Urologists For Social Responsibility 2023 Articles

(UroToday.com) Dr. Shira Abeles is an Infectious Disease Specialist and Medical Director of Sustainability at UC San Diego Health. Dr Abeles opened with introducing the Environmental Justice Index (EJI). An interactive tool developed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that gives ratings for the cumulative impact of environmental injustice on health for every census tract, The EJI uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the CDC. Each census tract is ranked on 36 environmental, social, and health factors.

(UroToday.com) Dr. Wael Al-Delaimy, MD, PhD, Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health and the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity at UCSD gave the first of a group of presentations and panels on climate change and its effect on health care.

(UroToday.com) Dr. Brian Stork, a community Urologist in Muskegon, Michigan, starts the session with sharing his experience with gun violence growing up in Iowa farming communities, where suicide amongst farmers was and continues to be high. With this background, we dive into addressing gun violence among our country’s youth.

(UroToday.com) The first Urology for Social Responsibility conference kicked off with an opening by Alec J. Calac, a MD/PhD student at UC San Diego and member of The Pauma Band of Luiseno Indians. Offering a welcome blessing, the group then acknowledged that the land that UC San Diego occupies is ancestral land of the Kumeyaay Nation. Showing the dearth of American Indian and Alaskan Native representation in medical faculty (<0.5%), medical students (<1%), and medical curriculum (11% of medical schools include Native American health topics), Mr. Calac called on the group to be forces of positive change.