother or rockier transition, she said.

Teen conflict is a risk for other behavior-related problems, Graber said. “It does seem that when there are higher levels of conflict, those daughters are more likely to have adjustment problems in terms of feeling more depression, sadness, anxiety and those problems,” she said.

The intensity of the conflicts aside, the study found that mothers’ and daughters’ reports of the frequency of conflict were similar, Graber said. The study, which Graber did with Sara Villanueva Dixon, a St. Edward’s University psychology professor, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a Columbia University child development professor, involved 45 African-American, 23 Latina and 65 white girls recruited through fliers while in the third grade and their mothers. The girls and their families were from racially integrated, working and middle-class communities in a large metropolitan area.

The girls’ respect for authority was observed during a series of videotaped interactions with their mothers. Daughters were scored on their listening behaviors, which included attending to their mothers when their mothers were speaking, acknowledging their mothers’ comments and not interrupting their mothers. They also were evaluated for defiant behaviors, such as disobeying their mothers’ requests, being unwilling to cooperate with their mothers and ignoring their mothers during the interaction.

Not only do children need to be more aware of the expectations their parents have for them, but mothers may also want to reassess their feelings about particular issues, she said.

“The challenge for African-American and Latina mothers is they are in an environment where their children are potentially getting messages at school, on television and elsewhere about what normal childhood behavior is like that may conflict with their own expectations for these behaviors,” Graber said.

“In the higher conflict families where mothers and daughters are arguing much more often there seems to be less productive resolution going on and less learning of those skills,” she said. “Everybody feels mad afterwards rather than feeling the potential of moving forward.”

“This is a fascinating study that enhances our understanding of ethnic and racial differences in parent-child relationships,” said Judi Smetana, a University of Rochester psychologist. “One of its strengths is that it examines in a very careful and detailed way how different cultural values are expressed in mother-daughter interactions and how those values influence the quality of family relationships.”

The University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute in cooperation with King’s alma mater Morehouse College in Atlanta kicked off the first of the webcasts at 10 a.m. EDT on April 4, when experts from UF and Morehouse, along with institutions in China, India, Kenya and South Africa, discussed in real-time King’s meaning for the 21st century, said James Oliverio, director of UF’s Digital Worlds Institute. The other three programs are also scheduled at 10 a.m. on successive Fridays in April, and all can be viewed on the Internet at www.worldhouse.morehouse.edu.

In his “World House” speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, King said “modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think. Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.”

The outreach developed from a collaboration between UF and Morehouse College, the recipient of about 10,000 pieces of Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal writings in 2006. Terry Mills, a former UF dean who moved to Morehouse last year to become the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, said the idea came in discussions he had with Oliverio about how the two institutions might use the acquisition in educational programming.

The innovativeness of the technology at Digital Worlds Institute, which Mills called the “Imac Theater of Videoconferencing” for its ability to allow multiple partners around the globe to engage in an interactive, unified virtual space, made UF the natural choice to help produce the program, he said. “There are also geographic and historical reasons for the connection, notably Gainesville’s close proximity to St. Augustine where Dr. King had led freedom marches as well as its location near the site of the Rosewood massacre,” Mills said.

The purpose of the global discussions is not only to remind the world of King’s legacy but to keep his vision alive, as his message continues to have relevance today, Oliverio said.

“This is a memorial to Dr. King, not just in the sense of looking backward to some academic papers in a museum, but honoring his life’s work in the hopes that students of today at Morehouse, UF and the other participating institutions will reassess their involvement with their own societies in the same way that Dr. King took a stand against oppression of African Americans in the United States,” he said. “Even at the beginning of the 21st century human kind is still butchering each other in tribal conflicts over economic materialism and resources.”

Although King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is well-known among college students, many are not familiar with the “World House” concept mentioned in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech and his writings where he discusses the need to fight racism, war and poverty, he said.

“Many people who are involved in the labor movement see African-American workers, other minorities and women as being the key to any hopes of unions recovering some of their organizational strength,” said Robert Zieger, a UF history professor. His new book “For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865” was published this fall by University Press of Kentucky.

With the shift from an industrial to a service-based economy, growing numbers of jobs are emerging in places such as hospitals, nursing homes and entertainment complexes, with minorities taking many of these positions, Zieger said. “If unions don’t organize these workers, they’re not going to be able to sustain a very viable and extensive labor movement,” he said.

As organized labor continues its decline by representing an increasingly smaller segment of the American work force, a bright spot has been the Service Employees International Union, which counts janitors, hospital and nursing home workers and home care staffers among its members, Zieger said. “They are the fastest growing union in the country, with about a million and a half members, and they have had a number of outstanding successes in recent years,” he said.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union, which represents police officers, building inspectors, grounds workers, maintenance workers and administrative and clerical workers and others in the nonfederal public sector, also has a large membership, much of it consisting of women and people of color, he said.

“It’s important to recognize that even in a state like Florida, which we don’t normally think of as being a union-friendly state, there are 400,000 union members, and they, along with their families, represent an important potential political voting bloc,” he said.

In the 2000 presidential election, a coalition of organized labor and blacks worked together to target the minority vote, Zieger said. The formation of this black-labor coalition is an important historical development that has received little attention, he said.

“If a Democratic president is elected in 2008, that, along with legislation now pending before Congress that would make the process of union recognition easier, could generate a rebirth of organized labor,” he said. “If it does, it is likely to feature minority workers.”

Until the 1930s, organized labor’s record on race, particularly that of the American Federation of Labor and the railroad unions, was poor, Zieger said. Many unions explicitly barred blacks from membership and even those that did not actively discourage them from joining maintained collective bargaining agreements with employers that excluded blacks, he said.

An exception was the integrated United Mine Workers, the largest union in the first half of the 20th century, which had black officers, even in the South, he said.

In the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, actively recruited blacks to work in the rapidly growing auto, steel, textile, meatpacking and rubber tire industries that marked the rise of industrial unionism, Zieger said. “CIO leaders realized that blacks had come to play an important part in these mass-production industries and that if you wanted to organize these industries, you had to organize black workers,” he said.

Even so, blacks tended to occupy less-skilled positions in the factories and often felt that even those unions dedicated to the principles of racial egalitarianism, such as the United Auto Workers Union, weren’t sufficiently responsive to black workers, Zieger said.

“There were tensions going through the post-World War II period and these continue in some ways even today,” he said. “But I think if you look at the current AFL-CIO, which is the primary labor organization in the country, with headquarters in Washington, it seeks to be very responsive to black workers.”

Paul Ortiz, a community studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wrote “Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920,” said Zieger’s book is a crowning achievement. “Professor Zieger’s ‘For Jobs and Freedom’ is the premiere historical synthesis on the complex relationships between African Americans and labor unions from the 19th century to the present,” he said. “It will be the standard text in this field for years to come.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Restrictions to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States are having the perverse effect of encouraging those who are already here to stay by any means necessary, a new University of Florida study finds.

The culprit is tightened post 9-ll security, which has prompted immigrants to skip visits to their homelands because of the risk of not being allowed back into the U.S., said UF anthropology professor Maxine L. Margolis.

“These draconian measures do not deter undocumented immigrants from trying to enter the country so much as discourage those who are already here from returning home,” said Margolis, whose research is scheduled to be published in the January issue of the journal Human Organization. “The restrictions are doing exactly the opposite of what they intend to do by locking these people in place.”

The research is based on interviews with Brazilian immigrants and applies to other nationalities as well, Margolis said. “Whether they are Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Dominicans or any other group with a large undocumented population, they are experiencing the same problems,” she said.

Unlike in the past, when most illegal immigrants made a single, permanent move to the United States, in the last few decades they have tended to move back and forth between their home and host countries for a variety of economic and social reasons, Margolis said. Many foreigners come here temporarily for jobs paying anywhere from four to 10 times as much money as they would earn in their native countries in order to support their families, but they may return home briefly to see a sick relative or to attend a family wedding or funeral, she said.

It has become increasingly difficult, however, for immigrants to leave the United States and return since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the government tightened restrictions for tourist visas, increased deportation of undocumented foreigners, strengthened border patrols and made it harder for immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and other legal documents, she said.

Many of these people have children, investments, jobs and apartments in this country and don’t want to risk being unable to return, Margolis said. Even with valid passports and visas, they can be denied re-entry if they previously overstayed the limit on their visa, she said.

One Brazilian immigrant, who owned a floor tile company in New York and had lived in the state for several years with his wife and American-born daughter, flew to Brazil when he learned his elderly father was seriously ill, Margolis said. On his return, he was stopped at JFK International Airport and was deported to Brazil for having previously overstayed his tourist visa, she said.

Some undocumented immigrants have found creative ways to get around the regulations and avoid detection, often at considerable expense, she said.

One Brazilian woman living in North Carolina who was desperate to visit her family returned to the U.S. through the Caribbean islands where she boarded a cruise ship bound for Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, Margolis said. Correctly assuming authorities were unlikely to search for illegal immigrants aboard cruise ships, she got through with her Brazilian passport and flew back to the states, she said.

Margolis’ study also revealed immigrants developing schemes to circumvent the requirements for driver’s licenses. Typically, Brazilian immigrants in the Northeast load up in minivans and drive to states such as Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina, which do not require a green card or valid Social Security card for a license, but some have traveled as far as the West Coast, she said.

So far none of the proposed federal, state or local immigration bills has included a provision that would allow immigrants to travel home to visit family and friends and be assured re-entry into the United States, she said.

Conrad Kottak, a University of Michigan anthropology professor, said Margolis “provides a valuable case study of how one group of transnational migrants — Brazilians in the United States — have been affected by changes in American border policies since the 9/11 attacks. Many of her findings no doubt apply as well to other new immigrant communities.”

Pilgrimages, retreats and conventions are fast becoming one of the most reliable and desirable forms of income for the travel industry, said Harrison Pinckney IV. He did the study for his master’s thesis in UF’s department of tourism, recreation and sports management. Participants usually bring along their families and stretch their visits over three to four days, making a mini-vacation out of the affair by shopping, visiting museums and eating out, Pinckney said. He is now working on a doctoral degree in recreation, parks and tourism at Texas A&M University.

“There may be 80,000 people in town, but they’re not the kind to show up at bars and drive home drunk,” he said. “Because they have their kids with them they might go to a family restaurant or catch a movie afterwards.”

Another advantage of these religious gatherings is they are less likely to be canceled because many churches’ bylaws require congregations to hold annual conventions, Pinckney said. “After 9-11 there was a decline in attendance at professional conferences, but the numbers stayed steady for church conferences and in some cases even increased,” he said.

Although greater attendance at large church-oriented events is part of a broad social trend, Pinckney focused on black churches in his study. Historically, the church has assumed great importance to blacks because it was one of the few places in society that welcomed them, particularly before desegregation, when black-owned businesses were rare, he said.

“More than just a church, it became whatever the African-American community wanted it to be — a civic center, an after-school program and then a summer camp, even a homeless shelter,” he said.

Pinckney distributed questionnaires at seven Church of God by Faith congregations in Florida and Georgia during 2004. A total of 102 participants returned the surveys at the end of the church service or gave them to their pastors the following week.

Eighty-two percent reported having traveled to at least one Church of God by Faith national event. Sixty-one percent said they attended the four-day national convention for its entire length, while 26 percent said they were there for three days. The remaining 13 percent of churchgoers reported going for two days, with no one reporting a shorter visit.

While at the conventions, churchgoers reported sampling a variety of outside events such as sightseeing, shopping, visiting family or friends, and attending local performances or sporting events. The most popular activity was shopping– 30 percent reported heading for retail outlets –followed by visiting family and friends, 21 percent. Attending sports events was least popular, attracting only 5 percent.

Like major sporting events, church-oriented special events have been a financial boon to cities, with some attracting more than 80,000 visitors at a time and generating as much as $18 million for the local economy, Pinckney said. MegaFest, a religious event in Atlanta, draws about 150,000 a year, he said.

Lori Pennington-Gray, director for UF’s Center for Tourism Research and Development and a professor in UF’s tourism, recreation and sports management department who supervised Pinckney’s research, said the travel industry is recognizing the importance of such events by assembling more meeting planners specializing in this type of market, she said.

Because church-oriented special events operate on such a grand scale, they must usually be planned at least a couple of years in advance, Pennington-Gray said. “That makes them less vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy than segments of the leisure market where people’s discretionary income is affected if the economy takes a downturn,” she said.

DeWayne Woodring, executive director of the Religious Conference Management Association headquartered in Indianapolis, said a survey conducted by his organization shows that the number of religious meetings grew 195 percent in the past 10 years.

“Meetings are becoming more and more important because within this increasingly complex and global society, people feel a need to meet with others with whom they share a common faith, bond or purpose,” he said.

“A man and a woman of different races in the movies have a greater statistical probability of dying than of getting married or dating seriously,” said Nadia Ramoutar, who did the research for her doctoral dissertation in mass communications at UF and is now a communications professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine.

White women have not appeared in an interracial relationship in a top-selling film since “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, she said. American Indian women have not been portrayed this way since “Dances with Wolves” in 1995, and the last time an American Indian man was part of such a union was in “The Trial of Billy Jack” in 1974.

The findings are important, Ramoutar said, because popular films do more than entertain: They are a powerful means of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

“The results of this study sadly show that racial and ethnic segregation in romantic relationships is heavily practiced in Hollywood blockbuster films and has become more common rather than less common in the past four decades,” Ramoutar said.

The study analyzed interracial relationships in blockbuster Hollywood films between 1967 and 2005, beginning with the landmark social commentary “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Ramoutar selected the 15 top-grossing box office hits of each year for her sample. Of these, she found 36 films with interracial couples.

Forty-two percent of the women in such partnerships were victims of violence. “Lying on the table like a piece of sushi” is how police described Cheryl, the drug-addicted, sexually deviant female character in “Rising Sun” responsible for three men’s deaths who dies herself.

The scripts use certain interracial combinations more than others and avoid some entirely, the study found. No Arabic or eastern Indian appears in any film, for example.

The most common racial coupling was a white male with an Asian female, who was often portrayed as a “model minority,” in that she was smarter, more compliant and less sexually aggressive than women of other races, Ramoutar said.

But while Asians were the most common women of color, representing nearly one-quarter of interracial romances, Asian men were practically invisible, Ramoutar said. The only major Asian male in such a relationship in nearly four decades was Jackie Chan’s character in the 2001 movie “Rush Hour 2,” she said.

And a Hispanic woman playing a CIA double agent who briefly falls in love with Chan’s character marks the first time a Hispanic female appears in an interracial relationship at all during those years, said Ramoutar.

Hispanic men also were marginalized, cast in only three movies, Ramoutar said. The women they were paired with, including Michele Pfeiffer’s character Elvira in “Scarface,” were drug addicts with no purpose in life but getting high, she said.

“Despite the large number of women actively employed in the American workplace, the most commonly portrayed occupation of all the women in these films is that they have no identifiable occupation,” Ramoutar said. The second most popular occupation was working as a spy, followed by a tie between prostitute and entertainer, she said.

While white women in interracial relationships came across as either morally corrupt or socially inept or as victims of physical or sexual abuse, women of color who become involved with white men were often presented as erotic, exotic and possessing exceptional talents, she said.

“(Chinese-American) Alex in ‘Charlie’s Angels’ is a sky-diving, computer-hacking, black belt martial artist who can defeat a room full of men – her only misgiving is that she is a bad cook,” she said. “And Charlotte Lewis’ character in ‘The Golden Child’ can leap over tall walls or from high buildings, usually just wearing Eddie Murphy’s shirt and her underwear.”

The majority of black women on the big screen were pale skinned like Halle Berry, with dark-skinned actresses rarely cast except as villainesses or femme fatales, she said.

Terry Francis, a film studies professor at Yale University, praised Ramoutar’s choice of a topic. “It might be the quintessential American narrative,” she said.

Anemia, a reduction in the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood that can cause fatigue, weakness and dizziness, is common in old age. But its signs are often subtle, and doctors need to be sure they carefully consider it as they evaluate older patients, say study authors, writing recently in The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences.

“Considering anemia should be part of an overall patient’s risk assessment even if the person is without symptoms or apparent clinical disease,” said Marco Pahor, director of the University of Florida’s Institute on Aging and a study’s co-investigator.

The study revealed that even a mild case of anemia increases an elderly person’s risk, indicating that treatment recommendations may need to be adjusted for older patients, Pahor said. Researchers found an association between late-life anemia and heart conditions, cancer, infectious diseases and diabetes.

The World Health Organization defines anemia as a concentration of the oxygen-ferrying molecule hemoglobin that is below 12 grams per deciliter in women, and below 13 grams per deciliter in men.

“Those older patients having mild anemia have not been considered at higher risk, but our data show that even those patients with low or even close to normal range do have higher risk for death and hospitalization and they should be considered for more in-depth screening for other conditions,” Pahor said.

To more fully understand its detrimental health effects, the researchers studied the relationship of anemia to hospitalization and death in 3,607 people aged 71 years or older who participated in the National Institute on Aging-sponsored Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly. About 13 percent of people 70 or older are anemic, and those percentages increase with age. Most cases occur in association with underlying diseases such as stomach ulcers, chronic infections, cancer, chronic kidney ailments and congestive heart failure or due to malnutrition or iron deficiency. However, up to a third of the time, anemia is not attributable to these factors, so people with pre-existing conditions that could have caused it were excluded from the study.

In the study, 451 participants were anemic. They were more likely to be older black men and women with a lower body mass index. During the four-year follow-up period, 37 percent of those with anemia died, compared with 22 percent of the other study participants. In addition, two-thirds of anemic participants were hospitalized at some point in the study period; only half of those without anemia were.

“We hope this study will promote clinical awareness of anemia as a risk factor for other conditions,” Pahor said. “It is a risk factor for mortality, hospitalization, loss of independence, lower muscle strength and increased inflammation. We would like to do further studies to find out whether, if you could correct anemia, could you prevent these events?”

The first step toward correcting anemia is to, when possible, identify and then treat the underlying disease causing it, Pahor said. Treatment also may involve giving iron when iron levels are low, vitamin supplements to replace folate and vitamin B12 in people with poor eating habits, erythropoietin to increase red blood cell production in people with kidney problems and antibiotics to treat infections.

Dr. Paulo Henrique M. Chaves, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University’s Center on Aging and Health, said the paper provides insight into anemia as a strong prognostic factor for major health complications.

“A little bit of anemia is often perceived as a benign finding in older adults,” Chaves said. “However, results from this study by Penninx, Pahor and colleagues – as well as consistent and recently published findings that link mild anemia and even low-normal hemoglobin levels to a status of increased frailty and greater functional decline in older adults – suggest otherwise, at least in terms of prognostic significance.

“What remains to be established now is whether pharmacological correction of mild anemia in older adults may help slow the disablement process, preventing the onset and progression of frailty and disability, improving quality of life and prolonging survival,” he added. “Randomized clinical trials will be necessary to address these important questions.”

The multicenter team spearheading the current study was a partnership with industry and the federal government. It included researchers from the National Institute on Aging, UF’s Institute on Aging, the Netherlands and Ortho Biotech Products in Bridgewater, N.J., which manufactures Procrit, a hormone that stimulates red blood cell production. Pahor has served as a consultant for the company.

“There were a lot of preconceived ideas about which type of communicator would be better,” said Dolores Albarracin, who with Marta R. Durantini authored the study published in the March Psychological Bulletin. “Generally the idea that comes from community psychology is that community members are better.”

People who want to prevent HIV or need advice after a diagnosis often feel more comfortable talking with someone of their race and gender, Albarracin said. Patients often consult their friends, family, clergy, classmates, people who frequent the same bar or who live in their neighborhood. However, talking with peers may not always lead to the best advice, despite the growing popularity of peer health education since the 1970s.

“We actually found that community members are less effective than experts, which is completely contrary to previous philosophies,” she said. “This has a lot of implications because many of the programs these days are based on the idea that community members are better, so funds are given to community-based organizations, thinking they are going to be better.”

The study involved a comprehensive statistical analysis from 166 HIV prevention interventions, and included published and unpublished works. Interventions consist of programs sponsored by experts and peer leaders, visits to medical professionals and programs led by peers.

“Our study was a large review,” Albarracin said. “We collected everything that had been done, throughout the duration of the AIDS epidemic all over the world, from 1985 to 2005, and we ended up with a really extensive database of results of interventions by community members and experts.”

The study analyzed results of intervention in all population groups, including men, women and children, and all risk groups such as injection drug users and people with multiple sex partners.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends peer consultation for HIV prevention, but Albarracin said her findings suggest that a better connection is necessary between community-based organizations and state agencies to make sure programs have both types of sources and that peers are better trained.

A redirection of funds from peer-based prevention groups to expert-led groups could help encourage a wider diversity of experts, which Albarracin said is needed.

“We found that the best experts for prevention among African-American women are African-American and female,” she said. “If you look at physicians, nurses, psychologists and many other health professionals, many of them are white. So to find those experts with racial and gender matching isn’t always easy.”

The study revealed that female and minority experts are necessary to create effective campaigns for women and ethnic minorities. Because of a shortage of health-care professionals in these demographics, policy makers must consider the development of training programs to make the available agents more effective.

A long-term goal is to encourage greater diversity in the health professions among ethnic minorities, which Albarracin said could be achieved through affirmative action programs.

Through broad research on the effectiveness of HIV interventions, Albarracin said it will become apparent which tactics work and which ones don’t.

“Dr. Albarracin’s research syntheses are some of the most systematic and complete of any that have yet been published,” said Blair Johnson, a professor of social psychology at the University of Connecticut. “In the scholarly community, they are certain to stimulate renewed interest in the social psychological mechanisms underlying successful HIV prevention efforts for practically any population at risk for HIV. In the public health and policy community, they offer the hope of better interventions, with the result that fewer people will contract (or transmit) HIV.”

The findings, to be published in the April issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association, call attention to the need to screen these men early — beginning at age 45 instead of 50 — and to offer them ongoing prostate cancer education, UF researchers report.

Prostate cancer remains the second-most-commonly diagnosed cancer and the second-most-common cause of cancer deaths in American men over age 45. Even so, prostate cancer mortality rates in the United States have been steadily declining during the past 10 years, thanks to serum prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, blood tests and improved treatments.

But the researchers found a different situation for inner-city men in Jacksonville, Fla.

“It all came about when we noticed that several patients we screened in Jacksonville were presenting with more advanced disease than what we had seen in similarly sized settings — namely Houston and Winston-Salem,” said Dr. Charles Rosser, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of urology at the University of Florida - Jacksonville. “Patients who presented in Houston and Winston-Salem had already been screened so thoroughly that they presented with a lot earlier disease than what we saw here. We wanted to know why Jacksonville’s numbers were so much higher.”

Although several variables may be involved, Rosser thinks the cause is a lack of prostate cancer screening and ongoing education in inner-city Jacksonville.

“Other communities our size have had fairly large screening initiatives – first directed to the general community and then directed to minorities in the inner city,” he said. “Here in Jacksonville we didn’t have anything like that until 2003, when UF College of Medicine–Jacksonville urologists, in partnership with the Duval County Health Department, began offering free screenings at UF’s affiliated hospital, Shands Jacksonville.”

Using the data from these screenings, the seven-member research team set out to assess the detection rate of prostate cancer and disease stage at diagnosis. Researchers collected and analyzed clinical and pathological data from the biopsies of 368 men — 52 percent white, 42 percent black, 5 percent Hispanic and 1 percent Asian. Because of the small numbers, Hispanics and Asians were excluded for study purposes.

Researchers then reviewed clinic and hospital records for several key outcomes, including cancer incidence, tumor stage (if and how far the cancer has spread) and tumor grade (how far the cells have changed from normal to abnormal on a 1-to-5 scale, with grade 1 being the least aggressive).

Still, the researchers were surprised to find these men were four times as likely to have advanced cancer, Rosser said.

“The chance of usually presenting with advanced disease is maybe 5 percent nationwide,” he said. “Our study sample showed 16 percent for blacks and 3.8 percent for whites — a statistically significant finding.”

When patients don’t begin treatment until cancer is advanced, the cure rate drops dramatically.

“Once the cancer has spread beyond the prostate, we’re not looking to cure the disease — we’re just looking to slow its growth,” Rosser said. “Our findings strongly suggest that, despite two decades of increasing emphasis on prostate cancer screening and detection in the United States, such programs may not be reaching or having the desired effect on underserved inner-city populations, especially blacks.”

Annual screenings should include the PSA blood test and an exam, with biopsy and further examination recommended for a PSA level above 4.0, Rosser said.

UF’s research is valuable and confirms what others have published, said Dr. Isaac Powell, professor of urology at Wayne State University and Karmanos Cancer Institute, who has been studying prostate cancer in Detroit for 16 years. “Not only do black men have a higher incidence of the disease but their death rate is two to three times higher than white men,” he said. “Our data suggest the disease may be growing faster among blacks than whites, so we’re studying genetics, diet, prostatitis and health-seeking behavior to try to explain these differences.”

Education is key for these men, according to Rosser.

“Of course, we need to stress the importance of annual screenings, but we also need to let them know why they’re being screened and explain that, as black men, statistically they’re at higher risk for the disease,” he said. “Education must go hand in hand with screening.”

The study identifies a disparity in prostate cancer screening and detection among men of differing social strata that is especially worrisome at a time when the underserved — especially blacks — stand to benefit most from such programs, Rosser said.

“We need to rectify this disparity by establishing in underserved inner-city communities across the United States large-scale and innovative screening programs to educate men about prostate cancer, screen them for the disease and assist them in obtaining follow-up care,” he said.

In her new book, “Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African Americans,” University of Florida law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown takes an unflinching look at how race, crime, fame and gender affect public attitudes toward people involved in public scandals. The book includes a foreword by New York University law professor Derrick Bell, a founding figure in the field of Critical Race Theory.

“This book was inspired by the O.J. Simpson case,” said Russell-Brown, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations at UF’s Levin College of Law. “I was intrigued by the black community’s support for O.J., when he had in many ways separated himself from the community.”

Opinions about the Simpson verdict remain seriously divided along racial lines, with a majority of blacks believing he was set up and a majority of whites convinced he got away with murder. In that and other racially charged criminal cases, each side is mystified by the other side’s decision-making process.

Russell-Brown examined 30 cases involving what she labels “black protectionism.” She also held focus groups with blacks and finds there is a simple explanation for the black-white divide in these cases.

“When white people hear that a black celebrity is accused of a crime, they ask one question: Did he do it?” Russell-Brown said. “For African-Americans, there’s a longer list of questions. Did he do it? If he did, was he set up? Is he the only person who has committed this offense? And is he being treated the same as whites who have done the same thing?”

Those questions are rooted in American history, which is rife with examples of entrapment and false prosecution of blacks, Russell-Brown said.

She notes specific historical examples of black celebrities who faced criminal charges that, even if true, seem in retrospect to be the result of selective prosecution. For example, after boxing great Jack Johnson defeated a white man to win the heavyweight title in 1910, he was convicted of transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Similarly, U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, who represented Harlem in Congress, spent months defending himself against a $3,000 tax evasion lawsuit.

Whether or not those people were guilty, Russell-Brown said, it is clear today that they were charged because they were outspoken, powerful and black. It’s a lesson black people remember when they hear that a rich or famous black man is charged with a crime, she said.

“Russell-Brown’s book takes a fresh perspective on the concept of linked fate, the idea that African-Americans are alternately embarrassed, protective about, or inspired by the acts of famous or infamous members of their race, by using focus groups and critical race theory to analyze this confounding phenomenon,” said Randolph Stone, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago.

Blacks aren’t the only people who engage in protectionism, Russell-Brown notes. White people extend a similar protectionism to police officers facing charges of brutality. She cites the example of the beating of Rodney King, which was caught on video tape, and the killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man who was shot by New York police who had falsely concluded he was a serial rapist.

“In these cases, white people noted that the police have a tough job, that they have to make split-second decisions, or, in the King case, that we really don’t know what happened before the tape was turned on,” Russell-Brown said.

Russell-Brown said she is concerned about the black community’s failure to extend protection to black defendants of average means, who deserve the presumption of innocence.

“The larger community gains when every member is valued and afforded the same protections, regardless of their fame or fortune,” Russell-Brown said.

Analyzing data from more than 5,000 premature births, UF researchers pinpointed a link between gender and race and the survival rates of babies born at extremely low weights, according to findings released today (Jan. 3) in the journal Pediatrics. It’s the first scientific evidence of a phenomenon doctors have observed for years, said Dr. Steven B. Morse, a UF assistant professor of pediatrics and the article’s lead author.

Baby girls of both races had the strongest advantage when born weighing less than 1,000 grams, about 2 pounds or as much as a quart of milk, Morse said. Girls had nearly twice the odds of surviving as baby boys did, and black infants also had a slight survival advantage over whites, the research shows. Overall, black baby girls were twice as likely to survive compared with white baby boys, 1.8 times more likely to survive than black boys and 1.3 times more likely to live than white baby girls.

“When you’re talking about survival, that’s very significant,” Morse said. “We have known in general that females tend to have better survival rates than males and blacks better than whites. But quantifying that and finding if there was a statistical significance had yet to be done.”

Morse and other researchers from the UF Maternal Child Health Education and Research and Data Center also analyzed the infants’ developmental ages and weights at birth, combining these data with race and gender to specify the odds of survival for babies born in each demographic.

Nationwide, nearly a half million babies are born prematurely each year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Only about 1 percent of all babies born weigh less than 2 pounds, and one of the first questions parents of these infants ask is if their child will live, said Morse, who as a neonatologist works with families every day. Having accurate data can help families and doctors make better decisions at a time when choices can be hard to make, he said.

“I’m trying to get as much information as I can before the baby is born to give the parents a realistic expectation of survival,” he said. “Not all babies are the same, especially with regard to survival at this early gestational age. There are differences based on race and gender, so we can’t group all these babies together and say survival at less than 1,000 grams is X-percent.”

UF researchers studied vital statistics from 5,076 babies born in Florida between 1996 and 2000 and weighing less than 1,000 grams. The influence of gender and race on babies’ survival rates was more noticeable the smaller the infants were, the research shows. The higher the weights and developmental ages were at birth, the more survival rates increased for all babies.

About 1,500 babies included in the study were extremely premature, born when their mothers were less than 24 weeks pregnant. On average, these babies had a less than 27 percent chance of survival. Because their organs have not had as much time to develop, these tiny babies are at the highest risk for disabling health problems, and doctors and families often struggle to decide what life-saving measures should be taken, if any, Morse said.

“This is the highest-risk population of babies and there is a lot of controversy, especially at the lower gestational ages, of how much should we really do for these babies, how aggressively should we treat them, especially around 23 to 24 weeks,” he said.

The researchers do not know what measures were taken to save the lives of each of the babies included in the study, which Morse describes as the only limitation of the research. Many families decide just to hold their babies as they pass away, while others adopt a wait-and-see approach or request all measures be taken to save the preemie’s life.

“It’s very hard to make rules as to which babies should be resuscitated,” said Herman A. Hein, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Iowa. “Each case should be addressed with individuals. These babies do have a tremendous risk, but it’s interesting when you talk to families and ask them if they regret their decision. I have yet to find one that says yes.”

Hein says the findings of the UF study do not surprise him. Prior research has shown that black women tend to have more premature babies than women of other races, possibly because their babies mature a little earlier and faster, he said.

There isn’t conclusive evidence yet to explain why girls and black infants have better chances of survival, Morse said. But female preemies’ lungs tend to be more developed at birth, which could be part of the explanation, Morse said.

For Morse, the next big question isn’t why these babies survive but what happens to them when they do. He now plans to study what happens to extremely low-birth weight children, who are more prone to health problems, as they age.

“Survival is not everything,” he said. “It’s a first step. Probably a bigger question to answer is quality of life. That’s the next step.”

People who left without paying for any items were six times more likely to be shoplifters who bypassed the check-out line to avoid drawing attention to themselves, said Richard Hollinger, a UF criminologist and one of the study’s researchers. The work also cautions against trying to spot shoplifters based on race, gender, age and ethnicity.

“We all believe it to be courteous behavior when a retailer asks ‘May I help you?,’ but what they’re really saying is ‘We know you’re here, please don’t shoplift,’” he said.

Behavioral cues are more important than demographic characteristics in identifying shoplifters, Hollinger said. Professional shoplifters often scan the store to make sure no none is watching them tampering with the products, he said.

“There’s a phenomenon called ‘shopping while black,’ with some evidence to suggest that certain shoppers, particularly blacks, are scrutinized more heavily and even harassed in various stores,” he said. “Our study raises serious questions about the profiling of suspected shoplifters, particularly black males.”

Popular shoplifting stereotypes were challenged in the UF study, in which researchers covertly observed 1,365 shoppers in an Atlanta drug store with closed-circuit television cameras. Slightly more than 8 percent of the people who entered the store stole an item.

The UF study, which was published in the December 2004 issue of Justice Quarterly, additionally disputes the image of most shoplifters being female. “The rule of thumb always has been that women shoplift more than men simply because there are more women shoppers, unless it’s a sporting goods store or a hardware store,” he said. “But we were able to determine that men actually stole more often than women.”

Drug abuse may be driving this trend, Hollinger said. “We estimate, based on other research, that many male shoplifters are not what we would call ‘primary household shoplifters,’ — they’re not shoplifting food for tonight’s dinner or medications for their child’s cold,” he said. “Rather, many of them hit the film, pain relievers or batteries, steal them in large quantities and sell them, using shoplifting as a way to feed their drug habit.”

And although shopkeepers often are quick to blame juveniles for missing items, the UF study found shoplifters were most commonly between the ages of 35 and 54. These middle-aged adults, most of them gainfully employed, were “primary household shoppers” who occasionally stole to acquire goods whose cost stretched beyond their household budgets.

Overall, blacks and Hispanics were no more likely than whites to steal merchandise. However, when race and gender were examined by subcategory, Hispanic females stole the most, shoplifting at more than seven times the rate of white females, he said.

Many stole household items they needed, such as medicine or makeup, or snatched a candy bar or lollipops off the shelf for their children, whom they had brought along, if they started to fuss or cry, he said.

Few studies have focused on family shoplifting, except those that examine “distraction teams,” Hollinger said. “These shoplifters might take children along with them, usually with an ice cream cone or a candy bar in hand, mainly to distract the sales clerk, who tries to head off the kids from damaging the merchandise while mom and dad steal,” he said.

Shoplifting is sometimes called the “crime tax,” because it results in annual losses of more than $10 billion that are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, said Hollinger, who did the study with criminology professors Dean Dabney at Georgia State University and Laura Dugan at the University of Maryland. “It’s been estimated that about $400 is spent annually by each family in America just to pay for the cost of replacing these stolen goods,” he said.

Recent evidence also suggests that many professionally shoplifted items are even fenced overseas and used to fund other criminal activities, including terrorism, he said.

Shaun L. Gabbidon, a criminal justice professor at Penn State Harrisburg and an expert on shoplifting, said the study is “groundbreaking and very important.” It raises serious questions about racial profiling of shoplifters, and unlike other research relies on observational rather than official data, which are often tabulated based on police arrests. Unfortunately, studies show police arrest patterns sometimes reflect bias, he said.

“With this observation data, we can actually see what is going on,” he said. “It tells us that relying on official data is fraught with problems and we should be very careful in how we interpret them. We need more studies like this one.”

“Unlike older grandparents who are frequently retired, middle-aged grandparents face problems trying to balance their newfound parenting roles with other responsibilities, including the demands of careers and personal interests,” said Terry Mills, a UF sociologist who did the study, which appeared in the April issue of the journal Marriage and Family Review.

Mills examined psychological distress in households where grandparents are raising grandchildren, with no biological parent present – so called “skipped-generation families.” He used data from the 1999 National Survey of America’s Families, a sample representing 430,018 grandmothers between the ages of 32 and 71, which was collected by the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute.

The older the grandmothers were, the study found, the less likely they were to experience symptoms of depression, the study found.

“Skipped-generation families,” a term coined in 1997, are growing because of a variety of social problems, Mills said. These include an increase in drug abuse, teen pregnancy, divorce, AIDS and the number of parents being imprisoned, he said.

“Some historians might point out that in more traditional agrarian times it was not unusual to have multigenerational families, such as those seen on ‘Little House on the Prairie,’” he said. “But ‘skipped-generation households’ are a 21st-century problem.”

U.S. Census data show nearly 8 percent of all children under age 18 (5.5 million) currently live in homes with grandparents, Mills said. Of these, 1.3 million are grandparent-headed households, with roughly half the children in such families under age 6, he said.

In the United States, the largest percentage of children living in a grandparent-headed
household are black, Mills said. Other research has found that black grandparents acting as parents are more likely than their white counterparts to be unemployed, live below the poverty line and have larger numbers of grandchildren to care for, he said.

“Such grandmothers are not all alike, and Dr. Mills’ work shows that younger grandmothers raising grandchildren are more susceptible to depression,” said Richard K. Caputo, professor of social policy and research at Yeshiva University’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work.

In Mills’ study, grandmothers were asked how much of the time during the past month they felt nervous, downhearted or calm and peaceful, as well as how frequently they were happy or could not be cheered up. Each item was measured on a scale that ranged from “all of the time” to “none of the time.”

“One reason for a grandmother’s emotional distress may be her sense of failure as a parent,” Mills said. “She may feel, ‘I’m having to do this because my own son or daughter could not care for their child.’”

Many re-enter the parenting role when their parenting skills are rusty, and some find it difficult to resolve the issues of whether they are a parent or a grandparent, he said.

The study found that besides being younger, grandmothers who experienced the most frequent feelings of psychological distress were those who were black and lived in the Midwest, had a family income below the poverty level, were on welfare, did not receive social service payments for child care and had a regular place for child care.

“It’s not surprising that having a family income below the poverty level or not receiving welfare payments for child care were associated with more frequent feelings of emotional distress,” Mills said. “One serious consequence of becoming a custodial grandparent is a change for the worse in the grandparent’s financial status.”

“A grandmother may want to work rather than receive welfare, but for those without a husband or partner who could help with child care, it might be difficult to manage,” he said.

He suggests that federal policies limiting welfare benefits and providing little assistance to skipped-generation grandparents should be revised to contribute more support for the valuable role they play.

“I don’t think society is aware of the public service these grandparents provide in struggling to keep families intact instead of just shipping the children off to foster care,” he said. “Yet foster parents get a lot more money and support in terms of social assistance than these kinds of caregivers do.”