Word: health
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Carrera holds the Thomas Hunter Chair of Health Sciences at Hunter College. But it is some 50 blocks uptown, in Harlem neighborhoods, where nearly 1 out of every 4 babies is born to a teenage mother, that Carrera's teaching is put to its sternest test in the Family Life Education and Adolescent Sexuality Program, which he created. Pregnancy-prevention courses, Carrera argues, are generally too narrow in focus to succeed. His approach is holistic, born of a simple premise: Give young people a sense of their own promise, and they will not be as likely to disrupt their lives...
Physicians from a local hospital provide comprehensive health care. Tutors recruited from the Junior League help with homework, and employment counselors place the kids in summer jobs. "Many employers have stereotypes of black urban youth," says Mary Kay Penn, who manages the Milbank program. "It is very hard to persuade them to take these kids on, even when we pay the salary." But last summer Penn placed 75 of the kids in jobs, and Carrera added a silk-screening program so they could learn to design and sell T shirts...
Though contraception is available -- prescribed by a doctor with parental consent -- Carrera knows that access to birth control is not enough. "When kids are empowered with information and stimulated by hope for the future, it has a contraceptive effect," says Carrera. "Education. Employment. Their own bank accounts. Good health. Family involvement. Self-esteem. These are also contraceptives. It's the total fabric that is important." Carrera also teaches them how to play sports, like squash, that rely on individual discipline and control. "Whenever you posit a single solution to a complex problem, you are not as successful...
Many people who get blood transfusions these days are understandably nervous. Transfusions have saved countless lives, but they have sometimes transmitted serious blood-borne diseases, including AIDS. While public health officials point out that careful testing has all but eradicated the AIDS virus from the blood supply, they have not been able to claim that transfusions are perfectly safe. Reason: about 5% of patients who receive transfusions are exposed to a virus that can cause a potentially deadly liver infection called non-A, non-B hepatitis...
...blood samples taken from patients with non-A, non-B hepatitis. By cloning large quantities of the protein, the company was able to develop a test to detect its presence in blood. Chiron called the pathogen the "hepatitis-C virus." In clinical studies done at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and laboratories in Italy and Japan, blood samples from patients thought to have non-A, non-B hepatitis were screened using Chiron's test. At least 80% of the samples tested positive for the hepatitis-C virus...