The survey of 507 Floridians found that although many see undocumented immigrants as threats to their economic well-being and personal safety, they still had “pockets” of sympathetic views toward those trying to establish themselves as U.S. residents, said Tracy Irani, director of the UF/IFAS Center for Public Issues Education, or PIE Center, the research group that led the study.

“They definitely have some concerns and some less favorable perceptions about undocumented immigrants, but despite that, still, the majority feels positively about there being some pathway toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants,” Irani said. “To me, that’s the big takeaway.”

Jack Payne, UF’s senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources, said the immigration survey results point out precisely why the university must take a leading role in studying immigration and educating the public about the pros and cons of immigration reform.

“To solve an issue, you must understand that issue,” Payne said. “Immigration is a critical issue for Floridians – it’s affecting agriculture, which is a key economic driver in our state, it affects our public schools, and our health care system … we can’t separate ourselves from it.”

Irani said the study found significant knowledge gaps about current and pending immigration policy.

Among those gaps: Many respondents knew that undocumented immigrants often work in agriculture or outdoor industries, such as construction or roofing, but only 6 percent of respondents knew that many work in the hospitality industry.

About 58 percent of respondents did not know that babies born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants are automatically granted U.S. citizenship.

And more than half of the survey’s respondents were unaware of the E-Verify system being considered as a mandatory check to see if potential employees are authorized to work in the United States, she said.

Seventy-three percent of survey respondents said they believe undocumented immigrants are a burden on the economy more than an asset, and 58 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “undocumented immigrants reduce the number of good jobs for Americans.”

Despite those negative feelings, 85 percent said the government should either allow undocumented immigrants to remain in the U.S. and eventually become citizens or require them to leave and return and become citizens only if they meet specific requirements. Only 15 percent said they would prefer the government to force undocumented immigrants out of the U.S. permanently.

The survey showed that 44 percent of respondents reported knowing someone who came to the U.S. in the last 10 years, either documented or undocumented. Thirty-nine percent of those said they consider that person a friend.

Survey respondents were asked to assign levels of importance to a number of topics, and immigration was not among their chief concerns. Only 70 percent of respondents reported it as extremely or highly important, dead last behind the economy, health care, water, the federal budget deficit, housing, K-12 education and higher education.

The survey respondents were selected as a demographically representative sample of adult Florida residents. This is the second of four surveys PIE Center officials hope to conduct every year, to track public sentiment over time. Besides immigration, the other topics include water, endangered species, and perceptions about organic and non-organic foods and agricultural practices used to grow them.

The PIE Center will host a webinar on immigration reform and its implication for agriculture on May 28. To register, go to www.piecenter.com/easy-as-pie/. The center also created an immigration webpage: www.piecenter.com/immigration.

The county has become a new destination for undocumented immigrants looking for work. With a history of racial conflict and tensions growing between natives and newcomers, it’s not the kind of place that fosters a bright outlook.

But while interviewing an elderly conservative barber for a new book, Williams, a University of Florida professor, discovered some optimism toward the gridlocked discussion on immigration.

The barber asked his grandson how many Hispanic children attended his school. The boy responded, ‘I don’t know, Papa. We’re just all the same.”

The interview with the barber is one among hundreds that went into “Living ‘Illegal,’ The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration,” a new book that records the stories of both undocumented immigrants and the natives of the communities they inhabit.

Williams, director of the Center of Latin American Studies, and Manuel A. Vásquez, a UF professor of religion, co-authored the book with Marie Friedmann Marquardt and Timothy J. Steigenga. The book is scheduled to be released Oct. 8.

The authors spent 10 years working in immigrant communities in Florida and Georgia, and wrote the book to focus the national conversation about immigration on the human aspects of the issue.

In the past, the topic has produced polarized shouting matches but no “informed, humanized” discussion, Vasquez said.

“This book is an attempt to say that the issue is more complicated than it seems,” he said.

In their research, the authors found that immigration is a moral and ethical issue and cannot be defined in simple “approve and disapprove” terms.

“The attitudes people hold toward immigration are a lot more ambiguous than we think,” Williams said. “The issue isn’t as black and white as our politicians make it seem.”

The book does not advocate for open borders but does suggest a more humane immigration reform that will benefit America as a whole and the immigrants themselves.

“Right now, immigration is a lose-lose situation,” Vasquez said. “These people’s home countries lose their best and brightest people. America loses when it doesn’t accept these skilled people who potentially could add a lot to our society.”

Vasquez and Williams, a professor of political science and Latin American studies, hope the book will help put a human face to the issue.

“We wanted to humanize the debate on immigration,” Williams said. “Our lives are very often entwined with those of immigrants. They are our co-workers. Their kids go to school with our kids. They worship alongside us. They play a huge role in our communities.”

While the authors hope for comprehensive immigration reform, they are not optimistic about its prospects in the short term. Politicians show no sign of rethinking their hardened positions to compromise on the issue, Williams said.

But even if the politics look bleak, Williams holds on to hope that the issue will resolve itself in the future. When he’s pessimistic about the current state of affairs, he remembers the barber’s grandson in Georgia and how every generation seems to be less fixated on cultural differences.

“If I’ve learned anything from this,” he said, “it’s that even in the most unlikely places, there is cause for hope.”

“My husband is still sick,” she responds, as the friend offers Teresa a jar of honey, the only “remedy” at hand for the husband’s ongoing cough, fever, and night-sweats.

That is how the first chapter begins of the Spanish-language novela “¡Vivir a Todo Pulmón!” or “Live Life to the Fullest!,” a 40-page recently released series that addresses misconceptions about tuberculosis, or TB, to better inform communities vulnerable to the disease.

Modeled after the storyline of a stereotypical Latin-American soap opera, the “fotonovela” is less high-drama and more reality TV.

“The idea was to create a story understandable to a Latino audience, but identifiable to the Mexican community,” said Dr. Paula Hamsho-Diaz, a physician with the Southeastern National Tuberculosis Center, part of the University of Florida College of Medicine and UF Emerging Pathogens Institute. “Proportionately, there are more foreign-born cases of TB and that’s why these resources are useful.”

Nearly 10 million new cases of TB appear worldwide each year and about 2 million people will die from the disease. The Florida Department of Health estimates that about 900 people will get active TB this year in the state, and that 60 percent of these cases are among people born in countries with a high incidence of TB, including Latin America and the Caribbean.

In the fotonovela, which is similar to a graphic novel but uses photographs instead of drawings, Teresa accompanies her husband to doctor’s office visits, social events and Mass on Sundays — scenarios in which they then address the concerns and stigmas that family members, friends or co-workers living with TB might face. Hamsho-Diaz led the team that created the fotonovela, which took three years to develop and evaluate how appropriately cultural themes were incorporated into the story.

“This is definitely something you can have on the kitchen table,” said Joseph Brueggen, a disease intervention specialist in Immokalee, Fla.

Brueggen, who educates mostly Spanish-speaking migrant workers about the importance of medication compliance if they contract the illness, added that the novela was the best educational tool he’s used in his more than 25-year career.

“I’ve noticed that it really touches these people in their ordinary lives, and this is important because sometimes a person’s immigration status deters them from going to a health clinic,” he said.

Tuberculosis is an airborne disease caused by strains of mycobacteria that attack the lungs and pose a range of symptoms for people who acquire the illness, most notably a characteristic chronic cough often accompanied by blood-tinged sputum. Although TB is treatable, new strains of the disease are showing resistance to currently available antibiotics, and a patient’s inability to stay on a medication regime promotes resistance in the organism.

However, experts caution that TB should not be seen as an illness exclusive to immigrant communities. In counties outside of Atlanta, for example, Georgia state health officials document a rise in TB among African-American men, who already have a national disease rate eight times above that of U.S.-born whites.

“Reaching out to groups with a high incidence of TB is critical to ensure that all of us are safe from this potentially life-threatening disease,” said Dr. Michael Lauzardo, director of the Southeastern National Tuberculosis Center and chief of the division of mycobacteriology in the UF College of Medicine. “Tuberculosis is a disease that cannot be considered truly controlled anywhere until it is controlled everywhere.”

The Southeastern National Tuberculosis Center is one of four national tuberculosis centers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that provide TB training, education, and expert medical consultation to health professionals and TB Control Programs in the United States and abroad.

To access the fotonovela, visit http://sntc.medicine.ufl.edu/Products.aspx.

The study also showed that taking stock of socio-cultural factors might improve our understanding of how genes influence individual health — regardless of race.

Consider high blood pressure, a complex disease governed both by genetic and environmental factors. Not only was social classification better than genetic-based ancestry at predicting disease status, it also brought to light a link between a particular gene and blood pressure that was not apparent when only genetic ancestry was considered.

The study, published today in the journal PLoS ONE, is the first to rigorously combine both socio-cultural and genetic data to simultaneously test the relative contributions of each to racial inequalities in health.

“What’s really groundbreaking is that we’ve got both types of data and they’re of equivalent sophistication,” said co-author Connie Mulligan, an associate professor of anthropology and an associate director of the UF Genetics Institute.

The results suggest that previously reported associations between genetic ancestry and health might be accounted for by socio-cultural factors related to race and racism, and not necessarily to genetic differences between races. It also suggests that including socio-cultural factors can strengthen genetics studies and help reveal how social inequalities can lead to biological differences.

“We have to take seriously the way race shapes people’s experiences, the environments they live in and their life chances,” said lead author Clarence C. Gravlee, an assistant professor of anthropology at UF. “In day to day life, people often assume that race exists as biology. Most anthropologists and geneticists reject that idea and see race instead as a cultural construct. The point of our paper is that race is so embedded in our society that it affects biology by shaping the types of environments that people live in.”

How social and or genetic factors drive racial inequalities in health and the role of race in genetic and biomedical research are the source of much controversy and study. Some scientists see race as useful for pinpointing gene-based susceptibility to complex diseases, but others caution that looking at race from a purely genetic standpoint can mask social causes of racial inequalities.

“We have to look at these in a way that will allow us to tell the whole story, not from one side or the other,” said Jay Kaufman, an associate professor of epidemiology, biostatistics and occupational health at McGill University and author of the upcoming book “Racing in Circles: Myths about Genes and Race in Biomedical Research.” Kaufman was not involved in the UF study.

In general, members of racial minorities in the United States suffer poorer health, and more die prematurely compared with their white counterparts. African-Americans are three times more likely than whites to die from high blood pressure, according to the American Heart Association.

“The sheer scale of inequalities in sickness and death deserves our attention,” Gravlee said. “Researchers have an obligation to explain the origins of these inequalities and to identify social factors that could be targeted for policy change.”

To examine the link between African ancestry and blood pressure, the UF team studied 87 adults in Puerto Rico, using two variables for which “race” is often used as a surrogate: genetic ancestry and social classification.

Genetic ancestry was assessed using gene variants that show large frequency differences among groups from different continents. Social classification was assessed by observers to estimate how people are perceived in everyday life in terms of skin pigmentation, or “color” (pronounced coh-lohr). The researchers found that the three major “color” categories had overlapping genetic ancestry, and that there was a strong link between “color” and blood pressure, but not between genetic ancestry and blood pressure.

Next, they looked at whether taking account of social factors changed our understanding of genes thought to affect hypertension. When only genetic ancestry was considered, no association was evident between candidate genes for hypertension and blood pressure. But when “color” and socio-economic status were included in the analysis, a significant association between the gene variant and blood pressure was uncovered.

“One of the important points here is that you can have an association between two biological variables like genetic ancestry and blood pressure, but it could be that the social and cultural implications of having African ancestry is what is driving this association,” Gravlee said.

Health differences could arise from differing stresses people face based on how society sees and treats them.

“There’s no doubt about the fact that perceptions matter,” Kaufman said. “This article reinforces the idea that if you don’t pay attention to how people are perceived you miss a big chunk of the story.”

The researchers found that the group of people who carried the associated genetic variant also contained multiple categories of “color” and socio-economic status. When these different socio-cultural categories were separated, the protective effect of the genetic variant became evident.

”What’s exciting about our study, is that we can show the value of including socio-cultural data by revealing a genetic association that would otherwise have been missed,” Mulligan said. “This is important in convincing other researchers that it is worthwhile to include nongenetic data in a genetic study rather than simply controlling for nongenetic factors.”

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.”

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.”

The Sunshine State produces half the fresh tomatoes eaten in the United States. The task requires more than 30,000 farm workers, growers and packers — all of whom will be required to undergo training in food safety practices developed by the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and the Florida Tomato Exchange, in cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

The effort has gained strong support from state Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, who today announced $253,000 in USDA Specialty Crops Block Grant funding toward the training.

The program could begin as early as this month. Similar programs will extend to leafy greens, berries and melons next year.

“People are worried about how safe their food is to eat, and this really is a case where education is a big step toward improving prevention,” said Keith Schneider, the IFAS food safety researcher who will lead the statewide effort to train tomato workers in the best ways to safely handle produce.

In a Sept. 7 report on foodborne illnesses in restaurants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that four widespread cases of raw-tomato-spread Salmonella infection between 2005 and 2006 led to more than 450 illnesses in 21 states.

Schneider said these kinds of reports aren’t signs of new and unheralded outbreaks, but rather examples of an improved ability to finger foodborne pathogens as the culprits.

“Our food is safer than ever,” he said. “But part of that safety — and a bigger part of improving that safety — is being able to detect when these pathogens are a problem, thinking about how to solve that problem and then taking that to the growers and packagers.”

“There are elements as simple as the fact that tomatoes need to go through something like a chlorine bath after being picked,” he said. “But there are a lot of details ranging from worker conditions to how fast the product is shipped — they all need to be taken care of if that salad or taco you’re going to get at a local restaurant is safe to eat.”

The statewide mandate comes from the tomato industry working with state and federal regulators.

“This is a step forward that this state’s tomato industry saw it needed to take, and so essentially took it upon itself to make food safety a priority,” said Martha Roberts, the former Florida deputy commissioner of agriculture, now special assistant to the director of the Florida Experiment Station, IFAS.

Many tomato growers already follow safe food-handling practices, she said.
“But there are still some that can use our help — this isn’t necessarily going to be a simple task to reach everyone now covered by these requirements,” she said.

Roberts added that new tools will need to be developed, such as training materials for the large number of Spanish-speaking workers.

Additionally, the CDC reports state that “current knowledge of mechanisms of tomato contamination and methods of eradication of Salmonella in tomatoes is incomplete,” thus making “tomato safety research a priority.”

The tools and expertise developed by IFAS for tomato training will be applied to other produce next year when similar education will be instituted on a volunteer basis for the leafy greens, berry and melon industries.

“It seems like every other day you see something in the news about food contamination. If it’s not tomatoes, it’s spinach…or peanut butter, or dog food. I think most people ask themselves ‘will this ever stop?’” Schneider said. “The truth is that there our food supply is safer than it’s ever been, but there will always be issues with food safety — it’s all of our jobs to keep trying to make it better.”

In the study of Hispanics enrolled in Medicare-managed care programs, Spanish-speaking patients reported more negative experiences with care than did English-speaking Hispanic patients. However, Spanish speakers in Florida were more satisfied with their health-care experiences than their peers in California and the New York/New Jersey region — a finding that could be attributed to the “Miami effect.” The results appear in the October issue of the journal Health Services Research.

“Eighty-six percent of the Spanish-speaking survey respondents from Florida live in the Miami area, the U.S. city with the highest proportion of Hispanic residents,” said lead investigator Robert Weech-Maldonado, an associate professor in the department of health services research, management and policy at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. “Spanish is one of the primary languages in Miami and there is an excellent network of Spanish-speaking health providers.”

The study is the first to examine health-care experiences of Hispanics — a population vulnerable to health disparities — by regional and language differences.

The Medicare-managed care program, known as Medicare Advantage, was designed to give beneficiaries the option of enrolling in a variety of private plans, including health maintenance organizations, or HMOs, and preferred provider organizations, or PPOs. Patients’ out-of-pocket costs associated with the Medicare Advantage plans are relatively lower than those associated with traditional Medicare. Although most Medicare recipients use the traditional fee-for-service program, about 5 million Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in the managed care program in 2004, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than 50 percent of enrollees were Hispanic.

UF researchers analyzed data from the Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Providers and Systems Medicare managed care survey, conducted in 2002. The survey focused on five aspects of care: timeliness of care, provider communication, office staff helpfulness, getting needed care and health plan customer service. Of the more than 125,000 Medicare-managed care recipients who completed the survey, 7 percent, or 8,463, identified themselves as Hispanic. The survey was available in English and Spanish.

Hispanic English speakers reported more negative experiences than whites for all aspects of care except provider communication. Hispanic Spanish speakers had more negative experiences than whites with timeliness of care, office staff helpfulness and provider communication, suggesting language barriers in the clinical setting.

However, the researchers were surprised to find that Hispanic Spanish speakers reported more positive experiences with getting needed care than their English-speaking counterparts.

“This was an unexpected result; we haven’t found this in other studies,” Weech-Maldonado said. “We speculate that Spanish-speaking Hispanics, who may be less acculturated, could be more tolerant of the managed care practices because they are less familiar with the U.S. health-care system.”

Overall, the UF study demonstrates that differences in Hispanics’ health-care experiences exist and there is room for improvement, especially given the regional differences, Weech-Maldonado said.

“Our study suggests that managed care companies should implement quality improvement programs to reduce disparities in patient experiences with care, and one area they can target is interpreter services,” he said, adding that the Hispanic Spanish speakers in the survey were more likely than English speakers to rate their health as fair or poor. “Managed care health plans cover a well-diversified population, so it is important for them to look at disparities in care.”

The UF study provides important information for legislators and policymakers, said Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo, director of the Columbia University Center of the Health of Urban Minorities and co-founder of Latinos for National Health Insurance.

“This study will serve as a wake-up call to those minority organizations that have been strong advocates of these Medicare Advantage plans,” Carrasquillo said. “The analysis by Dr. Weech-Maldonado and colleagues shows that even with the extra payments these Medicare Advantage plans receive, large disparities between Latinos and non-Hispanic whites exist. On many measures, the extra money these plans are getting is not providing added value to Latinos in many parts of the country.”

A UF study described in the current issue of the Journal of Women’s Health revealed that when treated with either of two commonly prescribed medication strategies, Hispanic women achieved greater blood pressure control and were half as likely as white women to suffer adverse outcomes such as heart attack, stroke or death from any cause. The findings provide new data on a population of ethnic women who have been all but absent from such research.

“The study is unique in that we enrolled a substantial number of women and a substantial number of Hispanic patients from a variety of different Hispanic regions. As a result, we have data that enabled us to really fully evaluate the treatment of hypertension in this ethnically diverse group,” said Rhonda Cooper-DeHoff, a research assistant professor of medicine and associate director of the clinical research program in cardiovascular medicine at UF’s College of Medicine.

UF researchers studied 22,500 patients enrolled in the landmark International Verapamil SR-Trandolapril study, known as INVEST, and tracked a subgroup of 5,017 Hispanic and 4,710 non-Hispanic white women who were randomly assigned to a drug strategy containing either a sustained release form of the calcium antagonist verapamil or the beta-blocker atenolol.

The INVEST study enrolled more Hispanic patients than any other hypertension trial to date, Cooper-DeHoff said, and included Hispanic participants from the mainland United States, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, Panama and El Salvador.

After 24 months of follow-up, researchers found that both treatment strategies worked — and worked better in the Hispanic women.

Blood pressure control, defined at less than 140/90 mmHg, was achieved in 75 percent of Hispanic women and 68 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

And despite having a higher prevalence of diabetes at baseline, only 5.7 percent of Hispanic women suffered from adverse cardiovascular outcomes, compared with 12.3 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

Cooper-DeHoff attributed the low incidence of adverse outcomes to the fact that Hispanic women enrolled in the study were younger. If follow-up had continued over a longer period of time, adverse outcomes in the Hispanic women may have increased, she said.

However, these women remained at a lower risk for these outcomes even after statisticians adjusted for age and other factors. Still, she warned that problems associated with diabetes are likely to show up in these patients down the road.

“Diabetes in and of itself imparts significant future adverse cardiovascular outcomes,” she said. “These women should be well-monitored under the care of a physician so that they can prevent future cardiovascular morbidity and mortality related to hypertension and diabetes. Importantly, because the Hispanic population is the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the United States, Hispanics — especially women — should be included in future cardiovascular research in order to further our understanding of these high-risk diseases in Hispanic patients.”

High blood pressure is becoming more prevalent in women across all ethnic groups, Cooper-DeHoff said. And although it is thought to actually be less common in Hispanic women, fewer Hispanics have been included in hypertension studies.

“The INVEST findings are important because they demonstrate that this treatment for Hispanic women really pays off,” said Dr. Thomas G. Pickering, director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center. “They’ve got something really interesting with this study, and it wasn’t something that could have been expected.”

Educators have long believed that a “critical mass” of like students is vital to making minority students feel at home on college campuses – but this study, appearing in the February issue of the journal Research in Higher Education, may be the first to find statistical evidence to confirm that belief.

“These data suggest that if colleges are really serious about reaching out to minority groups, they need to think in terms of clusters, not individuals,” said professor Linda Serra Hagedorn, chairwoman of UF’s Department of Educational Administration and Policy. “If you’re the only Latino or African-American on your college campus, you can certainly succeed academically – but if you’re surrounded by people who share your cultural background, your chances of success improve.”

Hagedorn is the lead investigator and director of the Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students (or TRUCCS) project, a multiyear, comprehensive study of the educational outcomes of 5,000 community college students at the nine community college campuses in the Los Angeles area. Investigators queried the students on their backgrounds, attitudes and experiences, and compared that data to the students’ transcript records.

When they looked at students who self-identified as Hispanic, the researchers found that students at largely Hispanic community colleges had better educational outcomes than students at colleges where Hispanic students were rare. The differences were small but statistically significant. Age, involvement in campus activities and even ability to speak English were less predictive of Hispanic students’ success.

Researchers have long suspected that the size of a school’s minority population plays a key role in the academic experience of minority students. The education field has even borrowed a term from nuclear physics – “critical mass” – to describe the point at which minority students become plentiful enough to change the campus climate and give a school a more welcoming feel.

The study produced some surprising findings. For instance, while students at colleges with large Hispanic colleges were more likely to stay in school and succeed academically, they were also less likely to enroll in remedial English or math classes.

In schools where Spanish speakers are few, teachers may be more likely to refer students to remedial classes, Hagedorn said. And a large community of bilingual students may help struggling English speakers learn the language without formal intervention.

The researchers also found that first-generation immigrants – students born in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries – tended to do better in school than students born in the U.S. to immigrant parents.

“One might expect students who grew up in the U.S. to perform better because they understand the social climate better,” Hagedorn said. “But in fact, many immigrant students were in very good schools in Mexico before they moved here – while many students who were born in the U.S. live in impoverished urban communities with substandard school systems.”

Alberto Cabrera, a University of Maryland education professor, co-authored an earlier large-scale study which found that parental involvement was one of the best indicators of academic success among Latino students. Cabrera said Hagedorn’s study sheds new light on his findings.

“Latino students often rely on their families for social support in school because they do not feel represented among the faculty or students,” Cabrera said. “In light of Linda Hagedorn’s findings, I would hypothesize that a critical mass of Latino students can create a support system that mimics the effect of support from one’s family.”

The study reinforces the benefits of the community college system. Hagedorn notes that among the colleges in the study, every institution with a large Hispanic population was located in a largely Hispanic neighborhood – providing additional social support for students.

“They’re called ‘community’ colleges for a reason,” Hagedorn said. “They’re supposed to serve the community in which they reside, and create a comfortable learning environment for students in that community.”

“Parents need to be able to talk to a counselor about their child’s progress,” said Professor Harry Daniels, chairman of the counselor education department at UF’s College of Education and a co-author of the study. “They need a place in the school system where they feel safe, where they feel their child’s needs are understood.

“These things may seem small, but they have a huge effect on academic success.”

Daniels and co-author Sondra Smith-Adcock, an associate professor of counselor education at UF, led a team that surveyed school services administrators in school districts across Florida on the counseling provided to Hispanic students. The researchers published their results in this month’s issue of the journal Professional School Counseling.

Fifty-nine percent of the administrators said their Hispanic students were at risk of not receiving needed counseling. Eighty-four percent said their district needed more Spanish-speaking bilingual counselors to address the personal needs of students, and 80 percent agreed that their district needed more Spanish-speaking counselors to guide students in making career decisions.

The results, researchers say, were worrisome but not surprising. Studies in the mid-1990s showed that while Hispanics made up one-eighth of Florida’s student population at the time, only 2 percent of school counselors were Hispanic. In the past decade, Smith-Adcock said, every single county has seen its Hispanic population increase by at least 30 percent – but there is no evidence of a similar increase in the number of Hispanic counselors.
“When school administrators think of the needs of Hispanic students, they tend to think in terms of language acquisition for new immigrants,” Smith-Adcock said. “There’s a whole stratum of services that is being missed.”

Hispanic students who face mental health issues may find it difficult to trust or open up to non-Hispanic counselors, and often need someone who speaks their first language, Smith-Adcock said.

However, mental health counseling is just one responsibility for counselors, Smith-Adcock said. They also help students define their career goals and navigate the increasingly complex academic world in a way that will help them achieve their goals. These services are particularly difficult to provide students who are new arrivals to the country, or whose parents are first-generation immigrants with limited English skills.

“Simply choosing electives is a new experience for many people in the Latino community,” said Jennifer Gonzales Young, a district-level bilingual counselor for Hillsborough County Public Schools. “In many Spanish-speaking countries, students take a prescribed schedule of courses, and don’t get to choose their classes. Some parents are overwhelmed by the system, and if it isn’t explained to them properly, their children can miss some important opportunities.”

Similar problems can arise when students apply to college, apply for financial aid or try to interpret the results of standardized tests, Young said.

Hillsborough County has one of the fastest-growing Hispanic populations in the state. Young said there are an estimated 51,000 Hispanic children in Hillsborough County’s school system, and more than 36,000 speak Spanish as their first language. Until recently, Young was one of only a few Hispanic counselors serving that population.

“There seems to be a shortage of bilingual counselors everywhere in the state, and Hillsborough is just one example,” UF’s Daniels said. “At the elementary level, for instance, the ideal ratio is one counselor per 300 students. I don’t know of a single place in Florida that comes close to that ratio for Spanish-speaking students.”

UF is attempting to relieve the shortage. The College of Education recently completed a three-year, grant-funded program that brought 17 bilingual Hillsborough County teachers to UF to study for the educational specialist degree in counselor education. All of those teachers were Spanish-speaking and most were either of Hispanic origin or had prior experience living in a Spanish-speaking country.

Daniels said the project, titled “Consejeros: Levantando El Pueblo” (or “Counselors Lifting the Community”) was more than simply a degree program. Students followed a culturally relevant course of study designed to give equal focus to the three major influences in the life of Hispanic families: the school, the family and the community.

Based on the success of that project, Daniels and Smith-Adcock are considering the creation of a permanent distance education program that would allow bilingual teachers to study for a counselor education degree in the county where they work.

“Many bilingual teachers are already serving as a contact point between the school system and the families of their Hispanic students,” he said. “By becoming full-time counselors, they can fill that role more effectively, for more people.”

“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.

The research was conducted in Mexico, but many of these pesticides, although they go by a different name, have the same ingredients and are used in the United States, potentially giving Americans the same risks, said Elizabeth Guillette, a UF anthropology professor who led the research.

The connection from mother to child was found among Sonoran Mayan girls whose mothers were exposed to chemical spraying. They did not develop the ability to produce milk, unlike their counterparts who lived a more organic lifestyle, she said.

“The results underscore the importance of women protecting themselves from manufactured chemicals beginning at birth because they stay in the body,” said Guillette, whose research is published in the March issue of Environmental Health Perspectives.

The study found changes in breast development when comparing pre-adolescent girls whose mothers grew up in an agricultural valley where heavy doses of pesticides were sprayed with those who were raised in surrounding foothills where none were used. Some of the girls in the agricultural valley had no mammary tissue or a minimal amount.

Although several studies have examined the effects of pesticides on when puberty begins, none have looked at how exposure influences the development of mammary gland tissue, she said. To investigate the question, Guillette found two population samples about 50 miles apart in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora’s Yaqui Valley that were almost identical except for their exposure to pesticides.

The Sonoran Mayan people of the valley split philosophically over the use of pesticides and other modern agricultural techniques during the country’s Green Revolution of the early 1950s, when large-scale pesticide-based agriculture came into practice. Valley residents embraced pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural chemicals, including spraying in homes, while the other group, which moved to the foothills, avoided them entirely.

“These groups were the same in every respect, culturally, genetically and socio- economically, except for their use of pesticides,” Guillette said. “They had the same diet, the same child-rearing practices and the same school system.”

Although the farmers in the valley and the ranchers in the foothills had cousins and other extended family members living in the other community, they never intermarried because of their strong differences over pesticides, she said.

Guillette began her research in 1966, comparing the physical coordination and mental development in preschool children from the two communities. In an earlier published study, she found that valley children were less adept at catching a ball, reflecting poor eye-hand coordination, and showed dramatic differences in their ability to draw a person.

Her more recent study focused on breast development in girls between the ages of 8 and 10 and involved 30 girls from the valley and 20 girls who lived in the foothills. Guillette and local nurses measured total breast diameter and mammary diameter.

While breast size was much larger in the girls in the valley, they had much less mammary tissue, and sometimes none at all, than the girls in the foothills, Guillette said.

Mammary tissue could not be palpated in about 19 percent of the girls from valley towns who showed signs of breast development. In contrast, none of the girls from the foothills who had reached this stage lacked mammary tissue.

“With the foothill girls, there was a direct correlation between breast size and mammary development, whereas with the pesticide-exposed girls there was none,” Guillette said. “In fact, we saw girls who were fairly well developed with absolutely no mammary glands.”

Because the Yaqui Valley was in its fifth year of a drought at the time of the study, with most farmers moving into ranching and stopping pesticide use, the results point to earlier exposure, probably transferred from the mother before birth, she said.

Various pesticides, mainly organophosphates and organochlorines, were used extensively to farm the Yaqui Valley near the time of the girls’ birth, between 1992 and 1994, and many of these compounds are known to cross a pregnant woman’s placenta to the developing child, Guillette said. A study of newborn children from the valley that was done close to the time these children were conceived found elevated pesticide levels, she said.

“Many of these pesticides are popular in the United States, both for agriculture and for home use and lawn care,” she said. “We know the age for breast development in girls is occurring earlier and there is the potential that pesticides may be playing a similar role in the United States as found in Mexico.”