AMERICAN DIAGNOSIS with Dr. Céline Gounder – Détails, épisodes et analyse

In 1942, Cleo Wright was removed from a Sikeston, Missouri, jail and lynched by a mob. Nearly 80 years later, Denzel Taylor was killed by police in the same community. The deaths of these two Black fathers tell a story about the public health consequences of racism and systemic bias. Meet residents determined to live healthier lives after generations of community silence. “Silence in Sikeston” is the podcast about finding the words to say the things that go unsaid. This is an invitation. Perhaps this journalism, these stories, will spark a conversation that you’ve been meaning to have.

All four episodes of Silence of Sikeston are available now on Apple, Spotify, or PRX

To hear all KFF Health News podcasts, click here.

Over 70% of Indigenous people in the United States live in urban areas. But urban Indian health makes up less than 2% of the Indian Health Service’s annual budget.

While enrolled members of federally recognized tribes can access the Indian Health Service or tribally run health care on their reservations, Indigenous people who live in cities can find themselves without access to the care they're entitled to.

“Even though we're living in urban areas now, that doesn't mean that our benefits should leave us,” said Esther Lucero, president and CEO of the Seattle Indian Health Board.

The Seattle Indian Health Board is one of many urban clinics across the United States that opened to address the discrimination and lack of services Indigenous people face in cities. These clinics work to meet the cultural and ceremonial needs of the populations they serve.

“We are much more than a community health center or place that provides direct service. We are a home away from home,” Lucero said.

Episode 12 explores the barriers Indigenous people face to accessing quality health care in cities and the efforts of urban Indian clinics to meet the needs of this population.

Click here for a transcript of the episode.

Voices from the Episode:

• Esther Lucero, president and CEO of the Seattle Indian Health Board 
• Dr. Patrick Rock, CEO of the Indian Health Board of Minneapolis 
• Douglas Miller, an associate professor of Native American History at Oklahoma State University
• Richard Wright, a spiritual health adviser with the Indian Health Board of Minneapolis

Season 4 of “American Diagnosis” is a co-production of KHN and Just Human Productions.

Our Editorial Advisory Board includes Jourdan Bennett-Begaye, Alastair Bitsóí, and Bryan Pollard.

To hear all KHN podcasts, click here.

On the morning of July 16, 1979, a dam broke at a uranium mine near Church Rock, New Mexico, releasing 1,100 tons of radioactive waste and pouring 94 million gallons of contaminated water into the Rio Puerco. Toxic substances flowed downstream for nearly 100 miles, according to a report to a congressional committee that year.

In the 1970s, uranium mining was a good source of income, leading many Indigenous people and other locals to seek out jobs in the mines and the mills where uranium ore was processed in preparation for making fuel. The work was often grueling, but many young people didn’t have other options to support their families. 

Episode 3 is an exploration of the forces that brought uranium mining to the Navajo Nation, the harmful consequences, and the fight for compensation that continues today. It is the first in a two-episode arc of reporting about uranium mining.

Working in the mills, people were exposed to a powdery radioactive substance, called yellow cake, that is produced as part of the uranium milling process.

Larry King, who is Diné and a former uranium worker, said he worked in his street clothes.

“So it was just usually one of my old shirts, my pants. No gloves. No respirator. Nothing. So everybody’s breathing all that dust.”

Another former uranium worker, Linda Evers, said she wasn’t told about the dangers associated with uranium exposure.

“When we had safety meetings, it was about regular first aid,” she said. “There was no mention of radiation — or any of the side effects from it.”

The consequences of radiation exposure can build quietly in the body, over decades and generations. It can cause multiple types of cancer, birth defects, and other ailments.

Click here for a transcript of the episode.

Voices from the episode:

• Amber Crotty, Navajo Nation Council delegate, Window Rock, Arizona — @Kanazbah
• Linda Evers, president of Post 71 Uranium Workers Committee and former uranium mine worker
• Phil Harrison, activist and former uranium mine worker
• Larry King, activist and former uranium mine worker
• Judy Pasternak, journalist and author of Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
• Edith Hood, activist and former probe technician for Kerr-McGee Corp.
• Cipriano Lucero, former uranium mine worker

Season 4 of “American Diagnosis” is a co-production of KHN and Just Human Productions.

Our Editorial Advisory Board includes Jourdan Bennett-Begaye, Alastair Bitsóí, and Bryan Pollard.

Reagan Wytsalucy was looking for a lost orchard. Martin Reinhardt wanted to know more about and better understand the taste of Indigenous foods before European colonization in North America. They followed different paths, but their goals were similar: to reclaim their food traditions to improve the health and vitality of their communities.

Native foodways of hunting, fishing, gathering, and farming have been under threat since the arrival of Europeans. Colonization, forced relocations, and, later, highly processed foods fundamentally reshaped the diet of many Indigenous people. The effects of those changes have rippled through generations. Now, Indigenous people are twice as likely to have diabetes as white Americans, according to a 2017 CDC report.

In this episode, we’ll hear how the history of a scorched-earth campaign, and other disruptive policies, altered the landscape of Indigenous foodways and, in return, Indigenous bodies. History and food experts like Wytsalucy and Reinhardt are nurturing Native food traditions.

One result: The Southwest peach has become a symbol of resilience. 

“So it's almost just a way of saying, you know, we're still here as a people. Despite everything that's occurred, we are still here,” said Wytsalucy.

Click here for a transcript of the episode.

Voices from the Episode: 

• Reagan Wytsalucy, Extension Assistant Professor at Agriculture & Natural Resources, Utah State University
• Roy Talker, Wytsalucy’s father who served as a Navajo translator and assisted with foodways research
• Martin Reinhardt, Professor of Native American Studies at Northern Michigan University — on Facebook

Season 4 of “American Diagnosis” is a co-production of KHN and Just Human Productions.

Our Editorial Advisory Board includes Jourdan Bennett-Begaye, Alastair Bitsóí, and Bryan Pollard.

Travel to the forests outside the Grand Canyon to follow Dr. Sophina Calderon and other Navajo Nation leaders as covid-19 tests the Diné people. 

Roughly 30% of the homes on the Navajo Nation rely on wood-burning stoves for heat. Many of those households haul wood from nearby forests. That’s what Calderon was doing when she realized the pandemic’s reach wouldn’t stop at the hospital — it was going to create a heating crisis too. 

This episode explores root causes behind why some citizens of the Navajo Nation lack access to electricity and other infrastructure, and how so-called social determinants of health made the Diné so vulnerable to the first surges of the pandemic.

Click here for a transcript of the episode.

Voices from the episode:

• Dr. Sophina Calderón — @calderonsophina
• Jill Jim, Ph.D. — LinkedIn
• Dr. Ernestine Chaco — @Ernestine_Chaco

Episode 1 includes audio of pine siskin birds recorded in Coconino, Arizona, courtesy of contributor Parker Davis via the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (ML153777441).

Season 4 of “American Diagnosis” is a co-production of KHN and Just Human Productions.

Our Editorial Advisory Board includes Jourdan Bennett-Begaye, Alastair Bitsóí, and Bryan Pollard.

In the years leading up to the pandemic, Dr. Celine Gounder, the host of the American Diagnosis and EPIDEMIC podcasts, had the opportunity to care for patients part-time at several Indian Health Service facilities around the United States. Working on the “rez,” one theme came up over and over: resilience.

In this latest season of American Diagnosis, we’re going to share stories of Indigenous people who are taking action to protect the health and wellbeing of their communities in the face of incredible odds and we’ll ask hard questions about why they are confronting so many challenges to their health.

Listen to new episodes of American Diagnosis Season 4: Rezilience starting Jan. 18, 2022. Subscribe to American Diagnosis wherever you get you podcasts.

"Science is harmed when scientists don't take into account the bias that comes along with inherently being a human." -Kafui Dzirasa

As a result of centuries of discrimination, and lack of access to education and opportunity, African Americans comprise only 5% of active physicians in the United States today.  Former-Surgeon General David Satcher, who was also the first African American to lead the CDC, has been working to improve health equity in the United States since his days as a medical student in the 1960s. In this bonus episode of AMERICAN DIAGNOSIS, we’re going to hear about efforts to improve health equity in America from leaders like Dr. Satcher, former-NIH director Harold Varmus, and Kafui Dzirasa. We’ll see how they are seizing this critical moment for racial justice to improve health outcomes and professional opportunities for people of color in the sciences.

This podcast was created by Just Human Productions. We're powered and distributed by Simplecast. We're supported, in part, by listeners like you.

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"Nobody really wants to leave their community and I don't blame them because it's our culture and we shouldn't have to move just to have clean air to breathe. That should be God-given right to drink clean water, to breathe clean air.” -Hilton Kelley

During the modern environmental movement of the late 60’s and early 70’s, landmark legislation was passed in the U.S. to ensure cleaner, safer air and water across the nation. But in recent years it’s been difficult for environmental policies to get through Congress. That leaves activists having to turn their energy away from Washington and instead focus on grassroot movements to create local change.

In this bonus episode, we will hear from Ralph Nader, a consumer activist and former presidential candidate, and Hilton Kelley, who is fighting to clean up his hometown of Port Arthur, Texas by empowering the community to demand cleaner air.

This podcast was created by Just Human Productions. We're powered and distributed by Simplecast. We're supported, in part, by listeners like you.

"As we enter into a time of climate change, one of the things we're realizing is these communities that have been systematically oppressed are now the spaces people with money want to be in because all around us is sinking" - Nicole Crooks

In this bonus episode of AMERICAN DIAGNOSIS, we’re going to look at how climate change is impacting the health of people… and their communities in South Florida. We'll hear from a physician working to change the way her colleagues think about how climate impacts health, and we’ll talk to two people working to make sure that residents can keep their homes when developers start looking to higher ground as sea levels rise.

This podcast was created by Just Human Productions. We're powered and distributed by Simplecast. We're supported, in part, by listeners like you.

"This can't continue to go on and if I have to be the one to take up the mantle, then I'll do that because that's what my daughter would have done." -Wanda Irving

The United States is the richest country in the world with some of the most advanced medical treatments available anywhere. But you’d never know it if you knew how many mothers die in — and after — childbirth here. The U.S. has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the industrialized world and the rate is staggeringly high for women of color, especially Black women. In this special bonus episode about maternal mortality we’re going to hear firsthand how this trend is affecting Black mothers and learn about one possible solution to this deadly disparity.

This podcast was created by Just Human Productions. We're powered and distributed by Simplecast. We're supported, in part, by listeners like you.