Despite recent and growing media attention surrounding obesity in the United States, the so-called obesity epidemic remains a highly contested scientific and social fact. This article examines the contemporary obesity debate through systematic examination of the claims and claimants involved in the controversy. We argue that four primary groups-antiobesity researchers, antiobesity activists, fat acceptance researchers, and fat acceptance activists-are at the forefront of this controversy and that these groups are fundamentally engaged in framing contests over the nature and consequences of excess body weight. While members of the fat acceptance groups embrace a body diversity frame, presenting fatness as a natural and largely inevitable form of diversity, members of the antiobesity camp frame higher weights as risky behavior akin to smoking, implying that body weight is under personal control and that people have a moral and medical responsibility to manage their weight. Both groups sometimes frame obesity as an illness, which limits blame by suggesting that weight is biologically or genetically determined but simultaneously stigmatizes fat bodies as diseased. While the antiobesity camp frames obesity as an epidemic to increase public attention, fat acceptance activists argue that concern over obesity is distracting attention from a host of more important health issues for fat Americans. We examine the strategies claimants use to establish their own credibility or discredit their opponents, and explain how the fat acceptance movement has exploited structural opportunities and cultural resources created by AIDS activism and feminism to wield some influence over U.S. public health approaches. We conclude that notions of morality play a central role in the controversy over obesity, as in many medical disputes, and illustrate how medical arguments about body weight can be used to stymie rights claims and justify morality-based fears.
This article describes an innovative approach to reach and educate workers and worker advocates about California's outdoor heat illness prevention standard. In 2010, Cal/OSHA initiated a statewide education campaign to reduce heat-related illnesses and fatalities and increase awareness of the standard's requirements. In Southern California, the UCLA Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program (LOSH) focused on three principal strategies of community-based outreach, popular education, and organizational capacity building. Central to the LOSH approach was the integration of health promotores into core program planning and training activities and the expansion of campaign activities to a wide variety of rural and urban workers. We describe each of these strategies and analyze the possibilities and constraints of worker education to support implementation of this standard, particularly given the vulnerabilities of the impacted workforce, the often precarious nature of employment arrangements for these workers, and the resource limitations of Cal/OSHA.
Heat is a well-recognized hazard for workers in many outdoor settings, yet few investigations have compared the prevalence of outdoor work at the community level and rates of heat-related mortality and morbidity. This analysis examines whether heat-related health outcomes occur more frequently in communities with higher proportions of residents working in construction, agriculture, and other outdoor industries. Using 2005–2010 data from Los Angeles County, California, we analyze associations between community-level rates of deaths, emergency department (ED) visits, and hospitalizations during summer heat events and the prevalence of outdoor work. We find generally higher rates of heat-related ED visits and hospitalizations during summer heat events in communities with more residents working outdoors. Specifically, each percentage increase in residents working in construction resulted in an 8.1 percent increase in heat-related ED visits and a 7.9 percent increase in heat-related hospitalizations, while each percentage increase in residents working in agriculture and related sectors resulted in a 10.9 percent increase in heat-related ED visits. The findings suggest that outdoor work may significantly influence the overall burden of heat-related morbidity at the community level. Public health professionals and healthcare providers should recognize work and employment as significant heat risk factors when preparing for and responding to extreme heat events.
This commentary highlights how immigrants who are linguistically isolated, have limited social networks, and lack legal immigration status experience unique health risks in disaster zones. Research on immigrants and disasters tends to focus on immigrants with these characteristics who are residents of disaster-affected areas, disaster recovery workers, or both. We review the sparse research literature and provide examples of innovative but underresourced programs that reduce immigrants’ exposure to disaster-related health hazards and economic exploitation in the recovery. We conclude with recommendations for advancing these initiatives while, simultaneously, addressing the anti-immigrant policies that contribute to these disaster-related inequities.
The aim of this paper is to examine whether a long-term trend can be identified in the mobility regime of French society from the middle of the century. It begins with a review of the international literature on temporal trends in social fluidity within modern societies. Analysing recent French research which has concluded that inequality of opportunity has remained unchanged in France during the last two decades, the paper argues that such a conclusion can only have resulted from the use of insufficiently powerful statistical techniques. The second part of the paper analyses father-son and father-daughter mobility tables drawn from national representative surveys carried out in 1953, 1970, 1977, 1985 and 1993 (N=35,741 for males and 18,484 for females). The use of log-linear and log-multiplicative models reveals that the statistical association (as measured with the logarithm of the odds ratio) between social origin and destination has declined steadily by 0.5 % a year over a period of forty years. This finding highlights a slow but continuous trend towards a reduction in inequality of opportunity from the middle of the century. Of the twelve million French men and women between the ages of 35 and 59 who were in employment in 1993, nearly half a million would have belonged to different classes without this forty year increase in social fluidity. The paper concludes that the thesis of temporal invariance in the intergenera-tional mobility regime cannot be maintained for France, but that the reasons of this change still remain to be ascertained.
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