Center in the News

There's a lot of encouraging news these days in the study and treatment of lung cancer ... But there's bad news, too.

"According to the 2022 results of the California Health Interview Survey, 33.1% of Kern County adult residents who have ever smoked, reported that they smoke every day," said Jasmine Ochoa, health equity officer at the Kern County Department of Public Health.

That's more than twice the rate in the state as a whole, she said.

"I am a 100% believer in strong gun control,” Berkeley-based photographer Judy Dater told me in September shortly before the opening of The Gun Next Door, her latest exhibition at Oakland Photo Workshop ... "We really need to understand why so many people in this country feel they need to have one or two or several hundred.”

Millions of Californians live with guns in their homes: 5.2 million, to be exact, or 17.6% of all adults in the state, according to a 2021 survey conducted by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. 

In 2020, the California Health Interview Survey found that Asian hate crimes had affected about 1.5 million Asian Americans.

“What was most shocking is that 27% said that they had witnessed another Asian American Pacific Islander experiencing a hate incident,” said Ninez Ponce, chair of the UCLA’s Department of Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “These hate incidents are because of xenophobia and because people see Asians as different from themselves.”

Sean Tan, UCLA Center for Health Policy Research; Sonya Young Aadam, California Black Women’s Health Project; Dr. Mark Ghaly, California Health and Human Services Agency; Jessica Altman, Covered California; and Assemblymember Miguel Santiago at Covered California's kickoff of the 2024 open-enrollment period at the Los Angeles State Historic Park and Roundhouse Bridge.

Advocates say that establishment medicine also must work harder for “disaggregated data,” information on smaller subgroups that provides invaluable insight on their medical needs and treatment. This information can be tougher and more time-consuming to develop and analyze — and for private and government funders to want to support. But as Ninez A. Ponce, PhD, MPP, and director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, has argued about sound medical policy making, based on hard data and factual evidence:

“We know that without data equity, we will not achieve health equity. But we also

New information from UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research shows that among California adults who tested positive for COVID, those with the lowest incomes were more than twice as likely as those with the highest incomes to have experienced long COVID — in this case, symptoms of the virus that last for two months or more. The long COVID figure for those at the lowest income levels was a staggering 50%, versus a 29% average for all adults and 22% for those at the highest income levels.

The event marked the start of the 11th year of Covered California’s offering affordable, name-brand health care coverage and financial help to Californians under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. While the opportunity to get more Californians covered is tremendous, the latest data from the California Simulation of Insurance Markets (CalSIM), a model created by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, shows that significant gaps remain between those with and without insurance.

According to recent reports, there's an increasing number of baby boomers giving marijuana a whirl. There's a pretty even split of older marijuana consumers (52.3% female and 47.7% male) according to the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS).

Gen Z teens and young adults are having less sex than past generations and want less sexually explicit content shown in the media they watch, according to a study by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA ... UCLA has been tracking youth behavioral trends for nearly a decade through its annual California Health Interview Survey, the most extensive state health report in the country.

Today SoCalGas continues to store, inject and withdraw billions of cubic feet of methane from the field, the second largest natural gas storage facility in the Western U.S. ... A team of about 50 UCLA researchers said they would study the effects of the leak on the health of residents near the Aliso Canyon field. Their team will examine “thousands of pollutants in people’s blood and blood of babies at birth, to look for unexpected differences in the blood of people in the community compared to those outside the affected area.